Over the holidays I read George Packer’s gripping and profound latest novel, “The Emergency.” It’s written in a manner akin to George Orwell’s “1984,” about our own day. It’s set in some faraway empire in an uncertain time period, but the parallels to our own circumstances are clear. There’s a discredited establishment. There are enraged and resentful rural populists and urban wokesters canceling their elders. Some people are addicted to screens and others are entranced by the idea that artificial intelligence will produce better humans. I was astonished by how much more clearly I could understand our own times when seeing them reflected back in a fictional parable. (Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where I’m a contributing writer.)
I was especially astonished by how much more clearly I saw people like … myself. And maybe yourself. The main character, Hugo Rustin, is a moderate, humane surgeon who pushes back against the extremes of left and right. He believes in cooperation, not domination, and that we can build a decent society if we talk to one another as human beings. He’s sort of the living embodiment of a more innocent 1990s American ethos, or the classical John Stuart Mill-style liberalism.
The problem is that the populists on left and right are disgusted by the social order and values Rustin embodies, and they tear it down.
Naturally my sympathies go out to the decent, moderate liberal person fighting off vicious extremists. But as the novel goes on, we begin to see Rustin’s flaws. He failed to notice as his old order was losing legitimacy. He failed to stand up to the thugs as they tore it down. He failed to adjust to the new climate. He was hooked on his own self-importance, the status that was afforded him by the entrenched social order. He does incredibly stupid and naïve things in an attempt to win that status back.
His teenage daughter is savvier than he is. She doesn’t have his faith in the goodness of human nature. Her understanding is that our political and social rivals really do hate us, and it’s necessary to fight hatred with hatred.
Many of us are in Rustin’s shoes in real life today. If you were born between World War II and 1990, it’s fair to say you were born in the era when the postwar liberal international order went largely unquestioned. That order consisted not only of obvious things like NATO, but also a whole system of restraints to make democracies function; not only codes of civility, but also respect for truth, norms of self-restraint, a commitment to dialogue and faith in institutions.
Writing in 1944, as this order was being constructed, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described the fine balance that democracy relies upon: “An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order.”
That order and those restraints are now being destroyed. People on both left and right decided that the old neoliberal order was a hypocritical pose elites had adopted to mask their own lust for domination. The restraints of civility and international law have been eroded, and now we live in an era of pure will.
Holdovers from the old era look kind of pathetic right now — Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron. The dominant figures of our age — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — say: It’s a brutal world out there; I do what I want. They govern by arousing the dark passions: anger, hatred, resentment, the urge to dominate.
They embody the White House adviser Stephen Miller’s already famous remark to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
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In this world, trust and civility are for saps. If President Trump wants something, he’s going to grab it. Politics, foreign and domestic, is a war of all against all. Deal with it.
So how are we moderate Rustins supposed to behave in this new world — we classical liberals of left, right and center? Do we live in the past and pretend the social revolution hasn’t happened, like Russian aristocrats clinging to a vanishing way of life in Paris after the 1917 revolution? Do we cower under our desks and hope the new ideological enforcers won’t notice us? Do we remain blind to our shortcomings and tell ourselves how morally superior we are? Do we adjust to the new reality and become Machiavellians ourselves? Do we seek to build a newer and better system of order and restraints?
This is actually an ancient question that has afflicted many generations. The Niebuhr book I quoted from above is called “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” The children of darkness, in his telling, are the moral cynics who believe life is all about power. The children of light are those driven by ideals to build a just civilization.
In Niebuhr’s view, the children of darkness are brutal but realistic about human nature while the children of light are admirable but naïve about entrenched human selfishness: “The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will.”
The children of darkness have advantages in their struggle against the children of light. They know what they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a social order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of insignificance by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only vicariously through some strongman.
Niebuhr is rooting for the children of light, but he wants them to be less naïve about human nature: “The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.”
I’m not going to give away Packer’s ending, but he reminds us that social orders are rebuilt from the ground up, as decent people keep opening the door for one another.
I’d add one elemental truth. The left progressives and the right populists who seek to tear down the neoliberal order are being shortsighted — idiotic, frankly. Sure, the postwar order was sometimes used as a mask to disguise American and elite power grabs, but it really did restrain people. As Yale’s Oona Hathaway wrote in these pages this week, “from 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged fewer than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year.” A great wave of savagery has been released, foreign and domestic. If you think foreign policy ideals were discredited by the Iraq war, how do you like Trump’s world without them?
Outrage over these trends should cause moderates to be immoderate. It should generate what Niebuhr called, in another work, “a sublime madness in the soul” — the kind of madness that arises from a fervent commitment to liberal ideas and institutions that constitute the decent drapery of a civilized life. “Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places,’” he wrote.
Mankind has been able to reconstitute new social orders after periods of savagery — after the 17th-century wars of religion, after the 20th-century world wars. Now that task lies before us again, and everybody who is active in community and public life has a role.
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