On Philosophy, Religion, Nazis, Conservatives, Leftists, Damon Linker, and Me

[Damon Linker--pundit, author, oft-infuritating centrist, and all-around great human being--recently lost his father, and is taking a break from his Substack to take care of family issues. I well understand how consuming the loss of a father can be, and my prayers are with him, his wife Beth, and their children at this time. I thought about delaying this post for a while, but then decided that it ultimately was, in some ways, a kind of a tribute to him and his, to me anyway, deeply clarifying philosophical journey, with just some perhaps interesting comments on political theory, metaphysical hopes, and regime-threatening racism along the way. Part of me thinks he'll appreciate that odd mix. Anyway, best wishes at this difficult time, old friend.]

 Damon and I have been friends for over two decades, going back to when we discovered each other in the late 1990s as two young ABDs working on dissertations on the 18th-century German educator and translator Johann Gottfried Herder. That launched a friendship--perhaps not a super-close one, but one that I've been consistently grateful for over the years--filled with deep disagreements and loud laughs over politics, religion, family, movies, music, and much else. Still, it wasn't until Damon started his Substack "Eyes on the Right," and particularly until he published a series of reflective, searching columns over the past couple of months, that I was able to see, via his writings, just how much we shared, and how much we were divided nonetheless

In the first of those posts, Damon identifies himself as "a peculiar kind...of conservative"; definitely a non-ideological, small-c conservative, whose primary motivation is a "persistent hostility and resistance to unpredictable, rapid change." Damon is up-front about how much of this is a particular anxiety of his, rooted in the painful upheavals of his childhood and young adult life. But it is also intellectual; he strongly identifies with the dispositional conservatism of Michael Oakeshott, who described conservatives as being those who "prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." This kind of conservatism obviously barely has any home in the Republican party of today, or the last 40 years for that matter. Damon not only has no sympathy whatsoever to Trump and Trumpist reactionary wishes to "Make America Great Again"; he wasn't particularly sympathetic to Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" call when he was teenager either. So an ideological right-winger in any sense Damon most definitely is not.

But his same opposition to any kind of transformative promise or crusade also stops him from sympathizing with what he sees as Ahab-like obsessions with "getting" Donald Trump. He was long doubtful about both the Mueller investigation and the Trump impeachments, and he's one of the best advocates out there (or so I think, anyway, even though I don't agree with his conclusion) for the position of treating Trump as a wholly political problem, rather than risking further violence from his cultish defenders by reaching for some kind of legal solution to Trump's baleful effects on our elections. Hence Damon is a centrist Democrat and a "conservative liberal;" the kind of worried and frustrated philosophical centrist who'd probably find a lot of agreement with Judith Shklar (or Jacob Levy) and who joins the Niskanen Center. Turning to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," Damon wistfully observes that, ultimately, what he values is "a place of rest. Constancy. Contentment. Stability. Reaching it, and then holding onto it. Preserving it against the ravages of change."

Those were the lines which struck me most, and sent me off on writing this long post...because that's me. I find everything about that statement simply beautiful, and could not endorse it more. I have a hard time thinking of anything I've ever written or spoken or done even just remotely associated with my obsessive interests in community, simplicity, family, and more that couldn't be summarized by the very same words Damon wrote there.

And yet, my own small-c conservatism ends up pointing me in an entirely leftward direction, however perverse or incoherent that may seem to some. Call it left communitarianism rather than left conservatism if you prefer, but ultimately it's all the same. It's a leavening of Karl Marx's economically-grounded socialism with Christopher Lasch's culturally-grounded populism; a recognition that nothing threatens settled and stable "places of rest" more than (as I wrote) "the dislocating, exploitative social power which the unregulated (and thus invariably concentrating and centralizing) flow of capital gives to those who master it," while also recognizing that any actually democratically empowering alternative to the exploitative, community-undermining reign of finance capitalism should have the aim of (as I also wrote) "jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced...and...done in a manner which [does] not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey--another Progressive!--here) 'the local homes of mankind.'" 

For those whose leftism is fundamentally liberal, which means fundamentally about expanding individual autonomy and opportunity in opposition to collective or environmental limits, or at least is fundamentally oriented around a fear of threats to those liberal goods which, however undeniably bourgeois, have nonetheless made hundreds of millions of lives immeasurably better (no, I don't deny that--I may not be much of a liberal, but I am, adjectivally and procedurally, quite liberal in a Bryanesque way all the same), this kind of thing might only sound like another apology for those invariably authoritarian "red-brown" alliances. As Richard Yeselson once claimed in response to a defense of Lasch by George Scialabba years ago, limiting individual experimentation and expansion in the name of community or simplicity or family or most anything else kills off the engines of liberal capitalism, which only means that there will be less to go around, and "dividing up less [however fairly and justly] leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism." To all that I can only say: yes, I can see that coherence of that terrible intellectual path, and will do my best not to go down it. But my "best" doesn't involve me fleeing from it entirely, particularly not in the direction of Damon's centrism. On the contrary, unlike my friend's pragmatic "distrust [of] romantic longings," I don't think I have ever really even so much as blinked at the prospect of contemplating radically populist, economically mutualist, or religiously communalist collective movements to shore up the things I think must be conserved in the face of liberal modernity. Does that mean I live a localist, agrarian, Luddite life in total support of such things? Not at all. But I don't have any particular distrust of those who aspire to so do, and I try to teach all about them as much as I can.

So what is the real dividing point between Damon and I, the dividing point which led to two people who, in terms of actual electoral choices, are rarely all that different, but whose justifications for those choices and whose hopes for better future choices are radically distinct? Of course there isn't just one thing that led two instinctively small-c conservative people to become a careful centrist liberal and unhappy Democrat on the one hand, and a constantly disappointed but still dreaming utopian and dues-paying Democratic Socialists of America member on the other. Perhaps its as our respective material and cultural backgrounds: Damon grew up in a highly fractured and secular urban milieu, and his conceptions of stability reflect the cosmopolitan pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, while I grew up in very tight and religious and almost-rural milieu, and perhaps unsurprisingly my conceptions of stability reflect the land-based communitarianism of Wendell Berry. (Or, to be utterly academic and nerdy, for anyone who wants to read our respective dissertations, perhaps its because the work of Herder which Damon found most important was his deeply historicist Yet Another Philosophy of History, emphasizing the cultural incommensurability of the rival, particularist goods that different nations will always legitimately conceive and pursue, whereas my favorite work by Herder was the religious anthropology he laid out in Letters for the Advancement of Humankind, emphasizing that there is a centripetal force in all the various expressions of human difference that point towards the unified realization of truly common goods.) But if I did have to pick just one thing, it would probably be the way our personal histories were shaped the undergraduate and graduate educations we received.

In another thoughtful column, Damon talked about how he hopes to "to attain a modicum of wisdom about what mixture or balance of competing visions will be best for the political community as a whole." His unavoidably aristocratic language there, deeply infused with classical philosophical presumptions about the need to "exercise of independent judgment" by "not just standing apart from the various factions on the playground" but also rising above it, reflects his predilection for authors like Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tocqueville, but also his education by scholars working in the tradition of the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss. Damon acknowledged that his "own skeptical and somewhat pessimistic liberalism has been shaped by [Strauss's] work," which among other things preaches its own kind of careful moderation, counseling those who aspire to truth to, as Damon wrote elsewhere, "[protect] society at large from the acids of skepticism and doubt unleashed by philosophical questioning, while simultaneously [speaking carefully so as to protect] philosophers from the righteous indignation of citizens who (rightly) suspect that such questioning undermines belief in the gods of the political community and thus corrupts the virtue of its citizens." In this Damon is hardly unique--there are plenty of liberals whose careful, borderline-aristocratic skepticism were at least partly influenced by scholars shaped by the legacy of Strauss. One of those is the historian Mark Lilla, who was an important figure in Damon's intellectual development. But either way, Strauss's presentation of philosophic inquiry as mandating a certain kind of  "esotericism," a hiding of the truth about ultimate goods from the unenlightened, has an unfortunate magnetic appeal: a promise that hard, uncompromising, almost invariably illiberal and undemocratic truths, truths which ordinary people cannot handle, are available to a select few.

That's the sort of appeal, as Damon has discussed at length, has warped far too many young conservative scholars into accepting philosophical criticisms of democracy as not just arguments worthy of contemplation--since, as Strauss himself wrote, "the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation"--but as exclusive, comprehensive truths which deserve to be politically enacted. Such exclusivity, when poorly understood, can become an apologia for Trumpist-style America-Firstism. Even more tragically, it sometimes settles in people's heads alongside other, even uglier political exclusions: that the esoteric truth of the world isn't available to those of the wrong background, the wrong gender, or the wrong race. And so Strauss, who fled the Nazis to come to America, planted seeds that sometimes grow up alongside genuine Nazis (one of whom, Greg Johnson, whose name I don't remember but whose face I think I do, very probably--as best I can determine from Damon's research anyway--sat beside me in a seminar on Martin Heidegger, another German radical thinker as well as a one-time Nazi, taught by my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America in 1999, where both of us graduated with our PhDs in 2001).

The connection to Heidegger is important here, because like Damon and some of those mentioned above, I read a lot of Heidegger once upon a time, both at my undergraduate and graduate institutions. And like Strauss, Heidegger's comprehensive arguments about the metaphysical weaknesses of Western philosophy--or, more accurately, the metaphysical flaws about the very structure of and the central apprehensions about human existence which liberal democracies and modern notions of individual rights are the flawed fruit of--can have a seductive appeal. Damon talked about this on a recent episode of the excellent podcast, Know Your Enemy. Responding to a question of how Lilla's skeptical liberal break away from the influence of more extreme interpretations of Strauss might have played a role in Damon similarly not being overly seduced by his philosophical esotericism, Damon reflected:

I mean it's funny; it was partly over Strauss, but it was also over Heidegger. I went through a period in grad school where I was, like, deeply seduced by Heidegger and I was just reading him all the time. Not just Being and Time but a lot of the lectures that at that time were just being translated….There was a period there where I really had a kind of temptation to sort of just take the leap. And Heidegger is one of those thinkers who can inspire that. A kind of…religious conversion, like an all-encompassing worldview. It's also like a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought to pieces...a ready-to-hand tool of deconstruction right there. In this period I already knew that Lilla was very skeptical about Heidegger. There was a point in which I started sort of haranguing him, insinuating in a very-handed, Straussian way: “Why don’t you have the courage to really look at these things? This is the truth!” Lilla wrote a very memorable, hand-written letter back to me, in which he basically insinuated that I have Daddy issues...."You’re always looking for some teacher to kind of show you the light, and then they disappoint you, and you leave them behind; you should be a little more skeptical.” He was just always counseling skepticism. Like: “Fine; try on those garments, see how they feel. But then put them down; keep them around, but don’t make them your wardrobe.” That’s my own awkward metaphor, but it very much was: just be cautious! And I think for Lilla that comes from the fact that he was a teen-age convert to a kind of evangelical Christianity, that he then worked his way out of, and it informs his entirely intellectual make-up; you know–don’t get fooled again! That kind of attitude…he ended up passing on to me to some extent, and by the time I got to a certain point, I had inculcated it enough that I was by then pretty inoculated from it all on my own.

I don't have a story like that, but I have a Heidegger story of my own, the practical outcome of which is quite similar to Damon's, but the intellectual path it took me on--one I'm still on to a certain degree--being very different from his. Basically, I wonder if it just come down to the two individuals most responsible for bringing me to an appreciation of Heidegger's deep critique of modernity being Jim Faulconer, a philosopher at Brigham Young University, and Stephen Schneck, a political theorist and my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America. They are both serious scholars and devout religious believers--a Mormon who has written extensively on devotional topics, whose essays have been enormously important to my faith life, and a devout Catholic who has spent the second half of his career articulating an alignment between Catholic social justice teachings and progressive politics; currently, he serves as an appointed member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. And while neither were pious in the classroom--unlike some faculty at both universities, neither ever opened their classes or seminars with a prayer--in retrospect, I have realized that they introduced to impressionable students and budding scholars deeply discomforting critiques of the run-of-the-mill liberal, rational, and individual verities which the capitalist markets, the scientific methods, the technological tools, and the democratic principles which Western modernity takes as settled, critiques not just from Heidegger, but Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Arendt, Rorty, Ricoeur, Wolin, and more, and did so in ways that suggested anything but, as Damon put it, "a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought." On the contrary, to me this introduction to deconstructive arguments--expressed by some of them in the midst of an ugly anti-Semitism, which Faulconer and Schneck never failed to expose as actually undermining the better readings of these individuals' own argument--was received, to use the language of Alan Jacobs, as an "invitation to repair."

Repair what? That which our Western metaphysical presumptions, our capitalist socio-economic confidence, and our distinctly modern belief in the possibility of--indeed the presumed moral requirement of--human technological mastery, all work unknowingly to cover over. To me, the importance of Heidegger's teaching about aletheia, or "unconcealedness" or "disclosure," as that which phenomenologically resides at the heart of "truth," was that it pointed toward, lurking within every claim or discovery, an original and prior revelation, an es gibt--that, in other words, something about that which is, is a gift that has been a given, and that something, that gift, should be attended to. Derrida's articulation of "the trace" functions that way as well; as Jim once wrote, Derrida is can be understood as almost a kind of negative theologian: "the point of his deconstruction is to help us remember what the text calls us to remember but then forgets by its very nature.....deconstruction calls us to the act of remembering, wonder, and praise, and in that to a remembering relation to what we have forgotten rather than to the descriptions of what we have forgotten."  (To those familiar with Heidegger, it should probably go without saying that both Faulconer and Schneck approached his writings with a strong emphasis upon--or at least it appeared to me--the post-Kehre or "turn" towards the poetic in Heidegger, rather than his pre-Kehre work of Being and Time and such.) 

In short, from all these thinkers I received, thanks to Faulconer and Schneck, not an invitation to a potentially threatening truth which warranted liberal skepticism, but rather a philosophical appreciation which communicated more than anything else an appreciate the constructive possibilities of our essential, always particular, but nonetheless collectively shared naiveté. Our very understanding of the world and our place in it, and our ability to think and speak about such things, are conditioned by deep structural "always-alreadys," horizons of understanding--expressions of language, culture, and more--into which we have been thrown and which we can have no other moral obligations towards except the work of tending and care...which is not the same thing as protectively preserving those thrown realities against any change! On the contrary, the aim shouldn't be to distance oneself from the fray, but to authentically engage with it. 

Is that a pretentious (and therefore potentially exclusionary) assumption of one's "authentic" right to engage in acts of tending and building, something which others presumably lack? That the hunt for authentic engagement can become so is something I acknowledge above. But these philosophers, and those who taught me about them, helped convince me that everyone, including those who only wish to exercise a serene, moderate, practical judgment over those still in the cave, are equally subject to thrownness, and thus equally obliged to articulate a subjectivity that puts them in some relationship to the world, even they just wish to survey it. To put it simply, I kind of think we're all unavoidably engaged in the same project-making and meaning-creation. And yes, I do mean creation, which can be just as much directed towards stability as towards reform, revolution, or reaction. You don't have to agree with Marx's Thesis 11 that the point of philosophy is to change the world (though I mostly do)--but it is worth considering, as Stephen once put it to me in a discussion about the German philosophical tradition (from Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger and beyond), the possibly that truth isn't something to contemplate and perhaps, at best, strategically create the conditions for: it is something to be lived. As the sort of Christian who leans more towards abiding notions of grace rather than restrictive notions of commandment, and as a Mormon whose beliefs include a healthy dose of utopianism (however buried over by Mormonism's embrace of modernity those 19th-century ideals may be), how could all that not fail to click for me?

So perhaps that's the story. Not remotely all of it--I could talk about my early exposure to Rousseau and my friendship with Marxists and my years in South Korea and my subsequent fascination with East Asian political thought and the work of Fred Dallmayr (my dissertation advisor's dissertation advisor), and who knows how much more Damon could add to this description of his thinking, even assuming it's accurate (which I hope it is, mostly). But maybe this is enough to add up to a proper intellectual account of where I'm coming from, philosophically speaking, when I read friend's reliably smart but also occasionally disconcerting commentary, and see in it someone whose perspective I both value and understand, and enjoy learning from, but at the deepest level--as opposed to the much more practical and needful political level--I simply don't share at all, however much our justifications for what we believe sound the same. Damon has a small-c conservative sensibility, which makes him want to skeptically push against anyone whom he suspects of wanting to upset the apple-cart, and for that the liberal pluralism of an Isaiah Berlin works far better than any comprehensive philosophical vision, particularly the poorly-read Straussian one too common on the American right today; I also have a small-c conservative sensibility, but since I also believe--thanks to the influence both philosophical and religious visions--that we are all already and invariably in the midst of constant apple-cart-upsetting anyway, I find myself instead pushing to find the space and grace to authentically realize, to locally build or rebuild, that which constituted the cart in the first place. If that makes any sense. 

Oh well. That's friendship for you. It's been years since Damon and I had a proper (non-alcoholic) symposium; this post can't serve as one, and it's the wrong time for one as well, but this heterodox Mormon left conservative raises a class to his mostly secular conservative liberal friend all the same. My memories of you are a blessing, Damon; at this time, I wish your memories of your father to be the same for you.