I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Yoram Hazony shortly after posting “Bird’s-Eye View” yesterday about the Good Society. This is a very interesting conversation, and I encourage you to listen to it. Hazony and Klein in their different ways would find my ‘Rescuing Aristotle’ argument weird, so I thought it might be useful to explore what our differences are as a way of clarifying what exactly my argument is.
First, I see this conversation between Hazony and Klein as just another higher-level version of the Scopes Trial dynamic that I wrote about yesterday. Hazony provides a highfalutin’ nationalist theory to justify the populist side, and Klein argues that he’s okay with living in a California-style, anything-goes pluralism. Hazony has a really bad cure for America’s ontological dizziness, and Klein—”What ontological dizziness? Nobody I know has it.”
Second, Neither Hazony nor Klein seem to have any awareness of how what I’m calling the TCM frames everything we think and do. They just accept Techno-Capitalism uncritically and argue about cultural issues as if we were living in a society that was normal and healthy except for the unhealthy views the other espouses.
Third, I think that their conversation appears to be a good example of two people reasoning together, but really isn’t. They do a good job of listening to one another, which is commendable, but because they have no shared metaphysical presuppositions, they have no shared common ground upon which to build. Even the fact that they’re both Jewish doesn’t seem to help. Their respective arguments come down to Yuk and Yay.
Fourth, while Hazony seems sane and reasonable, his sincere deferential tone when talking about Trump and even Pete Hegseth just comes across as bizarre, and it belies the reasonable image that he’s trying to project. Perhaps he thinks of himself as respecting the office if not the man, but he seems not to have a whiff of concern about how these men are defiling the offices they hold. For Hazony, it would appear that Trump is a true statesman whom people like Klein just don’t understand. This alone makes it difficult to take anything reasonable sounding that Hazony says seriously.
Fifth, if I were force to choose sides between Hazony and Klein, I would choose Klein, but the argument that I’m making is directed more to Klein than to Hazony because I believe that Klein is more rational than Hazony, despite Hazony’s reasonable demeanor. Hazony represents deep irrational, resentful, chthonic energies in the American soul, and his theorizing amounts to nothing more, imo, than his trying to put lipstick on the proverbial pig. He might be as sincere as he sounds—I don’t know—but if he’s sincere, he’s naive about the dark, violent forces that energize the politics he’s advocating.
Sixth, so the reason that my argument is directed toward people like Klein is that I believe it’s the responsibility of the the culture’s intelligentsia, which at this moment in American society comprises mostly secular Liberals like Klein, to be wise enough to find ways to channel these dark energies in a positive way. What this intelligentsia is doing now instead is condemning these destructive irrational energies as they appear on the Right while tolerating them as they appear on the cultural Left and in Silicon Valley. The intelligentsia in a society that has ‘rescued Aristotle’ will be wise enough to recognize that the goal is neither to kill the dragon nor let it romp about as it pleases, but to befriend and tame it. That, imo, the practical application of the gospel’s admonition for us to love our enemies. It’s not easy, but it’s what’s called for if we’re ever to end this stupid culture war and focus on what’s really important.