The Open Society and the Friends It Needs (Part 2)

Detail from Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Wikimedia Commons

(Warning: this is a long one. Striving for brevity in responding to the insightful but prolix N.S. Lyons is like bringing a knife to a heavy artillery firefight — so I didn’t try. Also, the 21st century erosion of attention spans is deplorable, but together we can fight back!)

In the prior essay and this one, I’m trying to make sense of Trump’s reelection. Last time, I looked at the failures — in which I shared — of the anti-Trump “resistance,” and in particular the unsuccessful efforts to frame that opposition as the defense of liberal democracy against an incipient authoritarian threat. Now I want to reexamine the broader implications of Trump’s return to power, focusing on a recent essay by the “post-liberal” conservative N.S. Lyons. He claims that the 2024 election marks a profound cultural turn: a toppling of the false idols of the “open society” and the return of the “strong gods” of family, faith, and nation.

Let’s work through Lyons’ argument. His prose is powerful, but not compact, so this will take a bit to spell out. And to note up front: Lyons’ narrative leans heavily on R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, and his book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. Following Reno, Lyons claims that we are witnessing today the end of “the long twentieth century” — the upheavals and horrors of 1914-1945, followed by 80 years of postwar welfare-state liberalism and the “liberal international order.” Here is how he sets up the story:

In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past — ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.

What followed was an ongoing quest to rid the culture of the precursors of fascism, driven forward by the imperative of “the open society or Auschwitz.” “To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism),” Lyons writes. “Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil…. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.”

With the end of the Cold War, the campaign for openness only intensified. Globalization, the formation of the European Union, and the debut of the Internet all underscored what seemed to be the “new world order”— in the words of George H.W. Bush — of “open borders, open trade, and, most important, open minds.” Dreams of making the open society a global reality took shape, given greater urgency by the shock of 9/11. Ironically, though, on the home front what was embraced as greater openness came with an ever-denser web of controls over what we do and say via “the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American ‘deep state’ that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle.”

Here's how Lyons wraps up this narrative:

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.

That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.

For the “return of the strong gods,” read the rise of right-wing populism. Here’s Lyons exulting in another essay written not long after the election:

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement’s electoral victory was so sweeping that an era of real counter-revolution may have finally dawned in America. This is certainly a sweet prospect to contemplate after having endured so many years of escalating political repression and civilizational chaos….

Trump’s reelection represents a genuine popular mass hunger for systemic reform, and in particular for a robust reassertion of democratic power, and the democratic spirit, over managerial oligarchy, its unelected state, and its many social pathologies including “woke” ideological madness. If harnessed correctly, this popular reaction has the potential to instantiate a real rollback of managerial control — and not only in the United States but worldwide.

Legends of the Fall

Let me confess up front, I’m a little confused by Lyons’ adoption of Reno’s narrative. Conservative potted-history narratives generally feature a “fall”: things started going off course back in [date X] because of [error Y], and we now need to acknowledge the error and change course. Conventional modern conservative narratives generally locate the fall sometime in the 20th century: the 1960s on cultural issues, the Progressive, New Deal, and Great Society eras (pick one, two, or all three!) on the role of the state. Reno pushes the cultural fall back 15 or 20 years, but he’s just identifying seeds that really sprouted in the ‘60s.

Locating the fall in the 20th century comports with the view of American conservatism as conserving America’s liberal tradition — this is the kind of conservative that Reno calls himself. But I was under the impression that Lyons sees himself on the anti-liberal right, according to which the whole Enlightenment project — including its political dimension of liberalism — was one vast and terrible mistake. That, at any rate, was what I took to be the conclusion of a truly brilliant essay of his on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, in which he approvingly quotes a line from a recent book that “totalitarianism is the defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition.”

I’m a committed liberal who unreservedly rejects this kind of reactionary radicalism. But Reno’s argument, which Lyons has endorsed and adopted, is much more modest —and, indeed, bears more than a passing resemblance to arguments I myself have made on this blog. I have lamented the decline of organized religion, the loss of faith in the American civil religion, and the turning away from family and childbearing. Faith, nation, and family are prominent among Reno’s “strong gods,” the great, profound loves and loyalties around which well-lived lives revolve. With Reno, I regard the diminished standing of these strong gods as a significant loss — one whose roots, like Reno, I trace to postwar cultural shifts.

We tell different stories about those shifts. I link them to the coming of mass affluence, while Reno sees them as the result of two global wars with an intervening global economic cataclysm. Although I’ve written little about it (except in connection to what I call the anti-Promethean backlash), I agree with Reno that the cultural consequences of the catastrophes of 1914-45 were significant, especially for Europe. Over the previous centuries, Europe had risen to world dominance, standing at the forefront of the economic revolution that was generating untold riches from utterly unprecedented productive powers. Yet it was here, at this point of maximum civilizational ascendancy, that Europe chose to descend into three decades of appalling, industrial-scale self-destruction. How could anyone live through this and not feel a crushing disillusionment? It’s hardly surprising that Europe lost its confidence and nerve. Shedding the empires it could no longer afford and submitting to the dominance of the new rival superpowers only underscored the sense in Europe that its time had passed.

We see in 20th century art and intellectual life the profound influence of trauma and disillusionment. Undoubtedly some of this worked its way into the broader culture as a general loss of faith in the modern, Western way of life. For centuries the engine of history for better and worse, Europe could no longer muster the will to shape the future. Instead it settled into its current vocation as a giant open-air museum.

Things were quite different in America. We won the war and came away richer and stronger than ever before, with losses that would be a rounding error for some of the other combatants. Of course our attitude was different: we had just taken the reins of history and proclaimed the American century. The European loss of civilizational self-confidence was not a mass phenomenon in the United States — though it clearly had a major impact on American intellectuals. And through them, and thanks to the boom in postwar college education, the “adversary culture” of civilizational self-doubt infected the broader cultural bloodstream.

And as I have argued in a previous book and on this blog, postwar America was also the scene of what amounts to a radical transformation of the human condition: the advent of mass affluence, creating for the first time in human history large and complex societies in which fulfillment of basic material needs could generally be taken for granted. Poverty in the form of material deprivation, humanity’s constant companion since the dawn of the species, was now the increasingly rare exception rather than the rule.

I grant that the intellectual reaction to the horrors of the 20th century played a role in creating the cultural “acid bath” responsible for dissolving so many of our vital loyalties, cutting us off from each other and belief in our way of life. But the role here was a supporting one, contributing additional momentum to the changes in social structure and shifts in culture unleashed by mass affluence.

As the economy shifted from an industrial economy led by manufacturing to an information economy focused increasingly on services, the whole culture’s orientation shifted from a focus on problem-solving in the material world (humanity’s focus in the long, preindustrial past as well) to one on solving social and psychological problems — proximately, keeping the customer and coworkers satisfied; ultimately, fashioning your own personal identity and seeking personal fulfillment. The social technology of bureaucratic control had emerged to handle and coordinate massive flows of money and physical goods; now, increasingly, it turned to trying to control the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the “human resources” under its direction. Thus did what Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of capitalism gradually morph into today’s intrusive and suffocating managerialism. Furthermore, the growing need for “knowledge workers” in the office led to a major expansion in the ranks of the college-educated — the segment of society in closest contact with the intellectual currents of the new adversary culture.

Just as changes in the structure of production on the supply side of the economy led to cultural changes, so too did changes in the volume of consumption on the demand side. As more and more people became increasingly affluent, liberation from concern with material needs enabled a shift toward pursing the spiritual needs of belonging, status, and self-realization. Although this new “expressive individualism” may have been encouraged by intellectual developments, most people absorbed it just from living in a world of dizzying choices and experiencing the incessant, antinomian influence of post-“conquest of cool” consumerism. Capitalism quickly and easily converted the anti-bureaucratic backlash of the ‘60s counterculture into an endlessly repeated sales pitch: have it your way, because you’re worth it, be all you can be, think different, just do it, no rules, just right.

As growing affluence meant that all our closest personal relationships were losing their practical functions, outsourced now to the market or the welfare state, those relationships — friends, family, neighbors, kids — became just more consumption options in a sea of competing possibilities. And to the degree that attending to those relationships meant turning away from the polestar of individual well-being and self-care, the necessary sacrifices needed to maintain those relationships were made with ever-declining frequency. The weaker ties to friends and loved ones were matched by diminished attachment to community and nation. The solvent that has done the most to atomize and alienate us hasn’t come from intellectually articulated disillusionment, but from the considerably more general and powerful phenomenon of affluence-generated self-absorption.

What is the “open society”?

Returning then to Reno’s narrative and Lyons’ adoption of it, I would say that their tale of the intellectual reaction to 20th century traumas captures an important part of the story but misses the main action. Worse, their analysis of that intellectual reaction is flawed beyond repair. Reno, followed by Lyons, argues that misplaced faith in the “open society” and its weak gods is the fundamental mistake that has led us astray. And they identify Karl Popper, who popularized the term “open society,” as a principal intellectual architect of our atomized, alienated present.

This is all wrong. Karl Popper’s social and political thought is open to criticism on various grounds, and there are tendencies in his thought that can be seen to contribute to the antinomian “acid bath.” But to identify Popper, fiercely anti-utopian and deeply committed to robust pluralism, as a Founding Father of all that has gone wrong is perversely bad intellectual history. And to cast the open society as a postwar false idol that must be repudiated is just deeply confused, especially for someone like Reno who claims to defend America’s liberal traditions. Both as an actually existing historical phenomenon and as an ideal type, the open society long predates Karl Popper and postwar America, though it has gone by other names.

Popper was a philosopher of science who argued that it was impossible for any process of induction to establish what is true. He saw hypotheses as mere conjectures that could come from any source — but which have to then be capable of being tested and falsified. Only propositions that are subject to the possibility of disconfirming evidence have the potential to qualify as scientific knowledge; the scientific method then consists of subjecting hypotheses to criticism and testing. Propositions that survive sufficient scrutiny add to our scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is always provisional, always tentative, as there is always the possibility of falsification down the line.

The two-volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during World War II, was Popper’s major contribution to political and social thought. His goal was to explore and identify the roots of totalitarianism, that terrible perversion of modernity that had transformed Europe into a blood-soaked charnel house. He argued that totalitarianism was not a strictly modern phenomenon, but instead could be traced back to ancient times — specifically, to the utopianism of Plato.

It was in this context that he introduced his concepts of the “closed society” and the “open society.” The closed society, according to Popper, is the organic tribal group that is humanity’s original social form — what the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft. It is composed entirely of concrete, personal, and usually familial bonds, it features little in the way of social differentiation or hierarchy, and it exists in a magical universe where the regularities of social life are as unquestioned as those found in nature.

The “open society,” by contrast, corresponds to Tönnies’ Gesellschaft, the impersonal social order that brings large numbers of unrelated strangers together in webs of social cooperation. The organic unity of society breaks down as different occupational groups and social classes emerge; social differentiation creates pluralism and the beginnings of individualism with a proliferation of different perspectives; new forms of personal relationship based on choice arise; the repertoire of possible social moves becomes so complex that it can no longer be guided by specific customs and taboos, leading to a morality of general rules and the newfangled challenges of moral choice (it turns out those general rules are often in tension!). Popper identified increasingly wide-ranging commerce as a midwife of the open society: “Close contact with other tribes is liable to undermine the feeling of necessity with which tribal institutions are viewed; and trade, commercial initiative, appears to be one of the few forms in which individual initiative and independence can assert itself, even in a society in which tribalism prevails.”

For Popper the scientist and critical rationalist, the defining aspect of the open society was its openness to discussion, criticism, and possible alteration of its beliefs, institutions, and ways of living. “The transition takes place when social institutions are first consciously recognized as man-made,” Popper wrote, “and when their conscious alteration is discussed in terms of their suitability for the achievement of human aims and purposes.”

It was in ancient Greece that this type of openness gave rise to the birth of science and philosophy: the interrogation of the natural and human worlds through an ongoing process of rational discussion and criticism. And since this process is open to participation by all regardless of birth or background, its emergence gave encouragement to new ideas about the universal brotherhood of man and the new political form of democracy. In ancient Greece, then, we saw the advent of the scientific/philosophical tradition accompanied by new universal ethical theories and the first stirrings of popular self-government.

The potential first revealed in ancient Greece came into full flower in the open society of liberal modernity, the civilization distinguished from all previous iterations of the human condition by its wide-ranging, open-ended processes of experimentation and discovery. Modern society is the open society: rather than expecting to receive the truth in the form of ancient dogmas, we seek it out through scientific investigation; rather than laboring for our sustenance according to settled custom, we have unleashed the creative destruction of the market process’s ceaseless, churning innovation; rather than vesting the power to rule in hereditary kings recognized as divinely authorized, we vest power in the people at large and rule ourselves through ongoing, never-settled persuasion and negotiation.

Popper saw parallels between the fall of democracy in ancient Greece and the world crisis of his day. And in Plato’s utopian vision, Popper saw the first blueprints of a totalitarian society, which he interpreted as the attempt to return to the organic unity of the closed society.

Although Popper was an unbending partisan of the open society, he recognized that its great benefits came with substantial costs. The open society, Popper conceded, was also an “abstract society.” “There are many people living in a modern society who have no, or extremely few, intimate personal contacts, who live in anonymity and isolation, and consequently in unhappiness,” he wrote. “For although society has become abstract, the biological make-up of man has not changed much; men have social needs which they cannot satisfy in an abstract society.”

Popper referred to this fundamental tension between the liberating potential of openness and our hard-wired social natures as “the strain of civilization.” When the open society first emerged in recognizable form in ancient Greek city-states, that strain made its first appearance as well. Nostalgia for the old, unquestionable certainties of the closed society, in Popper’s view, motivated the turn against Athenian democracy and Plato’s dreams of a perfectly ordered and harmonious republic. And the modern totalitarianisms of communism and fascism, according to Popper, represented a latter-day backlash against the openness of modernity

Many classicists have taken issue with Popper’s interpretation of Plato, but that doesn’t concern us here. What matters instead is his conception of the open society, and it should already be apparent from this brief discussion that Reno and Lyons’ attempt to identify the open society ideal as the source of modern social and cultural dysfunction is badly misjudged. The open society as Popper describes it, both as an actually existing historical phenomenon and an ideal type, long predates Popper’s time. He evokes the open society not to concoct a blueprint for postwar social and cultural change, but to clarify the nature of the contest between totalitarianism and already existing liberal societies.

Any historical narrative based on rejection of the open society must therefore be profoundly reactionary, locating the “fall” not in the mid-20th century, not even in the Enlightenment, but pushing it all the way back to ancient Greece. (Indeed, I’ve often thought of the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor for the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, which would push our cultural “fall” all the way back to the Fall of Man!) Imagining a return to premodern faith and organic social relations is very much in the same category as wishing you were a little child again, still an innocent in a world of magic — it’s a fantasy with real appeal at certain times, but that’s all it is. The open society as an actually existing social phenomenon is the irreplaceable domain in which everything we know and value exists. There is no soft exit from this social reality — the huge populations of contemporary societies cannot be sustained by premodern means. The only exit, then, is a catastrophe immense enough to wipe away billions of us and throw the world into a new dark age whose inhabitants have forgotten virtually everything that we know today.

It needs to be stressed that the open society as Popper conceived it is now truly global in extent. There are tiny pockets here and there of something like the Gemeinschaft of old, tucked away in the world’s most remote places. Everybody else has been assimilated into the vast and impersonal Gesellschaft. It’s true that most of the world isn’t democratic, but that just means that contemporary autocracies are relatively closed by modern standards — not fully closed societies by any stretch. Grading on a historical curve, contemporary China for example is extremely open — especially in relation to its recent totalitarian past. (That said, all of us who value the modern open society see the absence of political freedom and self-government as profound shortcomings.) Pluralism and individualism are now dominant; the sense that a society’s institutions are open to criticism and alteration is now all but universally shared. There is wide variation in self-conscious attachment to the ideals of the open society, but the fact of relatively high openness is established and deeply entrenched almost everywhere.

It's true that the threat of totalitarianism is not gone. We are right to worry about the totalitarian potential of contemporary managerialism, a potential that exists on both sides of the current democratic divide and that is likely to be greatly enhanced by continuing developments in AI-managed surveillance. N.S. Lyons has written eloquently about this threat; indeed, it is his sense of contemporary democracies’ vulnerability to a kind of soft but suffocating totalitarianism that motivates his break with liberalism and his denunciation of the “open society” ideal.

But here’s the thing: “alertness to the threat of totalitarianism,” which clearly characterizes Lyons’ writing, is just another way of saying “commitment to the ideals of the open society.” Lyons sees managerialism as a profound threat to pluralism in the social realm and to critical discussion and the search for truth in the realm of ideas – but these are precisely the central values of the open society ideal that he then claims to oppose. Much like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, who had no idea he’d been speaking prose all his life, Lyons is clueless that he is both a living embodiment and a zealous partisan of the open society as Popper conceived it.

Assessing Popper’s legacy

Bending over backwards to make sense of Reno and Lyons’ narrative, we can identify some elements of Popper’s midcentury thought that do align with the trajectory of social change they decry. Yes, Popper was a ferocious critic of nationalism — an understandable position for a generation that had just had a front-row seat for the savageries of German, Italian, and Japanese nationalism. Nationalism, it should be stressed, is a fairly protean phenomenon that can manifest in many different variations, and in interpreting Popper we should recognize the horrendous variant he was confronting and theorizing about. In the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, he sought to trace the bloodbath just ending back to Hegel. According to Popper, Hegel saw the nation-state as a quasi-divine force and believed that war among states was the essential driver of the “World-Spirit’s” advancement and the achievement of historical destiny. According to Popper, the Axis was the practical application of these ideas.

So yes, Popper condemned nationalism in sweeping terms, a categorical denunciation that doesn’t seem to leave room for the benign and indeed salutary forms of pride in and love for one’s homeland. (However, it should be mentioned that he did acknowledge that modern nationalism began as a force for liberalism, so he did understand that nationalism was more than its dark side.) And for that reason, you can try to draw a line from his ardent cosmopolitanism to the decline in patriotism and civic pride throughout the Western world — and to the decisions made in North America and Europe to launch transformative demographic changes through mass immigration. From the open society to open borders looks like a logical progression.

I can agree that his rejection of nationalism is too sweeping, but still it’s batty to cast Karl Popper as the intellectual father of the adversary culture’s anti-patriotism as well as mass immigration. The story of the former should center on the New Left of the ‘60s, the radical anti-Americanism of the Vietnam War protests, and the gradual leaching of that animus into the broader culture — through, for example, the 1980 publication of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Nobody writing that story without a peculiar axe to grind would think to include Popper among the New Left’s intellectual influences. (Reno and Lyons, you’ll recall, mention Theodore Adorno along with Popper as intellectual architects of the fall. I’m only glancingly familiar with the work of Adorno, but I believe that he is a much better fit in this story than Popper.)

As to the dynamics behind mass immigration, no fair account of what happened would give a prominent role to Karl Popper. In the United States, mass immigration was launched unwittingly: nobody who supported the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act imagined that it would lead to significant demographic change. The act emerged out of the civil right movement (try to find Popper mentioned in the histories of that movement), and the focus was on eliminating the old national-origin quotas, which were now seen as invidiously discriminatory (by the way, the legislation passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan majorities). In Europe, meanwhile, mass immigration emerged out of the exigencies of postwar labor shortages and the unwinding of global empires.

Karl Popper was also a committed “critical rationalist” who denied that humans had any reliable access to metaphysical truths. He didn’t deny the existence of metaphysical truths — on the question of God, for instance, he was a humble agnostic who hoped that God exists and who criticized atheists for their hubris — but he didn’t believe we have any workable method for acquiring knowledge of such truths. Popper wasn’t any kind of positivist: although he set a demanding criterion (falsifiability) for establishing scientific knowledge, he in no way disparaged other forms of knowledge as meaningless or nonsense. He recognized that much of human life operated according to habits and traditions that had never been rationally interrogated and justified. Indeed, although he thought emotional attachments to national sovereignty were dangerous, he celebrated strong communal attachments as constituting the pluralism that gave the open society its vitality. So while Popper believed in subjecting traditions to rational criticism (which basically amounts to testing one tradition’s compatibility with other, competing traditions), he had no patience for ideas about redesigning all of social life from scratch according to supposedly rational criteria.

Here again, it’s possible to draw a line from Popper’s rejection of metaphysics to the postwar decline of Christianity in the advanced democracies. But again, to say that Popper’s defense of the open society played a significant role in that decline is just ridiculous. I’ll grant that the enormities of two world wars and the ensuing threat of nuclear war played some role in organized religion’s decline, especially in Europe. It’s hard to imagine more strenuous tests of faith in a loving God than the Somme, the Holocaust, and the specter of nuclear destruction, and I’m sure that many lost their faith. But it was the horrors themselves that did the job, not Popper’s reaction to them.

OK, here’s a last gasp: what about George Soros? He was a student of Popper’s and is the founder of the Open Society Foundations. OSF was created to aid in the former Soviet empire’s post-communist transition to liberal democracy, but since then has funded a wide variety of progressive causes including protection of migrant rights and criminal justice reform. After Soros became active in U.S. politics and started supporting Democratic candidates, he developed into a symbol of “globalist” progressivism and an Emmanuel Goldstein-style hate object for the right — the opposing number for the Koch Brothers who served a similar function for the left.

Here then is one degree of separation between Popper and the progressivism that Reno and Lyons so hotly oppose. But what in the world does that prove? Let me tell you, as someone who works at the Niskanen Center, one degree of separation is all it takes to head off in very different directions. We were inspired by Bill Niskanen (the former chairman of the Cato Institute, where Niskanen’s founder Jerry Taylor and I both worked for more than two decades) as a model for engaged intellectual participation in economic and political debate — he was a staunchly principled man who followed the evidence even in inconvenient directions — but we did not pledge allegiance to all his specific policy views. As a result, in our early years we were regularly lambasted by libertarians for taking Bill’s name in vain. I always thought that was dumb, but I do agree that you shouldn’t look to the Niskanen Center as keepers of Bill Niskanen’s specific intellectual legacy. Nor does it make sense to attack Karl Popper on the basis of George Soros’s philanthropic and political donations.

The case against Popper mounted by Reno and Lyons is an embarrassing failure — quite simply, they nabbed the wrong guy. The open society isn’t their enemy: in all likelihood, neither would ever have been born without it. The ideals of the open society as Popper conceived it — free inquiry and popular self-government — aren’t their enemy: both claim fealty to these ideals and denounce the status quo’s deviations from them.

Not by reason alone

I will concede this much, though: the history of the postwar years has exposed real inadequacies in Popper’s conception of the open society. Those inadequacies did not have any meaningful causal connection to the postwar developments that Reno and Lyons denounce, but they still exist. And for contemporary supporters of the open society ideal — by which I mean, contemporary liberals of both left- and right-leaning varieties — reflecting on those inadequacies can be helpful in clarifying the challenges we face.

Popper thought that the chief threat to the open society was an atavistic longing for connectedness — a hopeless yearning for the organic unity of the tribe. And you can see this in the 21st century rise of both the anti-liberal right and left: the resort to politics as a pathetic attempt to replace the forsaken loyalties to faith, family, and community.

To put the current situation in Popper’s terminology, economic, social, and cultural developments since World War II have ratcheted up the “strain of civilization” to critical levels. But the 20th century strain that Popper wrote about was produced by industrialization, a process that for all its stresses and dislocations offered transformational benefits. In our time, the strain is coming from dysfunctional developments that undermine the health of the open society separate and apart from provoking a backlash. In Popper’s day, the backlash of totalitarianism was purely reactionary: fascism and communism were hopeless rebellions against the large-scale division of labor and technology- and organization-intensive production. They were inspired by the presence of genuine and serious social ills, but ills which were for the most part a necessary part of an overall beneficial process. By contrast, the populist backlash of today is reacting against real excesses and cultural wrong turns. As a force for positive change, the populist right has nothing to offer, but as an alarm bell it is ringing true.

Accordingly, contemporary partisans of the open society need to absorb and take seriously the cultural criticisms of Reno and Lyons (no need to extend the same courtesy to their intellectual historiography). The challenge we face now isn’t holding up under the necessary strain of civilization, but rather to reduce the crippling and entirely unnecessary strain we now endure.

We can say then that Popper’s conception of the open society was blindsided by its current nemesis. In particular, he never considered that the willingness to subject all our beliefs and institutions to critical scrutiny might metastasize into something ruinous. He knew that any society’s traditions were a mixed bag, some vitally important and some perverse and harmful. He imagined that an ongoing, open-ended process of critical inquiry and discussion would on its own be capable of separating the wheat from the chaff – that is, of preserving and defending beneficial traditions while opposing and seeking to reduce the influence of harmful ones.

If everybody were like Karl Popper, that might work. As I’ve mentioned, Popper went through life without religious convictions, but he never seemed plagued by a God-shaped hole in his heart. Instead, he maintained a kind of rational faith unsupported by revelation or metaphysics. This is the existential faith of Victor Frankl that I described in an earlier essay: the willingness, rooted a deep sense of gratitude, to say “yes, in spite of everything.” “When I look at what I call the gift of life,” Popper said in an interview he asked to be published only after his death, “I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God.” “I do think that all men, including myself, are religious,” he went on in that same interview. “We all believe in something more important and more — it is difficult to find the right words — than ourselves.”

I can relate. This is exactly the kind of agnostic faith that has sustained me throughout my life. It worked for Karl Popper, and it works for me. It also works for my friend Jonathan Rauch. But as Jonathan argues in his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Christianity, it doesn’t work for most people. “In today’s America,” he writes, “we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.” As Jonathan, a lifelong atheist, admits, for a long time he welcomed the erosion of organized religion as spiritual progress, but the steady pileup of countervailing evidence has changed his mind. “In American civic life,” he writes, “Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.”

Here Jonathan elaborates on the difference between him (and, I would add, Karl Popper) and most people:

Speaking as a scientific materialist,… I can say that it is better for us to behave as if our lives are special and meaningful…. I can even say that there is something ineffably mysterious and beautiful about human life which scientific, materialistic descriptions cannot capture, although perhaps poetry and art can. Yet I cannot provide meaning and purpose which transcend oblivion.

Is this a problem? As I’ve said, not very much for me…. But I am weird! Purely secular thinking about death will never satisfy the large majority of people.

This is an old point that conservative-leaning liberals have made recurrently over the whole course of the liberal tradition: liberalism, and the embodiment of its values in the open society, are not self-sustaining. Liberalism is the program for fostering cooperation across various pre-liberal or non-liberal belief systems and cultures. Liberalism, meanwhile, has its own particular belief system and culture that makes such cooperation possible. For a minority of weirdos like Jonathan, Karl Popper, and myself, that liberal belief system and culture can stand alone, but for most people it needs to be integrated into some underlying religious faith.

The need for wings and roots

The original theorist of the open society understood this. Although Karl Popper popularized the term “open society,” he did not coin it. The term was originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In that book, Bergson looked back at the history of religion and morality and saw two distinct and competing manifestations of the religious impulse. The older, primordial “static religion” develops out of the social pressure of the group toward conformity and obligation and serves to maintain social cohesion; it distinguishes sharply between insiders and outsiders; it proscribes through taboo; and it connects its members to each other and the rest of the world through ritual, myth, and magic. The “closed morality” that accompanies static religion encompasses only the specific group and is focused exclusively on the group’s survival and security.

“Dynamic religion” is a newer entrant on the scene. According to Bergson, it emerges out of the mystical experience of exemplary individuals – saints, prophets, heroes – and bursts through the limits of static religion and closed morality to pursue a vision of universal brotherhood and love. Here I see significant similarities with Karl Jaspers’ idea of “Axial Age” religions. Dynamic religion and open morality lead people beyond the narrow confines of the tribe to broader moral and spiritual horizons. While static religion attends to existential stability, dynamic religion inspires spiritual growth; static faith imposes obligations and nourishes our roots, while dynamic faith creates aspirations and gives us wings.

In this typology, the “open society” serves as the dynamic, open ideal. Here is Bergson:

The open society is the society deemed in principle to embrace all humanity. A dream dreamt, now and again, by chosen souls, it embodies on every occasion something of itself in creations, each of which, through a more or less far-reaching transformation of man, conquers difficulties hitherto unconquerable. But after each occasion the circle that has momentarily opened closes again. Part of the new has flowed into the mould of the old; individual aspiration has become social pressure; and obligation covers the whole.

The open society, then, is an ideal type, an asymptote that can never be reached. In Bergson’s view, all actually existing societies are in some measure closed societies, oriented ultimately toward cohesion and group survival. They vary, however, in their degree of opening — in the extent, that is, of their embodiment of the universal values of human brotherhood. There is no purely open society in the real world; relatively open societies must maintain closed foundations if they are to persist.

I’ve written previously about the fundamental dualism of human nature, captured in Kant’s idea of humanity’s “unsocial sociability.” We are, on the one hand, highly social creatures who are constituted and sustained by our relationships with other people; at the same time, we are an intensely curious and competitive species, although these traits are distributed with greater variance across the population than our need for human contact and belonging. Since a healthy society is one that promotes human flourishing, and since human flourishing involves the development and use of our inborn capacities, it follows that a healthy society must support and encourage both sides of human nature. A healthy society, then, must foster both inclusion to feed our roots, and dynamism to grow our wings.

This conception jibes with Bergson’s view that actual societies can at best be relatively open — they must maintain some closed elements or else face dissolution. The extensive social disintegration we see all around us attests to the fact that we’re now well along into the “or else” phase.

Popper acknowledged Bergson’s coinage, but saw almost no overlap in their two conceptions of the open society. Too bad for Popper: in my view, the two conceptions are better thought of as complements than alternatives. I agree with Popper that the critical rationalist criterion he sets — openness to questioning and criticizing beliefs, practices, and institutions as man-made and susceptible to possible improvement — is indeed an essential aspect of the open society ideal as it has shaped the development of liberal modernity. But I’m inclined to agree with Bergson that a religious foundation is necessary for the ongoing stability of any society hoping to follow that ideal. The path to the open society runs through both Jerusalem and Athens, but it starts in Jerusalem.

Popper thought that the adoption of critical reason led to a humanitarian ethos based on universal brotherhood. Because of humans’ universal access to reason (as compared to their culture-bound access to revelation), he saw rationalism as eroding distinctions between “us” and “them” and thereby opening up broader moral horizons. Bergson, by contrast, sees humanity’s on-again, off-again aspirations toward universalism as driven by the religious visions of saints and prophets and the inspired deeds of heroes. I think that history shows that both of these dynamics have been in play — but that religious motivations are much more powerful for the vast majority of people.

But how do open societies stay open? How do they maintain their distinctive values and institutions? Here Bergson’s contributions are needed to compensate for Popper’s theoretical inadequacies. Bergson makes the critically important point that the real world contains only relatively open societies – societies whose open elements must coexist and cohere with their closed foundations. Accordingly, all who favor the open society should recognize that its health and stability lie not in pushing “openness” to the maximum possible extent, but in maintaining a balance between openness and secure foundations.

Take two constituent elements of our open society today: modern science and liberal democracy. Modern science’s amazing successes in expanding knowledge of the natural world rest on a host of unprovable assumptions: the trustworthiness of our sense data, the uniformity of the regularities in nature, the comprehensibility of those regularities to human minds, etc. Liberal democracy likewise rests on unprovable moral assumptions: in particular, the civic equality of all citizens and the moral equality of all human beings (i.e., “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain rights”).

The particular assumptions underlying modern science and liberal democracy can be called foundational truths, as opposed to final truths. These foundational truths, if accepted, allow for processes of ongoing, open-ended exploration and discovery – uncovering nature’s eternal truths, on the one hand, and managing the ever-changing collective action problems of modern, technologically progressive society, on the other) These processes do not contemplate any endpoint – no perfect certainty for science, no perfect harmony for democracy. From fixed foundations, they open up indefinitely.

Notwithstanding their uniquely generative character, these foundational truths are still unprovable assumptions; further, their generative potential is best realized to the extent that those assumptions go unquestioned. Unfortunately, the “acid bath” of indiscriminate hostility to authority has been gnawing away at these foundations for decades now, with grim results that are increasingly obvious. It’s worth pointing out that the assumptions underlying modern science and liberal democracy are basically secularized expressions of Christian thought: an orderly Creation made to be legible to humans, all of whom are equally endowed with immortal souls capable of salvation. The principles of science and democracy are thus not only under direct assault; with the decline of organized religion, their source and bulwark is likewise embattled and has already suffered serious reversals.

Which is why, in my own thinking about our current predicament and how to advance out of it, I’ve had to admit that the changes needed to overcome the contemporary crises of dynamism and inclusion are unlikely to occur in the absence of a powerful countercultural force — oriented toward strong and cohesive communities that seek in some measure to provide for themselves. I would rally to a secular version of that, but I imagine that a religious revival that embraces that kind of counterculture would have many more takers.

Still waiting for the strong gods

Finally, a word about Lyons’ enthusiasm for Trump’s reelection as heralding the return of the “strong gods” and the kind of cultural renewal I’m hoping for. OK, make it six words: you’ve got to be kidding me.

I’ll keep going for a bit. First, here’s Lyons on the significance of Trump’s return to power:

The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting, and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.

Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth.

Here we see the gaping asymmetry in Lyons’ analytical acuity. When he’s identifying and denouncing the dysfunctions of the status quo, he is razor sharp. But his assessments of populism betray an almost cult-like credulity that reminds me of left-wing political pilgrims fawning over Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba. He sees only what he wants to see.

Trump’s success is no sign of impending restoration and reintegration; it is simply a sharp and accelerating turn in an ongoing downward spiral. It is both the product of social breakdown and the agent of further destruction.

As I mentioned in the first part of this essay, I see the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism — and the social justice radicalism of the past decade on the other end of the horseshoe — as manifestations of a legitimacy crisis for liberal democratic institutions. Trust in established institutions and governing elites has been in decline for decades — due in part to elite failures, but in larger part to the changing media environment and the diminished capacity of the increasingly atomized and alienated public to trust any impersonal institutions and systems. What Weber called rational-legal authority is breaking down, giving way to the older, more primitive authority of charisma and personal patronage. Trump’s political career was made possible by this cultural regress, and the manic early days of Trump 2.0 show that he means to ride that regress as far as he can. A recent article by Jonathan Rauch (he’s on a roll these days!) surveys the current chaos and sees a reversion to the premodern governing style of patrimonialism — personal rule, in which authority comes from the person himself rather than the office he holds, and authority is exercised through personal favors for allies and vendettas against rivals and opponents. You can’t really run a complex modern society this way, but you can put on a good show for your fans until you eventually hit the wall.

“Fans” is the correct word here. The so-called MAGA “movement” isn’t composed of joiners and doers who get together in real life to do the nitty-gritty work of amassing political power; it is by and large yet another consumption community with a side of performative LARPing. Noah Smith explains:

The MAGA movement, you see, is an internet thing. It’s another vertical online community — a bunch of deracinated, atomized individuals, thinly connected across vast distances by the notional bonds of ideology and identity. There is nothing in it of family, community, or rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumption good. It’s a subreddit. It is a fandom.

As Noah points out, the MAGA thing has been going for nearly a decade now. If it is, as Lyons claims, the leading edge of a return to family, faith, and love of country, what has it done in all this time to show its constructive potential? Basically nada, says Noah:

Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain well below their levels at the turn of the century. Republicans still have more children than Democrats, but births in red states have fallen too.

In Trump’s first term, the attempts at organized civic participation on the Right were almost laughably paltry. A few hundred Proud Boys got together and went to brawl with antifa in the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were a handful of smallish right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6th — mostly people in their 40s and 50s. And none of these ever crystallized into long-term grassroots organizations of the type that were the norm in the 1950s.

For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game; for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel.

Lyons, then is as mistaken about where we are now as he is about how we got here. There is nothing generative about Trumpism; it carries no seeds of renewal. Look back through history and tell me: when has a brighter future ever arrived in a cloud of chaos, corruption, cruelty, and lies?

The American electorate has lost faith in our system and chosen chaos and destruction to shake things up. From the early indications, it looks like they’re going to get what they asked for good and hard. If the republic is still standing at the end of this, I hope we can treat the Trump phenomenon as a heart attack that scares us into living right and building a better system. And if we’re really lucky, maybe some of the spaces cleared by Trump’s destruction will open up opportunities for the builders. But that exhausts the positive potential lurking in this godforsaken moment.