Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?

Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities

Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is:

R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “strong Gods” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20^th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.

However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.

In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.

On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them.

It’s worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule:

• The Amish: They live apart in tight-knit communities with strong countercultural values, and carefully control their technological and ideological environment. 10/10.

• Cults and communes: Any cult mature enough to have its own compound, or any communal living project, has succeeded almost as thoroughly as the Amish. We may not support their insane religious beliefs, or the various sex crimes they are no doubt committing, but they have succeeded at Fukuyama’s suggestion of knitting themselves a new god within the liberal order. 9.5/10.

• Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mormons: Get lots of people of the same religion together in one place - a timeless classic. Some of the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox are still more fluent in Yiddish than English, giving them near-invincibility from the mainstream. 9/10.

• The Free State Project: some libertarians made a deal that if enough other libertarians agreed, they would all move to New Hampshire and try to turn it into a libertarian paradise. They got about 20,000 people on board; the results ranged from building entirely new libertarian towns in the forest, to buying homes in Portsmouth or Manchester and keeping in touch with their libertarian friends. 7/10.

• Serious Christianity: Lots of Christians have social circles centered around their church, send their children to Christian schools, have Christian therapists they can visit if they feel down, and consume Christian media. On the other hand, they usually work a secular job, and most of their neighbors are secular. 6/10.

• The LGBTQ community: don’t laugh at this one. If you know many of these people, you know they have their own parallel society of LGBT friends, LGBT bars, and LGBT dating sites. They attend LGBT parties, conform to LGBT fashions, and watch LGBT sports (like roller derby). They live in special LGBT-friendly neighborhoods, and everyone around them follows LGBT-friendly norms. They even have their own flag, an obvious first step for people trying to form a country-within-a-country. 5/10.

• The rationalists: I live on a street with five other rationalist families and a small rationalist microschool. The broader Bay Area rationalist community has its own parties, dating sites, media, holidays, a conference center, and even a choir. 5/10

But even defining these exceptions broadly, probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to one of them.

Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?

My best guess is money.

If you’re sufficiently committed, you don’t need money. You can go out in the forest with your like-minded friends and probably starve (or, like the libertarians, get eaten by bears). But if you’re insufficiently committed, money is pretty helpful! Or at least this is what I gather from my own experience. There are three reasons the rationalists have somewhat succeeded at the community-building project when so many other movements have failed.

First, many of us worked in tech, and so ended out naturally gathering in the SF Bay Area without having to explicitly coordinate on it. We didn’t even have to take less-than-maximally lucrative jobs, because all the maximally-lucrative jobs for techies are in one place.

Second, some of us had enough money to live where we wanted (which turned out to be next to each other) and to cooperate to fund community projects.

Third, some of us made enough money to support other people who were working part-time or full-time on community building. Some of this looked like hiring them for community-building positions, but more often it was being able to afford family/housing structures where not everyone had to have an income-maximizing job at all times.

If we had even more money, we could do even better. Occasionally we fantasize about going further in the Amish or Free State direction. There are lots of reasons it doesn’t happen, but the main ones are money (building towns is expensive) and jobs (not everyone can work remotely). There’s some sense in which we’re being weak here - the Amish are very poor, and just sort of take the plunge and do it anyway. But keeping our level of weakness fixed, more money would help.

Why care about any of this?

I often see people whose politics center around tight-knit community make fun of those whose politics center around material abundance. But these are potentially complementary goals. The more material abundance we have, the better we can be at having tight-knit communities.

(yes, admittedly this is the opposite of how things usually work - some peasant village in medieval England had a tighter community than Malibu Beach or the Hamptons. I guess I would claim that “so poor you can’t leave” and “so rich you can be wherever you want” are two different strategies, and liberalism is more suited to the latter.)

I also see people say that if we avoid paperclipping, technofeudalism, and the other obvious ways a technological singularity could go wrong, the next thing we’ll have to worry about is some kind of crisis of meaning, where we all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop in a spiritual wasteland.

The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations you think are optimal?

And the obvious counter is: there’s also nothing to stop people from doing that now. But they don’t. So whatever mysterious force prevents it now will continue to prevent it after the singularity.

But I think that force is just economics. Most people have to work a normal job, which prevents them from running off to Hypothetical Amish Country. Replace that with post-singularity economic relations - maybe UBI, maybe something else - and new options become available.