The other day Timothy's interest was piqued by a review of John Gray's Black Mass. Timothy notes that:

Rauchway describes Gray as arguing that Thatcherite neoliberals assumed that reducing the size of the state and empowering markets would reinvigorate a mannered, respectable and traditionally moral middle-class culture within Britain. Instead, one of the fruits of neoliberalism on the domestic front was a less judgemental, more tolerant society that was even more socially and culturally decentralized than the post-1968 society the Thatcherites looked on with distaste. This, to Gray, explains the rise of neoconservative enthusiasm for state interventions into social, cultural and moral concerns.

With adaptations, this argument seems useful in the United States as well. For me, one of the key convergences of the last two decades in American political life has been in arguments used by a culturalist right and a culturalist left. Both factions assume that the only way to explain why many Americans do not “naturally” favor their own vision of naturally moral behavior is that the state and civic institutions are pervasively meddling with mass consciousness. Both groups ended up being challenged by the results of neoliberalism or deregulation of key social and cultural marketplaces.

I've paid some attention to Gray, even been accused of being a sort of Gray-lite blogger. I commented on Timothy's blog that this Appleyard article was a bit richer discussion of Gray. The bit from Gray that does intrigue me is his doubt. In Appleyard's words:

So, what is he all about? What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.

Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.

Because forms of utopianism are either implicit or explicit in most human projects, Gray’s is a world-view that causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage. Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all his thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused. I think our society is better for having escaped the tightness and oppression of the 1950s. But it left conservatism incoherent. It has still not recovered.”

It is a vertiginous view, but wrong. Timothy's take is similarly mistaken. We are not more tolerant, looser and less oppressive, more socially and culturally decentralized, and we have not otherwise made social improvements. We are intolerant about different things, ever tighter and more oppressive but about different issues, and we are increasingly socially and culturally stovepiped by nanny states. We are just as nasty as before, we just pick on different victims now. As ever. In that Gray is right. We are tribal carnivores possessed of reason, but eternally lack the wisdom to transcend our nature. Any apparent progress we have made is merely an accommodation of society to technological evolution. We seem to be a bit less vicious on an individual level, but only because we now have more indirect and automated methods to eviscerate our social competitors. We don't need to personally bash in their heads as often these days.

This is a scratchy subject seldom worth the effort to engage with. What's the use? But in the past few days a number of articles and posts have pressed that same bad button. Today Glenn had one:

ANNALS OF SEXISM: "How men cope with being cast as predators." . . . Similar bigotry regarding race wouldn't be tolerated. This, on the other hand, is embraced.

The linked article is a bog standard account of our increasingly perverse and intolerant society. Those who deny this use various justifications and evasions.

Norm had another one:

It's funny how one person's explanatory resource is another person's means of evading the issue. . . An example I won't need to remind anyone of is provided by the alleged 'root causes' of some people committing mass murder upon other people when the former people are being 'understood' by sophisticated members of the metropolitan intelligentsia, as a way of avoiding having to be too vulgarly condemnatory. But a different kind of diversionary use of causes occurs when someone explains away an argument by invoking its supposed social and psychological roots in order not to have to meet it.

What set Norm off was something that is related to Glenn's issue above.

Cue Ms Decca Aitkenhead. She's reviewing The Fall-Out by Andrew Anthony, whom she characterizes as one of a bunch of former leftists taking flight to the right. She speculates that perhaps the right was always their 'real political home', and the war on terror just gave them the opportunity to see that and realign. She wonders if their stance might...

... have something to do with a midlife panic over masculinity and mortality? These are, after all, men of a certain age, and they did seem to find Bush's shock and awe disproportionately exciting.

I'll pass over the psychologizing of a political difference for the manifest vacuity it is - as if Aitkenhead and her friends could have some means of knowing the real political personalities of the people she's talking about prior to and independently of what she takes to have been their - our - conversion. In response to the attempted 'gendering' of it, however, I offer two words: Pamela Bone . . .

Norm does meet arguments. He's all about meeting arguments, though he doesn't argue about it. He doesn't press the precise point Gray is making, or that I am making, but he makes one that I think is related.

Nothing in the way of arguments needing to be met, arguments about weaknesses in the anti-war movement or the compromising of egalitarian values, or the way indeed that Saddam's torture chambers and all the rest of the criminality he was responsible for have not been allowed to carry the weight that for many of us they did carry. They have not been allowed to by means of the very act of labelling of left support for the Iraq war as a departure to the right that Aitkenhead repeats in this review of hers, sealing it with the flip and repulsive cynicism of the passage quoted above. It's yet one more case of the 'Who, me? Who, us? What, the left?' sarabande.

See, I opposed war as a useful response to terrorism or the other ills of that region. I didn't think it would actually work though it would spill much blood and treasure. I didn't make much noise about that in part because it would have aligned me with the creeps that Norm so gently excoriates. Note that these are often the same creeps that Glenn cites for bigotry, and the same creeps that I claim have inherited the mantle of social intolerance and oppression, refuting both Gray and Burke in their view that we have become less intolerant. They blink reality. I suspect that this is in part due to the portion of reality they have focused on, and a lack of empathy for those who now bear the brunt of social oppression. It's an emotional error more than an intellectual error, though it results in intellectual error.

Burke's thesis that the assumptions of the culturalist left and right that "the only way to explain why many Americans do not “naturally” favor their own vision of naturally moral behavior is that the state and civic institutions are pervasively meddling with mass consciousness. Both groups ended up being challenged by the results of neoliberalism or deregulation of key social and cultural marketplaces" is simply wrong. State and civic institutions have pervasively meddled with mass consciousness, and so failed to be liberal. They have not maintained balance, they have taken sides, first one then another, and so ceased to be liberal. The culturalist left and right would still have complained had states sought balance since they do not want liberalism. Gray's expectation that "the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe" seems accurate, though not immanent. We are unbalanced but not yet defeated. We fail by trying to resolve conflicts, when we ought to be balancing them, however precarious a position that perpetually puts us into. Surf's up.

There's work to do. Glenn's and Norm's observations, and those of many others who have noted the illiberal and unbalanced state of states, need to be met, not evaded. In this way we can, as Gray recommends, defend the liberal state for a little longer, even if it is doomed to eventual overthrow.

Update: For example

Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum's charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players "white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape," men who could "claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness." Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved "castrate" banners, put up "wanted" posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.

The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham's "progressive" community--including the local chapter of the NAACP--helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times' coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and "analysis" articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: "You couldn't invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist." Such Nifong allies--unlike the district attorney himself--paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.

These are just are old fashioned bigots. We have not progressed, we have just shifted the targets of government protected bigotry. That these bigots are government employees, journalists and academics as well as grievance groupies is an excellent example of the illiberal state - at local, state and national levels. These bigots used to call themselves liberals, though they have never been liberal, and now call themselves progressive, though they are not now, and never have been, progressive by any reasonable definition of that word. That doesn't mean that a more liberal and progressive society isn't a goal worth pursuing. It just means that there are currently no large tribes in pursuit. There are individuals and small tribes doing good work, but they are thin on the ground.