In his reflection on Michael Novak’s
1980’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, in the October
issue of First
Things, R.R. Reno recalls the three mutually-supporting legs upon which
Novak held Western culture to stand, but argues that culture no longer supports
these legs. The first two legs--a free economy and liberal democratic
political institutions are especially mutually supporting, in that both seek to
limit the power of the state, thereby liberating “…the energies of individuals
and independently organized communities.” The third, a Judeo-Christian
moral ecology is also reinforcing, in that it “…prizes human dignity, and
encourages self-discipline, social trust, and individual initiative,” with both
religions based on “Greco-Roman philosophy, law, and civic management.”
But, Reno argues that the mutual support of these the three legs
critically depended upon an historical epoch that may now be passing
away. Ironically, that is the era of the less constrained and unitary
1960s, for which Novak believed “liberation from constraint,” represented
spiritual liberation. Spontaneity and creativity were characteristics of
that era.
Reno believes that globalization has weakened the spontaneity and
creativity that sprang from “…a multiplicity of motives, incentives,
presuppositions, and purposes.” A free market society provided “order
without authority and purposeful freedom without the need for agreement about
the common good, beyond the procedural rule of law.” By contributing to
globalization, however, that “birth of freedom” of the 1960s has come to
undermine both democratic institutions and a Judeo-Christian moral culture.
In a way, freedom has come to undermine itself.
Freedom from constraint allowed capitalism to become global in
scope, and to undermine the authority of both democratic institutions and
religious-based moral authority. As a result, democracies of the many
have turned into the oligarchies of the few. While Republicans believe
entrepreneurial pragmatism the best solution for all problems, Democrats
believe technocratic management the best. But, elites of both parties
share antipathy towards the common person, thus explaining the election victory
of the “outsider” Donald Trump against the consummate insider, Hillary Clinton.
Those who successfully participate in the endeavor of
globalization acquire economic advantages over non-participants or those who
participate unsuccessfully. So, domestic economic elites become either
traditional oligarchies or rules-based oligarchies, neither of which is good
for democratic institutions. The former tends to suborn those
institutions, while the latter supersedes them. In either case,
traditional mediating institutions tend to be cut out of substantive
decision-making. And, as the elites have little interest in traditional
religious values, traditional religious faith is ridiculed and undermined.
The years of strong political and social integration immediately post-World War
II made this fracturing of society difficult to forecast.
The undermining of religious faith is especially important, as
religious faith provides a sense of permanence, of transcendence from God to
our families, communities, and other things of meaning in our lives.
Ironically, the openness, dynamism, and creativity of modern global capitalism
undermine the very things of most value to us. Our very freedom has
undermined our fundamental need for permanence, and that loss of a sense of
permanence has, in turn contributed to undermining free markets and democratic
institutions.
The propensity for societies to decline as a result of technocrats
and an endless striving for money and commerce is not new, having been first
articulated by one of the three great British empiricists, Bishop Lord George
Berkley (1685-1793) and his theory of immaterialism, that matter does not
exist and that the world is comprised entirely of a collection of ideas,
(section 4 and section 6). Berkley believed that there are only finite
mental substances and an infinite mental substance, namely, God.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) also popularized the notion the
periods of history characterized by rules and run by technocrats are ones
of decline, while those
characterized by the “will to power” are ones of creativity and cultural growth
because they break the bounds of conformity and provide that sense of
permanence the human soul desires. And which in our post-modern era seems
to be diminishing.
Cultures progress by how much they promote individual autonomy and
purpose. The historian Oswald Spengler noted in the early 1900s that
during the previous 1,100 years of “Faustian” culture, the human soul
overflowed “…with expansive, disruptive, and imaginative impulses manifested in
all the spheres of life.” Spengler saw the Faustian soul as “…overcoming
of presence…whose yearning is infinity.” Too much cultural reliance on
the reasoning and desiring parts of thesoul,
as many argue is the case with globalization, limits realization of a
third part of the soul that Plato described as “spiritedness.”
Spiritedness is the source of religion and desire for some sense of eternal
recognition which provides a sense of permanence. Too much reliance
on reason and desire tend to constrain this “spiritedness,” and it is this
decline in spiritedness in our free economy and democratic institutions that
Reno is getting at.
