Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a piece on neoliberalism. These types of pieces are meant to be more impressionistic and suggestive than anything — bringing together ideas and personal experience and trying to glimpse at some different way of seeing things.
Best,
Sam
WHAT’S BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM?
Most of the time, wherever I go, my thought is: it’s amazing how well things work.
Really.
Even in places that are poor, places that are supposed to be “backwards,” the economy happens, infrastructure functions, things work.
And what’s at the basis of that astonishing international harmony is — let’s say —neoliberalism, the reigning order of our era. And what’s so intriguing about neoliberalism is that nobody seems to have created it, or to administer it, it has none of the intellectual pedigree of socialism or of any of the rival economic systems. It emerged fully-formed soon after World War II and unfussily governed the world.
I once had an editor excise a paragraph on neoliberalism because, he claimed, “I’ve given up trying to understand what that phrase means.” Which is a truly odd state of affairs — to be living in a world fully dominated by a system that a perfectly intelligent editor of an intellectual journal finds too tedious or mysterious to even describe. What it is, I would argue, is an interplay between security and markets, where security (the service provided by the nation-state) is of value in that it keeps peace and permits the uninhibited flow of markets. Meanwhile, markets determine all actual worth within the society — with the market, as an extension of Adam Smith’s “hidden hand,” seen as a form of vast social wisdom, the needs, desires, and values of the society expressed in a far more precise and engaged way than they possibly could be under even the most idealistic application of democratic civic values.
And the most obvious thing about neoliberalism is that it really works. As often as not, the security imperative gets pushed up the needs-ladder so that the exercise of violence seems not to impinge on daily life but is held in reserve — most famously, with great powers holding onto massive deterrent capability with their nuclear weapons. Statecraft becomes less about endless territorial wars than it was in earlier periods — since the understanding is that the acquisition of territory is not nearly so important as the maintenance of open trading routes with client states. And the flow of capital means that, on the whole, there is work for everyone: more so than in any centralized, proscriptive nation state, in the neoliberal order everyone gets to be a cog in an endlessly inventive, endlessly expansive global market.
So the question becomes whether that system just rides off, frictionlessly, into the sunset — Francis Fukuyama’s End of History maybe at some point transplanted into Jeff Bezos’ space pods. The dissenters to that system — North Korea, Cuba, Turkmenistan — appear to have paid a steep price for their opposition. Nations that seem to have broken with the neoliberal order — Russia, conspicuously — are, it is assumed, bound sooner or later to contract and then collapse under the weight of their closed system. Anywhere anybody looks, there is no alternative to the space pods.
But I just don’t quite buy it. And the effective dissent to neoliberalism, I believe, comes from carving out space within the system rather than trying to supplant it. There’s inspiration to be had from Isaiah Berlin’s reading of Machiavelli — with Machiavelli in some sense understood as the very deep roots of neoliberalism. Machiavelli, facing a similarly totalizing world system (in his case, the moralistic and inquisitorial medieval Catholic Church), didn’t do anything so daft as to come up with an alternative to Catholicism, e.g. some sort of Protestant Reformation, he simply declared that there were domains, for instance the domain of statecraft, to which the perfectly wonderful god-given dictums of the Catholic Church did not apply.
And, as I get older, though remaining in awe of the effectiveness of the neoliberal order to maintain security and stimulate economy, I find myself becoming more and more aware of all the domains of human existence that do not participate in neoliberalism. The GDP per capita model for measuring quality of life turns out to be a singularly bad proxy given that money has very different meanings in different parts of the world, and cultures that are more community-oriented can distribute smaller amounts of money more effectively across a large number of people and get by with far less than the GDP model would suggest. And coercion turns out to play a larger role in the system than is generally understood — so that those who are vital cogs of the system find themselves working harder and harder, with no discernible improvement in their actual quality of life but with their status measured by their relative indispensability to the neoliberal order. And, in domains like art, the market turns to be not only imprecise but an utterly absurd barometer of worth.
The neoliberal view on art is stated candidly and crisply by Michael Eisner in which he defined “a good movie as a movie that makes money and a bad movie as a movie that loses money.” Something about that would strike just about everyone as being wrong — the artists constantly accusing each other of “selling out” are, even if they don’t put it in exactly these terms, holding to a Platonic sort of vision of art as its own domain, with its own ironclad aesthetic ideals, that diverges dramatically from the neoliberal paradigm. On the show Louie, Dane Cook (arguing with Louis about whether he would need to steal Louis’ jokes for one of his albums) gives the neoliberal position — the data of his sales showing that he had no need to rip off an, essentially, underground comedian. Cook sounds convincing — and he gets really enthused about the empirical evidence of his own sales — to which Louis’ response is to, very quietly, say, “They were funny jokes.”
A values gap comes into focus here. Many of us (cheerfully) spend a great deal of our lives arguing about whether this artist is good or not, whether or not that film is overrated, and we do so with precious little attention to sales data or the market. But the neoliberal regime is ascendant, and if a joke turns out to be a very difficult kind of widget to measure, it’s manageable to assign worth to Dane Cook or, for that matter, Louis C.K. while the rest of the would-be comedians are exiled from the field.
My belief, though — which is turning more and more into a guiding star in my life — is that it’s possible simply to ignore the exigencies of neoliberalism and to live in a way in which one does what one wants while coming to terms individually with not being a cog in the market system. Poor people can stretch a dollar in ways undreamt of by the agencies that index GDP. Creatives can do the work they like to near-infinitude while tapping into the market only to fulfill their basic survival needs.
The real role of creatives is to be in the vanguard of society — to feel what’s coming and to enact it, courageously, before it’s completely acceptable for everyone else. My sense is that this is the real turn — that the two-way traffic of the web, digital nomadism, etc, make a different way of living possible — and creatives can, without attending Marxist discussion groups or anything like that, start to carve out domains for themselves within the neoliberal empire that are untouched by neoliberal values. That means, above all, undoing a few tricks of the mind — the belief that markets determine worth, that audiences are measured by the bulk, that audiences deserve the god-given right to be entertained.
Under neoliberal auspices, we’ve been in a very vapid sort of cultural domain — competent, quality work is produced, vast amounts of it, and it gets swallowed up by the ever-churning machine. What I would like is, culturally-speaking, to move towards a different era and different set of values — with emphasis placed on intensity, the spiritual journey of the individual, the fraught questions that actually absorb us and for which there is no cure in the marketplace. Aesthetically, I would like to be in the matured ‘30s as opposed to the frivolous ‘20s: Nathanael West rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louis-Ferdinand Céline rather than W. Somerset Maugham. The sense is that the world is becoming tougher — China and Russia in different ways pulling out of the Pax Americana, that the 30-year holiday is coming to an end. On the macro scale, neoliberalism isn’t going anywhere (I certainly prefer it to the options bruited by Russia and China). But, on the micro scale, in people’s souls, where people really live, it’s possible for scales to fall from eyes, for people to be proactive in ways that they have forgotten how to do in figuring out what worth really means to them.
Great stuff. Carving out those spaces is a big part of my mission as a teacher.
Great post that made me think.
It strikes me that the sorts of life choices you write about are made possible by the neoliberal system continuing to function. And I also considered that the fragmentation of social media can contribute to those life choices in the form of self-selecting communities that come together online to support quality. For example a community of Substack readers who may eventually come together in real life.