In 1869 the sun of classical liberalism was nearing its meridian: A long and bloody war among the United States had demonstrated that a democratic nation could marshal the political and military will to withstand potent rebellion. Universal suffrage for men was fast becoming the norm in the most advanced countries. Yet John Stuart Mill, the leading philosopher of British liberalism, saw clouds on the horizon.
Once the laboring classes, who have no property and therefore no stake in the system of private property, know their power, their combination, through force of numbers, would control the course of legislation and government. Would private property survive democracy? Should it?
Mill’s chapters On Socialism explore this question from a utilitarian point of view and many elements of his approach have been reprised by political economists for the past century and a half. Needless to say, for workers barely subsisting at the border of starvation or severe deprivation the urgency of survival takes priority, even if it does not wholly extinguish the quest for dignity and meaning. The first half of the 20th century was the age of progress through organized labor in the United States and other industrial democracies. Yet even then, and certainly afterwards, class consciousness did not rigidly determine the outlook of the average worker. Why not?
To begin with, many purely economic goals were gradually satisfied without the need for radical, thoroughgoing reorganization of society. The example of socialist economies, where greater economic equality was ostensibly to be achieved through state intervention, was not encouraging. More importantly for our discussion, laborers did not choose to submerge their interests and their goals in their class consciousness because, just like other human beings, their identities were more complex and their goals in life not reducible to the calculus of wages and economic benefits.
Marxists, of course, denominate persistent loyalty to ideals other than economic self-interest as “false consciousness.” Such ideals are as grand as pride and hope for the destiny of one’s nation, for which many are willing to risk their lives, or as modest as the thousand small courtesies and small everyday pleasures that make up civility. Then there is commitment to God and the desire to ensure the flourishing of the way of life we believe He ordained for us in our individual lives and in our communities. Where such ideals are alive, even those who are not materially wealthy and who are entitled to want more are rich enough in spirit not to be distracted from what is really important to them in the name of one-dimensional material progress. Only where such a way of life has been deadened and made meaningless do people fill the void by clinging to dreams of more money and more goodies and to the envy of groups who seem happier than they. Materialism is the opiate of the dispirited. Materialism, in this connection, is not always the same as hedonism.
We know people who value only material goods and money whose lives are not devoid of meaning despite the relative dearth of both. The adventurous, preferring the democratic exercise of liberty over the socialist promise of equality, hitch their lives to the hope of achieving these things themselves, even while recognizing that their chance at realizing the “American dream” is not assured and not even probable. Or one may toil unselfish and unrewarded expecting one’s children to cross the figurative river Jordan and attain the materialistic Promised Land. Furthermore, when materialism arouses genuine esteem, some gain a measure of consolation in the aura of others’ material grandiosity. They relish “the lifestyles of the rich and famous” all the more as these magnetic paladins flout conventional morality and flaunt their crudeness, just as run of the mill scholars or athletes are inspired by the true Olympians.
However laughable such vicarious enjoyment may seem to outsiders immune to its charms, in a free country this too is an option that serves to reconcile people to their lot. For them materialism, for what it’s worth, bestows spiritual satisfaction disproportionate to the physical benefits it provides. So, for all these reasons, it would seem that the liberal economic system in the West is in better shape than Mill feared, mainly because the preponderance of its participants prefer it that way.
II
But not only individuals seek meaning and purpose in life. Many, including no few eminent thinkers, value the nation and worry about the fate of national meaning in the absence of ideals that inspire and guide the nation. Will such a nation have the resolve to withstand threats to its integrity and freedom? Will its members possess the vigor to put their commitment to the next generation above their personal ambition? Will they continue to exist as a nation?
Forty years after Mill’s chapters, R. Kook, in his famous essay LeMahalakh ha-Ideot be-Yisrael, confronted this question in its general form. As the title—“The Unfolding of Ideals in Israel”-- indicates, R. Kook’s focus is on the national and religious destiny of the Jewish people. The opening sections, from which I quote, are formulated in universalistic terms. R. Kook posits a duality: the “divine ideal” expressing the spirit of a nation, and the “national ideal” expressing its mundane identity. He envisions a situation where the two are not in harmony because the national ideal is no longer guided by the divine ideal. R. Kook believed that such dissonance had harmed the Jewish people during the First Temple period and he was most concerned it was happening in his own time. He insisted that no nation had survived without such an idea in the past, and he saw no reason to anticipate exceptions in the future. How does a secular society struggle for coherence in such a crisis?
One possible solution, R. Kook suggests, is to embrace materialism as the unifying glue that holds together an otherwise disordered society. “Materialism then offers itself as a remedy to a society smothering under the yoke of life without purpose, reason, and content,” he writes. The stimulus of material benefit, he continues, “is mobilized to nourish the heart and mind, the life-centers of the individuals, in the effort to construct from these fragments some technical foundation for social and human life. But all in vain.”
R. Kook thus proposes two theses: 1) Nations cannot survive without an ideal that gives them cohesion; 2) Materialism, taken as a social and national ideal, cannot satisfy the spirit. One may dispute R. Kook by rejecting either thesis. Perhaps, contrary to prior experience, nations may indeed flourish without the benefit of a shared spiritual identity. Or, one might argue that materialistic striving and enjoyment can supply that identity, that we can all gather round, and find unity, in valuing material goods. Note, also, that R. Kook may be right about the collective’s inability to sustain itself on the materialistic diet even though individuals, in particular those who have little use to begin with for national frameworks of identity, happily discover in materialism a source of meaning and purpose. Conversely, one may hold that material striving suffices to maintain an adequate national spirit, at least for some national entities, but doubt its ability to give meaning to the lives of most or any individuals.
Our analysis so far echoes familiar debates in our culture. The religious side typically argues that neither the individual nor society can abide without the cement of the ideal, by which they usually mean a specifically religious ideal. Secularists, for their part, eschew such skepticism, believing fervently that such ideals are not necessary either for society or for the individual, or that their culture has produced or will, in the fullness of time, produce satisfactory substitutes or that national identity is obsolete at any rate and will be replaced with new structures of identity.
Meanwhile the world goes on, and each philosophy preaches mostly to the converted. Advocates of traditional religion or culture express fear that national purpose has been dangerously eroded; hence that Western society is speeding towards calamity, or that it is living on the diminishing spiritual capital of previous ages, which will sooner or later be depleted. So long as our physical safety, communal structures, our well-being and that of our families are not directly undermined, the complaint is pretty much an academic one. Opponents dismiss these fears as wrong-headed, misguided, or grossly exaggerated. Over a century has passed since R. Kook wrote this essay, and the catastrophe he predicted is not evident to them. As the populace said of the prophet: “The days grow long, and every vision comes to nothing” (Ezekiel 12:22).
III
What if our present social balance becomes unstable? Perhaps the nonmaterial values we mentioned—national pride, public civility and private intimacy, religious commitment—are weakened, or perceived to have been weakened, to the point where the desire for material goods predominates over all other values. Perhaps human beings can never be entirely satisfi ed with the pure selfishness of merely material progress so that, in the absence of traditional ideals, it is eclipsed by preoccupation with his or her relative position vis-à-vis his neighbor, the desire to surpass or avoid being surpassed by one’s peers. At this stage, strict enforcement of economic equality, even if it were possible, will no longer succeed in satisfying the individual or sustaining the public spirit in the face of invidious competitiveness because the latter cannot be measured by monetary standards or remedied by bureaucratic fiat.
What I mean is well expressed in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here. On the eve of an election that brings to the presidency the homegrown demagogue Buzz Windrip, a character says of Windrip’s most aggressive partisans: “There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or digest better.”
Optimistic materialism’s likely response is that this doomsday scenario cannot take place because good social engineering and unbounded technological advances underwrite endless material progress and that is sufficient to keep the overwhelming majority of the people contented. As Western society has thrived for the past hundred and fifty years, so will it thrive forever. The American dream is not only good to achieve; it is equally good to dream. We must keep the faith: “The lights must never go out, the music must always play;” the economy must always expand.
R. Kook taught that this system cannot prevail for long because there is no precedent for it in the past and because, in his religiously informed view, it goes against the spiritual elements in human nature. At a practical level, the question is not about a priori possibility but about everyday reality. Are we right to stake the future of our civilization on the conviction that R. Kook is wrong, or that the demoralization of the public square doesn’t matter very much, or that, if he is right in principle, the day of reckoning will be indefinitely deferred? Will the lights never go out? Will the economy always expand?
Imagine what would happen if the music stopped and the economy stopped expanding. I mean that the standard of living for the middle classes, already affluent beyond belief by comparison with the prosperity of our parents’ or even our own youth, remained exactly what is was. We would eat the same food, wear the same clothes, retain the same level of medical care, drive the same cars, utilize the same conveniences, entertain ourselves with the same gadgets and toys and, for those so inclined, continue to exploit the internet for our Torah study and our general edification, but the dream of more would be placed on hold for our lifetimes or for the foreseeable future. Do not concern yourself for the moment with the effect on the truly destitute, on their present misery and future expectations. Think only of those who do not go to bed hungry, whose material benefi ts make the most luxurious nabob of yesteryear look like an abject pauper. Are they—are we—ready to absorb such a check, not to our physical well-being, but to our sense of purpose in life?
And now for an even more unthinkable question: What if the economy does not remain where it is but actually regresses, so that we must give up benefits to which we have become quickly but addictively accustomed?
This can occur for many plausible reasons: war, pestilence, long term change of global temperature, or other aspects of the environment—and if we suffer these calamities, it will not matter if they are man-made or natural, or how many of us signed well-meaning petitions against them.
I am not raising these alarms in order to propose particular methods of preventing them; nor am I competent in adjudicating the severity or probability of danger posed by these threats. My question is simple: If and when we face any of these crises, if our present economic security and our faith in its perpetuation become dubious and obsolete, is our democratic, materialistic society psychologically and socially prepared to endure them?
As rabbis, as educators, as simple Orthodox Jews, we already feel overtaken by innumerable, imminent challenges. Our first and urgent mission is to sustain, in a discouraging world, our singular spiritual commitment to the service of God, as individuals and as a community, with all the day by day responsibilities that entails. Whether or not we relish the task, we must safeguard the economic means to pursue those goals. Nobody else will do this for us. In the public arena we must counter hostility to traditional religion and to the well-being and security of the state of Israel. I am loath to add to my portfolios and to yours by asking what we have done and what we can do for the morale of our democratic society, though I suspect that its shaky underpinnings are not unconnected to the problems we struggle with constantly. Yet, if not we, who will look at our situation from an honest and wholesome perspective? And if not now, when?
R' Carmy
Tradition
