Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike have approached that question from different angles.
Today, the answer to the question of how we live with each other is “increasingly, not at all.” With eyes stuck on our phones or TVs at home, we’re spending less and less time in one another’s company, and it doesn’t seem to be relieving any of the tensions that come with living in a diverse society. Liberals are often criticized for leaving meaning-making to the market, but in today’s piece, columnist Matthew Yglesias objects to this “crude caricature.”
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- Jerusalem Demsas
Probably the last thing the world needs is another basically secular Jewish intellectual opining that it would be good for Americans to go to church more.
But I’ll accept being a cliche in service of getting people to appreciate the actual role religion has played in public life.
As American associational life has declined, many secular commentators have waxed nostalgic about the community-building aspects of religion — the idea that people would be better off if they spent more time interacting with others and less time home alone. In this view, the case for caring about religious observance has less to do with the specifics of religious faith and more to do with the reality that, in practice, people are mostly spending would-be church time watching an endless feed of algorithmically distributed streaming video.
There’s something to this, but I believe it has received disproportionate attention relative to the actual content of religious belief. After all, while it is probably true that the social ties forged through regular attendance at in-person events have value, this kind of value could theoretically be created through other means.
But religions aren’t just regularly scheduled meetings. They are ethical systems that make claims about value in the world. They teach, normally, that you ought to care about other people — at a minimum about co-religionists — that you should donate to charity, and that there is such a thing as right and wrong distinct from what you can and can’t get away with.
Religion isn’t the only thing that can fulfill the human need for some sort of moral system. Personally, I identify with secular values of universal benevolence. And while I don’t find a ton of value in the effective altruism community, I do subscribe to many of effective altruism’s beliefs. As a result, I donate 10% of my company’s subscription revenue to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund and have encouraged others to donate millions as well.
Yet I’m not a fanatic about it. There’s something to be said for community and localism.
My wife was deeply involved with the Parent Teacher Organization at our son’s elementary school, and I was a frequent volunteer at events. We give to a local food bank. I take an interest, in a low-key but real way, in the welfare of some of the kids at school who have more chaotic home lives than my son’s.
This is all, I think, fairly normal stuff: having values, having ethical commitments, having standards, not always living up to your own standards and feeling bad about it, caring about people you have incidental connections with, and being aware that you should care about people whom you’ve never met.
These can be secular values or religious ones, but in the aggregate, it seems young people are casting aside religious values, not for secular ethics, but just for money. A wide range of different surveys indicates young people are less interested these days in things like starting a family and more focused on making a lot of money.
In tandem with this, I have noticed a real shift in the content of progressive economic thinking. You hear less and less about the plight of the poor or the virtues of a Nordic-style social model with broad-based taxation and a universal safety net. Instead, you hear more about middle-class college graduates wanting the state to do more for them personally (cancel student debt, raise revenue exclusively from billionaires, address the high costs of DoorDash and junk fees at concerts).
At the same time, many people’s political engagement has become more totalizing and illiberal.
Liberalism leaves people free to decide what makes life worth living, but those of us who defend it need to take more responsibility for helping people find compelling answers. We should be making the case for commitments beyond personal enrichment and building communities that help people live up to them.
Keeping the government out of the business of prescribing a good life is good. Keeping liberals out of the business of prescribing the good life is an abdication of power to the illiberals snapping at our heels.
The communitarian moment
Liberalism is under threat, not just implicitly but increasingly overtly, as prominent politicians seek reputations as thought leaders explicitly by disavowing liberalism’s main elements.
Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., come from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have little overlap on specific public policy questions. But they both have new books out arguing that America has badly erred by overemphasizing individual freedom at the expense of some vision of “the common good.”