In Blake Smith’s essay “Just Another Liberalism?” he describes liberalism, à la Michel Foucault, as having a “nondogmatic reflexivity.” I like that phrase. It recalls Alasdair MacIntyre’s description of the flexibility and expandability within the boundaries of a living tradition — boundaries which are also flexible yet in a way consistent with the tradition itself. Liberalism’s reflexivity, says Smith, is part of a larger “capacity for imagining utopias… in spaces outside of state power.”
Liberalism’s utopias reside in liberal subjects’ capacities (themselves instantiated by a wider culture and its pedagogical institutions, such as schools, media, and the political process itself) to imagine themselves as the agents of their own lives, which are most intensely and happily lived where the shadow of politics least falls.
Our lives are “most intensely and happily lived where the shadow of politics least falls.” I think that’s a great place to plug the “anarchism” in the politics quadrilateral.
As many, many, many have pointed out for some time, liberalism has been slowly losing (and ceding) ground to both “neoliberalism” and illiberalism. (Of course, these are words that are happily and helpfully avoided in the healthy day-to-day.) That loss of ground has occurred not only because of badly misguided politics and poor civic education, but because the proponents of liberalism have so neglected that life outside the shadows. On this, Smith/Foucault offer a grave warning.
If liberals do not recover these traditions, they—and the vitalizing energies of political life—may pass wholly over to their enemies, who may be able to appropriate for themselves, on the one hand, all our longings for a natural, normal, quiet life outside of politics, and, on the other, all our desires to be something greater (larger and more estimable) than a self-interested individual calculating his potential gains.
That calculating, self-interested individual is the human as homo economicus, the primacy of which, according to Foucault, marks neoliberalism from its more “polyvalent” classical rendering. I count myself a fan of that polyvalent liberalism, of that polyvalent treatment of the liberal subject in all of his or her diverse capacities, no matter how idealized and unrealized it has always been. That it is infinitely preferable to the ever-self-intersted, necessarily disenchanted neoliberal subject should always have been obvious. But even this subject — the blindered, morally shallow, left-brained human — might find itself in danger very soon.
Left with no decent passions at its command, liberalism would be—and perhaps is—a spent force. But even illiberalism seems trapped within the specifically neoliberal anthropology, narrower and meaner than the expansive, polyvalent vision of humanity at the heart of the liberal tradition. And what comes may be still worse. The rational, self-interested individual, however base we consider him, possessed at least a certain coherence. Contemporary technologies of distraction seem to act increasingly on fragmented, disconnected parts of a splintering subject, while contemporary political rhetoric, in its systemic and transparent falsehoods, bypasses the minimal conditions of instrumental reason. If there is a subject of governance after neoliberalism, rather than transcending self-interest, he may be too psychically scattered and disoriented to be considered a self. The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination in its true political dimensions (and not merely as the false charms of an aestheticized inner life) may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism.
Despite being explicitly about liberalism, all of this also points pretty clearly to a need for the “conservatism” in the above mentioned quadrilateral — conservatism that values the past, as well as the unknown and uncontrolled, and is therefore wisely skeptical of change (especially the “inevitable” kind), and is therefore always inclined toward reform over revolution. (At least this is true in the political realm; the clearly conservative anarchist revolucion is another thing.)
Yes, this conservatism is utterly opposed to progressivism, as well as zealotry and the pride of victory, but that’s because it is more fundamentally concerned with inheritance and with gratitude — that is, with the human condition itself, improvement of which cannot erase a loving “fidelity to daily tasks.” There is still plenty of legroom here for a nondogmatic reflexivity, plenty of capacity for imagining utopias, in spaces both within and without state power. As Ivan Šarčević wrote about tradition and inherited identity: “Like the parable of the talents, in gratitude for the inheritance, with things he received an individual regains not only the equal worth of the inheritance but the chance to engage in creative work with the gifts and have them ‘double” in value.’”
To me, the opposite of conservatism is not progressivism but neglect. (By its nature, it’s primarily neglect of the past, but always of the present and future, too.) One of the obvious problems with this neglect — that is, with our neglect of any of life’s conservative elements — is that whatever starting point one envisions, whether for conviviality or for revolution, will be more callow and tenuous. Whereas inheritance and gratitude, with a little reflexive critique and utopian-inspired imagination and investment — to this, more will be given.
In any case, it is not, and has never been, possible to avoid being a bit idealistic. Envisioning a liberal-conservative(-socialist)-anarchist imagination, however proleptically, is not an easy thing, let alone enacting such a vision. But as Kay Ryan once wrote (and many others have said to similar effect): “This is, of course, an ideal, and one not fully attainable. Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners.”
As Nicholas Carr took the time to warn us yet again, there’s a lot of present and future space currently being carved out by and for very small, very callow souls who possess as little human imagination as possible — if a capacity for human beings exists in that space at all.
Whether you’re a liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, or all or none of the above, now’s not a bad time to decide what banners you and yours want to stitch and hold aloft. And make ‘em count.