Postmodern Conservative.: Flaky Historicist Residue

"an excess of historicism that flattens distinctions into differences"[:] Interesting phrase, but what does it mean, exactly? Maybe something for you to blog about someday? -- John Gorentz

Leo Strauss, always a hot commodity, has written a great deal about the evils of historicism, and if you want to know more I recommend the first several chapters of his Natural Right and History, also known as his Walgreen Lectures. Strauss condemns radical historicists for deciding that "all knowledge, however limited and 'scientific,' presupposes a frame of reference; it presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view within which understanding and knowing take place" (26). Since things and thoughts about them only make sense in their own context, our study of more than one thing and thought reveals that any and all thoughts and things can transform over human history into any other thoughts and things. But the realization of this constitutes a singular moment in the history of human thought -- because the recognition of the historicity of humanity is a one-time event. This 'discovery', the 'invention' of historicism, requires a decision from us: either plunge into nihilism, in which cannibalism cannot be defended against or attacked in favor of civilization, or select references and preferences of our own, as a matter of willed choice rather than some silly sense of necessity, nature, or truth. But even if we opt for the latter, we cannot escape the knowledge that our choice cannot be justified as worthy of distinction in virtue of its being anything other than a different choice from ones others might make. So because the noun, our different choice, has had its value ironed flat out of it, the verb, our commitment to it, takes on all the value.

This is Strauss' beef with Max Weber, who he accuses of commanding to all "Have preferences!" The better for social scientists, that is, to inform people with valuably strong commitments to their preferences how best to actualize them -- a most valuable skill indeed, and the grim signal that despite Weber's best intentions science has actually fallen in absolute thrall to power.

But I am also interested in Philip Rieff's problem with historicism -- which, because he is a social and not political theorist, focuses less on the dangers excessive historicism poses to politics than it does to the psychological dangers posed. His footnote 143 in Fellow Teachers is illuminative:

It is no accident, comrades, that the 'infinite' was the god-term of Schleiermacher and other Protestants who make the critical turn into modernity, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schleiermacher completed the Lutheran psychologizing of the Christian godhead into a god-term, a spiritualization of dangerous thoughts, but, in the Protestant era, now ended, strictly for use outside -- in a professional, even intellectual way -- from within the security of being a family man.

Perhaps this does not yet seem illuminative. Bear with Rieff. He means to explain how the comfortable space of Protestant family life stood foreclosed from breaking or serializing commitment -- while the intellectual atmosphere brought about by the psychologization of Christianity called forth an unprecedented permissiveness in the exercise of interpretation. Interpretation became its own science; breaking or serializing interpretations became a profession for men unable to act with such abandon in their own personal lives. Well, not for long:

Out of Protestant psychologizing came that smart condition of the modern intelligentsia, adultery of the head. From adultery of the head, penetrating the world in free activity, the Protestant principle penetrated downwards [into the culture]. There is a subtle but distinct difference between the intellectual as interpreter and the intellectual as adulterer. [...] For the intellectual, adultery became the form of spiritual aspiration. Moreover, as he is moved from affair to affair, the intellectual expects each to end in disappointment.

Rieff is charting a psychological course -- the therapeutic -- to which Strauss remained blind: rather than having to choose between nihilism up front and Weberian devotion to willed but really arbitrary references and preferences, therapeutic man discovered the capability to commit serial 'adultery of the head' -- the ability to hop repeatedly and at trained whim from commitment to commitment, safe in the dual knowledge that he could extricate himself more or less painlessly from his commitments if he learned how not to think too long or hard about them, and that the consolation of this abandonment was the 'faith' of historicism that every reference and preference lacked the essential truth that would validate permanent commitment (that is, real faith). And so:

For the security of the family, the Communist adulterer substitutes the security of the Party; anything goes, so long as he has the Party to go back to. After the 'family man' and 'husband' as adulterer, then what type of actor shall we see?

Notice how, in China, Russia, Arabia, and elsewhere, the power bargain struck by political masters is increasingly just this: anything goes, so long as you keep coming back to the Party. The police state that permits pleasure, and guarantees its security, is the new model to compete with representative liberal democracy, which has to see this bargain as an abomination in both directions, political as well as moral.

But in the West, historicism has found a comfortable, 'infinite' home away from the political exterior and close within the psychological interior. The distinctions we wish to flatten into mere differences are, narcissistically, personal. We still, even after the shock of 9/11 and Iraq, find it instinctual to make political distinctions and recoil at making real personal ones. (Celebrity culture permits us a long orgiastic therapy of transgression, in which idols may be ritually criticized, rebuked, and condemned for personal shortcomings ranging from rape to dogfighting to criminally bad fashion. But drug abuse to be condemned in one instance is to be celebrated in another; Britney Spears is both a mother to be protected from the malice of Sarah Silverman and a dumb white-trash slut whose children, we all really know, really ought to be called, maliciously, mistakes. That the manner in which we permit this, in our transgressive therapy, to be done is public and for payment [in dollars and exposure] maintains the very anxiety we seek to relieve.) We persist, sometimes in panic, in repeating the official mantra that we all have, and are, nothing but frames of reference, each with our own issues, each with our own brokenness, with no alternative but to 'open up' in a mutual airing of references and preferences. Oprah can rebuke, but only insofar as Oprah could praise under different circumstances. And we remain safe in the 'knowledge' that always somewhere those merely different circumstances obtain. Psychological historicism condenses and consolidates its power into a permanent present of simple differences, as enduring in their mere alterity as distinctions of judgment are fleeting in their radical contingency.

In this respect, Strauss was right to suggest that we are losing the ability to know what we want. Strauss would say that knowing what we want requires us to recover what the moderns left behind in premodern philosophy: the erotic pursuit of the knowledge of our nature. But to surrender this project as a political endeavor has led to its surrender as a psychological endeavor, if Tocqueville was right that political institutions of the right type draw us out of ourselves and mediate our encounters in the democratic age so as to provide us a realm in which contingency may safely be given responsibly free reign. The therapeutic, if viewed as a massive cultural effort to cope with a massive inadequacy in Western politics, presents the psyche, private and public intermingled, as the realm of safe free contingency. It is not: it opens up trapdoors on the 'infinite', on, in Tocqueville's phrase, truant's freedom, and to close those doors and retreat back into public politics we must restore our capacity to judge -- to really distinguish between -- differences. Whether we can do this 'psychologically' without the benefit of religion is an issue that Taylor, Habermas, and others are now coming to terms, and which Tocqueville for his own part answered some century and a half ago.

Comments

Thanks for that explanation. I am not familiar with the works of most of those writers you tell about, but those are somewhat familiar concepts -- where I picked them up over the years, I'm not sure. Your last paragraph tells me that maybe I really do understand some of what you're saying. Thanks.

Posted by: John Gorentz | September 19, 2007 at 01:57 AM

Very nice, but isn't this analysis of the interconnection of a Weberian nihilism (at least as Strauss views it) and therapeutic religiosity and consumerism already in chapter 3 of Alasdair Macintyre's "After Virtue."

Posted by: scriblerus | September 19, 2007 at 10:48 AM