Dystopia and beyond

Studies flooding the market give the impression that all roads in the country lead to dystopia. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed argues that autonomous individualism, the Enlightenment’s gift freeing the West from medieval theology and absolutism, promotes such obsessive self-indulgence it’s dissolving cultural cohesion.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die predicts that current political discourse and public policy puts the country on the road to authoritarianism. Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? notes that internal contradictions (wealth inequity, automation) and external factors (war, climate) will end capitalism sooner than later. Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine traces how decisions in World War II to target civilian populations progressed from bombing, to fire bombing, to nuclear bombing, to today’s massive array of weapons targeted to destroy cities, countries, even humankind.

Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation in 1944, tracing the origin and solution to these problems. The industrial revolution crowded workers into privately owned factories where wealth and power concentrated. Liberalism split into an ideology that emphasized the freedom to make profits on a free market (neoliberalism), and one emphasizing liberties and justice for all (democracy).

Only in the West, he notes, did economic theory rise to primacy in shaping all other social and moral structures. And as more nations industrialized they sought expanded empires to assure resources needed for production, leading to endless global conflict. The transformation back to social health, he argued, is for capitalists to demand less profit, for citizens to demand fewer material benefits, for moral ideologies to supplant economic ones, and for all to take responsibility for social well-being. Who knows, his vision just might energize that slow-growing mustard seed that offered such high hopes centuries ago.

DAVID SIXBEY Flippin