God and Mammon

 Yesterday, Donald Trump got up before the world's business elite gathered for their annual summit at Davos, Switzerland, and told them for the hundredth time: yes, he does indeed plan to impose universal tariffs aimed at decoupling the U.S. economy from global supply chains. Alarming stuff. And yet meanwhile—over on Wall Street—the stock market ticked upward for the third day in a row. "Everything is fine; nothing to see here" seemed to be the collective takeaway. How is this possible? 

Part of what's happening here must be sheer wishful thinking. Trump keeps saying he is going to do this, but he still hasn't actually done it yet—so people will keep hoping that maybe he never will. But I can't think of any other time in financial history when merely the dim hope that someone might be slightly less bad than feared was enough on its own to actually send markets higher. So, something else must be happening here...

Reports from Davos give some indication of what that X factor might be. The New York Times's "Dealbook" newsletter describes a palpable sense of relief among the world's economic elite. Or: maybe "relief" is not the right word. More like: liberation. The handcuffs are off. "One executive described the vibe [...] as 'atavistic'," the Times reports; "Talk about 'saving the world' is out, talk about U.S. growth and deals is in." 

The world's wealthiest suddenly feel like they can just focus on getting richer again. They no longer have to attend workshops on DEI or ESG. They no longer have to pretend to care about diversity in leadership or climate change. Instead, they can just count their winnings and try to get even more. They can let it all hang out. 

"But"—I am inclined to pipe up at this point, in a small voice—"Climate change is still real. Burying our heads in the sand and wishing it would go away won't actually make it less of a threat to the future of humanity. Diversity and accessibility are still important."—and so forth. 

And I'd be right. Climate change is real. Diversity and accessibility are important. But being right is not enough anymore, it would seem. 

The Left's great strength for years has been that we are in fact right—in the sense of being correct. We are the ones who are actually following through the logic of the ostensibly shared principles of our civilization. If you ask who is practicing more consistently both the Christian ethic and the values of the Enlightenment that could be said to undergird our society, it is plainly the Left. We are the ones following out the logic of what it means to recognize human equality and pursue scientific truth. 

We thought, back in 2020 or so, that this would be enough to carry us to victory. We'd move from strength to strength, because none could prevail against our overwhelming advantages in the domains of conscience and logic. 

But what we are seeing in the Trump 2.0 era is a great rejection of the force of both conscience and logic. We are living through a collective revolt against morality on the part of the global elite. Conscience and logic have proved to be such a drag—such a bummer—for people who really just want to make a profit and stroke their egos, that they are prepared to simply jettison both, rather than even pretending to have the better claim to either. 

And so, being right—and even being able to prove one is right—is simply not enough anymore. It turns out that when the facts and conscience get in the way of people's self-interest for too long—people may simply decide to let the facts and conscience go hang. 

And so, the Left is left out in the cold. We are left safe in the knowledge that we are right, and they are wrong—but that is all we are left with. And that is when we see, as Faulkner once put it—in The Wild Palms—one can be "consistently and incontrovertibly right, but withal tragic too since in the being right there was nothing of consolation nor of peace." 

That seems to be roughly the position the Left is in these days. We are incontrovertibly right about climate change, social justice, and all the rest. But there is precious little consolation in that bare fact of being right. You can't dine out on righteousness. You can't pass a law or stop a would-be dictator just by being right. Most especially—you can't enjoy yourself, just from being right. 

What did the Left do wrong? Back in the day—four years ago, or so—we thought that if we could win the moral and scientific argument (which we did), then we would triumph all around. But it turns out we failed to take into account the weakness of the flesh. The human animal can only take so much moral truth and righteousness before it rebels against them. The left thought that it could simply drive in the moral force of its arguments until the public cried "uncle"—but in the end, they simply thew us off. 

I was reading the British modernist Wyndham Lewis yesterday. Now, Lewis is often denounced (with reason) as a fascist, so one should take whatever he says with a grain of salt. But precisely because he was something of a fascist or at least saw its appeal—he was well-positioned to diagnose exactly the political phenomenon we are witnessing today. He can help us understand the great revolt against morality we are living through. 

It was Lewis who traced the downfall of the liberal post-Enlightenment civilization of the nineteenth century to its sheer force of conscience. He quotes from the philosopher T.H. Green, who proved by irrefutable logical demonstration that the gradual extension of the principles of liberalism—the recognition of the equal rights and entitlements of all—would necessarily require a concomitant increase in the burden of duties laid on all other humans, in order to ensure the positive realization of other people's rights. 

And so, the liberal pursuit of human "freedom," turned out—somewhat paradoxically—to involve an ever-increasing load of obligation.

It's that same force of moral obligation that our executives at Davos are rebelling against this week. It's that same desire for liberation from all moral restraint—that same desire to unleash the Id—that Trump's second presidency represents, and which is sending markets higher this week. 

Lewis—notably—doesn't say that Green was wrong. He acknowledges that Green's logic is irrefutable. The egalitarian precepts of our civilization do indeed lead inexorably to exactly the moral constraints and overpowering weight of obligation that Green describes. And Lewis doesn't exactly endorse the anti-moral rebellion to throw these shackles off. Instead—he merely urges people to acknowledge the scale of the sacrifice they are asking of ordinary people. He asks us to recognize why the incredible moral task demanded by liberal civilization strikes some people as drab and joyless. In short, some people experience it as a bummer. 

That seems to be what the Davos executives were telling the New York Times. All that DEI and ESG stuff may have been correct—but it was a bummer. Whereas all this "atavistic" puerile Trump chauvinism stuff—this "Drill, Baby, Drill" and let future generations fend for themselves—is fun!

Lewis shorthands the bummer of liberal civilization—founded in the egalitarian Christian ethic and the recognition of the inherent value of the human person—by borrowing Swinburne's image of the "pale Galilean." The ethic of Christ may have conquered—as Julian the Apostate is said to have uttered; the "pale Galilean," in Swinburne's version of the famous (if apocryphal) phrase, may be right, in matters of conscience and logic. 

But that doesn't mean the righteousness is not depressing. It doesn't make the force of moral truth any less of a bummer. 

The great handicap of the Left—in other words—continues to be the one Orwell attributed to it all those years ago: the Left has a very hard time having fun. They may have all the arguments on their side. They may be correct as to the obligations we owe one another in a modern global civilization. But actually living up to those obligations may be more than the human animal can bear. The flesh is weak, as I say. 

I don't argue that therefore the Left needs to give up morality. We shouldn't join in the anti-moral revolt. Heaven forbid. After all, even Lewis was forced to admit—the T.H. Greens of the world are still right. The "pale Galilean" conquered for a reason—he had the forces of logic and conscience on his side. 

But perhaps we should press the claims of logic and conscience a little less mercilessly and unrelentingly. Perhaps we should press them with a little more acknowledgement of the limitations of the human animal (including ourselves). 

After all, a great deal of left-wing rhetoric in recent years has focused on forcing people to acknowledge the logical implications of their own ostensible egalitarian principles—the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence. This can be salutary, because it can move people to set aside their own self-interest for the sake of what is right. But we also need to be cognizant of the ever-present risk of backlash. Because, if people are forced too strenuously to see the logical implications of the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence—they may simply decide to jettison both. They may erect in their place an explicitly anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anti-moral worldview. 

Then, the Left will have succeeded only in making things worse. Because we weren't willing to tolerate people's unconsciously self-interested behavior, as they went about telling themselves inwardly that they were actually true egalitarians at heart—we merely succeeded in turning these same people into conscious anti-egalitarians. 

In other words, we confronted them too hastily with an ultimatum. We forced them to choose. "Once to every man and nation/ Comes the moment to decide," we said, with James Russell Lowell. It's got to be either your self-interest, or your ostensibly egalitarian ethical code. You can't have both. You cannot worship God and mammon alike, as the Bible says.

But unfortunately—faced with this ultimatum—a lot of them simply chose Mammon. They said, "okay, if you're right, and I really can't have it both ways—then I'm going with self-interest. The Christian ethic be damned." 

And then they go and set up a fully-conscious worked-out scheme of anti-egalitarian ideology—some explicit theory of anti-democratic elitism or national chauvinism or white supremacy or male superiority such as we see in the MAGA movement and its allied school of Silicon Valley tech fascists—and which proves to be infinitely more dangerous than the unconscious variety of the same. 

So all we've managed to do is shoot ourselves in the foot. 

Perhaps we shouldn't have forced people into that choice. Perhaps we should have accepted a little bit longer that people are flawed, and may mean well, but are also prey to the usual forces of selfishness and egotism that are perhaps impossible to banish utterly from society. Maybe, instead of insisting on being so morally and logically consistent all the time, we should have practiced a bit more of that "charitable inconsistency" that proves essential to human life—as Samuel Butler put it. 

This is what Lewis too identifies as the best aspect of Butler—his emphasis on "tolerance." And perhaps that's what the Left has been missing. We have righteousness figured out. We have logic and conscience down cold. We don't need more of those. But perhaps we do need to learn to temper our logic and conscience with a bit more "charitable inconsistency."