This is both insightful and kind of brilliant, Noah; it takes Damon's plainly quite smart--if problematically amerliorative, rather than structural--recommendations, and examines their implications in a really thoughtful way. Obviously I'm predisposed to agree with almost anything that aligns itself with Gioia's and Crawford's entirely correct observation that "we are increasingly disempowered to make things work, because the 'things' can increasingly only be fixed by professionals, if they can be fixed at all rather than replaced," but it's nice to see someone fundamentally on the side of bureaucratic liberal modernity--as I've always assumed you to be--acknowledge its truth. The only thing I would add to make what I take to be your overall point even more clear would be to slightly alter your final sentence. There have always been skeptics; philosophical liberalism is, in a sense, built upon exactly that bottom-line, skeptical, individualistic judgment. But what we're looking at now, and what I understand you to be making a moderate defense of, is STRUCTURAL skepticism, a skepticism about all sorts of supposedly (but maybe not actually?) foundational structures and norms about our economy, our constitutional order, our technological tools and toys, our sexuality, and more. Liberal modernity hasn't ever, I think, had to comport itself to the reality of skepticism on a deep, structural level, or at least certainly hasn't had to do so in this moment of mass democratic aspirations + the internet. Whether it will be able to find a way forward may be the work of centuries, not presidential election cycles.
The Damon Linker litany of horrors over the past two decades left me singularly unimpressed. As an oldster with a memory (in synch with Noah's point that things weren't all that much better in the past), I posted this comment on Slow Boring when Matt linked to Linker:
""That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years."
That Damon Linker sentence really got me thinking. Twenty years is a long time to catalogue bad stuff happening! Let's play this out and take, oh, 1960-1980:
"Kennedy assassination, King assassination, Kennedy assassination, Cuban missile crisis and get ready to say goodby to the world, almost 60,000 American dead in Vietnam, more civil strife and (largely generational) division in the nation since the Civil War, riots in the cities, Watergate, disastrous and humiliating retreat from Vietnam, oil crisis, stagflation -- one can fill out the rest of a Billy Joel song from here."
And all of that might have been tolerable in that period, it might all not been so devastating had it not been for the crowning jewel of terribleness, the thing that will stamp this time period with ignominy for all time. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm referring to Disco.*
This is both insightful and kind of brilliant, Noah; it takes Damon's plainly quite smart--if problematically amerliorative, rather than structural--recommendations, and examines their implications in a really thoughtful way. Obviously I'm predisposed to agree with almost anything that aligns itself with Gioia's and Crawford's entirely correct observation that "we are increasingly disempowered to make things work, because the 'things' can increasingly only be fixed by professionals, if they can be fixed at all rather than replaced," but it's nice to see someone fundamentally on the side of bureaucratic liberal modernity--as I've always assumed you to be--acknowledge its truth. The only thing I would add to make what I take to be your overall point even more clear would be to slightly alter your final sentence. There have always been skeptics; philosophical liberalism is, in a sense, built upon exactly that bottom-line, skeptical, individualistic judgment. But what we're looking at now, and what I understand you to be making a moderate defense of, is STRUCTURAL skepticism, a skepticism about all sorts of supposedly (but maybe not actually?) foundational structures and norms about our economy, our constitutional order, our technological tools and toys, our sexuality, and more. Liberal modernity hasn't ever, I think, had to comport itself to the reality of skepticism on a deep, structural level, or at least certainly hasn't had to do so in this moment of mass democratic aspirations + the internet. Whether it will be able to find a way forward may be the work of centuries, not presidential election cycles.
The Damon Linker litany of horrors over the past two decades left me singularly unimpressed. As an oldster with a memory (in synch with Noah's point that things weren't all that much better in the past), I posted this comment on Slow Boring when Matt linked to Linker:
""That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years."
That Damon Linker sentence really got me thinking. Twenty years is a long time to catalogue bad stuff happening! Let's play this out and take, oh, 1960-1980:
"Kennedy assassination, King assassination, Kennedy assassination, Cuban missile crisis and get ready to say goodby to the world, almost 60,000 American dead in Vietnam, more civil strife and (largely generational) division in the nation since the Civil War, riots in the cities, Watergate, disastrous and humiliating retreat from Vietnam, oil crisis, stagflation -- one can fill out the rest of a Billy Joel song from here."
And all of that might have been tolerable in that period, it might all not been so devastating had it not been for the crowning jewel of terribleness, the thing that will stamp this time period with ignominy for all time. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm referring to Disco.*
(* And special runner up, leisure suits.)