The Zman is analyzing the fistfight between Curtis Yarvin and Christopher Rufo over at IM1776. To the Zman they are both ideologues with an “image of how society ought to be organized based on how they think men ought to act toward one another.” Yarvin wants a monarch to set things right according to Yarvin; Rufo wants to reaffirm our natural rights. Zman thinks they are both wrong.
The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible.
Thus, the Zman is saying that we don’t know what we should do, because we really don’t have a clue about the destiny of mankind (except, per Elon Musk, to Occupy Mars!).
For all of human history, how we ought to organize society was a practical question, not a moral one. Ideology is an invention of Western man, the weeds that grew out of the rubble of the Thirty Years War.
I agree. I have been reading Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power about how back in the Middle Ages kings weren’t all that powerful. Because the church and the nobles. To say it in Schmitt-speak, the king dealt with the political, friend vs. enemy, and the Pope dealt with the moral, good vs. evil. And neither was powerful enough to dominate the other.
It wasn’t until the Reformation and the absolute monarchs that the notion of the Divine Right of Kings got going. Now, of course, we have the Divine Right of The People. In other words, our modern society combines the political and the moral in a state ideology. Thus, right now, our peaceful protesters are all worked up about the morality of the Israeli government leveling Gaza and the horror of a society riddled with systemic racism. The job of the modern political elite is to deal with enemies and with evil both.
Zman says that we are coming to the end of ideology, but I wonder. He says:
As soon as you accept biological reality, most arguments about how we ought to live become superstition. You are left with the question of what can we do with the material at hand.
Yeah. Why don’t we all just get along, all friendly like.
I’ll tell you why. First of all there are people interested in politics and they are always ginning up a war against the enemy. Then there are people interested in morality and they are always worried about those witches, or those racist-sexist-homophobe haters. And the rest of us just want to wive and thrive.
Fact is that we humans have always worried about the enemy on the other side of the hill; we have always worried about bad apples, whether they might incur the wrath of the gods or disrupt society with their evil ways. And the rest of the time we are worried about putting food on the table and a roof over our heads.
When we combine politics and morality and the economy we call it totalitarianism. And for the last two hundred years we have had a ton of wars that were at least partly religious, with an enemy that was clearly evil. That’s because we have been living in the Age of Ideology.
So, what comes next? Honestly, I don’t have a clue. I just know that I don’t like living around liberals that want to direct all the traffic on the morality front.