Goldberg - Suicide of the West: how the rebirth of nationalism, populism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy

There is no God in this book.

The humans in this story are animals who evolved from other animals who in turn evolved from ever more embarrassing animals and before that from a humiliating sea of ooze, slime, meats, and vegetables in the primordial stew. We pulled ourselves out of the muck, not some Garden of Eden. Indeed, if the Garden of Eden ever existed, it was a slum. We created the Miracle of modernity all on our own, and if we lose it, that will be our fault too.

This book assumes that the Almighty does not guide human affairs and does not intercede on our behalf. God is not in the picture. Well, He is in the picture in the sense that the idea of Godand godsplay a very large role in human affairs. But my assumption is that God is in our heads and hearts, not in the heavens above.

The only concession to my own beliefs lies in the word assumes just above. I am making this assumption for the purposes of an argument. I am not an atheist, but I think it is useful to play one for the argument I want to make, as a means of guiding the reader through a way of thinking about the world.

In Enlightenment-based democracies, claims that something is true because God says so are inherently suspect because part of the point of the Enlightenment was to create a space where people can disagree about what God wants from usif He wants anything at all. Thats why the highest form of argument in a democracy is one based on facts grounded in reason and decency. I wont deny Im passionate in parts of this book, but I try not to let the passion get ahead of the facts or the argument. That is because I think persuasion matters, though you wouldnt know it from the last few years in American life. On the right and the left, persuading your opponents is out of fashion, replaced by the mandate to rile up your supporters. I am weary of that, particularly on my own side. So Im taking a gamble and doing this the old-fashioned way.

For the purposes of this book, I assume that nearly all the important truths about good and evil or freedom and tyranny are not self-evident. But they can be discovered. The truths we know we have figured out for ourselvesover a really, really, really long time. After thousands of generations of trial and error, we discovered best practices out there in the world, like prizes in some eternal scavenger hunt. If the concepts of right and wrong were as universally obvious to everyone as, say, hot and cold, the library shelves groaning under the weight of tomes chronicling war and barbarity would instead lie empty.

And for those who cant suspend their faith in God and believe He revealed to us all we need to know, thats fine. All I ask is you bear in mind that He took His time revealing it all. The Jews, never mind Jesus, show up very late in the story of humanity. And long after the Ten Commandments and the Bible appeared, most of humanity still spent thousands of years ignoring divine instruction.

But just as God cant get credit, neither can any of His more popular substitutes. There is no dialectic, inevitability, teleology, or hidden algorithm that made human success a foregone conclusion. What happened happened, but it didnt have to happen that way. There is no right side of history. Nothing is foreordained.

If you cannot let go of the idea that there is a great plan to the universethat we as individuals, a nation, or a species have some inevitable destinythats fine too. All I ask of you is to consider a secondary proposition: We have no choice but to live by the assumption that this is the case.

For instance, many philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists have depressingly compelling arguments that there is no such thing as free will. Brain scans reveal that many of our conscious decisions were already made subconsciously before they popped into our heads. It looks an awful lot like free will is a story our brains tell us.

But heres the problem: Even if you believe there is no such thing as free will, it is impossible to live any kind of decent life based on that belief. Even if our personal choices are some deep fiction, we still have to convince ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We are still obligated as a society to judge people as if they make their own choices.

The same goes for every nation and civilization. You can believe that cold, impersonal forces drive humanity to a certain destiny like wind drives a leaf, but we still have to argue about whom to elect president, what Congress should do, and what schools should teach. Prattle on about how free will is a delusion to your friends at the bar all you like; youre still going to have to choose to go to work in the morning.

We all understand in our bones that choices matterparadoxically because we have no choice but to think that way.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing for some kind of nihilism or moral relativism. The philosopher Richard Rorty famously wrote in Consequences of Pragmatism:

Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.

This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartres remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.

I think there is much truth to this. What societies decide is right or wrong becomes what is right and wrong for most of the people who live in them. But I think the lessons of history show that societies can choose poorlyand that this can be proved empirically through facts and reason. Some cultures are better than others, not because of some gauzy metaphysical claim, but because they allow more people to live happy, prosperous, meaningful lives without harming other people in the process. Because this is true, it is incumbent upon all of us to fight for a better society, to defend the hard-learned lessons of human history, and to be grateful for what we have accomplished. This book begins and ends with that simple idea.

With all this in mind, let me review, not necessarily in perfect order, what lies in the middle of this book.