‘Deadly sins’ of left and right

Two articles that came out earlier today in American Compass that are deliberately paired off with each other, one on either side of the political divide, attempt to explore the ‘deadly sins’ of the left and the right. The first article, written by Ruy Teixeira, purports to explore the five deadly sins of the American left: idpol, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growth-phobia and techno-pessimism. And the second article, written by Henry Olson, explores the three deadly sins of the American right: market fundamentalism, snobbery and hubris. Both of these articles are well-intentioned attempts at introspection and self-examination of certain political mythologies and forms of inertia that have accumulated largely through the ‘bubble’ effect; and I appreciate them both for attempting to concentrate and explore the blindnesses, weaknesses and self-indulgences inherent in the political lifeworlds that most Americans now inhabit.

However, I would – to extend the metaphor slightly – like to play devil’s advocate to each. When it comes to discussions of ‘sin’ what we are really discussing is a moral anthropology and the relationship of man to the divine, and as such these questions are fundamentally religious in character. I would therefore like to think I am approaching these from a point of view that is faithfully Orthodox Christian in accordance with what is to date still the most trenchant and insightful document articulating the political and social values of the Church, though ultimately I must leave that to my confessor and to the hierarchs of my Church to judge.

Regarding the first article, by Teixeira. I agree with some of its central tenets. Firstly, I agree with Mr Teixeira that the American left suffers intensely from its fixation on identity politics, which despite the rhetoric of ‘intersectionality’ actually only serve to fracture the body politic into various grievance groups, and cast all social problems through a lens of oppression. I also agree that the left has allowed itself to be coopted by an elite politics which hides, underneath a ‘green’ veneer, a thoroughly nasty and anti-human Malthusian streak (of which I’ve been consistently critical these past eight years), and which tends to see poor people as a dead-weight problem rather than equal agents and partners in the political process. Insofar as he shares these points with the ‘realist left’, I tend to agree with him.

However, I would push back on a couple of the assumptions Mr Teixeira makes here. There is one really big one that he gets wrong, and that is the assumption that more is always better.

I am not convinced, frankly, that people actually always do want more. Based on the data, I’m fairly sure that’s not actually the case. The data consistently show, in fact (the linked CNBC story being only one example in a genre of œconomic studies that has been going on since the early 2010s), that up to a certain point, more material abundance does correlate with human happiness and satisfaction. Actually, that point is right around the average purchasing power parity in most modern Western developed nations, $75,000. However, past that point, having more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier even though we don’t stop trying to accumulate it. It’s the law of diminishing returns. With apologies to Daft Punk, there comes a point where harder better faster stronger just doesn’t get people off, and mo’ stuff actually begins to correlate with mo’ worries.

The irony is not lost on me that Teixeira is using the language of ‘sin’ here, because he is ignoring a critical dimension of the left’s failure to engage. The techno-enthusiasts and the growth-philes ignore these studies and these bodies of data at their own peril, because they are prescribing the wrong medicine – that of more material prosperity – for what is ultimately a hunger of the spirit. Saint John of Patmos put it correctly in his first Epistle: the problem with the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ is that it the stuff of the world that these desires want to find satiety in, is all ‘passing away, along with its desires’. Even though we cannot do without the material – Christ never condemned the material; He came in a material Body and by that Body gave us a material means of salvation – we look for more happiness in more material in vain. And we literally name as deadly passions – as sins – the sorts of behaviour Teixeira wants to encourage: lust, gluttony, avarice. Here is what the Russian Orthodox Church says about this:

The Church is not someone who defines the rights to property. However, the material side of human life is not outside her field of vision. While calling to seek first «the kingdom of God and his righteousness», the Church does not forget about people’s the need for «daily bread» and believes that every one should have resources sufficient for life in dignity. At the same time, the Church warns against the extreme attraction to wealth, denouncing those who are carried away by «cares and riches and pleasures of this life». The Church in her attitude to property does not ignore the material needs, nor does she praise the opposite extreme, the aspiration for wealth as the ultimate goal and value of life.

And still more emphatically:

Wealth cannot make man happy. The Lord Jesus Christ warns: «Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth». The pursuit of wealth makes a baneful impact on the spiritual condition of a person and can lead him to complete degradation. St. Paul points out that «they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things».

And again, with regard to the human impact on œcology, here is what the Russian Church has to say. Note the relationship between material desire, technological progress, and spiritual loss:

Relationships between anthropology and ecology are revealed with utter clarity in our days when the world is experiencing two concurrent crises: spiritual and ecological. In contemporary society, man often loses the awareness of life as a gift of God and sometimes the very meaning of life, reducing it sometimes to the physical being alone. With this attitude to life, nature around him is no longer perceived as home and all the more so as temple, becoming only a «habitat». The spiritually degrading personality leads nature to degradation as well, for it is unable to make a transforming impact on the world. The colossal technological resources cannot help humanity blinded by sin, for, being indifferent to the meaning, mystery and wonder of life, they cannot be really beneficial and sometimes become even detrimental. In a spiritually disorientated man, the technological power would beget utopic reliance on the boundless resources of the human mind and the power of progress.

One of the first unambiguously-left politicians to have foreseen the problem of too much prosperity, and how this prosperity should be dealt with and distributed, was General Secretary Hu Jintao, when he made a suspiciously Confucian (specifically, the Odes) call for a xiaokang shehui 小康社会, or a ‘moderately prosperous society’. It’s been a practical goal of the Chinese left since 2002 to aim for a society where a certain basic standard of living is met but not exceeded; and Xi Jinping has included this aim specifically in his ‘Four Comprehensives’ policy. Note that Chinese policy has not been anti-growth per se, and certainly not anti-technology per se. But according to their own internal documents they are still only willing to pursue growth up to a certain point and are committed to a goal of ultimately tapering off.

So here is where I would say that Teixeira needs to reevaluate. He accuses the left of something like ingratitude when he comes to the topic of technology. I think that’s fair. The left does need to evince a certain degree of gratitude for the frontiers in medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, communications and so on that have been pushed by technological innovation. But the attitude of ‘I want more’ runs thoroughly counter to this position of gratitude. Indeed, what happens when the ‘more’ that people want is inevitably unable to be satisfied by greater material wealth? If ‘more is better’, and ‘more’ even beyond the point of satiety – or even to the point of satiety – is all that the left really wants, then Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were completely right to reject it. And American voters will be right to reject it.

~~~

Coming to the second article, on the sins of American right, by Henry Olson… this article strikes me as a trifle strange on account of its fixation on the figure of Reagan. More on that later, though. The fact that Olson is straight-up willing to criticise these streaks in the Republican Party – not just the market fundamentalism but also white Protestant snobbery and the tendency to idolise the businessman and the pious patriarch – is truly laudable. What’s more, I don’t really dispute Olson’s diagnoses, though it must be admitted that I approach this topic more from a grounding in the American left than in the American right, and thus have a predisposition to affirm these critiques. Even so, there is a certain Whiggish anthropological falsity even under these needed and praiseworthy correctives, that needs to be addressed – and so I feel I have to play Devil’s advocate here as well.

Market fundamentalism is indeed a sin, and it is indeed a sin of the Republican Party in general going back to the 1980s. (It’s an intriguing bit of sleight-of-hand Olson uses to elide the fact that Reagan himself did much to foment and popularise within the Republican Party at least the first of these three cardinal partizan sins he discusses, despite a couple of protectionist flourishes Reagan made in his second term.) The Russian people know about market fundamentalism, having had a direct experience with the ‘shock doctrine’ between 1992 and 1998. So it should come as no surprise that the Orthodox Church likewise censures, first, the absolute commitment to private property among people:

According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Saviour repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used, on talents distributed among many and on an estate handed over for temporary management. Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.

And second, that the Russian Orthodox Church condemns the idea that ‘market relations’ should be the sole or even primary consideration in the distribution of goods like healthcare:

Without giving preference to any organisational model of medical aid, the Church believes that this aid should be maximum effective and accessible to all members of society, regardless of their financial means and social status, also in the situation of limited medical resources. To make the distribution of these resources truly equitable, the criterion of «vital needs» should prevail over that of «market relations».

I likewise agree with Olson that snobbery and hubris – these two appear to be synonymous with the passions of vainglory and pride – are common failings on the political right, though they are far from exclusive to the right. Olson seems to be angling after a particular anthropology or genealogy of the American right, with his observations of these sins: a genealogy which is rooted in its class origins and in its religious origins. I’m a trifle uncomfortable with this genealogical account of conservative sins for, I guess we can call them ‘Quakerdox’ reasons (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony), but fine, we may take it as read.

Olson accuses the Republicans of entertaining, too often, a kind of white and Protestant intégrisme, which elevates the (private, devotional, pietistic) religious concerns of the holders of power over considerations of policy – that theological failings are tantamount to political failings. I kind of get this complaint, and I share it. But he’s treading out on some very thin anthropological ice. The common roots of sæcular law and religious law are more deeply entangled than he wants to permit, and the common roots of morality and religious devotion as well:

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source. Moreover, for a long time they only represented two sides of one legal field. This idea of law is also characteristic of the Old Testament.

The Lord Jesus Christ, in calling those faithful to Him to the Kingdom that is not of this world, separated the Church as His body from the world lying in evil. In Christianity, the internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually-fallen state of the world and is even opposed to it. This opposition, however, is not the violation but the fulfilment of the law of the divine Truth in its fullness, which humanity repudiated in the fall. Comparing the Old Testament norms with that of the Gospel, the Lord in His Sermon on the Mount calls people to seek the full identity of life with the absolute divine law, that is to deification: «Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect».

At the same time, though, the law is written upon all human hearts; the law is made for all and all are bound to it, regardless of what religious beliefs they hold. There is a certain basic level of human dignity which cannot be reduced to mere religious belonging. Again, the Russian Orthodox Church on the subject:

Among the oldest monuments of the written language are numerous collections of homilies and statutes. Undoubtedly, they go back to the even earlier, pre-alphabet, existence of humanity, since «the work of the law» is written by God in human hearts. Law has been there in the human society from times immemorial. The first rules were given to man as far back as the paradise time. After the fall, which is violation by man of the divine law, law becomes a boundary and trespassing against it threatens the destruction of both the human personality and human community.

The law contains a certain minimum of moral standards compulsory for all members of society. The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell. The fundamental principle of law is: «do not do to others what you would not want to be done to yourself».

So I would go along with Olson happily, as long as what he is critiquing is a certain vainglorious image of homo conservativus, a certain false idol of the self which American conservatives are sometimes wont to lug around with them: an idol of the self in which sentimentality and private devotion (or worse yet, self-interest masquerading as piety!) substitute themselves for actual works of mercy. Merely going through the performative motions of religiosity is no substitute whatsoever for actual works of kindness and justice, true mortification of the will, true acts of courage. He and I can agree all day long on that count. As Khomyakov put it:

He who loved truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part.

But Olson only partially frees himself from the objections to such idolatry, because of the abject and even idolatrous hero-worship of Ronald Reagan which suffuses his article. Olson engages in the sæcular canonisation of a figure who (again, despite some protectionist flourishes he made as California governor and in his second term as president) possibly did more than any other to retrench the ideas of market fundamentalism on the American right, in a way that had not held sway since Calvin Coolidge. In an article which is meant to explore the sins of the American right, such an emphasis – at best – lacks good taste. At worst, it seems to be an admission of cluelessness with regard to how the American right arrived in its current plight.

Again, I don’t want to come down too hard on either of these authors. In many ways, they are doing better than I am: they are engaged in the hard and necessary work of metanoia on behalf of their respective political communities; and allowances are certainly to be made for excesses of overcorrection, or for lacunæ in the rearward view so dearly held. And I’m sure that there are such lacunæ and such overcorrections in my own idiosyncratic syncretic political views, which are themselves grown out of the crooked timber of sexual fantasies and utopian dreaming, which I have yet to address. I applaud the bravery of these two authors for the conversation they have begun.

EDIT: I cannot believe I posted something about the deadly sins without also referencing Maiden’s Seventh Son album. Bad hesher! Bad! Ahem. At any rate, here to make up for it is ‘Can I Play with Madness’: