I’m not sure “the Left” is the right category to refer to for this essay. The progressive left clearly has moral commitments, is willing to stigmatize and be judgmental, etc., they are just wrong about a lot of stuff. Maybe the small-l liberal left should do these things more, but I suspect if they did it would express itself similarly to how the progressive left does, and on the same topics.
"To say the Left has been materialist doesn’t mean it lacks moral commitments; rather, its moral compass has been recalibrated toward largely "thin" or managerial aims. In another essay I argued that three dominant moral ends—Safety, Utility, and Equality— now function as the guardrails of modern life. Out of these, the centre Right tends to be more focused on Utility, while the Left emphasizes Safety and Equality. Notably, these moral ends do not guide us towards a substantive vision of what a "good" or "virtuous" life actually looks like."
The counterpoint is that offering a substantive vision of virtuous life would definitionally mean leaving the Left. The origins of the Left are to be found in Bolingbroke and Rousseau, neither of whom were materialist atheists, but sentimental deists. The core of their deism was not the rejection of the miraculous, but the rejection of the idea of a God with moral attributes and of individual judgement after death. And because the State is in every society created in the image of God (as understood by that society's religion), this religious change corresponded to the modern discomfort with the State judging individuals and attempting the moralization of society. Just as Rousseau sought to invert the relationship between God and the individual: the free individual is not judged by God, but judges the idea of God as the source of misery; he also sought to invert the role of the State and individual: it is not the State that is tasked with restraining the evil that lies within each heart, but it is the task of noble savages to cast off the Ancien Regime which had caused societal ills by repressing inborn goodness.
Nice piece. I’ve appreciated seeing your very clear writing along these lines here and in previous articles.
It’s interesting because the philosophical groundwork has been available for a long time, but that’s almost beside the point. Moral vocabulary doesn’t move through culture the way arguments move through seminars so simply. It moves slowly and these lines of thinking have always needed better carriers or maybe the right societal conditions.
Why has asking “is this good for us?” felt naive or condescending? A materialist view makes that thought have sense of embarrassment that is itself diagnostic. The fact that Klein and Thompson are now working through that same question, from inside mainstream commentary rather than from the margins, makes me hopeful the embarrassment may finally be loosening.
Why is a moral judgement necessary? For example, why did parents, at least in the past, try to refrain their minor children from engaging in sex? Was it because unmarried sex was wrong (sex the parents themselves had done)? Or was it because sex at too early an age can be deleterious to their future happiness?
It is a job of a parent to try to prevent their children from fucking up too much. They do so by "governing" their behavior. In the same way, the state "governs" the passions of the populace to prevent them from fucking up too much (and in doing so fucking it up for the rest of us).
So yes, we need to reign in a lot of this gambling that used to be illegal. This is classic Chesterton's fence stuff. Rather than ask why this prohibition on gambling existed in the first place, we just willy nilly expanded it.
I’m not sure “the Left” is the right category to refer to for this essay. The progressive left clearly has moral commitments, is willing to stigmatize and be judgmental, etc., they are just wrong about a lot of stuff. Maybe the small-l liberal left should do these things more, but I suspect if they did it would express itself similarly to how the progressive left does, and on the same topics.
"To say the Left has been materialist doesn’t mean it lacks moral commitments; rather, its moral compass has been recalibrated toward largely "thin" or managerial aims. In another essay I argued that three dominant moral ends—Safety, Utility, and Equality— now function as the guardrails of modern life. Out of these, the centre Right tends to be more focused on Utility, while the Left emphasizes Safety and Equality. Notably, these moral ends do not guide us towards a substantive vision of what a "good" or "virtuous" life actually looks like."
The counterpoint is that offering a substantive vision of virtuous life would definitionally mean leaving the Left. The origins of the Left are to be found in Bolingbroke and Rousseau, neither of whom were materialist atheists, but sentimental deists. The core of their deism was not the rejection of the miraculous, but the rejection of the idea of a God with moral attributes and of individual judgement after death. And because the State is in every society created in the image of God (as understood by that society's religion), this religious change corresponded to the modern discomfort with the State judging individuals and attempting the moralization of society. Just as Rousseau sought to invert the relationship between God and the individual: the free individual is not judged by God, but judges the idea of God as the source of misery; he also sought to invert the role of the State and individual: it is not the State that is tasked with restraining the evil that lies within each heart, but it is the task of noble savages to cast off the Ancien Regime which had caused societal ills by repressing inborn goodness.
Nice piece. I’ve appreciated seeing your very clear writing along these lines here and in previous articles.
It’s interesting because the philosophical groundwork has been available for a long time, but that’s almost beside the point. Moral vocabulary doesn’t move through culture the way arguments move through seminars so simply. It moves slowly and these lines of thinking have always needed better carriers or maybe the right societal conditions.
Why has asking “is this good for us?” felt naive or condescending? A materialist view makes that thought have sense of embarrassment that is itself diagnostic. The fact that Klein and Thompson are now working through that same question, from inside mainstream commentary rather than from the margins, makes me hopeful the embarrassment may finally be loosening.
Makes me optimistic.
Why is a moral judgement necessary? For example, why did parents, at least in the past, try to refrain their minor children from engaging in sex? Was it because unmarried sex was wrong (sex the parents themselves had done)? Or was it because sex at too early an age can be deleterious to their future happiness?
It is a job of a parent to try to prevent their children from fucking up too much. They do so by "governing" their behavior. In the same way, the state "governs" the passions of the populace to prevent them from fucking up too much (and in doing so fucking it up for the rest of us).
So yes, we need to reign in a lot of this gambling that used to be illegal. This is classic Chesterton's fence stuff. Rather than ask why this prohibition on gambling existed in the first place, we just willy nilly expanded it.