The Dreamworld Of Procedural Neutrality

Earlier today in a response to a comment by Ray SoCa I wrote:

"What the tweet roll showed was the involvement of the deep state with the internet giants. Silicon Valley changed from a libertarian ethos, to a very woke ruthless capitalist ethos ..."

I would argue that there isn't much if any difference--one feeds the other. The essence of libertarianism is the claim that there is no actual human nature--we all just invent ourselves as we prefer and come to socially contractual arrangements to protect our interests. It's basically the Anthony Kennedy "sweet mystery of life". It is what we want it to be.

This acts as a solvent on all human bonds in society, breaking down any common morality on which real human society is based. But of course no society can go on that way. Rather than a society wide social contract agreed upon by all, what we wind up with is interest groups coalescing and seeking to impose their visions (because individuals just aren't that unique when it comes to inventing themselves). The strong and driven and cohesive prey on the rest.

This is where we are in America and much of the West, and we got here through Classic Liberalism aka libertarianism.

In the meantime I came across this brief (less than five minute) video. It’s quite articulate and the Protestant speaker clearly recognizes the issues America is facing on a society wide cultural level—if you extend this to the collective West you might even call this a conflict on the “civilizational” level and contrast it to Russia, China, and the Islamic world.

I’ll present my running summary cum commentary of/on the video first, and you can compare it with the actual video. The speaker, Tim Keller, frankly admits he has no final answer. I would argue that this ultimately flows from his Protestant worldview and his commitment to Liberal Democracy. Which he realizes no longer exists. If it ever really did. I should add, we’re not likely to get an answer, since Keller died last year. Nevertheless, the clarity with which he frames the issues is stimulating, IMO:

The first people to move from Liberal Democracy to the idea of imposing their worldview on everybody else were the Progressives. Rowan Williams called that "programmatic secularism." That's opposed to "procedural secularism." From the government being a (supposed) "neutral umpire" they moved to co-opting the government to actively impose Prog views. This came about, as I argued, as a result of the working out of Classical Liberal aka Libertarian views, which had become the unconscious default American public theology. Liberal Democracy with its radical skepticism undermined and led to the collapse of the Christian culture of the West. As I argue, rather than this leading to everyone amicably doing their own thing--hey, you can't legislate morality, so why can't we all just get along?--what it really led to was conflict among rival interest groups who concluded, quite logically, that if the basis for our Liberal Democracy is a moral skepticism then there's nothing at all wrong with imposing our views. Especially if we feel really strongly about those views.

Now Christians--especially Catholic Integralists--are coming to the realization that the Liberal Democracy they thought they knew doesn't actually work--not in the long run, anyway. The Founding Fathers thought they could enshrine in a written document what--from a strict philosophical standpoint--had already become legacy Christian values. Their experiment was the idea that, with this procedural document to serve as a rules based order, as a social contract that had been ratified, the American people could--exceptionally in human history--agree to abide by the rules in a civil manner. The problem, of course, was that the rules weren't strictly procedural. They were tilted toward the legacy values and, when those legacy values were implicitly (and, increasingly, explicitly) rejected, a large proportion of Americans saw no reason to abide by the rules. Some lapsed into indifferentism, but quite a few opted for "programmatic secularism"--for a variety of reasons. The practical move started with the reinterpretation of the rules, and that continues. But increasingly we see a forthright rejection of the rules as "racist", as power based subterfuges to privilege a ruling class or race, etc.

The result is that the old "proceduralism" based in the written Constitution "doesn't bring us together--it divides us," and "we're at each other's throats." Americans are facing off with "alternate views of reality." Keller admits he doesn't have a good answer for this dilemma. He still thinks "Liberal Democracy is way better than Catholic Integralism (people like Patrick Deneen) or Protestant Christian Nationalism." But he realizes that what Progs call "democracy" isn't democracy--or it isn't what he considers democracy to be. It's actually an imposition of a worldview. So he doesn't have an answer. He's working on that (as of the end of the video).