So here's Joe's latest, in which he asks a sensible question: are the public policies that Gerson "praises 'unconservative' or therapeutically liberal?" After all, here's Gerson:
The second reason for this cultural renewal is bold, effective public policy -- welfare reform with time limits and work requirements; zero-tolerance approaches to crime; education reform that tests and requires basic skills; and comprehensive anti-drug efforts, including enforcement, treatment and education. In all these cases, good government and rational incentives have made a tremendous difference.
Now everyone already knows that "zero-tolerance approaches to crime" are not unconservative, although somewhere in the cotton candy of "treatment and education" I caught a whiff of tutelary-state therapy. But clearly reforming welfare and enforcing the law are policies good conservatives and anti-therapeutists support. In fact they seem to have _nothing at all_ to do with Gersonism. One might go so far as to say that Gerson appropriates them so as to enjoy the following syllogism:
Enforcing the law is good government. I am in favor of good government. I am in favor of subbing in for the Federalist Papers the political legacy of Helmut Kohl. Therefore the political legacy of Helmut Kohl is good government.
Read closely: tucked within that brief litany of applause lines is the assumption that good government means good federal government. And within that assumption is the woeful idea that if the state can do something well it should do it. And this is the heart of the matter for today.
The paradigmatic centerpiece of Gersonism -- the conviction that, just as heroes are those who help people, government that helps is a government of heroes -- is education. The state is to teach: how to be safe with drugs, how to be safe with sex, how to be safe with credit. Getting too reckless with any of these things ruins your life and helps wreck the culture, racking up expensive social costs borne by the national weal.
Now, the American people (who also deserve to think of themselves all as heroes, of course) can learn a few lessons on their own, recognizing
their own self-destructive tendencies and reassert[ing] old norms -- not just arresting decline but even reversing it. Many Americans, for example, have seen the damaging effects of divorce on children -- sometimes from the firsthand perspective of their own childhoods -- and divorce rates, especially among upper-income couples, have fallen. Over the decades the social wreckage of drug use has become undeniable -- and the social judgment on this practice has shifted from "stylish rebellion" to "suicidal idiocy." In many cases, our culture has benefited from the natural healing mechanism of simple sanity.
But Americans today also recognize the great amount of anxiety wracking the culture and troubling the individual mind -- the tradeoff we've received for cutting down on agony by therapeutic means. We are learning how to fail incompletely, to cope with our problems instead of curing them or being destroyed by them. So the finalities of life -- divorce, drug death, abortion -- dip down, but the interdicts against the bad behavior which, unmanaged, leads to these things seem enduringly weak. It seems obvious to me that we are, for example, simply getting better at doing drugs. It's no fun being a crackhead. Responsible recreational drug use is stylish; irresponsible use can be suicidal. So we learn through experience how to walk the line. After a bad night we lay off for a while, recover, and reindulge just a little bit wiser. Rather than refraining from bad things, we focus our energies on mitigating their bad effects. And that's the evil genius of therapy.
The key as far as Gersonism is concerned is that we the people learn how to therapeutically manage our practical morality by the experience of everyday life -- whereas government can help by providing the scientific expertise that we anxious, hectic citizens of a democratic age don't have time to accumulate. They can set national standards, mobilize national resources, apply uniform regulations, and deploy centralized management techniques. All falls under the heroically altruistic rubric of education. Tocqueville, who I will continue hurling at Gerson until one or the other quits, knew this 150 years ago:
The only guarantee [he wrote of the French physiocrats] that they created against the abuse of power was public education; for, as Quesnay says, 'despotism is impossible if the nation is enlightened.' 'Struck by the evils which the abuse of authority brings,' says another of his disciples, 'men have invented a thousand absolutely useless means, and have neglected the only truly effective one, which is universal public education, permanent, essentially just, and part of the natural order.' It was the force of this literary gibberish that they intended to substitute for all political guarantees.
Writing of Turgot, Tocqueville revealed explicitly how education in the physiocratic mind is essentially therapeutic:
For him, as for most of the physiocrats, the first political guarantee is a certain public education given by the state, according to certain procedures and in a certain spirit. The confidence that he shows in this kind of educational medicine, or as one of his contemporaries put it, in the mechanism of an education according to principle, is limitless.
Gerson's probably unconscious intellectual debt to this tradition, which failed so utterly and spectacularly in absolutist France, is glaring. But rather than posing this top-down, tutelary, unitary, 'Catholic' model against the competing American counter-tradition he calls 'libertarian' -- that improvising and ingenious local pragmatism of free citizens -- Gerson, that therapeutic virtuoso, wants to eliminate the pain of contradiction by championing both traditions. Shifting scale up to a higher level of abstraction, he makes both fall under the therapeutic rubric. The pragmatic morality of common sense practiced by common people is joined with the pragmatic morality of scientific expertise underwritten, orchestrated, and executed by the tutelary state.
Unfortunately for us all, Gerson is not making this synergy up. Within the 'libertarian' tradition -- including its crunchy-con strain -- there is indeed the startling conflation of morality and practicality which has characterized therapeutic living ever since the replacement of the talking cure with the coping mechanism. Listen to this and try to guess who it's about:
In the long and graceful essay 'Discipline and Hope,' ________ says that to 'the virtuous man...practical and spiritual values are identical; it is only corruption that can see a difference.' It should be obvious, he says, that moral value 'is not separable from other values. An adequate morality would be ecologically sound; it would be esthetically pleasing...[I]t would be practical. Morality is long-term practicality'. ________ asks us here to consider that '[m]oderation and restraint...are necessary, not because of any religious commandment or any creed or code, but because they are among the assurances of good health and a sufficiency of goods.'
Ladies and gents may I present Mr. Wendell Berry. What's shocking is not simply how profoundly therapeutic and presumptuous Gerson is, but how deeply rooted he is within every tradition of pragmatic morality on hand -- statist and anti-statist, religious and irreligious, nationalist and localist, European and American. The coup de grace of therapeutic logic is precisely this ingestion of all contradiction under conditions of intellectual painlessness. Hegelian synthesis looks to a therapeutic like primitive medicine. The therapeutic genius is the recognition that thesis and antithesis can be maintained together, despite their contradiction, by denying the experience of pain that flows naturally from contradiction. Either/Or is out; Both/And is in.
Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time should recognize now at once why I think Gerson is so awful. And he or she should also recognize along with me that the real awfulness of therapeutic statist Gersonism is that it fulfills politically the therapeutic promise that has taken hold of 'western' culture -- just this promise that you can make contradictory choices and not suffer agonizingly for it. Of course the tradeoff is an explosion of anxiety, but through government educational programs, group-therapeutic entertainment, and watered-down religious faith, you can cope with that anxiety indefinitely.
So sorry, Joe, I'm still not buying it. Therapeutic Gersonism is bad for America even if Gerson wants to dial down the welfare state. I won't let him wipe away the contradictory tension between 'zero-tolerance' programs and 'treatment and education' programs, and I won't let him lead the country down the self-deluding path of practical morality managed by government social scientists. Not without a fight, anyway. Gerson calls pessimism an easy pose, and hope a moral virtue. But a vote of hope for Gersonism is a vote against the entire logic of virtue and vice itself. Nowadays, what pose could be easier than that?
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