Every month or so, I see some story titled something like: So-and-So Says Capitalism Is Not Compatible with Democracy. The implication is always: so much the worse for democracy. As far as it goes, in arguing that uncontrolled capitalism is incompatible with unalloyed democracy, the statement is true, but it is a statement based on idiotic and false assumptions. We have never experienced an atmosphere of capitalism or democracy in pure form, and, as with most things, such as oxygen unmixed with other gases, life would immediately become impossible.
For reasons unclear to me, we live in a time in which "purity" and "the extreme" matter to people. One of the results is that the lessons of the past are simply ignored. If we have never had pure capitalism nor pure democracy (nor pure communism, totalitarianism, theocracy, etc.), then it remains possible for some to argue for the utopia that would result from the extreme, pure application of the chosen ism or ocracy. Never mind, that, whenever a society has approached one of those ideals in pure form, the results have been catastrophic. John Gray has done a wonderful job of documenting the causes and diseases of these would-be paradises in his book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). To put it bluntly, and far too simply, Gray argues that we have not escaped from Christianity, or any other religion, but have simply carried over religious thought patterns into our application of religious and political notions. Now, of course, we have religion nakedly obtruding into both realms again, for as Gray notes people need meaning in their lives, and that is one of the roles of religion. But that is the beneficial role it plays. The thought processes we have carried over from it are all too present today. As Gray notes (page 6), " If a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking."
Millenarian thought has been the bugbear of my existence for decades. It's appeal has always escaped me and always worried me. Growing up surrounded by ICBMs (14 in my county alone) it always caused that reaction as a child and young adult. What we are dealing with today with the desire for a pure application of -isms and -ocracies is often shaped by the basic structures, if not the content, of Christian millenarianism. Somehow, pure capitalism is held by some to be the key to a perfect world. For others it might be pure democracy, or pure communism, pure environmentalism, or the total domination of one religion or another. None of those can, of course, bring about utopia or paradise, none can bring about the millennium, which. (I am not writing as an atheist, but, if one wants to accept that God - any deity in fact - operates in unknowable ways, and is all powerful, then the belief that one can understand its will, through the correct interpretation of prophesy, and then force that god to execute some sequence of events to bring about the desired outcome is not religion, in the modern sense but the crudest divination and magick - and I use the Crowley spelling of that advisedly.)
The way out, of course, has always been moderation. That has also always been present in some religious and political thinking, though often ignored. In a sense, we teach the wrong book by Machiavelli in colleges and universities. Whether The Prince was really conceived as a practical joke or not, its message of absolutism achieved by any means is clearly the wrong one. We would do much better to teach his longer work, The Discourses, with its messages of mixed and balanced government. Even Machiavelli, who was quite radically opposed to absolutism, by the way, preached moderation in practice.
The great successes of Victorian Britain and of America, during its Century, were due to moderation in government and religion. Neither was anywhere close to perfect, neither came anywhere close to utopia, but both were successful by many measures (though clearly not environmentally nor in creating true equality for citizens or subjects). Both did well enough to foster at least the illusion of human progress, and in many ways did so. Now we face a dire future, but the accomplishments of both these mixed, moderate states and the worlds over which they exerted hegemony suggests ways forward. (If you are convinced that no progress has been made in the world, please take a look at Hans Rosling's last testament, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018, written by a doctor who had worked in some of the poorest countries in the world with the most rudimentary health care, and who approached the world with an openness that neither prophets of doom or utopian idealists could blind.)
What kind of moderation do we need, though? Much of the talk of moderation comes from those with extreme views, people who want compromise on their terms. Some of it comes from real moderates who fail to see that what political parties and religious groups offer is not compromise but, again, simply a move in their direction. I cannot call myself a moderate anymore. At one time I was but I have both moved far from the supposed center, but also become uncomfortable with every camp.
What I think we need is a a spirit of personal moderation as well as a societal one. That does not mean we need to compromise with Nazis, Fascists, Dominionists, Communists, or any other set of extremists. If possible, we should try to get them to compromise with us, or abandon their views, but trying to work with any totalizing philosophy is a dead end, in fact it is partly how we got into our present mess.
In, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (New York: Norton, 2018), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes (p. 211): "Values aren't a birthright: you need to keep caring about them." He says much the same about identity. To Appiah, both values and identities, which, after all, are intimately connected, are the work of a lifetime, hard work at that. We have to attend to them, they are what we are, and "attention must be paid" to them, and to their environment, as surely it had to be paid to Willy Loman.
This is directly related to the state of the world in which we find ourselves. We have to pay real attention, both to who we are, to what the world is, and to what it may become. We cannot settle into an -ism or an -ocracy. They are not mirrors that reflect the world, nor prisms that refract it, but inner illusions, too self-consistent to engage with the world as it is. Everyday is a struggle not to fall prey to one or the other of them. Each hour must see us attempting to engage with the world within whatever physical or mental limits we can and to broaden our perceptions. But we must also learn to live with others, their values, identities, and perceptions, not by ignoring them, but by trying to engage and find a common path forward whenever possible.
