https://unherd.com/2022/05/covid-was-liberalisms-endgame/I don't find the parts about Hobbes and Locke particularly relevant, because I don't think managerial bureaucrats are thinking about, or care about, the varying Enlightenment-era conceptions of the state of nature. The overall argument is very good though.
Some key passages:
The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasise the cognitive incompetence of human beings, deposing the “rational actor” model of human behaviour. This gave us nudge theory , a way to alter people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised, on both sides of the Atlantic. The innovation achieved here is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behaviour management that relies on our pre-reflective cognitive biases.
Lockdowns kicked our social atomisation to a level we’ve never seen before. Loneliness profoundly damages our ability to orient in the world and distinguish what is real from what is in one’s head, as the work of Ian Marcus Corbin shows. With little shared material existence to provide an intersubjective anchor, we found what solace we could in disembodied interaction on social media. Screen time rose dramatically for all demographics. But such interaction tends toward the feedback loops and brittleness of merely verbally constituted tribes who have no skin in the game because they lack the shared, pragmatic interests of those who inhabit a real world together.
It has been said that, in its formalism and insistence on neutral procedures, liberalism has an “empty centre”, denuded of substantive commitments. But political life abhors a vacuum, and the center doesn’t remain empty. The good that was latched onto as a source of collective meaning during the pandemic was that of minimising deaths attributable to a single cause, never mind the wider field of harms done by the lockdowns outside this tunnel vision.
This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics.
Platonic psychology offers a useful point of reference for grasping the transformation Hobbes aimed at. Thumos, often translated as spiritedness, is the part of the soul prone to taking offence, and to making claims for one’s own dignity. That is because, more broadly, thumos asserts the value of things, creating the field for moral choice. If all goes well, it does this in dialectic with logos, the reasoning part of the soul. Working together in a well-ordered soul, they don’t merely assert, they are alert to the value of things.
The idea that emotion should have any positive epistemic role to play in grasping reality is foreign to modern thought. Pride can only be a source of partiality; to be “judgmental” is to be prejudicial. The ancient perspective offers a critical challenge, answering that reason without spirited evaluation fails to apprehend things in their true colours, because the lifeworld of human beings is shot through with value and cannot be adequately described in “neutral” terms that are value-free.
This is a very well-written piece about what I see as the fatal flaw of modern liberalism: its tendency toward a totalizing project of maximizing the "utility" of humans, as understood by statistical metrics legible to
thumos-less bean counters deep within an impenetrable bureaucratic state. The result is a regime in which humans are simply replaceable and interchangeable utility-generating cogs, stripped of their inner lives, and in which soul and spirit are frowned upon. I don't see how in today's society liberalism can be separated from this tendency. To me liberalism is dying, and this is both thrilling and terrifying: we don't know what will replace it. It could be the kind of high-minded civic republicanism characteristic of the American founding, with the recognition that rights and duties, and society and the individual, depend on each other and are nothing without the other. Or it could be an even more totalitarian technological fascism. Or I could be wrong and we could keep hurtling toward pod-life "own nothing and be happy" fully-automated-luxury-communist hell.
