The Persistence of Old Values; The Metaphysics of Realignment

Two shorter pieces

Two shorter pieces for this week.

The Persistence of Old Values

The transition from the old regime to liberalism symbolized by the French Revolution meant, in principle, a replacement of aristocratic values with bourgeois values. We gave up honor and courage for the more mundane values of thrift and rational management together with the safety afforded by fewer duels to the death and wars in which the peasantry was mobilized by aristocratic pride. A less romantic life, but a safer one.

It was thought that the business world would be where competition could take place instead. Instead of fights over land and hierarchy, ambitious individuals could sublimate their drives into producing better and better products that would serve society.

Observation of prominent business influencers, however, shows that it is not bourgeois virtues of calculation and rational management of resources that motivate many businesspeople but rather more base drives such as the need to win at all costs and to dominate competition. These are not even necessarily the old aristocratic virtues, which were at least elevated by an idea of nobility. In the petit bourgeois, we often see a neo-martial ethos on display.

Defenders of capitalism say that the accommodation still works because the aim is essentially to prevent violence, not to cultivate virtue. Noah Smith has argued that capitalism is best because we might have warlords if these martial tendencies of billionaires and others with outsized egos were not sublimated from the game of life and death to the game of market share and user adoption.

But Sri Aurobindo identified the neo-martial sentiments found in such businesspeople clearly as a form of barbarism—specifically an "economic barbarism." The barbarians of old wielded blunt weapons and sought the spoils of violence to fuel unrefined modes of living. Though the economic barbarians of our time refrain from physical violence, to their credit, all else is on the table, from legal challenges to ad spending blitzes to working around the clock; and they, too, show no interest in finer aspects of life.

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But what is the alternative to economic barbarism? Thinkers who don't go beyond critique stop at the argument that economic barbarianism is bad without proposing a solution. If economic barbarianism is bad, then we must give up on it, even if we don't have any other way to run the economy, this line of thinking goes.

Those who think past the fact that economic barbarianism currently runs the economy and would need to be replaced by something often land on the idea of managerialism. Instead of the economy being owned by barbarians who battle over the control of market share, perhaps resources and means of production could be owned by society and simply stewarded by rational managers with a vested interest in managing the system for the good of society. The managers would thus become the true stewards of bourgeois virtues and the rule of bourgeois liberalism would continue.

Another alternative idea that is popping up is the crypto economy where power would be decentralized and software itself would prevent any one person from being able to dominate the rest of society.

But just as the martial values of the aristocrat and the barbarian persisted into the bourgeois world of business, we should not assume that a mere conceptual reshuffling of the idea of ownership to manageralism or crypto decentralization would get rid of the drive to win and dominate. The underlying human nature which seeks to dominate would remain the same if it is not regenerated by a higher system of values. Hence Sri Aurobindo's insistence that there is ultimately no change of institutions that could substitute for the change of consciousness.

That said, we must not let this idea stop us from trying new things in our institutions. It may be time to try crypto decentralization, or nationalize industries into managerial bureaucracies, or on the contrary lower taxes to spur even more business sector growth, even if we don't believe that those ideas will bring the ultimate change of consciousness. The problems of our current society are real and require new ideas and actions.

In his short book The Mother, Sri Aurobindo presents several psychological aspects of consciousness and their virtues, showing that multiple complementary sets of virtues are needed for the completeness of the Divine manifestation. This suggests the possibility that rather than being fixed on a single institutional change as the thing that will save us, we may see different institutions as places where different aspects of the play of consciousness can occur and be uplifted by different values.

If a particular domain is governed by managerialism, let it be guided by the principle of Mahasaraswati aspect of consciousness: "...Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment... This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless." Let it be this energy that presides over bureaucracy and not simply the laziness of the sinecured and the haughtt unhelpfulness of the one with a senior administrative position.

And there may still be elements of society where the martial ethos persists: because of its insistence we should assume that it is not an easy element of human nature to get rid of. Let it then be guided by what Sri Aurobindo identified as the Mahakali aspect of consciousness, called to great deeds uplifted by a spirit of nobility rather than simply what seeks to dominate. "Not wideness but height, not wisdom but force and strength are her peculiar power. There is in her an overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle... Her spirit is tameless, her vision and will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath and she has a deep and passionate kindness." If the economic barbarians could be converted to this spirit, it would be a great step forward for consciousness and the world order, indeed.

The Metaphysics of Realignment

After the 2016 election, I was curious about some social-political reinventions that have been grouped under the moniker of "the Realignment." One was the defection of establishment conservatives like Bill Kristol and David Frum to the "Never Trump" side, where they joined forces with the liberal establishment to combat Trump's flouting of norms. On the other side, veteran Gen X journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald went from left-wing before to now being anti-establishment figures who ended up being against the liberal establishment. The most personally amusing examples for me were a few Gen X bloggers who before 2016 had a dark, edgy persona but after 2016 revealed themselves to be basic, compassionate, center-left liberals. I don't name them because these are some of my favorite writers, but it's funny to remember the previous edgy personas now that they've been tamed by the liberal consensus.

I had been thinking of the 2016-2020 period as "the" Realignment, meaning that it seemed like the only one, that political categories were obvious and set in stone before this period and would be stable again after it. But the last few weeks with Biden’s debate performance and the attempted assassination of former President Trump provided an occasion for another turning of the wheel, with more factions realigning, showing that we have not reached the end of realignment. The largest realignment has been in the tech world. Such "heterodox" but previously noncommittal figures in the tech sector as Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan, and Beff Jezos (a tech influencer not to be confused with Jeff Bezos) all posted or spoke about supporting the Trump campaign.

I realized that there is not just one realignment, but that realignment is an ongoing process in life and in the universe. There will always be new political forces and new life circumstances that cause industries or social identities to tip to one side or the other. What these realignments do is reveal what people truly are. I don't just mean that it reveals people as "really" "good" or "bad"—moral judgments are possible, but I'm referring to a diagnosis of essences that happens even before moral judgment.

Every outer form of an identity is the revelation of a real aspect of a person's being. We tend to think of identity as a mere outer form because, the argument goes, identity categories are mutable in contrast to the permanent authentic soul or essence. But another way of thinking about it is that even though the categories change with time, they still indicate a certain essence while they apply. Seeing that one or another identity applies to someone indicates something about the essence of that person. When a realignment happens, a new revelation of that person's essence is disclosed. It doesn't negate the previous category but rather discloses reality in the process of becoming. As Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine, the process of evolution is "the overt realisation of that which she [Nature] secretly is."

Eventually these will be facts that we've always known—Elon Musk has "always" been a right-wing billionaire; his time as a center-left immigrant entrepreneur darling has been memory-holed, and a right-wing billionaire is what he "really is." It is these moments of realignment when previously known realities are reinterpreted according to new labels that allow the clearest glimpse into the process of things becoming what they are.