First off, last Saturday was Walker Percy’s 100th birthday. Here’s some stuff Percy said: People are nicer, more clueless, and more loony than ever these days. Most ideological anger — most outrage against microaggressions, for example — is a diversion from the nothing that we really think is the truth about our being. The particular hell of our world for the affluent is “pure possibility,” to have no idea what to do with all the freedom given you by modern technology and good government. Percy himself admits that the Okies fleeing from the Dust Bowl were too desperate and hungry to have any experience of that particular hell.
Still, the problem of surrendering our personal sovereignty over our truthful experiences to the experts who want to engineer scripted solutions to the problem of anxiety (that is the prelude to wonder) is becoming more pervasive. People are told they have to be nice to avoid being brutish. And so they mostly submit to the discipline of the 21st-century global competitive marketplace, the linguistic therapy of experts and, if necessary, the mood-regulating therapy of the chemotherapeutic psychologists.
Now nobody denies that the niceness has the benefit of clamping down on the cruelty of racism, sexism, and so forth and so on. Still, niceness is not enough, and it can be pushed way too far. It seems not to have the effect of making people feel more safe and secure. That’s because, of course, niceness is no substitute for virtue. In our time in particular, it’s the nice person who sacrifices real human controversy for public relations, refuses to use truthful words that might cause dangerous trouble, regards spirited aggression as a disease to be cured, and in general is in favor of using words to cover over every form of inconvenient and unpleasant human experience.
So the libertarian futurist Tyler Cowen is pretty rattled that he didn’t predict the rise of the thuggish Donald Trump and the socialist Bernie Sanders. Here’s what he thinks he missed: The truth is that the world is getting nicer and more comfortable, but it turns out there are “brutes” (his word!) who aren’t happy with it. The brutes, in his telling, are some of our men. They aren’t doing well in the present economy, where the nice or scripted qualities of being conscientious and being compliant are so prized. Not only that, they just prefer jobs that require physical strength and endurance, and those are in short supply now. They even preferred the days of compulsory military surface, when it was possible the knock the heads of those that needed knocking. And it was, Cowen forgets to mention, possible to find personal meaning through the courageous risk of life.
Cowen thinks that Trumpism is the brutes in rebellion against the nice. There’s no good reason for that rebellion, because a nice world — the world in which the brute is being replaced by the abstract role player who is on good terms with being both a producer and a consumer — is obviously better, the ever emerging world on the right side of history. So Trump etc. depresses Cowen with the insight that the history might not keep moving in the free and productive direction after all.
Cowen rightly can’t imagine that some program of finding safe outlets for brutishness would really work. Even fight clubs don’t work if they have rules (for fighting). And he can’t imagine that doubling down on “feminizing” propaganda would work in our country, given our diversity. He shows us, of course, that so much of our the pro-diversity propaganda is a war against genuine cultural diversity. And that so many of our faux-cosmopolitan economists play on the anti-diversity team.
In the spirit of both Percy’s Christian charity and his Southern Stoic lady and gentleman, I have to respond that the mean between being nice (or someone who deploys words to hide reality) and being a brute is being civilized. Being nice isn’t to be confused with having manners and morals. You can’t trust nice people to be there when you need them. General Mattis, Mother Teresa, and even a caring parent aren’t nice. The men and women who died for our country that we remembered on Memorial Day weren’t nice! The first vice of those who think that niceness can be an adequate replacement for the allegedly dangerous aggressiveness or wholehearted love of virtue is ingratitude.
That’s why you shouldn’t vote for Trump! Some Trumpians say that his extreme — and often genuinely brutish or uncivilized — reaction against political correctness is justified as employing one extreme to counter another. But that’s not what civilized men and women do! And it plays right to the hands of the experts and their scripts!
In any case, our scientists say we should reserve our wonder for the stars, for the story of evolution that encompasses us all, and maybe for our marvelous technological accomplishments that have freed us so successfully from our brutish natural condition. But the truth, according to Percy, is that there’s nothing more strange and wonderful than particular human beings, stuck in a predicament not of their own making, the wonderers and wanderers with singular destinies. We belong to the only cruel and the only sentimental species, and, if you look closely, one reason we’re so screwed up is that we’re both more cruel and more sentimental than ever. Why? We’re less accepting of and less grateful for who we are as created beings with the singular joys and miseries of being open to the truth.