Legal Commentary

Mark Lilla is often depicted -- sometimes caricatured -- as a dyed-in-the-wool secular liberal.  Readers who take this line point to the separationist melodies of The Stillborn God and his occasional denouncements of the Sarah Palin-opulist right wing. 

They have it exactly wrong -- they are missing the harmony.  Lilla is at core a conservative, albeit one of an older, elegant variety that it is becoming harder and harder for people today to recognize as the genuine article.  I had the great pleasure of taking a seminar that Lilla taught on the thought of William James (his final judgment: not all that positive) and was lucky enough to get to know him a bit.  He is a deft thinker, quick, occasionally biting, subtle and highly cultivated.  One thing he is certainly not is easy to pin down.  After the break, my case for the conservatism of Mark Lilla, with particular reference to this recent piece, which, again, has been mischaracterized as a standard liberal diatribe by readers who do not have ears to hear conservatism all'antica.

Before getting to the piece, a little groundwork.  Exhibit A is his enjoyable early book on the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, an early 18th century Italian historicist (some might say, the father of historicism) with what Lilla describes as "anti-modern" sensibilities.  The book is intended as a sympathetic portrait of a thinker who trenchantly criticized the individualism of the intellectual enlightenment.  Exhibit B: Lilla's friendliness to Isaiah Berlin (who himself was interested in Vico) and his partiality to the "history of ideas."  Exhibit C: his stint as en editor of The Public Interest at a time when Irving Kristol, more than Daniel Bell, was the man in charge of the journal.  Exhibit D: his book, The Reckless Mind, which took writers of both the left and right to task for, essentially, falling so much in love with their ideas that they became blind to their horrific, real-world consequences.  Here one can witness Lilla the anti-theorist, the anti-perfectionist skeptic. Exhibit E: a column last year in the Chronicle in which Lilla claimed that the intellectual traditions of conservatism ought to be the subject of academic study. 

And these conservative strains can be seen in the most recent NY Review piece as well.  There, Lilla takes aim at libertarianism -- the way in which the ideology of autonomy (the mantra of "leave me alone" to be me -- the real me, the authentic me -- whether the sexual me of the '60s or the economic me of the '80s)has been damaging and has contributed to the rise of the tea party "antipolitical Jacobin."  A fragment:     

If either [Glen] Beck or [Max] Blumenthal is right about the new populism, then it?s not worth taking seriously. My own view is that we need to take it even more seriously than they do; we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement?s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing?and unwarranted?confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.   

In this paragraph, I was reminded of two of Lilla's American anti-heroes: Whitman and Emerson (particularly the latter -- in a Slate piece a little while back on American higher education, Lilla advised that American educators should steer well clear of "anything polluted by Emerson").  The arguments that Lilla is making here are ones from stable authority, from institutionalism, from political centrism and moderation.  In sum, from tradition.  They oppose the radical autonomy and me-ism that has long been associated with American libertarianism and, because of the fusionist movement, with American conservatism.  But they actually have little to do with conservatism itself, which is committed to traditions, history, and cultural institutions. 

Exactly the same sensibility is at work in Lilla's description of the contemporary situation in which western Europe now finds itself:

In Western Europe, the collapse is ideological. For two centuries after the French Revolution there was a rough but evident distinction between Europeans who accepted its legacy and those who, in small ways or large, rejected it. Each side had its parties, its newspapers, its heroes, its enemies, its own account of history. That ideological distinction began to fade in the postwar years as Western Europe?s new consumer societies became more atomized and hedonistic, and with the collapse of communism it became meaningless. At the same time, European political elites were busy blurring national identities in order to construct a faceless ?Europe,? whose eerily blank currency is a powerful symbol of the crisis of representation there. It would occur to no one to lay siege to Brussels or build barricades to defend it. Xenophobic, anti-immigrant parties have cropped up instead, giving cruel expression to genuine mourning for a lost sense of belonging.

Note again the intellectual European heritage of 'modern' against 'anti-modern' that has informed Lilla's own work, and which together is taken to be a kind of cultural backbone that is rather rapidly disintegrating, replaced by the anomie of untethered, institution-less liberty.  As the tyranny of freedom has increased, so has the disinclination to invest in civic institutions, the distrust of government, the cynicism of the mob.  And as the loyalty which people (can we really call them citizens?) feel for institutions fades, they entrust those loyalties to like-minded others behind gated communities (or urban coffee shops) or they withdraw even further (e.g., homeschooling) "confiden[t] that they can do it better themselves."  Distrust continues to mount, pumped up unceasingly by the notion that anybody can teach himself, anybody can cure himself of disease if he's got the right Internet source or the right witchdoctor's herb, anybody can govern just as well as anybody else.

Respect for elite expertise and respect for authority -- these, says Lilla, are the casualties. Now people instinctually rely on themselves and making up their own minds, as if all it took to think well about any difficult question is cable television and a sub-average intellect.  We've reached, he thinks, the pathetic populism of the proud pygmy-mind: "YOU DECIDE."

I should say that while I find Lilla insightful on many matters, I often disagree with him.  But my purpose here is to analyze his views.  All of this -- the anti-libertarian, pro-traditionalist, pro-institutionalist, pro-elitist, pro-hierarchical, anti-Woodstock and anti-Wall Street political centrism that Lilla champions -- is characteristic not of contemporary liberalism, but of a conservatism that was never really part of the American scene.  It is closer to a British conservatism, or perhaps a British conservatism such as that of Oakeshott (and which may now be gone there too...I don't know enough about their politics).  Indeed, if populist Jacobinism is to become the face of the right (or if it has already become that face), I wonder whether it ought to be called that, rather than "conservatism" -- a view that will then really be an outmoded historical idea.