Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes:

* The arrival of the war focused the discussion of the moral crisis. One theme was the question of what the war was being fought for: Robert Maynard Hutchins and John Dewey debated the question in the pages of Fortune. The famous London discussion group The Moot debated the possibility of reviving Anglicanism or alternatively of creating a new social doctrine with the force of religion, in contiguity with the writings of T. S. Eliot, such as his tract Christianity and Culture. The Moot’s participants were concerned with the biggest of pictures, the problem of how the lessons of past societies and social change could inform the creation of future societies. They tended to think of the present as an unsatisfactory interregnum between coherent orders. And they were not alone in having difficulty coming to agreement. In The Year of Our Lord 1943, Allan Jacobs shows the idea of the war as a contest of values with Nazism was widely accepted, but the many intellectuals who contributed to this discussion had trouble agreeing on what these values were.

Then it all stopped. The end of the war meant the end of this self searching dialogue, and a turn to the conflicts of the Cold War and to the celebration of the victory of liberal democracy and the expanded place of Communism in the world. Tawney’s Christian socialism was institutionalized into the bureaucracy of the welfare state and lost its spiritual character.19 Mannheim’s ideas on planning a social order complete with planned values had the same fate. In Britain, the kind of non-professional public sociology that had provided a home for this kind of work was replaced by a newly professionalized British Sociological Association that lacked interest in these civilizational concerns, and disdained their predecessors. In the United States, a new historiography and social theory of consensus was created in such works as Richard Hofstader’s The American Political Tradition.

The sense of living in an interregnum evaporated, as did the urgency of the concerns of the earlier discussion.

* …modernity is characterized by a mixture of traditional and novel forms; late modernity or post-traditional society is characterized by a particular novelty, the reflexive self.

* Either we accept something like a liberal framework, of shared rules but few shared ends, and treat individuals as autonomous bearers of culture who get along with one another under these rules, or we can hope for spiritual regeneration that overcomes difference, or we can seek new values that allow for a positive relation between cultures.

* Tradition once supplied a basis for community, but it was a rigid and oppressive basis that ‘crushed individual autonomy’. It was also based on exclusion and ‘traditions of family and gender’43 that are themselves oppressive. The existence of a variety of cultures in modern societies makes a return to this kind of community impossible. What is needed is something different, and cosmopolitan in character, meaning accepting of the existence of this variety and seeking a peaceful way of accommodating it.

* Giddens’ performative solution to the problem of mutually intolerant traditions is ‘Active Trust’, leading to a ‘positive spiral’ of trust-building that creates a functional substitute for ‘traditional’ community and which builds obligation at the level of personal relations based on ‘the communication of difference, geared to an appreciation of integrity’.

* reflexivity is not enough as a basis for social life. Indeed, one might say it is merely corrosive of social life, because there must be some non-reflexive, taken for granted, basis for social relations.

* The ‘type of community where shared ends and needs make possible the growth of a common life and a common commitment, which can be expressed in a common language’… is precisely the type of community that liberalism, which accommodates different ends and needs without a ‘common life and a common commitment’, cannot create. From the point of view of this kind of community, liberalism is simply an arrangement, a compromise in a society without common commitments. …the existence of moral pluralism, in contemporary society, and in English society in the nineteenth century, meant that there was no such common base.

* the very lack of a common project meant that society elevated and depended on what he called ‘the secondary virtues of co-operation, of compromise, of a pragmatic approach, of fairness’.54 The idea of civil association to which Giddens appeals has precisely this character: it is not and cannot be, given the lack of consensus on the religious foundations of the legal and political order, grounded in anything but a kind of compromise. It is essentially about the rules of the game – purposes and goals are individual, and pursued within the framework of the rules, and it is to the rules that citizens must subscribe. It contrasts vividly to the kind of association with shared collective goals: Oakeshott’s ‘enterprise association’.

* …Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which purported to show the decline in associational activities in the United States. Necessarily, this was concerned with associational activities popular in the past, and their decline, such as the bowling leagues referred to in the title. What it could not address, or did not address, was the development of novel forms of association, or forms of association that have not been recognized as such. It is evident that internet-based forms of association have increased, radically, and that phenomena such as women’s book clubs have become more important.

* A small Toronto Airport posted an advertisement that read ‘You’re Precious Cargo, not Cattle’. An animal rights activist protested, calling it insulting to cows. The ad was removed. The implication was clear: cows have honour claims, can be dishonoured, and others will defend their honour.

* Did people suddenly become aware in the 1960s that they had practices that they could reflect on, and were therefore forced to either choose to abandon them or to embrace them, in both cases being forced to reflect and choose? Or is this a completely normal and continuous part of social life, and always has been?

* Dialogue is the fetish of the tradition of liberalism. And the idea that we progress through dialogue fits with a suppressed and unacknowledged grand narrative to the effect that the various traditions of the world are mixtures of moral truth and error, and that somehow the interaction of these traditions will bring about a purified, universal, ‘rational good’… Dialogue then becomes the performative act commanded by the goal of progress, with cosmopolitanism is its apex…

4-13-26 update: Here is Stephen Turner’s original conclusion:

The performative implications in the streets are equally problematic, but more dramatic. The political meaning of post-traditionalism in its more radical extension appears as hostility to the project of modernizing the “other” as it existed in the past, for example in the efforts of the colonizers to uplift their wards, which assumed the superiority of the modern and its values, such as universalism, but which at the same time demeaned, and thereby oppressed, the Other, who failed its tests and did not meet its standards. This implies a repudiation of the modernizers, who are taken to have imposed their own self-serving ideals, such as meritocracy and universalism. This is more typically explained in terms of “racialisation”: these ideas were never more than “White” ideology, which had the effect of “racialising” the Other as inferior. And this effect in turn requires moral compensation for the effects of this hidden form of White supremacy through a responsibility for championing those who were and are oppressed by it, as well as a reform of our own ideas, including, for example, White women’s ideas of civility and niceness, which one might imagine to epitomise the kind of peaceful cosmopolitanism implied by post-traditionalism. As one White women puts it, rejecting this ideal: “We crave the illusion of order, and we truly believe in civility, laws, systems and RULES. Why? Because all of them were created to protect US. Our niceness is simply tacit complicity in the injustices and inequalities that keep people of color systemically and generationally oppressed.” (Real Talk: WOC & Allies, ‘When White Women Practice the Politics of Polite, the Violence of Nice’, 11 August 2019. https://medium.com/@realtalkwocandallies)

That this impulse is itself a form of modernity, an example of the insistence on self-examination rooted in religion that Bellah describes, and thus of White ideology itself, and that it is itself a condescending assertion of supremacy, is not an implication that has yet occurred to its proponents. Nor do they see that in their zeal, their self-abnegation, their aim to provide salvation for the Other, and their moral certitude and sense of the wickedness of the world, they are not as different from the missionaries and Christian reformers of the past as they would imagine. And in this, the problematic character of the concept of post-traditionalism reappears: they are no more free of tradition, or modernity, than their predecessors.

Turner’s original conclusion does something the published version apparently softened. It takes the post-traditionalism framework and applies it to contemporary progressive moral culture directly and without flinching. His argument is that progressive anti-racism, the self-abnegating White ally, the demand for reform of White women’s niceness and civility, is not a departure from tradition but a continuation of it in disguise. The self-examination, the moral certitude, the sense of wickedness, the aim to provide salvation for the Other: these are the marks of Protestant missionary culture translated into secular progressive idiom. The people performing this critique of their own tradition are, Turner observes, doing so from within that tradition and cannot see it. Their zeal, their self-abnegation, their moral certitude, are not different from the missionaries and Christian reformers they imagine themselves to have transcended. They are no more free of tradition than their predecessors.

The progressive White ally who performs self-abnegation in the service of antiracism is making exactly the tacit knowledge claim Turner has spent his career analyzing. She experiences her performance as clear-sighted perception of reality rather than as the expression of a specific formation. She cannot see that her civility critique, her demand for self-reform, her moral certitude, and her sense of the wickedness of the world are Protestant habits of the heart dressed in secular vocabulary. The tradition has not been transcended. It has been reproduced in a form that is invisible to its bearers because it presents itself as its own opposite.

This connects directly to the Robert Alter essay’s closing argument. The secular literary intellectuals who praise Alter’s translation as the model of serious engagement with the Hebrew Bible experience their praise as clear perception of achievement. They cannot see that their claim to serious engagement through translation is the expression of a formation that has naturalized a specific set of practices as the baseline of intellectual seriousness while remaining opaque to the formation’s own tacit standards. The claim to have given secular humanists permission to have the Hebrew Bible without God or without the German seminar is the post-traditional move Turner’s conclusion analyzes: the claim to have escaped the tradition by recovering its object in a purified form, when what has been recovered is a version of the tradition dressed as its transcendence.

The progressive anti-racism movement Turner describes operates by authority claims that cannot be audited from outside the formation, enforcement through social sanction rather than explicit argument, and the conversion of dissent into evidence of the dissenter’s inadequate formation. The secular literary world’s treatment of Alter’s translation is a milder version of the same structure, where the people who could evaluate the claim against the Hebrew are either outside the status game or have their own reasons for playing along.

In his book, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, philosopher Rony Guldmann’s central argument is an extended empirical and philosophical demonstration of what Turner states in that final paragraph.

Turner’s observation is compressed and delivered almost as an aside: that the progressive anti-racism formation reproduces the structure of the Protestant missionary tradition it imagines itself to have transcended, that its self-abnegation and moral certitude and sense of the wickedness of the world mark it as a continuation rather than a break, and that this is invisible to its bearers because the tradition presents itself as opposite. Turner states this and moves on. He does not develop it into a full account of what the formation consists in, how it enforces its standards, why it is so difficult to contest from inside or outside, or what philosophical resources might be available for understanding it.

Guldmann does all of this. His book is the sustained philosophical anatomy of the formation Turner identifies in that paragraph. Where Turner names the structure in a few sentences, Guldmann traces it across hundreds of pages, showing how the progressive formation codes conservative sensibilities as pre-rational, how it converts the very act of taking conservative complaints seriously into evidence of the complainer’s inadequate formation, how it maintains its authority through tacit knowledge claims that cannot be externally audited, and how it reproduces the missionary structure of the traditions it claims to have superseded. The woman Turner quotes about White niceness as tacit complicity is a perfect single-sentence illustration of the broader pattern Guldmann analyzes in detail: the movement that presents itself as the transcendence of inherited moral framework while being most thoroughly captured by it.

What Guldmann adds to Turner’s compressed observation is three things. First, a philosophical account of why the formation’s authority claims are contestable rather than simply wrong. Turner is content to note the irony that the post-traditionalists are not as free of tradition as they imagine. Guldmann argues that the specific content of the formation’s moral claims, the coding of conservative sensibilities as psychological deficit, the attribution of traditional attachments to anxiety and resentment, the treatment of cosmopolitan rationality as the neutral baseline against which all other orientations are measured as deficient, rests on contestable philosophical assumptions that the formation has naturalized as obvious perception. This is Turner’s tacit knowledge argument extended into the specific domain of moral and political philosophy.

Second, Guldmann provides the lived institutional account that Turner’s theoretical observation cannot supply. Turner identifies the formation from outside, as a philosopher analyzing its structure. Guldmann documents it from inside, as a scholar who was processed by it. The Star Chamber memoir supplies the phenomenology that Turner’s conclusion gestures toward but cannot provide: what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of a formation that enforces its standards through tacit knowledge claims while presenting those claims as disinterested scholarly judgment. The 1980 Glacier View confrontation in the Adventist context and the Stanford Law confrontation in the progressive legal academy context are the same structure at different institutional scales and with different doctrinal content.

Third, Guldmann provides the hermeneutics of suspicion applied reflexively. Turner’s conclusion applies the post-traditionalist critique to the post-traditionalists. Guldmann takes this further by arguing that the conservative complaint about progressive cultural dominance deserves to be analyzed with the same hermeneutic tools that the progressive formation developed and applied to others. The conservatives who feel culturally displaced are not simply misreading their situation through a lens of resentment and status anxiety, which is the progressive formation’s diagnosis. They are responding to something real, and the tools for understanding what they are responding to are precisely the tools of cultural and sociological analysis that the progressive formation taught them to use. Guldmann’s book is the demonstration that those tools, when applied honestly rather than selectively, generate observations the progressive formation cannot absorb without considerable discomfort.

The most honest summary of the relationship between Turner’s spicier conclusion and Guldmann’s book is this: Turner identifies the formation in a paragraph and notes its ironies. Guldmann builds the philosophical and sociological infrastructure that Turner’s observation requires but does not supply. Together they constitute the most serious available account of what the progressive moral formation is, where it comes from, how it enforces itself, and why it is so resistant to the kind of reflexive scrutiny it applies without hesitation to every other formation it encounters.