Unfortunately, we seem to be losing the capacity to generate and communicate that wealth. We’re becoming increasingly ideologically fractured, cultural traditions and institutions eroding. We have an expectation that life should be a certain way, that it’s just a default, a guaranteed inheritance, and we forget all the work that went into creating the conditions we enjoy and don’t realize that it only takes time to lose them. And as our cohesiveness and cultural capital begins to erode, we begin to turn on one another. We begin fighting over territory, fighting against each other, blaming each other, waging internal wars that slowly break down our culture and destabilize our institutions. We’re starting to cannibalize ourselves.

How long this can go on, how far it can go, is hard to say. But the trend seems to be toward a slow collapse of all the major repositories of our cultural strength. As fair play becomes less and less possible or productive, the temptation will be to become more and more exploitative and extractive and defensive. And I believe fair play is being eroded from both ends of the ideological spectrum. Partly because the idea of what’s fair has come to be so differently understood by so many people. Most people now seem to conceive of the fair option as being one of two extremes: the unrestrained pursuit of all possible natural outcomes, and the forcibly equalized outcomes of all possible pursuits.

So, for one group, everyone gets whatever they are able to get. Survival of the fittest, karma, the invisible hand of the market. Whatever results you are able to achieve you deserve to achieve, and little to no restraint should be placed upon that action, allowing the natural forces of selection to operate so as to optimize all possible outcomes. Unstable ways and means of operating must be allowed to fail and be set aside, productive and successful ways and means of operating must be allowed to enjoy their success so their can be seen and recognized and embraced and replace less functional systems. For this group, there are simply some ways of doing things that work better, and the only truly fair way to approach life is to allow those systems of selection and adaptation and discovery and refinement to operate. Preserving non-productive or dysfunctional ideas or approaches in inherently unjust, for it denies each the proper results of their identities.

I think the consequences, excesses, and pathology of this outlook are fairly well understood and have been widely popularized. The “harsh realities of life” outlook, let the cards fall where they may, hierarchy of competition and value, has some obvious upsides and obvious downsides. It goes all in on rewarding success and survival, but it can be merciless and tyrannical. It is nature, red in tooth and claw. It selects, it discriminates by necessity, for survival, and does not apologize. And although its easy to idealize this approach and argue that the best, by its nature, will rise and win out, and the survival of the best and brightest of the human race (or at least the best able to survive and thrive under the circumstances of the time), and that’s ultimately good for everyone, it’s also a system prone to excess, abuse, manipulation, and many harsh acts and results that scandalize modern minds.

So I’m going to spend a bit less time on this outlook, because it’s been fairly popular, if often disagreed about in its details as to what actually is the best path to success, but it’s a very well-established ideology and has been articulated in many forms across many cultures. It’s a fairly straightforward ethical system, with both a lot of commonalities and a lot of diversity. The general idea is that there is some definitive nature to the world, there are specific ways of operating in it that will bring success, and our success, and the nature of moral and social and practical wisdom and value are determined by how accurately our mental map follows the actual contours of reality (for both the universe and ourselves) and how good we are at living in accordance with that knowledge.

In way, the different cultures (from the individual up through family and country) are like little experiments in different maps and different approaches. And they’re tested by many means, but especially by their long term results. If you find great success, you probably have something right (and want to try to distill exactly what and preserve it and pass it on), and your victory in competition with others is a victory for justice itself, and for humanity. Because you have grasped the nature of the world and the nature of right action, and your success (and others’ failure) is the system working to reward those who deserve it and punish and correct those who need it. The world is always changing and presenting new circumstances and difficulties, so a system that constantly competes to adapt and survive and succeed while pruning the branches that would drag down civilization seems like a harsh but necessary and just system.

Or at least it would, if the world, and people in general, were as fair and impartial as one would hope. There is a certain moral ambition imputed to the system that may not actually exist with some deliberate effort. And although competition and dominance and selection are inherent aspects of the function of the natural world, they are not alone. They do not make up the whole fabric of reality for humans, or even all other species. There are checks and balances. There is cooperation, there is compassion, there is altruism, there is patience, there is generosity, there is idealism and optimism and the ability to go beyond our own narrow interests.

Some of the harsher adherents to this outlook might argue that all this is merely a cloak cast over our own self interest, a fancy that masks our true pursuit of our own success and survival through indirect means. And others might argue that such indulgence is, in fact cruelty and injustice. That to deny the natural results of success or failure is to deny the justice of nature. That stealing the rightful success of that which deserves it is the greatest and most destructive injustice and prevents the development of the strongest, most beneficial systems and institutions that will protect and benefit us all.

And to deny foolishness its proper consequences is to endanger the lives of everyone, like throwing a lifeline to a cancer, whose survival could cause it to spread and infect and harm everyone. It forces the deliberately healthy to carry the weight of the willfully sick. Because in this system, no one is healthy by default. Disorder and instability is the default, the changing challenges of the world are the default. Success is the result of special effort and advancement and the conservation and preservation of achievement and wealth bought dearly in days past. The easy thing is to fail and die, or at least fail to advance or grow. But through effort, through risk, through sacrifice, through cleverness, through preservation and effective use of inherited cultural wealth (which can be literal, philosophical, ethical, scientific, traditional, imaginative, legal, administrative, technological, any kind of valuable advantage that can be transmitted).

The problem is, so few of us are actually in control of our circumstances. Not all outcomes or circumstance ls are just, deserved, instructive, or productive. A lot of them, not all mind you, but far more than we would prefer, are random, unjust, broadly destructive.

For another group, the nature of injustice consists in unequal outcomes. For this sector of the ideology, all identity is sacrosanct and fundamentally valuable and fundamentally equal. There are no qualitative differences of one over another. Therefore results should be evenly distributed. And if they are not, that is injustice. The mechanisms of injustice are the arbitrary arrangement of wealth, power, and position, and they must be rectified through redistribution. No one gets to choose in what place or time or position they are born into, and therefore bear no responsibility for them.

Or at least this is generally held to be true for the victims of bad luck. You can’t be blamed for being born into difficulty and disadvantage and a poverty of cultural capital. Beneficiaries of good luck, however, are held responsible as inheritors of benefit, culpable for their own advantage and responsible for seeking redress. It is an asymmetrical system whose foundation for moral judgment lies largely in power. If you have it, you can be held culpable and morally responsible, even if you yourself are merely the arbitrary inheritors of your position. If you do not have it, you cannot be held culpable or morally responsible, because you are merely the arbitrary inheritors of your position.

Moral value as a whole, then, largely descends from power, or rather, the lack of it. Because all imbalances in outcomes are the result or responsibility of fundamental individual, cultural, or ideological differences (all identities being of equal value), the basis for all injustice is located solely in the inequality of outcomes. Such imbalances are the result of personal or structural injustice. Normativity, arguing that there is a proper or correct or best way to do something or to be, is fundamentally an act of idol worship and the promotion of lies and injustice and disenfranchisement. All superiority, all unequal outcomes, are fundamentally tyrannical. Therefore, the moral value of any action is largely dependent on the relation to power of the person in question.

If your identity exists along the intersection of multiple groups possessing a perceived imbalance of power and successful outcomes, then even your most basic actions, even those with no clear unjust intent, may be interpreted as being inherently exploitative and unjust. They’re structurally unjust, made unjust by the nature of the power structure, not by an specific quality or intent your actions possess. After all, that’s the point. Identities and actions, ways and means, are all of equal value, it is only in the imbalance of outcome in which moral culpability or praiseworthiness exists.

Conversely, the more your identity exists along the intersection of multiple groups possessing a perceived deficit of power and successful outcomes, the more morally excusable or unquestionable or praiseworthy your behavior becomes. Actions that might on the part of the other party be perceived as unjust become actively just, because their aim is to redress the imbalance of power in which morality consists.

To pick a contemporary example, it has been argued that white Americans live lives of fundamental, structural racism that are not dependent on the existence of any actual, individual racist attitudes on the part of those people to be recognized as such. The racism consists in the imbalance of outcomes, and can be reasoned to exist implicitly, and the culpability of the white people for that imbalance can be determined purely from those grounds. White actions and attitudes and cultural and economic systems are fundamentally racist. The imbalance of outcomes proves it.

Similarly, attempts to reduce or redistribute power, including deliberate declarations and actions aimed toward favoring a group or disadvantaging another group purely on the basis of their identity are not considered prejudiced, racist, or otherwise morally questionable or culpable, because they are not being executed by those who possess power. They are aimed instead toward redressing the imbalance of power in which justice and injustice consist, so they cannot be racist or prejudiced.

It’s an interesting basis for a system of ethics and moral identity. It makes the moral value of actions as well as persons fairly easy to calculate (on the face of it). Just look at who fits the profiles and you’ve got your rulebook for interpretation. Where things get complicated, of course, is when you get into the details. Deciding which differences and identities qualify as advantaged or disadvantages and how much weight each carries could get a bit tricky. Race and gender and sexuality are currently approved categories, and physical appearance, weight, and religion are also contendenders. How much responsibility each person holds for their positions of injustice may also prove tricky to calculate, unless we just agree to oversimplify. Every person has a unique history, family background, biology, cultural background, and racial history. Who gets to say what counts, and how much, and how much conflicting identity values should weigh against one another?

And if we’re concerned not only about current imbalances but historical ones or historical actions, how far back are we allowed to go back for either criticism or promotion? Do we take in account claims of inequality within individual groups? There are, after all, large disparities between different subsections within racial groups, among descendants of Northern free Blacks, descendants of slaves, and later immigrants. Should all three be assigned similar value and have similar claims? Are all Jews or white people or Hispanics homogenous, or should we separate them based on their specific histories and circumstances and countries and time of origin? Might certain qualities like height, or being born into a rural or urban environment, for example, be just as statistically determinative of advantage or disadvantage as other, more well-publicized categories?

Might a moral ideology based on identity intersections suffer from a problem of infinite regress? If we define identity as being “not the norm”, could we not find infinite ways to parse the differences between us right down to each and every individual person? And will we find enough commonality in the supposed “norm” or “hegemony” to justify ascribing the qualities, advantages, and culpability of the norm to a large and likely very mixed group? Will we not have to create a calculus that has to be individually figured for each and every individual based on their personal histories and intersections and therefor has little large scale usefulness as a guide for moral behavior and criticism?

Is there not something of irony in the strategy of redressing injustices and inequities by establishing an institutionalized system wherein moral and social value and praise and blame are dependent on group identities that are apparently beyond your ability to choose or determine? A system where your individuality is far less significant than what your demographics, and systems can be justifiably put in place to favor or retard your advancement in accordance with an a priori calculus of based on your demographics. Still, if you’ve firmly located moral value in the realm of group identity and power distribution, that is a perfectly consistent position, and if your guiding value is that all outcomes should be fundamentally equal, that that’s what a just system is.

In such a system, conversion must be one of the worst sins, for it goes against the entire logos of the whole structure. At least, for any reason other than a sort of arbitrary indulgence or affectation, because it pleases you to do so. If you actually change identity groups for some other reason, if you adopt the ways, means, and beliefs of another group because you actually think them to be better or more true or more effective, that’s a fundamental dootion of prejudice. That’s discrimination. Drawing differences between options that make one more desirable or favorable or better than the other. Discrimination is a fundamental evil, it goes against the fundamental assumptions of this worldview, that there is no “better” identity, no justified hegemony, no universal norm, no righteous inequality.

It goes without saying, of course, that one big question for both worldviews is, are their assumptions actually true? Might they be wrong about the world and wrong about people, wrong about outcomes, wrong about what equality and justice are? Might the likely result of their unrestrained pursuit of justice actually be widespread oppression and injustice, especially if they have their basic assumptions wrong?

I think both of these ideologies dress up injustice and call it kindness. They take half the story of humankind and try to reduce everything down to a simple formula that will make them righteous in their eyes. They seek to define what is good for people down to a (supposedly) simple formula that brooks no criticism or elaboration but stands as holy writ. And I think both, given a sufficient leeway of power to pursue their ends without the restraint of the opposing viewpoint, will end in prejudice, injustice, dysfunction, and cruelty. Possibly by different means, possibly by similar ones.

People in our current times have often been fascinated by the two specters of Fascism (the Nazis) and Socialism, or Communism (Marx and Stalin). The very names have a sort of totemic power. They’re almost infinitely useful for blanket condemnation and criticism. And I think, beyond the typical human tendency to hyperbole, there’s actually a good reason. They’re such wonderful examples. They represent, in many ways, two very different approaches that, thanks to the enormous power of technology that the modern age afforded us, created such extreme results. In fact, everything both sides stood for has always been around.

The 20th century contained no unusual or unique people, it was in many ways quite typical. But it afforded unique modern opportunities, because of the powers and structures available for use by those people and ideas. There have always been dangerous people. But those people haven’t always had atomic bombs or the sophistication of modern systems of administration. Even the holocaust was not really so unusual an event, except in the level of success it was able to achieve because of the powers and organization of the German people. The difference between many of the great achievements of the modern era (both good and bad), and those of the past, is not their nature, but their degree. They happened bigger, with far more momentum of accumulated cultural capital behind them, and so had larger, more exaggerated effects.

So Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany are a bit like caricatures, wonderfully capturing the excesses in extreme of different worldviews. And we have gradually over time come to associate them strongly with a sort of idea or attitude we either value in ourselves or despise in others. I don’t think the survival of the fittest, invisible hand of the market, natural selection club would actually choose the Nazi party as their banner bearer. They would argue that that was a polluted distortion. And most socialist-minded or influenced folks of today, the post-modern social justice egalitarians, would likely say the same about Stalin. That his Russia was a corruption and distortion. And yet I think both see the ultimate destiny of their opposing faction pressed quite clearly in both Stalin and Hitler.

And I think they are both wrong, and also both right. Because what Russia and Germany became in those instances was partly dependent on the ascendancy and power of those regimes, the amount of efficacy at the fingertips, the ability to actually enforce their ideas without check, I would say that, but for the existence of their opposing counterbalance, yes, there might not be much that would divide them. And of course that’s always their argument for why it’s so important to stop the other side. Not realizing that the risk is not only in being overcome, but in overcoming.

Yes, you’re not entirely wrong, if the socialists win, they probably would eventually realize something like the Communist disaster all over again. And if your party won in the way you want, you would probably realize something like the Nazi disaster all over again. The risk is not only in losing, but in winning. The only thing that’s keeping either side from becoming the worst version of themselves (merely by the restraint of power and the institutions we have that force them to compromise and share power) is the other side. Ideologically, they arm themselves more and more into the most militant versions of themselves, to protect against the potential apocalypse the victory of the other side would bring. And in so doing hasten the apocalypse they would bring if the powers and tactics they’ve adopted should ever truly prevail and be allowed free rein. The result of the victory of either side would not be the imagined utopia, but the already perfectly exemplified dystopian nightmare of so many other cultures that gave in to their extremes.

Modern politics certainly bears this out. One needs to spend little time listening to the rhetoric of the national discourse to realize how much of it consists of extreme counterprogramming designed to resist the advance of the other side. Less and less attention is given to governing or articulation of an effective and balanced platform, and more and more effort is redirected to weaponization of the platform, resistance of the other side, counter-actions and counter-narratives. In fact our entire current presidency is less a platform than an anti-platform, a hostile, defensive, extreme reaction to the extremism and threat of the other side.

Within their parties both sides seem to be deeply divided and not at all in agreement any longer about what they are about. If they didn’t have the threat of the other side to keep them together, it’s not clear what they would stand for or whether they could remain in a union. Extremes within the parties, as well as a willingness to compromise on the most basic beliefs and values of those groups hold for the sake of common defense against the other side, are now commonplace. Such divisions and compromises are regrettable, but are seen as justifiable in the pursuit of self preservation and protection from an even greater threat. But it’s increasingly hard to tell what anyone actually stands for.

And so, what people appear to stand for keeps creeping closer and closer to the worst, most extreme, most weaponized, most dysfunctional version of their ideology. And that creep only makes the problem worse, as each side correctly observes the increased hostility and adversarial posture of the other side, and finds more and more justification for that creep.

At what point we will either find cause for an armistice, or otherwise resolve the conflict through open conflict and historical process (in other words, we wrestle openly for the fate of the future and some of us win and some of us lose), I cannot say. It seems like a head-on conflict must be inevitable. An ideological civil war. The various wars we have fought from the Cold War to the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, are essentially those moments in history where disagreement about fundamental guiding principles and historical direction reached a pitch that could not be resolved through any means but direct historical process, open conflict and competition, the way nature decides who gets to determine the course of the future. The ability to expend one’s life to alter the likely course of future history is an extreme but powerful tool in the human toolkit. Often selection can be achieved without taking things to such extremes, or such confclits can be resolved through proxies other than direct physical violence.

During the Cold War, political influence and economic power helped to serve as a proxy for direct conflict, partly because both sides had grown so powerful in their means for destruction that a direct conflict would have likely devastated the entire globe. The Civil War and Revolutionary War were both wars of secession, with different outcomes, over fundamental assumptions about how the world did and should work and the right of one group or another to decide for America which approach was ascendant.

Are we heading toward something like a Cold Civil War? I think we might be. Here and there, as with the Cold War, it might spill out into outright violence, but because of the nature of the battlefield and the sides (with no really clear territories and everything essentially being on our home turf), these will likely remain isolated incidents scattered across the country for quite some time. A protest here, an act of violence there, a standoff in this place, a rally in that place, voices from one side praised like heroes on one hand, voices from another side shouted down and driven out of town on another.

And, unfortunately, such an environment plays to the advantage of demagogues, extremists, and opportunists on both sides. The most reasonable and bakanced and cautious members of both sides will be lost and forgotten, traitorous relics of an earlier age when there was room for such ideological pollution. There will be no such room nor any such opportunity in the future to which we head. War does not leave much room for subtlety. And it does seem like a new kind of war, the Cold Civil War, is our destiny, if not already our present circumstance.

Afterword:

One result I’m concerned about from the conflict between these two worldviews, and one of the barrier to them being able to hear or understand one another, is the way our approach to moral authority overlaps with epistemological authority. What we consider to be true. At a certain deep point in our minds, the true, the good, and the beautiful all converge. Therefore anything we set as a lodestar near the center of our foundational beliefs is going to shine its light along all our major avenues. It will affect our navigation and direction, not only when it comes to moral matters, but also what we consider to be true or lovely.

I’ve described these different approaches as more like attitudes, in many ways, more than codified systems. Another way to describe them would be personalities, or orientations. They’re a way of facing and responding to the world, a certain expression that greets it. You could capture their essences as well with a painting as you could with many words. I’m reminded of the figures of Plato and Aristotle in the famous painting of the Academy. Plato with his hand lifted, pointing to the heaven, to the transcendent realities of the forms. Aristotle with his arm outstretched, indicating the world of practical observation and action. I’m not sure how best one could capture the essence of the two philosophies we’re considering today. I’m not an artist, sadly. But if I had to make a guess, it would be a cosmic mother and a cosmic father.

Your approach to knowledge is conditioned by what you perceive as valuable, a good worth pursuing, what is lovely, what will help you reach the desired end.

So if your moral search is built around what would be pleasing, what you would like to be true, how you wish the world was, your truths will build themselves around this same prejudice. And you’re likely to miss out on some important things, since not all reality and not all truths are as we would wish them to be. There’s a sort of noble optimism and positivity to it that argues in its favor.

Whatever your perspective is, you tend not to notice the water you’re swimming in. You don’t realize you’re doing it. Because your whole epistemic system, how you select and test knowledge, is built around it. So unless you’re in the habit of allowing yourself to either rigorously challenge yourself according to some independent metric, or you’re willing to let yourself be genuinely challenged by people with a different metric and give their ideas some credence, you likely won’t encounter many ideological obstacles to your own viewpoint. In fact you’re most likely, especially in these days when technology can so easily bring us material suited to our tastes, to find more affirmation, more data that fits your process of epistemic selection, more people who agree with you and hold the same values.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. And there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. Knowledge is specific, it belongs to a category, a perspective. There are many kinds of knowledge, many different fields. Wisdom is a capacity you develop in your approach to knowledge. Wisdom is what you get when different perspectives on knowledge get tested against one another, become integrated and balanced, and achieve a kind of functional harmony that allows you to navigate life and knowledge more effectively and completely. Wisdom requires some knowledge to work on, but it can be possessed by people with little education and even, potentially, intelligence, and it can be taught. Wisdom is learning to get a glimpse of truth and goodness and beauty greater than your own natural inclinations and limitations. Wisdom is the perspective of Heaven, in religious terms, the perspective of God, who is without limit or particularity.

Wisdom is neither cooperative nor competitive, neither idealistic nor realistic. It’s a fusion and integration of both. Wisdom is like a jewel, the more facets it has, the more perspectives it can gather light from and integrate into a stable structure, the more light it will reflect into more places. Wisdom isn’t a mother or a father, it’s a marriage. It adapts, it moves between perspectives in balance as the situation requires. It is not formulaic, it is not a mechanism, it is living, it is alive. Wisdom is the words of life. It is living water. They are ennervating, they are not static. It is a dance, not a stance. It is chaos and order united, movement/changeability and structure united.

So the quest of all good philosophers is the love of wisdom. It is a posture toward wisdom itself, toward unity, not toward any one perspective alone. It is the willingness to come together with others or with other ideas and test them in both a competitive and cooperative environment. Cooperative because we seek the good of all and give patience and respect and a voice and credence to all. Competitive because our goal is to test and refine and improve and integrate them.

We bring the tools of logic and different perspectives together not merely for them to sit next to one another in a dusty collection, but to strive together and refine one another and prove themselves. It is a peaceful war, the best kind of war. One that does not seek destruction or elimination, but perfection and preservation and integration of all that is true and valuable and harmonious (all the belongs to the unity of the true, good, and beautiful). And we seek to test and understand each according to all these dimensions, and we seek first of all to test and improve ourselves.

Yes, in a way we will always be what we are. We will always have our particular gifts, our particular temperament, our particular perspective and voice, our particularity. We will always be one, we will always be ourselves. But in our quest for wisdom and our work with other people and other ideas and perspectives that test and expand and complexity and refine and strengthen our own, we get glimpses. We participate in the dance, we learn to recognize the dance, even if we can only ever be but one of the partners. We bring the knowledge and experience and structure of the dance back to our understanding of our role as a dancer. Seeing the dance will also help us keep our role as a dancer in balance and perspective too. It will help us remember that we are only one, that we are not the dance itself, we are not the divine, not God, but only serving and seeking it. We are part of something living, we are not life itself.

So, to get a bit less romantic and grand, the whole point is that philosophers do something that’s a very important and valuable skill that the average person never learns. It’s more than education. Seeking wisdom is whole different kind of pursuit that shapes the person and tests them in ways that challenge them as a human. Knowledge can be gained. Wisdom must be wrestled with. Not that even all professional philosophers are good at this. But they’re still better than most people, who never learn in the first place. The democratic political process, when it’s especially functional, works a lot of philosophical dialogue, with both sides having to cooperate and compete and build the best thing they can out of it. Parenting between good parents is also not so different. All require similar skills, all seek a similar end, a kind of wisdom.

Modern forms of discourse, especially modern media, do not seem well set up for this process though, which requires so much cooperation and competition at the same time to be effective. The narrowing of the window of communication to such short, limited ways of reaching one another, structures that seem to favor the shallow and provocative and indulgent, disadvantages the acquisition of wisdom through such channels. Socrates didn’t conquer the internet. Kim and Kylie Kardashian did. Donald Trump did. Logan Paul did. And of course lots of fluffy content like cat videos, makeup and fitness enthusiasts, greeting-card level inspirational quotes, pop stars, and famous athletes. Those sorts of results should start to provide some information as to what sort of dialogue is structurally favored by our modern communication ecosystem.

Great thinkers and saints, complex and balanced ideas, difficult and glorious truths, deep and lengthy and thorough explorations, subtle perspectives, all of these are not the cream rising to the top of the pail today. If something isn’t compelling enough to get someone’s attention and provoke a reaction at just a glance, from just a picture or headline or meme, it won’t survive and spread and be valued in our modern ecosystem. It will fail the test of vitality and clickability. And Kylie Kardashian and Donald Trump know one thing if they know anything, and that’s how to be provocative and clickable. They know how to get a reaction. It’s the secret to their success. They know how to keep the eye of the public on themselves.