Cultivating Conditions

The use and abuse of Studebaker’s Political Platonism

The best political philosophy lectures on the internet right now are being delivered by Benjamin Studebaker behind Theory Underground ‘s paywall.

(and, no, I’m not being paid to say that)

Benjamin not only provides remarkably clear explanations of each thinker’s ideas, but also supplies a wealth of historical context which serves to give their positions some stakes, inviting learners into the concrete struggles which find their tensions expressed in the work of these particular philosophers.

Let me round out my praise of Benjamin with this — he’s also a world-class interlocutor who is committed to the virtues necessary for fruitful dialogue (which you can find on display in his podcast with Dave McKerracher, “Why Left?”). To me, this makes him a worthwhile conversation partner for developing one’s ideas, and a rare example in our internet age of someone who practices the patient and arduous art of dialogue, embodying the Socratic spirit.

In this piece I aim to provide a comprehensive assessment of Benjamin’s work. I will introduce the reader to a summary of his thinking, explore where his ideas are resonating with my own, and articulate some critical comments which I hope can spur further dialogue.

Throughout this essay, I take as my point of departure his two recent essays “My Conception of the Left” and “Political Despair and Moral Injunctions,” supplemented with material from a recent private seminar at TU, as well as my reading of his book The Way is Shut: the Chronic Crisis of American Democracy.

To read the whole piece in one sitting, I recommend budgeting 25-30 minutes. If you’d like to read my exposition of Benjamin’s philosophy, then you will want to read the next section (10 minute read). However, if you’d like to jump to my appraisals of where our work resonates, I recommend jumping to section two (6 minute read). That section will then be followed by three critical observations in section three (10 minute read) which will bring the piece to its completion.

I — A Platonism for the Left

Virtue in the City

Benjamin Studebaker’s political philosophy works unabashedly from the Left and in service of Leftist aims, but he does this by way of a revival of the thinking of Plato. Platonism thus serves as the theoretical core of his approach to Leftist politics, a rare move in a field often defined by modernist or rationalist thinking, and in which post-Kantian philosophy and critical theory tend to dominate.

Based on my understanding of Benjamin’s work, he understands politics as the mediation of irreconcilable differences in the pursuit of the Good of the polis.

To understand politics, Benjamin adopts Plato’s vision of the Good as that which towards each thing aims and in which it finds its purpose and flourishing. Politics is the work of the city, or polis, ordering itself towards its Good. Further, the city and everything within it is oriented towards some vision of the Good at all times, even if that vision is deficient or vicious in crucial respects. Everything has a sufficient reason for its existence, grounded in the pursuit of some Good.

Further, it’s only within this communal Good of the polis where the individual can find their individual Good. One cannot achieve their own good in isolation from others, for not only does the individual’s Good require social bonds, but also the affordances of the polis may provide better or worse conditions for developing or practicing the virtues whereby one comes to enjoy the Good.

We also begin to see in this formulation where Benjamin’s philosophy is liberal, for his formulation of politics assumes that intractable disagreements exist about the nature of the Good, and that rather than siding with and directly instantiating one particular vision of the Good, the aim of politics is to create free and fair mechanisms for properly adjudicating the competition amongst competing visions of the Good. This plays particularly well with the dialogic nature of Plato’s thought, where we must be constantly trying to understand truth and goodness through the conceptual testing of different perspectives.

Vicious people under Capitalism

Benjamin puts his political Platonism to work critiquing a capitalist political economy as a system for forming vicious people, a state of affairs which in turn will produce a political situation where both the rulers and the ruled are without virtue. This has at least two primary causes within the City run by capitalism:

First, a capitalist society predicates the securing of basic needs on performing wage-labor, an arrangement which makes otium scarce and threadbare when present. Otium is the active leisure which Aristotle recognized as necessary for the pursuit of wisdom and the formation of the virtues (what Benjamin’s compatriot Dave McKerracher has called “timenergy”). The economic arrangement where the majority of people spend most of their waking hours working to create surplus value for a minority who own the means of production prevents the majority of people from enjoying those conditions most conducive to pursuing their Good as humans and as citizens of the City.

Secondly, Capitalism actively undermines virtue formation by directing people away from the pursuit of logos, — reason, the highest part of the soul, and the component necessary for bringing unity to both the city and to the human. The state of human goodness (eudaimonia) cannot be had without an active work of logos to subjugate spirit (thymos) and appetite (epythemia) to its service, but Capitalism promotes a focus on pragma, practical means and utilitarian ends, which are captured either by thymotic social games for winning honor and recognition or put to work for the satisfaction of appetites through the acquisition of commodities.

The libidinal pressure cooker of capitalist society creates an immersive planetary-scale “Plato’s Cave” where even the greatest among us struggle to break away from the shadows playing on the wall which offer only the simulacrum of what is true and good. When everything is stacked against virtue, it’s no wonder that few ever escape the cave, and capitalist systems exhibit many adaptive mechanisms for absorbing and silencing critical voices.

Thus, Benjamin’s critique of Capitalism focuses not primarily on decrying the injustice of the system per se, but instead on how the conditions it provides for humans fails to support the virtue formation necessary for the actualization of the Good, even actively undermining this pursuit in many ways, thus leading to oppressive social conditions where vicious rulers lead a city of vicious citizens. Such a situation falls far short of the Good towards which the City ought to be oriented if we seek to achieve actual human flourishing.

Focusing on Material Conditions

In his two most recent posts (and his private seminar at TU expanding on and clarifying his first post), Benjamin has been trying to tease out the various understandings of the Left which exist, and by doing so, clarify his own vision of what aims the Left should pursue, and how it should go about pursuing them.

The Left Benjamin wants to see focuses on positive incremental changes in material conditions for most citizens, which he argues will lead to a transformation in social conditions to enable the pursuit of virtue and the communal Good. This program of concrete changes within the realm of material conditions aims to kickstart a positive feedback loop: improve the conditions for virtue → the pursuit of virtue produces a clearer vision of the Good → conditions are further improved in line with this new insight into the Good → repeat.

The problem of Nihilism

In trying to articulate this perspective, Benjamin has taken particular concern recently with the obstacle which our society’s nihilism poses to enacting change of this kind. The Left’s particular brand of nihilism is what Benjamin has to contend with inside his own faction, which tends to express itself through various violent negativities and a thirst to tear down or destroy. From the French Revolution to Black Lives Matter protests, we can see how the Left embraces a spirit of radical opposition to existence itself, a stance which leaves violence and destruction in its wake.

(However, we should note that this nihilism is not simply isolated to the Left. We can just as easily read the contemporary right as a nihilistic phenomenon, as Žižek has done by proclaiming Trump the first truly postmodern President — a man who consciously acts for an audience, eliciting reactions of shock and dismay. The shame-less culture of Leftist activism, starting with May ‘68, Žižek says, have found their grotesque double in Trump’s own shamelessness.)

In addressing the question of nihilism though, Benjamin wants us to recognize the core problem which cuts across our entire political landscape — Capitalism discourages the pursuit of the Good and the formation of the virtues, both at the individual and communal level. We can observe how this destruction of the Good can be achieved through two different but mutually reinforcing strategies.

First, capitalism undermines the Good by claiming that no such Good exists or is possible. This is a virulent nihilism which casts down the notion of the Good, calling it variously oppressive, patriarchal, or simply mythical. The notion of the Good must be destroyed to liberate the desires and free activity of the sovereign individual. Such a nihilism operating with a community corrodes capacities for pursuing anything higher than “personal peace and affluence,” as Francis Schaeffer once said in describing the reigning values of our age.

However, alternatively, the apologists of Capital will also claim that the polis’ Good actually arises from each individual pursuing their own self-interest with utmost freedom. This theory of the Good as byproduct of each person’s earnest pursuit of their private interests maintains the existence of some sort of Good, but this claim amounts to a total inversion of the Platonic formula. For Plato, the good of the individual can only be attained through participating in a rightly ordered polis, whereas the capitalist believes that the good of the polis can be secured through each individual’s self-actualization.

This inversion ends up collapsing the Good into a race to the bottom where each person’s radically individual good becomes ontologically prior to the city’s good — we call these “Moloch games” where each agent rationally pursuing their own incentives in a situation ends up producing the worst possible result. To my lights, this cynical reversal of the Platonic Good in capitalist ideology amounts to a proclamation of the non-existence of the Good of the polis, not only because it stigmatizes alternative visions of the Good at the outset, but also because it effectively bars the pursuit of any Good which would place demands upon individuals to pursue something higher than thymos or epythemia.

“Moral injunctions” won’t change things

Benjamin diagnoses the shift in our political discourse towards the emphasis on symbolic demands and lifestyle advice as a response to this nihilism — because any conversation about society having an aim other than maximizing personal utility has been foreclosed within the political sphere, politicians and “thought-leaders” have had to retreat into the realm of personal consumption, identity, and language, serving to charge these spheres with political energy, while simultaneously obscuring the path back to genuine political action which holds a chance of developing a communal Good — the aim of politics.

As we noted earlier, Benjamin’s work emphasizes, along with both Plato and Aristotle, that the communal Good of the polis is an essential precondition for each individual to attain practice their individual Good. Thus, the fashion amongst the chattering classes on both Left and Right to issue commands (“injunctions”) to modify one’s lifestyle or to take personal responsibility for acting virtuously cannot be properly political, for these things concern only individual behavior, not the adjudication or execution of political ends.

If we want people to be better as both individuals and as a community, Benjamin argues, we need to work on cultivating conditions more conducive to virtuous behavior. Simply telling people to change never changed anyone, argues Benjamin, and such shaming certainly never changed a political system. If Leftists see a cultural phenomenon they do not like, they have to first examine the material conditions which give rise to it, and then critique or change those conditions if they wish to modify or eliminate the practice. Policy changes, lifestyle modifications, and “De-stigmatization” simply will not do the trick.

Instead of accepting a balkanization in the ineffective and non-political realm of moral injunctions, a real political agenda defines goals which will create better conditions for enabling and fostering virtue. Benjamin argues that such an agenda would focus on what he calls “HEHE” (Healthcare, Education, Housing, Energy), which are the key areas to concretely improve material conditions in order to make virtue more attainable on a society-wide scale. Increasing the quality of and access to things like healthcare, education, housing, and energy would significantly improve the real living situations of most most possible.

Not only is it unreasonably difficult to be virtuous under conditions where we are sick, ignorant, or lacking shelter and power, but that level of extreme social dysfunction often creates situations where vicious behavior naturally arises as a rational response to one’s situation — if my job barely pays enough to get by, why be industrious? It makes more sense to quiet quit. If buying a home is unattainable, why invest or save money? Better to shoot for the moon with meme coins. If elected officials don’t pay attention to my views anyways, why not just vote for the guy who promises to burn it all down?

Benjamin wants the intelligentsia of the political class to realize that people who oppose them and their aims, or who engage in behaviors they do not like, are not “deplorables” who lack rationale for their decisions. Instead, the material conditions of workers help us understand why people no longer trust institutions, and feel exhausted and frustrated by the current political system. They are responding reasonably to a situation where they must cope with feeling helpless as their circumstances continue to worsen. To change the culture then, Leftists must work to change these underlying conditions.

Beyond nihilism though, Benjamin also outlines in his The Way is Shut how a constellation of structural impasses currently afflict American democracy, preventing genuine political action. The book is tightly argued and highly generative, but because this section is getting long, I will summarize it thus — we are experiencing a period of minimal legitimacy in our democracy where “democracy” remains the dominant mytheme or political framework, but the meaning of democracy is so contested that it undermines the system’s function.

Unfortunately, powerful elites benefit from this reigning ambiguity about what democracy actually means, because democracy can function as an empty signifier allowing them to play a shell game where they opportunistically swap various meanings to rally their base or score points on their opponents. Thus, there will be no rush to clarify the word “democracy” in our national dialogue.

However, this cynical behavior on the part of elites exacerbates a deeper structural flaw in democracy which Benjamin tries to elaborate in his work. The way democracy works makes it very difficult from within a democratic system to adjudicate or reform the structures which legitimate that democracy. How does a struggling democracy use democracy to restore its own legitimacy?

An example of this conundrum includes issues like the electoral college or voting laws. Democrats who critique or advocate for the abolition of the electoral college are accused by Republicans of trying to manipulate the very mechanism of how American leaders are elected (presumably in their favor). Voting laws present the same issue, but from the Republican side. Democrats portray Republican advocacy for voter ID laws as creating barriers for civic participation which Democrats claim would suppress voter turnout. So, in both cases, we have a battle over changing the democratic mechanism itself, but it’s this very democratic mechanism which lends legitimacy to the process of elections. How can we all feel that a legitimate outcome has been reached when it’s the very mechanisms of adjudicating legitimacy which are being changed?

Benjamin’s book sketches a number of other interlocking dynamics which are both downstream from and contribute to this political deadlock, but we don’t have space to get into all of them without recapitulating the whole book. In response to this situation though, which he captures with the slogan “the way is shut,” Benjamin has taken to promoting a practice of “political despair” where we come to the end of our rope, accept that every actually existing avenue for political action is already captured, virtually impotent, or actively contributing to the problem, and then take a pragmatic stance of watching for conditions to ripen for action.

Political despair is not a giving up, but a serious acknowledgment that the options available from within our social landscape are not really avenues for genuine political action at this time. Elsewhere, he has compared his approach to that of a vulture which, instead of swooping down to kill its prey like other birds, watches and waits while large structural forces (such as the Sun!) slowly take their toll on the animals below, closely observing how the situation saps the vitality of our opponents, and only moving when the time is right for us to act without wasting too much energy. In the meantime, we content ourselves with rigorous analysis which allows us to maintain a clear-eyed perspective about the present and its possibilities.

This despair is not a nihilism which disavows the Good, but rather a refusal to become trapped in the various symbolic struggles and traps which have been laid for us by those who would waylay us into impotent non-political fights. Further, it’s to resist both a radical extremism of wanting to burn everything down right now or to directly instantiate utopia today. Ironically then, some level of despair may be necessary to practice hope today, and this hope will find its expression in the modest work of incremental but impactful changes strategically chosen.

II — Cultivating Conditions

Benjamin’s political philosophy diverges from typical Leftist theory by re-centering the notion of the Good towards which individuals as both humans and citizens aim, rather than exalting nihilistic destruction or the reign of empty values like liberty and equality. In short, Benjamin wants us to talk about what we hope to achieve through politics. What kind of city do we want to live in, and how can we build that city in a world where we have to live with those who disagree with us? We cannot live in perpetual revolt, as the Left is want to do.

However, Benjamin deftly avoids the excesses of reactionary politics by qualifying that this Good towards which the City must be oriented can (1) only be clarified through dialogue and (2) is in some important way dependent on social conditions which promote the virtue formation necessary for that dialogue.

His work insists on the necessity of virtuous dialogue whereby competing visions of the Good are explored and evaluated, and this necessity entails the need to create conditions for such virtuous dialogue to occur.

Thus, unlike either the authoritarian tendencies of the Right or the totalitarian tendencies on the Left, Benjamin does not believe that we yet truly know what the Good is which we ought to be pursuing — we may still too confused in our thinking, and we certainly have not reached even a minimal level of agreement — and thus we do not seek to impose our vision of the Good, but instead focus our political efforts on changing the material conditions which provide the form of life in which most people in the polis engage.

We might then say that Benjamin believes in the Good, but he remains apophatic about this Good — unwilling to be overly prescriptive in what it looks like, hesitant at the zealous imposition of any particular vision, and suspicious about about whether we have really done the work (or even have the capacity to do the work!) of subjugating thymos and epithymia to logos in pursuit of the Good. It may be that better conditions are required before we can have a clearer idea about the Good. In the meantime, we grope after it carefully, resisting forms of political action which bypass dialogue to pursue our vision directly.

This is where Benjamin’s work begins to resonate with my own — my emphasis on the need to focus on our material and spiritual conditions as the conditions of the possibility of exercising practical freedom. I join Benjamin on wanting to remain more apophatic about the Good, speaking less in concrete terms about what a virtuous city must look like, focusing more on cultivating the conditions which will be most conducive for the emergence of this better city. We must become a community of people capable of such a good city before we can fully understand the destination towards which we are trekking.

The “cultivating conditions” approach cuts against a hubris endemic to human beings where we find ourselves powerfully drawn to methods for directly producing a desired result — do this, get this — using magic, religion, science, what have you, to manipulate the cosmic vending machine whereby we immediately instantiate our will in reality.

I see modernity especially as a massive machine built for achieving this end of “controlling causes to product effects.” This stance has given birth to an endless stream of horrors, with new ones appearing every single day. When we play God, we do not create divine works, but rather bring forth perverted and catastrophic facsimiles instead.

The way to counter this tendency towards mastery focuses on studying the ecosystem which condition the arising and falling away of phenomena. What set of conditions invites the result we are seeking? What ecology of agents is most conducive to summoning the world we wish to create? We can till the soil, we can put water in the ground, we can provide a habitat for the worms, but we cannot make the plants grow. And when we start excising or optimizing, we often lose more than we thought we would (as the grand modernist projects have amply proven).

When thinking about problem, I often turn to learning and education as a useful example. Modern education exhibits this ambition for calculation, technique, and mastery in that it rests on the fantasy of the transmission of knowledge as information from teacher to student. On the contrary though, as Ivan Illich points out, we observe that learning only comes when it wants — we cannot make someone learn (nor can we fully control what it is that they learn).

Rather than employing an army of scientists and administrators to develop and oversee a regime of curricula with attendant standardized assessments, we should instead experiment with many learning environments, paying attention to those elements within those learning ecologies which facilitate the learning experience For example, Ivan Illich lists models, mentors, peers, and tools as essential ingredients. Where such vital elements are available, learning becomes more likely, but never guaranteed, and never mastered ahead of time.

I find myself in general agreement with Benjamin about the necessity of pursuing the Good obliquely, or through the tending of conditions rather than controlling the causes, for reasons I’ve stated above, but also because this position leads us towards an open and experimental mindset which overcomes the false binaries the elite and their ideologies employ to trap us in endless debate about abstractions. Rather than wasting our energy battling over systems (“capitalism vs socialism”), the “cultivating conditions” approach promotes pragmatic salvaging of intellectual systems for parts, historical moments for examples, and social mechanisms for results to develop tooling adapted for our community and our values.

I share Benjamin’s frustration with the prevalence of lifestyle discourse which has become a dividing line both between people and within groups. It has come to serve as an immobilizing force blocking broader action in the political arena. Benjamin’s opposition to this politics of “moral injunctions” maintains that telling people to change does not change them. In fact, as Benjamin is fond of pointing out, the very act of commanding someone to do something already indicates that one has lost some control on the situation. Injunctions serve as a final resort before violent coercion, which furnishes evidence that the situation has deteriorated quite far. Something must be upstream causing the situation in which moral injunctions present themselves as the most viable course of action.

Especially within the past few years activist professionals, media grifters, and politicians of all stripes have been more willing to take stands for or against various symbols than to make decisions or change things, and we should read this tendency as arising from a lack of political capacity created by prevailing social and political conditions. The field of possible political maneuvers has become so narrowed that people must generate causes which can be pursued within this shrinking field of political alternatives, eventually resulting in a proliferation of strategies for personal change and waging war over narratives — the terminus of all futile political action is the mere management of opinion.

This resonates with how my own thinking has been evolving for the past decade, a change which has come from following the singular intuition that our ideas are often lagging indicators of tectonic shifts which have already taken place or which are well underway. The reasoning function within the broader human capacity for cognition is comparatively late and crude in its development, lacking an awareness of its own dependence on underlying systems and their affordances. This makes it liable to hallucinate its own importance. Reason thinks of itself as the captain of the ship (or, at least, the rightful captain), but reason often simply serves to bring some justification to the drives which have already been at work in us and in our broader situation.

To change your mind, change your life. By thinking that we have to have our ideas in order and to have attained some superlative level of virtue before we can act to change our circumstances, we remain locked within the practical range afforded to us by our current imaginative, social, or political technologies. Simply changing our world engenders a deeper sense of involvement in and responsibility for our situation, introducing new ways of seeing and thinking which were not visible from our prior coordinates, all of which empowers us to make further changes, building momentum as we feed higher growth processes. This is the positive feedback loop which our conditions can cultivate.

III — The use and abuse of Studebaker’s Political Platonism

Having noted in the previous section the broad ways in which I agree with Benjamin, I want to frame my proceeding critical comments as more of concerns with how Benjamin’s formulations lend themselves to abuse in our political and epistemic context (with one exception, which I note at the end).

I say this because, while Benjamin strictly delimits the scope and intent of his words, the medium of the internet makes it such that our pronouncements take on a permanent life of their own, becoming separable from the context of their utterance, and able to be pressed into use for alien causes. This is not Benjamin’s fault, and thus the truth of his ideas cannot ultimately be judged on the basis of how others may put them to use.

Nonetheless — to elaborate my own theory of our political situation and to explore how we might creatively respond to it, I find it valuable to draw out how underlying methodological choices and omissions within Benjamin’s theorizing lend his ideas to a certain appropriation by the dynamics at work within our context, forces which I believe we must account for in our theorizing. We can never fully abstract ourselves from the context for our own utterances (otherwise they would be meaningless), and thus we must also attempt to include the context within our speech in how we formulate our ideas.

(1) HEHE is too school-brained

I’ve praised Benjamin’s emphasis on changing material conditions, but his choice of words to describe key areas of reform (“healthcare, education, housing, and energy”) immediately announces a vital difference between our approaches. If we were to rephrase this string as “vitality, learning, shelter, and power,” the distinction becomes a bit clearer, I think.

Dave at TU has brought up multiple times that Benjamin and I need to have a debate about Medicare for All because I oppose that policy aim (while also decrying the insanity of our current system), whereas Benjamin continues to take Medicare for All as a central aim of socialist politics, presumably because it concretely affects one of the key areas he has identified as most impactful. This debate shows again how the choice of words for inclusion in the HEHE acronym already announces a substantial disagreement which I have with Benjamin.

The politics of HEHE demands services which are delivered to us, rather than goods which we create and confer upon ourselves as agents within an equipped and empowered community. “We need more healthcare” carries a different theoretical import than the phrase “we need the conditions to become healthier” — the second is a far more radical demand, for it concerns not multiplying the number of doctors and the availability of pharmaceuticals, but the improvement of soil quality, the development (and retrieval) of regenerative agricultural approaches, the ethical treatment of animals, bans on certain environmental chemicals, the regulation of food ingredients, and much more besides.

In light of this, it’s notable that ‘food’ is not listed as part of Benjamin’s list of most impactful policy areas — I haven’t seen any indications that the need to reform our agricultural system, food quality standards, or pharmaceutical industry are on Benjamin’s policy radar, even though these are the primary inputs for health, rather than the mere amelioration of sickness via allopathic medicine. Medicare for All provides an expensive (tax payer funded) bandage on top of a rotten food system which generates profit by keeping us sick.

This blindspot seems typical of contemporary Leftist politics in general though. The problem of access to food and healthcare is centered in socialist politics, but attempts to critique the mode of food’s production, and thereby establish some connection between our food and our health, is maligned as anti-science and conspiratorial thinking. Socialists passionately advocate for access to the very things which are making us sick, pushing for taxpayers to pick up the tab to pay for the social effects of poor decisions made by business leaders and regulators.

The same goes for education — we do not need more education, but rather we need to cultivate the conditions for genuine learning. Schooling disciplines the child into the habits, thinking, and values of necessary to succeed as a member of the professional class, while also serving as publicly subsidized daycare to widen the labor pool by broadly facilitating the two-income family lifestyle. Learning is not the transmission of information or the mastery of a body of facts or rhetorical techniques, but this is precisely the theory and practice of education which underlies those institutions which activists demand should be funded at greater and greater rates. I’ve written extensively about “the schooling industry” elsewhere, so I won’t recapitulate those comments further here.

Ultimately, the way that Benjamin frames the issues of HEHE falls into the trap which I try to uncover here at Moloch Theory — how realities like vitality and learning are converted into commodities like health and education which are then delivered by scientific institutions. This continual process of objectifying non-marketable use-values moves our political life from one of cultivating conditions to directly manipulating causes and effects, usually through greater control and the application of force overseen by an expanding professional class.

(2) No boundaries?

While I find myself extremely sympathetic to Benjamin’s critique of moral injunctions as a form of anti-politics disguising itself as urgent political action, at times he seems to me to take his positive pronouncements too far — he will explicitly oppose telling people to take responsibility for their actions or for recommending any lifestyle changes in the context of public discourse.

A strange tension lurks here in Benjamin’s work, for I know that Benjamin supplements his opposition to moral injunctions in the political realm with an earnest pursuit of virtue and the Good in his personal life, testifying that he believes the cultivation of virtue cannot simply be abdicated in the face of vicious social conditions. However, nothing within his theoretical work sustains this private commitment, much less demands it.

The best argument I think you can make from Benjamin’s theory might be that the level of timenergy available to you increases your level of responsibility to seek virtue (I understand that Benjamin’s family is independently wealthy and that he lives at home so he can devote his attention to doing excellent scholarly work). He might reply that, since he has access to HEHE, he enjoys the material conditions which free him to pursue virtue, and thus he does pursue it. This is something I’ll need to seek more clarity from him on.

But, this gradient approach leaves out the individual and existential dimension of one’s relationship with Go(o)d. A key part of an ethical life which seeks to act in accordance with divine Love is that we are bound to pursue this course without regard to what others around us might be doing — Jesus was clear that we’re each to take up our cross, to die to self, and that if family or tribe get in the way, we must cast them aside to continue pressing onwards towards the prize.

I do not think that God exempts us from the call to righteousness simply on account of our lacking the best conditions or resources — certainly this did not hinder the saints in their pursuit of holiness. Indeed, the Christian tradition has often seen the set of provisions in HEHE as possible hindrances to the attainment of a life which looks like Christ. Further, the Church Fathers also portrayed Socrates as a proto-Christian martyr figure who “took up his cross” for the sake of the truth. This then would be a point of contention between a Christian approach and a common interpretation of Platonism, but perhaps not the only one available within the Platonic tradition.

I can’t find anything in Benjamin’s political formulations which prevents one from appropriating his pronouncements in the following way — “telling other people to be virtuous is oppressive until we change political conditions, so it’s wrong and unhelpful to have any moral expectations for other people. In fact, telling others to take responsibility for their private pursuit of virtue short circuits emancipatory politics, and thus stands in the way of the achievement the Good.” How does one reply to such an individual from Benjamin’s Leftist Political Platonism?

Benjamin’s allergy to making moral injunctions stems from a reaction to the excessively censorious spirit on the Left, but an opposition to moral injunctions also has a strong pedigree in progressive circles too! This unwillingness to make strong recommendations or hold people to higher moral standards mirrors a tendency within the Left towards a weak paternal function, where the permissive father becomes the supplement of the devouring mother. As the group “holds space” for dysfunctional and anti-social behavior, cowers in deference to the demands of the latest lifestyle fads, or finds itself paralyzed by the dizzying array of voices which need to be “centered,” it becomes less capable of acting towards improving the material conditions of the working classes.

While we do see Socrates “holding space” for vicious characters like Thrasymachus, he does so in such a way that he (1) attempts to persuade them of the folly of their position and entice them to pursue a better path, and (2) implicitly demonstrates for any onlookers or third parties observing the conversation the superiority of Socrates’ own approach over those of his interlocutors. Socrates corrupts the youth by inciting them to a more fervent pursuit of virtue, and he does this without undertaking attempts at political action for himself. Instead, he influences ascendant leaders like Alcibiades, encouraging them to seek the virtue which will allow them to rule well and orient the city towards the Good.

So, while I happily take up Benjamin’s critique of how moral injunctions can often serve as a retreat from genuinely emancipatory politics, substituting personal change for structural reform, I resist how far he sometimes pushes this principle. It seems to be that we can acknowledge both that an environment of political impotence has incentivized public figures to replace political action with moralizing but also that people should pursue the Good regardless of their circumstances, and that actually an individual’s pursuit of virtuous formation is integral in some way to large-scale structural change, even if it is insufficient on its own. I don’t think that we should shy away from either simply because they have been misused. Instead, we should do each well in its appropriate time and place.

(3) … and now it’s time to talk about evil

Now we get to the part where I most explicitly disagree with Benjamin.

From his comments in various places, we discern that Benjamin’s political theory operates with a view of humans which predominates on the Left: “I think people are broadly good but could be better under better conditions.”

I certainly agree that it would be easier for people to be better under better conditions, but is it the case that people are broadly good, and that it just takes better conditions to bring this out?

While this view of humans as “basically good, just need the right conditions” runs strongly through the political tradition of the Left, I have argued elsewhere that this view of humans and the Good also characterizes the Platonist position — if people could clearly know the Good, they would be able to do the Good. Within a Platonic framework, just action ultimately boils down to knowledge. The role of the will and desires in valuation are downplayed, needing to be subordinated to reason which lifts us up and aligns us with the Good — a schema which I think falls for reason’s fantasy about itself as the charioteer (even if it complains that it’s not always in charge).

I dissent from this theory on the basis of both Christianity and psychoanalysis. As an intellectual child of St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, I remain convinced that human beings are fallen, harboring a capacity and propensity for evil which neither can be socialized away nor is purely the product of socialization into an oppressive society. The default state for human beings is not “basically good,” but rather one of pride, envy, and murder. Violence is the default, and peace is an achievement.

I have written about psychoanalysis’ critique of the ego as an inheritor of Judaism’s critique of idols, and that Freud’s insights were made possible by the long tradition of Christianity’s intense exploration of the contradictory nature of human beings. This belief that human beings are basically good ignores an ineliminable negativity which haunts our subjectivity, a capacity for negation and destruction which at once opens up new frontiers of creativity but which can also manifest itself as the most profound and cruel forms of evil.

St. Augustine captures this with his story of the pears — in his Confessions, he retells a story from his youth when he and his friends stole pears from a nearby orchard. He relates that they had no reason for this action, nor did they even eat the pears, but it dawned on him that he stole simply for the enjoyment of transgression itself. Some compulsion operated within him which simply enjoyed evil for its own sake. This experience seems to have been incredibly formative for his Christian walk and his theological endeavors.

“The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” reveals that evil is the dark shadow of the Good — “Corruptio optimi pessima,” the corruption of the best is the worst. Good and evil share the same root, and the possibility of evil lurks within us as a consequence of our freedom to pursue the Good. To tie this back to some earlier comments, our hubristic attempts to directly produce the Good rather than cultivate conditions or go on the dialogic journey ends up producing worse horrors than before. This perversion of the Good and its possible enjoyments haunts every human heart and community.

Thus, I diverge from Benjamin’s optimism about human beings as ‘basically good,’ and I assert instead that we must reckon with our nature as unnatural animals haunted by negativity (this has been the core of my project for years). Cultivating the right conditions will never be enough to transform ourselves and our society, even as the practice of tending to our physical, social, and spiritual ecology is both necessary and highly impactful. The most decisive element in a city oriented to the Good nonetheless remains beyond our mastery — grace.