Political Animal

From Aristotle and Arendt, through old and new politics, to ancient wisdoms and anarchism

Hannah Arendt convinced me that human beings are not only political beings, but political actors. She goes beyond Aristotle’s definition of the human being as “by nature a political animal” (ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, Politics I.2) to make action, political activity undertaken in a plurality of newness-inventors, higher than work (making, produce a world) and higher than labor (striving for survival). Politics is not in our nature, but in what we do.

To discover an anthropology for the Anthropocene requires politics.

But which politics? There’s a fundamental Tension or Question about whether ancient or classical wisdoms, including classical political thought, can be brought to bear on present day dilemmas, because if the Anthropocene is fundamentally a new era, what has gone before may not be able to speak to us.

Old Politics

Most ancient or classical wisdoms originated in pre-modern times — in classical world philosophies and religions. What happened in the modern age up to the definitive onset of the Anthropocene, whether you take that to be the industrial revolution of the 19th century or the Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century, stands in a middle zone between genuinely ancient or classical and whatever it is we’re trying to do now.

The dominant political philosophy that took hold during this middle zone is classical liberalism. It’s a view about political economy, not just politics. It’s also a philosophy, as the name implies, of freedom. It quickly gets tied up with capitalism (free markets) and democracy (the rule of the people, who are ostensibly free). Classical liberalism’s main heroes are Adam Smith (18th c), John Stuart Mill (19th c), and more recently economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (20th c). Party-wise, in the 20th century in the US classical liberalism has been championed by conservatives, Republicans, especially libertarian-leaning or small government conservatives. Under Ronald Reagan, there was a kind of three-legged stool conservative coalition of classical liberals with social conservatives and hawkish neoconservatives on the foreign policy scene.

New Politics

More recently, provoked by the Trump presidency, conservatives have been doing all sorts of interesting — and potentially scary — things to move beyond classical liberalism, based in part on a breaking-up of the old coalition, and in part on a growing roiling hatred of late 19th and 20th c progressivism and its supposed heirs: “woke” elites.

Left Progressivism, according to postliberal Patrick Deneen, is simply the other side of the coin of classical liberalism, right Libertarianism being the other side. The failures of both (together) can start to merge, with decidedly new and unfamiliar forms of conservatism emerging. (See Deneen’s many public interviews, his book Why Liberalism Failed, and his new book, Regime Change.)

It seems that now, competing for a politics of Anthropocene humanity, we have:

• post-liberalism and a so-called New Right, moving beyond…

• an older classical liberalism, whether of

  • a more libertarian or

  • a more progresse variety; and

• a far left preoccupied by identity politics surrounding race and gender (but not, curiously, concerned much with economics or class, like old left Marxism).

Old socialism fits presumably somewhere between classical liberal progressivism (if we buy Deneen’s consolidation) and old Marxism.

Anarchism, usually placed on the farthest left, actually has surprising affinities with the farthest non-Fascist right, or the most extreme libertarianism. It closes the loop, as it were, on the distinct opposite side from modern and moderate classical liberalism.

Strangely, given the hyper-politics of the New Right, and of the older Big Government progressive left, and of the now even further “woke” left, one might be tempted to straddle from a moderate classical liberalism, perhaps slightly right-leaning, over to a benevolent anarchism!

Maybe it looks something like this?

However you look at it, it’s a confused picture.

Postliberals and New Right thinkers, who will drive the Republican party and conservatism in the future, with or without Trump, take it upon themselves to attack not only failed classical liberalism, but especially the new “woke” left along with older school Progressivism, which in their minds have become one. Hot ire targets a non-democratic Big State (“deep state”) dominated by administrative and bureaucratic elites (non-democratic because non-elected), who are now “woke” and have assumed the vanguard for new and destructive culture wars. The new elites’ roots nevertheless trace back, according to the attack, to 19th and 20th century progressivism, to the politics of the Roosevelts (Teddy and later FDR), Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey.

It’s quite the narrative!

See various Hillsdale College courses, whose faculty come out of the Claremont Institute; and now the recent manifesto by The Upheaval’s N.S. Lyons, “The China Convergence,” arguing that the US has become a “soft” version of China, given its takeover by a “managerial elite.”

The China Convergence

Three-way Sweet Spot?

Here’s where I think a future sweet spot lies, for us Anthropocene humans as political animals.

1. Don’t lose the thread of pre-modern wisdoms, philosophical and religious, especially as they offer insight into the human condition as such. Weave new fabrics cross-culturally from the best threads, both west and east. This includes, in the west, not only a) western European religion, Protestant and Catholic, and b) modern philosophy, Anglo-American and continental, but also c) Middle Eastern/Levantine Judaism and Islam, and d) eastern and northern European Greek/Byzantine/Orthodox Christianity. In the east, there are the deep civilizational wisdoms of India and China, especially as these cultures and societies continue to respond, rapidly assimilate, and most importantly, adapt to the massive ideological and material encroachments coming from the West over the last three centuries.

2. Defend every last good thing about classical liberalism, especially its political economy that protects basic liberties for modern human beings. And yet, we will be forced to move beyond it. This is so a) because the End of History has not arrived (Fukuyama’s thesis), and b) anyone in the Anthropocene must now deeply question the possibility of unlimited economic growth, certainly via unhindered use of natural resources regardless of planetary impact. (The possibility of technological fixes sufficient to save the day is highly debated.) — Not to mention, c) the many other destructions, corruptions, and decadences that are coming to light in once-liberal societies. Constructive political debate, recognizable as such, lies here, defending the bastion, yet with critique in the air — hopefully non-violent.

3. Give room and credence to the best of anarchist thought, whether Jacques Ellul’s Christian anarchism, the political anthropology of James C. Scott, or Wengrow and Graeber’s Dawn of Everything.

CAPTURE OF BASTILLE, 1789. The capture of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. Contemporary French engraving. Source: "Citoyennes et citoyens!"