Limits and Hope

An introduction

Limits and hope combines the arguments that Christopher Lasch offered in the conclusion of his magnificent critique of Progress, The True and Only Heaven. They represent the “populist” response to the onslaught of progressivism against everything that makes a life worth living. Since the book’s publication, in 1991, the raid against decent life has only gained in intensity and is now directed at the complete eradication of all pockets of resistance against a mutilated conception of existence.

The targets are not limited to forms of social organization (families, small-scale communities, church communities, the Amish etc.) that put up resistance. The charge is now primarily directed at our inner resistance, as Georges Bernanos, in La France contre les Robots so prophetically understood: “One cannot understand the least thing about modern civilization if one does not first and foremost realize that it is a universal conspiracy to destroy the inner life.” It is difficult to make a comprehensive inventory of all the crises that are converging, which all point toward a terminal crisis of liberal modernity.

We are living through an ecological crisis, which is the product of an economic system premised on the idea of Man as “master and possessor of nature.” We are living through a related crisis, no less profound: the relationship of Man to his technology which led him to turn Technique into an idol. Having subjected the outside world to its unquenchable thirst for rational control, liberal civilization is now turning against Man himself and treating any form of inner life as an object of extraction. We are living though a geopolitical crisis corresponding to the end of the American century, and the subsequent transfer eastward of the center of the world economy — a crisis the dominant center is trying to resist by embarking on a succession of ever more grotesque imperialistic projects, beginning with the “Project for a New American Century,” two decades ago, and continuing, today, to its re-enactment in calamitous conflict of Russia in Ukraine, with the hyperventilated affirmation of a “rules-based international order.” We are living through a crisis of competence of the Western elites who have stirred us toward a world too complex to manage; as the crises arising from their hubris pile one on top of another, and as the anger of populations subject to crisis as a way of life grows, the elites double down and resort to techno-totalitarian means to coerce us into embracing the moribund idea of progress (and, as well, to maintain their grip over society). Last but not least, we are living through a related ideological crisis of the West arising from the growing acceptance of an elite-bred culture of inversion, as Paul Kingsnorth calls it, which despises everything that is rooted and would like to coerce us into “defin[ing] ourselves now by what we are not. And what we are not is everything we used to be.”

In Limits and Hope, I will attempt to address the multifaceted questions raised by the terminal crisis of liberal modernity by enlisting the works of thinkers who offer us a response based on limits and hope. For it is only through cultivating a sense of limits and fighting hard for the virtue of hope that we can address the onslaught against any decent conception of the good life in a radical way — in the etymological sense of the word radical, which means a return to the root. Only through the combination of limits and hope can we, as French philosopher Renaud Garcia put it in his wonderful book, Le Sens des Limites (The Sense of Limits), ontologically anchor our lives in the “world of life” against the invasion of the “abstract world” ushered in by progressive liberalism and its sinister child, the civilization of the Machine.

An examination of limits is essential to understanding that progressive liberalism is, above all, an anthropological catastrophe premised, as Lasch so brilliantly demonstrated in The Culture of Narcissism, upon an infantile psychology. In its emphasis on the mastery of necessity and a desire to remove all risk from life — in its rejection of tragedy — progressive liberalism generates a dominant personality, an anthropological type reminiscent of a baby in the stage prior to the discovery that he is separated from the world outside him, and that he cannot return to the oceanic, tension-free state that precedes his birth. This infantile ignorance of one’s limits breeds an anthropological type of human who is fundamentally dependent on forces over which he has no control, just like the newborn is dependent on his parents to satisfy his desires and ensure his survival. By a trick of reason, a society premised on overcoming all limits does not create a powerful self ; on the contrary, it generates a “minimal self” obsessed with psychic comfort, a self incapable of an active engagement with the world outside him.

In turn, a society premised on removing all limits to rational control generates a population incapable of hope. I am using the word “hope” in the most Laschian sense. Lasch, borrowing from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote of the “nerve of moral action,” which “had to be asserted in the face of evidence that could easily justify the conclusion that the world is ‘meaningless.’” The “product of emotion, not intelligence”, hope contains within it an idea of gratitude towards the gift of life, which is the essence of all self-governed communities, who recognize and codify the common sense of human frailty. Lasch went to great lengths to distinguish hope from liberalism’s unbridled optimism, which can only breed resentful individuals — a resentment that makes them prone to worshipping the magical powers of promethean technology, on which they become dependent not only for their survival, but for the fabrication of their own desires. This notion was expressed with unequaled clarity by Bernanos, who, in a 1947 conference, offered perhaps the most beautiful distinction between hope and optimism: “Optimism is a substitute for hope. One may encounter optimism everywhere — even at the bottom of a bottle. But hope must be won. One can only attain hope through truth, at the cost of great effort and long patience. To find hope, it is necessary to go beyond despair. When one comes to the end of the night, on meets another dawn […] Optimism is a false hope, for the use of the cowardly and the stupid. Hope is a virtue, virtus, strength, an heroic determination of the soul. The highest form of hope is despair overcome.”[i]

All the thinkers and writers who will prominently feature in Limits and Hope have addressed the crisis of liberal modernity through these particular lenses. Some of them will be familiar to American and English-speaking readers, such as Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Matthew B. Crawford, Patrick Deneen, Paul Kingsnorth, Edward Abbey, and NS Lyons, among others. Others, who wrote in the French language, will be less familiar, either because their work is completely unavailable in English translation (Philippe Muray, Bernard Charbonneau, Michel Clouscard, Renaud Garcia, Pièces et Main d’oeuvre…), or partially, and often selectively, translated (Charles Péguy, Cornélius Castoriadis, Jean-Claude Michéa) and/or forgotten, often not republished, (Bernanos’ essays), or not publicized enough (Pierre Manent), and/or pigeonholed in a discipline (François Furet).

It is my intention, as times goes by, to make all posts in Limits and Hope available in English and French.

Every writer has pet themes, and among mine are: Teilhard de Chardin, this “Prophet of a Totalitarian Age”, as Bernard Charbonneau called him, the cyberneticians-parading-as-environmentalists James Lovelock and Bruno Latour, the French absolute State, the American blob, the international development industry etc. Most of my posts will look for some sort of anchor amid the stupefying events that constitute our day-to-day life, in an attempt to divine the deeper truths in the onslaught against a decent human life. Whatever the subject under consideration, I hope to find something essential about what we are living through — whether that essential something is admirable (as in the films of John Ford, Frank Capra, or Jacques Tati; a painting by Rubens, a novel by Jean Giono or Alain Damasio, etc.), or more sinister (as in the movie Titane).

For I believe, as Lasch put it, that Democracy “has to be judged by its success in producing superior goods, superior works of art and learning, a superior type of character.” A large part of the cultural hegemony of the civilization of the Machine and of the progressive liberalism that supports it, is that it produces forms of art that are not countenanced by forms of opposition cabined in political philosophy or social critique.

I hope that you will join me in this journey, as we embark upon an exploration of Limits and Hope.

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[i] Georges Bernanos, Liberty, The Last Essays, Rhode Island, Cluny Media, 2019, transl. J. &. B. Ulanov.