STRONG GODS IN THE AGE OF MANAGERIAL LIBERALISM

OR, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

This is a review of Russell Reno’s 2018 book, Return of the Strong Gods. The book aspires to shed light upon several of the main themes of this substack. And it succeeds in several areas. However, there are some serious flaws in the analysis, which leads Reno to misconstrue his topic. He seems to believe he’s discussing the cause, when in fact he’s discussing the effect – or perhaps a means rather than an end. It seems to me that at the heart of his discussion is a misunderstanding of the naturalistic fallacy.

He confounds that fallacy not only in his description of what he considers to be the problems in the contemporary world, but, perhaps even more troublesomely, he fails to see how others are violating the same naturalistic fallacy for ideological purposes. In effect, he therefore winds up legitimizing the ideological premises of those he aspires to oppose. All of this results in the book being a heat seeking missile locked onto the frying pan rather than the stove. Once this conceptual misdirection is compensated for though, Reno’s book becomes an asset in our analysis here at The Circulation of Elites. This post will be a bit on the long side, but I hope the length is justified by both the insight of the book and the importance of the issues it addresses. 

As the full title of the book indicates, Reno wants to explain the recent rise of populist and nationalist passions, which has so aggravated (what we, around here, call) the globalist faction of the managerial class. It’s these resurgent passions which he refers to as the return of strong gods.

By “strong gods,” I do not mean Thor and the other residents of the Old Norse Valhalla. The strong gods are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies

His argument, in broad strokes, is that following all the human suffering of the first half of the 20th century, 1914-1945, a post-war intellectual consensus emerged which determined that the best way to avoid a repeat of such horrors was to cultivate an intellectual culture that minimized such grand, collective passions. Reno highlights two post-war intellectuals who were especially influential in this regard: Karl Popper and Frederick Hayek. Though he addresses the same broad themes in the thought of several of the influential intellectuals of the period: e.g., Lippmann, Adorno, Friedman, Rawls, Buckley, Derrida, Camus, and Burnham. (Though, interestingly, and tellingly, not the books of Burnham that might have helped Reno recognize where he was going astray, on either the Italian realist school or the managerial class.)

In his influential book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues precisely against the kind of grand political visions characteristic of the thought of Plato and Marx, as well as the politics of Stalin and Hitler. Instead, he argues for a modest social engineering, in which reform is made piecemeal, like forms of social experiments. If the initial experiments produce the desired results, they can be expanded or generalized; if not they are easily revoked, having caused minimal harm.

In the case of Hayek, Reno points to the emphasis upon spontaneous order. By allowing everyone to pursue their own personal ends, free of disruption from others, the aggregate of all these individual choices, processed through the power of the market, allow for the spontaneous emergence of a Pareto optimal world. Though the emphasis is clearly placed differently between the two models, what they have in common is the idea that it is better for all of us to live in little worlds. Therefore, the post-war intellectual consensus was geared to promote what was celebrated as openness, entailing weakened social bonds and weakened identification with historical or political passions. For it was just such grand visions and passions that at mid-century were seen as having led us astray, into catastrophic, verging on apocalyptic horrors.

The remedy to avoid a repeat of such outcomes though had perverse effects, dramatically reducing our perceived scope of what legitimately should constitute public life. In the process, a core dimension of what makes us human has been lost – even we might say squandered. That would be bad enough, but, interestingly, right from the start of the book, even if only intermittently, Reno intuits that all of this is not merely some random system error. Rather, it serves as the veil behind which, what he gives such imprecise terms as “our ruling elites” – but I’d call the ruling faction of the managerial class, specifically its globalist wing – has been vastly profiting at the expense of their working-class compatriots.

The following passages from the book’s introduction gives a sense of what Reno is getting at here:

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems

These days, the rhetoric of anti-fascism, and even that of anti-racism, has become a cynical way to discredit those who challenge the supremacy of our elites

Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and other populist challengers are not choirboys or immaculate liberals. But their limitations are not nearly as dangerous to the West as the fanaticism of our leadership class, whose hyper-moralistic sense of mission—either us or Hitler!—prevents us from addressing our economic, demographic, cultural, and political problems

Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler

This broad analysis from Reno strikes me as being right over the target. His book is immensely valuable in teasing out the intellectual strands that have woven the fabric of this world of weak “gods” in a fanatically “open” society. Famously, though, the devil, as they say, is in the details. And so, all the immense benefit from Reno’s book could be lost or obscured by misdirection arising from his attribution of causation within all this.

For those unfamiliar with the terms, and I apologize for the crude shorthand to those who are familiar, but broadly speaking, theories of society can be broken down philosophically into materialist and idealist. The latter, for our limited purposes here, can be described as the belief that society and social forces are driven by ideas; ideas generate people’s actions, and those actions manifest in actual social effects. In contrast, materialism (or, at least, the version applied here) argues that it is material forces that drive social actions. In the case of crude, Hegelian, left-wing Marxism, it would be the economic infrastructure that is the ultimate source of such material forces; in the case of clever, profound, right-wing Marxism (that’s me waving at the camera), it is evolutionary biology that is the ultimate source of such material forces.¹

And in fact, from such a materialist perspective, ideas are not merely not the driving force in social action, but rather ideas are the products of materialist forces. They are selected for and leveraged in response to material forces. Ideas held by specific people, at specific times, are explained by material (specifically biological) circumstances. Any of you who have read his book now immediately see how I’ve situated myself on a direct collision course with Reno’s argument.

The problem here is that Reno seems (though, as we’ll see, later this impression becomes a bit obscured) to adhere to an idealist analysis of the situation he’s assessing. As already mentioned, he sees the driving force in this post-war consensus as a concern to avoid a repetition of the horrors of communism, Nazism and fascism. And, incidentally, I entirely agree that the intellectual consensus he so vividly exposes was motivated to create distance between the victorious post-war Western regime and these defeated alternatives.

However, as I demonstrate in my (must read) book, The Managerial Class on Trial, that victorious regime, which I’ve called managerial liberalism (also, briefly described here), was a strategy of the managerial class, which was in direct competition with these other managerial class strategies – communism, Nazism and fascism – for global class dominance, finally resulting in war to resolve the conflict. WWII was a managerial class war for global intra-class dominance. Understandable, then, that the victor would want to put as much distance between itself and its vanquished competitor class strategies as possible – even while all those strategies, contingent on local circumstances, were all motivated by the same class interests.

The point here is that it was not some vague, amorphous ideal of openness, aspiring to transcend totalitarianism, that explains this post-war consensus. Rather, right from the start, it was the material interests of the victorious faction of the class that generated such an intellectual consensus. This confusion between idealist and materialist explanation is even more insidious as we dig deeper into the details of Reno’s argument.

In elaborating the details of how this open society ethos took shape, he takes specific aim at the impact of what he calls relativism, sociobiology and critique. These all, in their own way, contribute to the weakening of strong gods – convictions and beliefs that could give form to the human need for deep social passions. Again, a few passages from the book gives a feeling of what we’re discussing:

we read from Harvard’s 2007 report [that the educational priority], “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances”

Popper and Hayek’s anti-totalitarian agenda advanced in two ways. The first was the way of critique, culminating in today’s diffuse but powerful ideology of multiculturalism. The second was the way of reduction, showing that human affairs can be explained by material interests and biological processes that govern us by default

We must drive out the strong gods from the West…by relativizing them, putting them into their historical contexts, critiquing their xenophobic, patriarchal, cisgender, and racist legacies, and showing how they are products of a sociobiological process that produces in us a reptilian “tribal mind”

Reducing the human condition to economic interests or “selfish genes” has the same political and cultural effect as multiculturalism. Both disenchant and weaken, serving the ideals of an open society

Obviously, there’s some merit in this criticism, but Reno obscures the valuable insight in all of this by not merely missing the target but by shooting the messenger. The very sociobiological critique which he wants to eliminate provides the necessary insight into precisely how he gets this analysis wrong. At the heart of all this conceptual confusion is what is known as the naturalistic fallacy. Again, in broad strokes, for those unfamiliar with the term, and all due apologies to those who do know it for the necessary simplification: the naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of thinking that a naturalistic (Reno might say scientific or sociobiological) description of what is, in some way constitutes a prescription for what should be. Another expression of similar sentiment is David Hume’s is/ought problem: just because something is true, doesn’t mean it ought to be.

The essential distinction here is between empirical description and human values. From an evolutionary biology (Reno would say sociobiology) perspective, it’s understandable why some people would commit murder. Removing a rival could improve the murderer’s fitness through better access to resources, status or a higher mating-market valued mate. Evolutionary pressures select for those traits – physical or psychological – that improve what is commonly called fitness: i.e., effectiveness at getting one’s genes into future generations. If a psychological disposition to commit murder, under the right conditions, serves fitness in that way, it will be selected as a fitness enhancing psychological trait in future generations.

This of course does not happen in isolation. Other, pro-social traits are also selected for, and serve to mitigate the resort to murder as fitness enhancement. (Those who want to understand all this better should read my books Darwinian Liberalism and particularly Biological Realism.) That doesn’t change the fact though that a willingness to resort to murder, given the right conditions, is an evolutionary adaptation. Again, though, what one thinks about this; whether murder is good or bad; when (patriotic war, self-defense, restoring family honour?) murder is good or bad, is a matter of values. So, what we have is merely a description of what is. Acknowledging what is though in no way constitutes an endorsement of the action at either a personal or social level. One can believe that no one should ever murder anyone, while still understanding that murder is a fitness enhancing trait selected for by evolutionary pressures. (And, therefore, is going to happen.² )

It seems to be a failure to appreciate this distinction that leads Reno to his idealist vilification of science in general and “sociobiology” in particular. Understanding the biological effects of “the tribal mind” or the “selfish gene” (if Reno even understands the latter term which it’s not clear that he does), in no way endorses any specific manifestation of those phenomena. Acknowledging the role of human tribalism in no way passes judgment on the social manifestation of that tribalism. The fact that the post-war intellectuals Reno is criticizing considered tribalism to be negative reflects their values, not the scientific and biologic description of that tribalism. Describing tribalism is in no way a condemnation of the strong gods. That presumption is prescriptive values being snuck in the back door of scientific description.

In my terms, the ruling managerial class is (deliberately? possibly) engaging in the naturalistic fallacy; they act as if a scientific description constitutes a value judgment. In fact, managerial class ideology is largely grounded in a moralized weaponization of the naturalistic fallacy. Rather than being regarded as a methodological warning, the managerial class treats the naturalistic fallacy as a political validation. During the COVID affair, this ploy was front and centre with the constant incantation to “follow the science.” Somehow, science was supposed to dictate policy decisions. But of course, what ever benefit scientific knowledge provides toward informing the choice, policy making is always about values. Science might inform us about the means to achieve a policy end, or the potential consequences of a policy choice. The policy though is always based upon the values being politically privileged by the choice.

In a great irony, though, rather than rebuking the managerial class for their resort to (indeed, their formal, moral weaponization of) the naturalistic fallacy, Reno amplifies the fallacy as though it were not a fallacy, but an accurate description of reality. Reno endorses the managerial class’s technocratic premise that describing something scientifically, or biologically, constitutes a statement on its social value.³ Or, at least, as regards his argument: it constitutes a statement on the value of those somethings which serve to denigrate competitor strategies from other factions of the managerial class: racism, fascism, etc.  

The technocracy of the managerial class is based on the very idea that scientific or engineering solutions to social problems are the correct solutions, precisely because they are scientific or engineered. Reno ostensibly dismisses this claim, while simultaneously reiterating its premise that scientific and engineering thought constitute reality; no less than does the managerial class’s ideology, Reno’s idealist myopia obscures the surreptitious imposition of class-based values in these science and engineering claims. To understand all this, though, Reno would need a materialist analysis that situates, in its social and historical context, the nature and interests of the managerial class. He rejects the tools he needs, because he perceives these as the tools of those that he opposes. In the process, though, he falls victim in that perception to the managerial class’s own ideology of technocracy – premised precisely on its blurring of description and prescription through a weaponization of the naturalistic fallacy.

And it’s not that he doesn’t recognize the existence of the managerial class nor that that class’s concern with ideology. There are many passages that indicate that awareness. To cite a few:

Urban planning, economic management, and other technocratic enterprises were thought to transcend ideology because they were based on scientific rather than political principles

The postwar era aimed at good economic and social management—governance by economic planners, psychological help from therapists, and cultural management by experts. These techniques were thought to be the best way to ensure increases in private utility, healthy adaptations to modern social conditions, and low-friction civic relations

Conveniently enough, the university-educated, well-to-do Americans who win in the open economy are the very same people who the open-society consensus tells us deserve to rule—the virtuous champions of diversity

What is missing, instead, is a consciousness of managerial liberalism as the materialist, interest-based ideology of that class. Though, interestingly, on a few occasions Reno himself, without any apparent awareness of his own appeal to materialist explanations, provides just such a class analysis, and even marries it, amazingly, to a critique rooted in an appeal to human nature. How much more materialist can one get? Again, a few passages illustrate the point.  

The cohort of foreign-born residents of the United States is now estimated at nearly 15 percent of the total population, the highest level in more than one hundred years. Under these circumstances, only a person ignorant of human nature, of man’s innate desire for stability, familiarity, and continuity—a home—can cheerily reiterate the win-win promise of diversity

The upshot is a politically toxic division of the West into two camps. In one we find the members of the “creative class,” who are told (and tell themselves) that they both deserve financial rewards (innovation drives growth!) and have all the virtues necessary to build the anti-fascist, anti-racist, and open society that will redeem the West. In the other camp languish the economic and cultural losers. They are the “takers” who also lack a proper zeal for diversity. They are the “angry white men” who voted for Brexit and Donald Trump, or so we are told

During World War II, American elites depended for their very survival on factory workers to build ships, planes, and tanks, just as the workers depended on the leadership class to bring victory rather than defeat and slavery. This reciprocal dependency was a powerful source of the solidarity that persisted in the years after World War II, which is why those who came of age in the 1950s remember it as a time of unity and common purpose. Global trade and the free flow of capital slowly eroded this solidarity, especially the bond between the leaders and those they led

So, despite Reno’s insistence upon treating the ethos of the “open society,” idealistically, as a sincere spirit of the age, genuinely concerned with mitigating the risks of repeating the horrors of the early 20th century, he’s well-aware of how both human nature and class conflict structured the post-war world. It seems peculiar then that he is so blind to the function and nature of the ruling class ideology that is responsible for this purported spirit of the age. The explanation for this blindness is that he holds the mirror image of the managerial class’s ideology: they both operate on the premise of the naturalistic fallacy. While the managerial class says that scientific description (once cleansed of “pseudo-science” and “conspiracy theory”) equals social prescription; Reno claims that scientific description effectively is social prescription: subjecting social forces to scientific investigations determines social outcomes.

Reno thus legitimizes the premises of managerial class ideology by conceding the validity of its weaponizing, even institutionalization, of the naturalistic fallacy. Obviously, he does this inadvertently, but it is the logical consequence of his appeal to idealist critique. Categorically rejecting materialism, for its allegedly disenchanting social effects, Reno is left without the tools required to recognize how his own idealist critique of the spirit of the post-war consensus effectively is providing cover for managerial liberalism, even as he flays about in the dark, trying to land a knockout punch against the managerial class.

One might argue of course that all of this ultimately comes down to what side one wants to consider the right way up. (Old school Hegelian Marxists will appreciate the allusion.) I’ve claimed Reno’s idealist analysis is just a description of managerial class ideology at work, better explained by a materialist analysis. One might counter that the materialist forces to which I’m pointing are just manifesting effects of the causative idealist forces really driving history. This is where what might be called a crucial test comes into play.

A crucial test is one in which two hypotheses are simultaneously tested, in which the outcome is zero sum: only one can be right; the other must then be wrong. I suggested something like that in my discussion of Dugin’s appeal to nominalism as the explanation for what I attribute to managerial liberalism. I pointed out there that the phenomenon of identity politics didn’t make sense in terms of Dugin’s idea of nominalism’s runaway individualism, and that managerial liberalism provides therefore a more parsimonious and consistent explanation.

A similar crucial test is available for evaluating Reno’s idealism and my materialist appeal to the managerial class ideology of managerial liberalism. In fact, I’ve noted two such crucial tests arising from his argument. The first is the interestingly inconsistent application of the supposed virtue of diversity. Diversity of race or gender is valued and enforced under the “open society” ethos, but not diversity of political views:

as any conservative university student knows, the commitment to a “diverse student body,” so often reiterated by educators, does not mean a diversity of political views. But the vagueness and apparent contradictions don’t matter.

Reno was too quick in this section to gloss over an important point. If it was some sincere spirit of intellectual commitment to openness that really was driving the fixation on diversity, then diversity of opinion would be valued and promoted. The vilified counterexamples (e.g., communism, Nazism and fascism) were notorious for their suppression of diverse opinion. The discourse of openness though isn’t a sincerely held ideal; it is just an ideological support to a hegemonic strategy. It is not some vague drift to a spirit of openness but the ideological logic of managerial liberalism that explains why certain kinds of diversity are welcomed and others are shunned.

Another, perhaps even more telling, crucial test comes in the explanation for how differently the managerial class lives from what it preaches:

For all their talk of an open economy and open society, those in the upper echelons of our society work very hard to protect their children. They carefully choose homes in neighborhoods with good schools, not trusting the open competition of merit, but instead giving their kids every advantage. They may join in the chorus that condemns traditional norms as authoritarian, but they keep their marriages together, and their families look like traditional ones. In other words, they share the basic human desire to protect one’s children, to secure one’s patrimony, to sustain and transmit a living inheritance. They shelter themselves and those whom they love—a natural and healthy impulse. The problem is that what our most powerful and capable fellow citizens do in private is at odds with what they insist upon in public

But here’s the problem, if Reno’s idealist analysis were correct, and these ideas about the essential character of an “open society,” with all the weakening and disconnection from strong gods that it implies, were a genuine intellectual grip upon the culture, we would see the social actions and behaviours dictated by these ideals manifest in the behaviour of the managerial class itself. However, as Reno notes, and those like Charles Murray have documented, this is not the case. The managerial class may continue to preach the virtues of the “open society,” with all its weakening of familial bonds and erosion of social norms and traditional values, but they don’t live that way.

Such contradictions over attitudes to diversity and preached-versus-practiced lifestyles would be difficult to explain if the post-war era had been swept up in some sincere sentiment about the need to transform society to avoid a future Auschwitz or Hiroshima. However, such contradictions are not the least surprising if we recognize that all this talk about the spirit of openness, diversity, equity and the like, is just ideological claptrap. That’s precisely what the materialist, right-wing Marxist critique of managerial liberalism reveals.   

Reno, it might seem, would have us throw out our materialist culture of science and critique in the interests of paving the way for the re-emergence of the strong gods. Yet, oddly, by the end of his book, his own arguments seem to fly in the face of such prospects. Reno himself turns to a rhetoric of human nature and class conflict. So, is he so anti-science and anti-materialist as his argument at times may suggest?

I don’t dispute the importance of ideas among humans. I’ve written a book emphasizing the evolutionary importance of the emergent trait of symbolic thinking among humans (Not for the Common Good). However, idealism cannot be the driving force in a material and biological world, as most of the biota in the world don’t seem to have anything like ideas. Certainly not symbolic ones.

Still, as I started off saying, there’s great value in Reno’s book. Filtered through the materialist corrections suggested here, his book goes a great distance in helping us understand how the technocratic weaponizing of the naturalistic fallacy in managerial class ideology has laid the ground for the world-shaking resurgence of what he calls the strong gods. The resurgence around the world of populism and nationalism is an emphatic repudiation of the world that managerial liberalism built. And Reno shows us a great deal about how it was built.  

Populism is antiestablishment because our leadership class refuses to renew the “we.” Instead of guiding and refining the populist calls for love and loyalty, it bears down on them with disenchantment and weakening

Marriage is collapsing among working-class Americans. In the face of this reality, it borders on insanity to fix political attention on transgender bathrooms and other symbols of cultural deregulation. An epidemic of death by drug overdose is damaging communities and shattering families, and our leaders are pushing for marijuana legalization. As the suicide rate among unemployed men rises, we launch a crusade for doctor-assisted suicide. Poor neighborhoods are being denuded of functional civic organizations, religious or secular, and we sue the religious communities trying to serve them, seeking to compel conformity with the sexual revolution. All of this suggests our leadership class is so thoroughly blinded by the postwar consensus that the only problems it can see are those of discrimination, exclusion, and conformism—nails for their open-society hammer

This is a powerful statement, unfortunately marred by Reno’s failure toward the end to recognize that what he describes is not a perverse effect, due to their having been blinded, of the elite’s promotion of an open society. Rather the verdict he provides here is a consequence of the logic of managerial liberalism itself. With this correction kept in mind, though, it is a description very much in the spirit of my own book, The Managerial Class on Trial.

Now, it is true that in my book I did warn against populism as a solution to the calamities of managerial liberalism, largely because historically populist movements have tended to rally around some form of resurgent democracy. Democracy, though, as I argued in the book, as well as in recent posts to this substack (see here and here), under the rule of the managerial class, is just the sock puppet of that class’s political ventriloquism. What Reno’s book does though is offer a clear explanation for why it is that populism, like nationalism, has been such a powerful medium for resisting the world that managerial liberalism built. And if we are careful to not fall victim to Reno’s idealism, with its neglect of the managerial class’s ideological ploy of weaponizing the naturalistic fallacy in the interest of its own legitimization, I would strongly recommend Reno’s book, and the verdict it provides, as a companion volume to my own “trial of the managerial class.”

1. While I don’t think the digression would be of sufficient value to go into it at great length here, I want to briefly emphasize that in this post, and elsewhere, when I use terms like interests and values (as well as strategies and power), I’m using these as distinctly biological terms. Such use may resonate with the more conventional, seemingly strictly human, uses of the terms, but in fact their biological foundations are more generalizable. Further, when understood that way, they root human life in a deep biological infrastructure, which justifies the right wing Marxist interpretation employed in this analysis. A good place to begin understanding these arguments is in my book Biological Realism, but future posts to this substack will flesh them out.

2. There is a fascinating question of how we maybe should be rethinking our concept of criminal justice and incarceration in light of understanding this distinction. That would take this discussion too far afield, but some ideas might be found here.

3. Which is of course why certain areas of science, such as IQ and human biodiversity research, are so fiercely policed by the ruling faction of the managerial class. If scientific description is going to equal value prescription, managerial liberalism requires that the “wrong” kind of scientific description be excluded.