I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.
The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.
It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.
2016 is just the beginning.
I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.
Now we just need to finish the job.
True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.
Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible. But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers. They really, really, really want those things. They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.
And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term. Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t.
So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.
I mean, that’s sort of what I’m declaring war on.
The desire for cultural identity, meaning, and belonging. That’s what I want to defeat.
Why, though?
I kind of want to point to @balioc’s response here and say “this, but without the negativity”. In particular
An ideology with a foundation of “people should generally get to do whatever they want” has a lot of value, but it is very bad at telling people how to live, which is culture’s primary function.
seems to me to be about as searing a critique of “culture” as it’s possible to make. We shouldn’t be telling people how to live. We should be enabling people to choose their own lives as freely as possible.
No gods, no masters. No values but mine, no choices but mine, connections and obligations only as freely chosen.
I don’t belong to anything. I’m not part of anything. I’m me.
“No gods, no masters, no values but mine” is nice rhetoric, but…as an actual recipe for a human society it’s empty. For two major reasons, one abstract/theoretical and one practical.
I.
If you leave a child out in the woods, and by some miracle he survives, he will not develop any values other than survival and the fulfillment of basic urges.
If you leave a child in an environment that protects him and fulfills all his basic needs, but provides no mental guidance, he will not develop any values at all. Maybe he’ll go crazy with anomic despair, maybe he’ll basically be a walking piece of happy-beast orgasmium, but…he’s not going to be finding and fulfilling anything we would recognize as a purpose, self-constructed or otherwise. He won’t have the mental infrastructure.
Those are your options for having a totally free, uncultured human intelligence. As soon as you provide someone with any socialization at all, as soon as you teach him how to read, you will find that you’ve already done a lot of work in terms of shaping his mind and setting him on a path. He will have learned, from you, what is deserving of pride and what is deserving of shame. He will have learned, from you, what he wants to be and what he definitely doesn’t want to be. You won’t have a ton of control over the proceedings – maybe you’ll be a role model, maybe you’ll be an aversive bogeyman, maybe everything you say will get interpreted in some crazy sideways fashion – but your actions will be responsible for the shape of his thought. And that’s culture. There is no way around it. There is only the question of what the culture does and what it fails to do: whether it actually creates victory conditions for the challenges it sets, whether it supplies sufficient grist for the intellectual mill, whether its values are compatible with human biology, etc. etc.
…this sounds like some glib silly reductio-ad-absurdum shit, I know, but it really is important. There is no unmoved-mover homunculus inside us who gets to make all our decisions from the vantage point of Perfect Free Will. We are made up of our influences, even if our minds perform some unknowable alchemy on those influences before they become part of us, and we are all influenced from the very very beginning. The Free Decider is a phantom, and once you realize that, “let’s figure out what influences are actually doing the shaping” becomes a much more interesting and worthwhile project than “let’s try to have there be less influence overall somehow.”
II.
…but of course, once you’re a functional self-willed human, you actually have a lot of intellectual and emotional freedom. (Even if you’re ultimately driven by, ultimately made of, cthonic determinist forces you don’t fully understand.) You can accept or reject influences. You can seek out new influences of many different kinds. You can Construct Yourself to a really very astonishing degree.
Let me say: I am super in favor of people doing this. I am basically obsessed with this on a personal level. A lot of my major projects involve finding new, off-the-beaten-path methodologies for doing this. I am implacably opposed to any society that prevent people from doing this (by punishing them harshly for deviating from their culturally mandated identities, by denying them information and tools, etc.).
Let me also say: most people do not actually want to do this to any significant extent. Also, they are very bad at it.
Which is no surprise! It’s hard work! It’s socially-unrewarding work, at least compared to building up bonding identity with family members / allies / sex partners! Making it pay involves a lot of living inside your own head, which is not really how most people function!
If you tell people “go figure out the Good Life for yourself” – ninety-five times out of a hundred, they just don’t. They try to copy each other, or act on impulse with zero reflection, or follow Good Life scripts from decaying obsolete half-understood Good Life philosophies. They fall into anomie and madness, making themselves and each other miserable, failing to accomplish very much of worth.
And you can stomp your feet and demand that they comport themselves like philosopher-kings, but this will not actually help them, or anyone.