Daniel Kahneman helped turn the world of economics upside-down by demonstrating that the Emperor of the so-called “dismal science” — Homo economicus, aka the Rational Actor — has very few clothes on. The Emperor is not nearly as rational as he pretends to be, but for many years most people never spoke that truth out loud.
Now, Yoram Hazony is trying to do something similar in the world of political theory.
In The Virtues of Nationalism, Hazony takes aim at John Locke, one of the godfathers of the liberal democratic project. But you don’t have to read Hazony’s whole book because he recently distilled his central argument into an article, “Locke’s Rationalism and the Future of Political Theory.” And because I know you’re busy, here is a key excerpt:
… None of the axioms from which Locke builds his system are empirically true. In saying this, I do not mean only to dispute Locke’s account of the way in which states have historically been founded. Rather, my observation concerns empirical human nature in general: There is no historical context in which Locke’s premises can be said to have been true. Nowhere in history do we find conditions in which human beings are all capable of attaining universal political insight by means of reason alone; are all blessed with perfect freedom and equality; and are all without membership in, and obligation to, any political collectives except those that they have consented to join. And if these things are not empirically true even in a single case, they cannot serve as the foundations for a political theory whose purpose is to understand the political world.
Shorter version: The liberal democratic experiment is built on quicksand.
Hazony is right that Locke had a fertile and active imagination. Some of Locke’s key assumptions do seem disconnected from reality. Then again, Hazony seems a bit unhinged himself. Follow Hazony’s “new” nationalism to its logical conclusions, and you gradually realize his whole political script is a nightmare in the making:
My exchange with Hazony brings to mind something a college professor told me recently:
All political philosophy is a form of faith. Some people believe they have a personal relationship with Jesus. I don’t. I prefer to believe in John Locke because if we lived in a world that abandoned Locke, then I’d be the sort of person who’d be taken out and shot.
Yup. My professor is right. And I’m on his side because I’d get shot, too.
What does all this have to do with my Towers of Babel project?
There are stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re doing here — individually and collectively. Some of these stories we get from our parents. Some we get from our friends. Others we were taught in school, such as The Enlightenment Adventure: Liberal Democracy, The American Experiment & The Wisdom of John Locke. And some of those stories — quite a lot of them, actually — come from The Storytellers Formerly Known as Journalists. They feed us stories, a tsunami of them, every single day.
The questions that fascinate me: What kinds of stories are journalists telling us? What assumptions do those stories make? And as we get tossed around by that giant wave of narratives, what are the stories we ultimately choose to live by?