Stopping Suicide Requires Shared Purpose
Why Jonah Goldberg’s new book is the start, not the end, of the conservative conversation on the present crisis.
Jonah Goldberg, “Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy,” Penguin Random House, 2018.
“Suicide of the West” is a decent book authored by a terrific writer, taking on an admirable task: defending the American, classical liberal order from all comers. Although Goldberg has more than a few foibles, it is a worthwhile read to engage with.
Ultimately the main theses of “Suicide” are listed as such;
“We are living in an unnaturally prosperous time. Our prosperity is not merely material but political and philosophical. We live in a miraculous time, by historical standards, where every human born is recognized by law and culture as a sovereign individual with unalienable rights. This is not normal in humanity’s natural environment. It is, to use the label I have used throughout this book, a Miracle.
We stumbled into this Miracle without intending to, and we can stumble out of it.
Human nature not only exists but is fundamentally unchanging.
If we do not account for and channel human nature, it will overpower and corrupt the institutions that make prosperity possible.”
Ultimately, as a conservative, whether you think Goldberg’s book was a success or failure will probably be determined by where you sit on the traditionalist-classical liberal spectrum of the American right wing. As something of a traditionalist myself, I find the book a well-written mixed bag. I finished “Suicide” thinking that Goldberg had in fact defended these arguments but undermined his own in few critical places. One can agree with his core conclusion while disagreeing with more than a few of his premises.
Is the West Committing Suicide?
For the metaphor to work, there must be a life in question, before we can talk about “committing suicide.” The life Goldberg writes of is the accomplishment of Western civilization. Ultimately, to Goldberg, the main achievement of the West has been the astounding combination of immense material prosperity, peace and human rights. While arguably this ignores the huge cultural achievements of the West like Bach, the Tridentine Mass or Shakespeare, it does seem obvious that Goldberg’s ostensible “Miracle” is the main political achievement of the West.
Goldberg demonstrates the reality of this miracle with an impressive marshaling of facts and figures, though oddly most of these are in the appendix. For all of Goldberg’s love of Locke, his main point is starkly Hobbesian: Most of human existence has been lived in immense poverty and threatened by violence. In short, throughout human history, most life was “poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Because it would be redundant to simply recite the various points Goldberg cites, we can safely assume that since the advent of classical liberalism and capitalism, the world is, in fact, a much less miserable place for virtually everyone. Starting in the 16th century, the world economy skyrocketed into the modern age. In our lifetime, we will see the near annihilation of extreme global poverty. Not only are we living in the most peaceful time of the last century — this century remains one of the least violent times in world history.
Goldberg warns us that this astonishing miracle is under threat from various sources. Across Europe, the United States and the wider West, voices on the right and left champion illiberalism as the solution to our modern woes. Although many on the right can have reasonable concerns about the limits of liberalism and capitalism, Goldberg’s Miracle should give us pause before we tear down the entire structure in a fit of populist rage.
Can we stop the cycle?
As the far left and populist right feed off each other, Goldberg correctly notes, they create a cycle where the classical liberal order becomes collateral damage in the ensuing chaos.
However, the main weaknesses of the book manifest in his attempt to stop the cycle.
Goldberg wants to save the achievements of liberalism but his approach may be its undoing. There are a few issues that keep this book from being instructive as a conservative way forward. These are namely: God, the role of identity and the market.
The opening line poses a major problem.
“There is no God in this book.”
Ultimately this undermines everything Goldberg hopes to conserve. Without a shared concept of telos or purpose, without a shared moral universe, ideas like property, liberty and equality lose their proper place. Furthermore, most of the identity clashes that “Suicide” warns about are largely due to the collapse of the shared Judeo-Christian moral universe that once undergirded the common American civic identity. Kirk had it right when he pronounced conservatism as foremost about a,
“Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.”
Goldberg, though himself secular, partially admits the weakness of his own approach towards the end of his chapter “Decline is a Choice.” Without Judeo-Christianity, the taproot to the ideals that make liberalism healthy is cut off and we are left with something altogether unhealthy.
Furthermore, without a set of moral prescriptions and common vision of the good life, liberalism no longer becomes a model for prosperity and thriving. Instead, it has begun to turn in on itself as Alasdair Macintyre predicted. By abandoning the argument over a transcendent moral order, liberalism has been reduced to a neutral arbiter between a whirlwind of competing claims.
However, this arrangement cannot last and the liberal order instead becomes an illiberal progressive order, imposing a new orthodoxy. The transformation of “live and let live” into “toe the line with the latest piety that we just discovered or be fired” demonstrates the truth of this sad fact. Making our arguments as if there is no objective Transcendence of some sort doesn’t broaden the appeal of our point but rather simply cedes the field to another faith.
Secondly, Goldberg just misses the mark on identity. He ironically starts with conservative premises and ends with liberal conclusions. “Suicide” is absolutely correct that civilization is fragile and our barbarian impulses (our cultural Puritan ancestors would call this “total depravity”) means that our cultural work is never finished. Furthermore, the embrace of identity is completely natural and unavoidable.
However, the book leaves you thinking that to be conservative must require some repudiation of identity altogether. This is neither possible nor desirable. The problem in America is not one of identity but identities. The collapse of a common American identity, complete with inter-class cultural solidarity, buttressed by shared institutions, leaves people scrambling for anything they can craft together. They will resort to the most base and common denominators: race, sexuality and class. This has been nothing short of a civic disaster. America, unlike Scandinavia, is too diverse for this sort of tribalism to be sustainable. Goldberg could have written how we can reclaim this shared identity but regrettably leaves this task to another day.
Lastly, while “Suicide” does aptly defend the market as the necessary engine of human prosperity, it could do more to deal with capitalism’s ragged edges. Goldberg makes great points against the state’s corrosive effect on traditional life. By performing the roles of traditional mediating institutions, the state colonizes those institutions, rending them redundant until we are little more than solitary individuals bound only by the Leviathan. Progressivism, with its telling “Life of Julia,” has no worthwhile program to deal with this issue.
Meanwhile, as Goldberg does admit that capitalism has some negative side effects, he does not propose what a healthy relationship between the state and market would look like. He rightfully praises Burke’s “small platoons” of society but what if the market was possibly just as corrosive to our traditional lives as the state? While the state cannot give us the metaphysical meaning we crave in our lives, it certainly can carve out spaces where the creative destruction of the market cannot reach. Not all of these proposed solutions will be helpful or feasible, but in an era of immense technological change and globalization, concerned conservatives will have to ponder the possibility of a renegotiation between capitalism and conservatism.
Ultimately I found “Suicide” to be refreshing even when I found it lacking. Its defense of Western civilization’s primary political achievements — prosperity, peace and dignity — is profound. The threats that Goldberg warns of — tribalism, statism and inchoate rage — are real. And although it does not serve as a complete guide rolling back a potential tide of barbarism, it does serve as a great conversation starter to how this guide could possibly be written.
