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The future Liberals want by Noah Smith on substack. It’s not that interesting a vision really: the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant with oh thanks an olive branch for conservatives.
I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.
What strikes me about it is a vision of total anomie and dissolving of any sense of common culture and this is supposed to be good. Each nations singular (or maybe 2-3 tops) religion replaced by anything or nothing. Each national ethnic group replaced by a multicultural hodge podge with inclusion and acceptance for all. Diversity of income (inequality). Imagine there are no countries…
I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision — or indeed if they really exist. Is a world of radical self invention fuelled by technology compatible at all with human flourishing as its always been known: freedom to choose the burdens we bear for maximum meaning. What if blank slatism wasn’t a description of the world, but a challenge!
It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).
I sort of alluded to it with this comment, but I think the problem with Noah's idea is that...well, it's still not enough. Shiny, cozy cities sure do sound nice and all, but it's just not Promethean enough, IMO. Where's all the mega-arcologies powered by underground fusion reactors? Where's the space elevators guarded by semi-autonomous rocket-plane-mechs? Where's the space colonies?
If you're going to propose a radical vision for the future that doesn't end in the options of AI Panopticon, Radical Environmentalist Degrowth, or Planet Riyadh, you need to go bigger than those--bigger than the planet, arguably.
Put another way, the most attractive presentation of American liberalism that I know is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not radicalism, not Marxism, but FDR/JFK/apple pie and patriotism liberalism. (Less overtly, the same spirit is also made attractive in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.) Without agreeing with that vision, I can still admire it, and share some of its ambitions, including the Promethean values in TNG that help it to appeal across the political spectrum. Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.
As I see it, the distinctive spirit of American liberalism is self-actualization. Tolerance, multiculturalism etc. are valuable not so much in themselves, but insofar as they enable people to pursue their higher and often idiosyncratic goals. Moderated by a stronger concern for negative freedom and/or tradition, self-actualization is also something that is important in American libertarianism and American conservativism, so there is a lot of room for cohesion among these value systems. That's why both liberal visions like TNG and conservative 80s action movies can appeal across the mainstream US political spectrum. And something like the Rocky series has cross-political appeal, even though there is a lot of political/philosophical themes where there could be controversies: the films have themes that are bound by a self-actualizing vision of "Do it yourself, for yourself, by sorting yourself and your relationships out" that almost all Americans enjoy.
The problem is that many cultures of the world do not share this vision, and the idea that you can have American liberalism among any cultural group is an item of faith rather than knowledge.
(Incidentally, I'm not American. View this as an alien's interpretation of your culture.)
Interestingly, that would probably get Star Trek and TNG cancelled today. Here's a fun exchange from Star Trek:
Remember that episode when Riker hooked up with a transwoman, but then her planet made her do conversion therapy? The federation didn't use centralized corporations/control of the financial system to punish them or anything. Just an explicit anti-colonialist statement from Picard that they need to be allowed to do their thing.
Similarly for the eugenics planet, although they did grant asylum to a few.
It's also not the utopia that everyone remembers, or at least not everywhere. Earth is nice but one crew member is a former drug addict from Space Baltimore.
Yes, I think a lot of the appeal of TNG is that it was a utopia that still recognised that there was room for moral complexity even in a future utopia. TOS had the same virtue. I think it suggests that American liberal culture was less prone to authoritarianism then. After all, college-educated American liberal TV writers of that period would have encountered conservative professors, and would have read about how things were done differently in other times and cultures, like the Native Americans or the Ancient Greeks/Romans. Reading about cultures for which you have sympathy and yet which you recognise as genuine (and perhaps even attractive) alternatives to your own culture is a great preparation for thinking seriously about philosophical issues. In short, they had what used to be the referant of a "liberal education".
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Original Trek is very clear that humanity is a work in progress, that it took a lot of wars and violent history on our part to get us to adopt "live and let live", and sometimes people backslide. Interestingly, in a couple of episodes, there's also the suggestion that we need a certain amount of trouble and strife to be truly human, that we need to work hard to reach the ideals we're aiming for, and that too much peace and prosperity is bad for us (usually the result of mind-controlled populations on planets where, with the best intentions, they let AI run their society).
From the episode "The Return of the Archons", where an ancient AI has been controlling the population in the name of a perfect society, under the programming put into it centuries ago by its dead creator:
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