Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

3. Specifically to Elias Isquith: my definition of “authoritarianism” is more all-encompassing than simply being authoritarian regimes.  One of the major problems in American society today that I think we should all be able to agree is a problem is the encroachment of politics into every single facet of life.  It seems like this could be (and has been) rationally explained as the effect of the death of “real” conservatism and its replacement with an aggressive conservative authoritarianism to compete with an aggressive progressive authoritarianism for rule of everything America.  We commonly call this mutated conservatism “movement conservatism”.  How this relates to Lears’s piece: Lears (and everyone else) uses the term “New Atheism” to refer to what should instead really be called “movement atheism”, just another participant in the mad rush to remake the world in one’s own chauvinistic assumptions.  In criticizing “New Atheism” Lears criticizes a positivism which has gone beyond applying itself to science; i.e. the belief that the scientific method should guide not only science but everything else as well.

4. In calling for a dialectic between socialism and libertarianism, I am specifically calling for a socialism that stops allying itself with progressive technocracy and a libertarianism that stops allying itself with social conservatism.  In other words, it’s time that every political issue in this country be discussed in terms of collective solutions designed to realize a greater good vs. individual decision-making.  While Burt Likko suggests above that that is effectively what we have, I would argue to the contrary (It may be how Mr. Likko thinks about political issues, but most people root for their “team” to win so that it can pass bills favoring its own breed of authoritarianism.)  Socialism and libertarianism currently fill roles supporting a system from which they gain nothing.

What this has to do with Lears’s piece: Lears’s piece illustrates some of the themes common to socialism and libertarianism, important themes around which the two approaches to politics can find commonalities.  But this opportunity for commonality is wasted in misunderstanding: Goldwater is classified as a positivist modernist; libertarians are castigated as corporate toadies and exponents of scientism.  Socialists are all equated with Stalin.  I think this antipathy is unfortunate considering that socialism and libertarianism share “a certain epistemic humility; a realist policy outlook; an appreciation for life’s complexities and humankind’s poor ability to understand and tame them; politics as a utilitarian resource and no more; a focus on the agency of the individual; an engagement with the idea of justice as fairness; and a desire to remove unnecessary obstacles to subjectively-defined meaningful existences.

This [original] post is a culmination of a long period of political soul-searching on my part, or trying to reconcile two ostensibly conflicting self-identifications, and it makes me sad that it was so poorly received. Back to the drawing board I guess.

Later I added:

I’ll agree that liberalism was the outright winner of the 20th. Century’s ideological wars, and overall freedom and free markets and whatnot represent the best basis for government, but I also think that it seems probable that liberalism’s monopoly on mainstream political thought in this country is the cause of many of our social problems.

Liberalism (and any ideology really) is most effective when it is restrained in certain regards. It has been an unrestrained and antagonistic liberalism that has given us massive environmental destruction, a selfish and materialistic consumer culture which brought us to the brink of economic collapse three years ago (and will again unless the underlying basic problem is identified and purged), and the growth-at-all-costs model which prioritizes the accumulation of capital regardless of its intrinsic worth over maximizing the welfare of humans. I’m not saying I agree with any socialist positions on these issues in particular (as it is, I think liberal solutions are usually superior), but I certainly value the socialist critique for highlighting these problems and attempting to redefine how we think about some goods: for example, in an age without a frontier, is land not a public good? In a truly globalized age, do the resources of the earth and sea not belong to all? When we have the capacity to provide medical care for all, do we not have a responsibility to do that?

The socialist critique of the corporation is particularly trenchant. Corporations are great at what they do: maximize profit for shareholders; but to try and put any sort of social responsibility on corporations as more interventionist schools of liberalism espouse will only result in a system which rewards the corporations that most effectively create the appearance of compliance. To treat corporations as people and not machines used by people has become a defining feature of modern liberal capitalism. The more socialistic component of the modern liberal system advocates policies which only create incentives and opportunities for those corporations to take the lead to write regulations that crowd out competitors and create barriers to entry. This kind of behavior is bad for all but that company’s shareholders yet we tolerate it as a priori consistent with liberalism.

As you say, a lot of socialist attempts to create competing orders have failed, but some sort of presence of those ideas is valuable as a restraint on a society that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

I still believe socialism and libertarianism can and should be somehow reconciled, but it's something I'm going to have to think about a bit more.