Science at the End of History

N.S. Lyons’s wide-ranging speech before the Civitas Canada conference on May 5 makes an important contribution to understanding the global trend of left-wing authoritarianism and offers a spirited call for the resistance by the MAGA movement in the United States and similar popular uprisings elsewhere. As the speech correctly notes, 

In country after country, governments are moving desperately to tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.

Lyons’s overall analysis, as well as his recommendations, are thoughtful, serious, and largely on point. I offer a few clarifications that I think can sharpen our understanding about the nature of the enemy and inform an appropriate course of action. Because the speech was delivered before a general audience, and was not an academic paper for scholars, I recognize that Lyons was speaking about the problem in broad terms. The following thoughts are presented not in the spirit of criticism, but to refine and enlarge his insightful arguments.

In the speech, Lyons argues that what “ails our democracies” is not “populism, but a regime type inimical to the essence of democracy itself.” A great struggle is underway between “an entrenched technocratic elite class bent on exercising ever greater control, and common people in revolt against the tightening grip of their distant, opaque, uncaring, and unaccountable form of political regime.”

First, rather than populism, I would prefer (at least in the American context) to speak of republicanism or constitutionalism. Democracy is equally misleading. Not only is it a term the American Founders eschewed, but it is one leftists (with some justification) claim for themselves. Their smug mantra “Our Democracy,” which one hears constantly these days, is quite sincere. Leftists see themselves as the true defenders of the people en masse. What they mean by democracy, of course, is a community defined by a specific “enlightened” outlook or view of the world, and which excludes all those right-wing deplorables whose racism and sexism disqualify them from democratic citizenship. 

The bulk of Lyons’s speech is devoted to examining the idea of managerialism and the rule of the managerial elite. As he has explained elsewhere, this framework derives largely from James Burnham’s classic book The Managerial Revolution. According to this analysis, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass society led to a new way of addressing political, social, and economic problems:

In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale produced by industrialization: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. 

Lyons properly recognizes the connection between this procedural revolution and a deeper philosophical transformation that remade the modern world. But he misunderstands how radical and far-reaching these philosophical arguments were. And by focusing on managerialism, he elevates a secondary issue that is in fact merely one effect, rather than the primary cause, of our travails.

Perhaps the main deficiency of Lyons’s argument is that it takes the essence of managerialism to be a desire for control — which means it isn’t fundamentally different from the tyrannical impulse found throughout human history. Indeed, Lyons says that the bureaucratic global elite represents a threat that any “political philosopher of antiquity would have recognized,” namely, “a form of oligarchy: rule by the few, for the few.” 

Is that correct? Are today’s managerial experts not essentially different from the oligarchs of classical Athens, who claimed that wealth was an adequate stand-in for virtue or wisdom, and thus a legitimate claim to rule? A related question: If managerial tyranny is (to quote Lincoln) just “the same old serpent,” this would suggest it doesn’t represent anything essentially new or modern. 

Yet much of Lyons’s speech is rightly devoted to arguing that the managerial elite is something new or modern. It seems to me that his analysis requires a clearer framework to explain how our current ruling elites not only reject consent, but believe that consent is no longer necessary. When Lyons says that the managerial elites take for granted “their own credentialed expertise” and feel that they have a “moral mandate” and a “mission to remake the world in their own image,” it is hard to see where these impulses come from, and — more problematically — how the managerial elites justify “rule by the few, for the few.” 

This deficiency — of treating managerialism as just a variant on old-fashion oligarchy — becomes clear when Lyons writes:

Indeed, overall, at the heart of managerialism is the compulsion to control. It is the firm belief that all things must be measured, calculated, and progressively brought under rational control — that they must be managed.

But other than the fact that managers manage, it never becomes entirely clear in Lyons’s speech how this new regime of control displaced the Founders’ republican government based on consent (a word that never appears in Lyons’s speech), or why such a large plurality of Americans not only failed to object, but have energetically supported this regime change. 

Because he thinks the managerial elite simply seeks control for its own sake, Lyons misunderstands the real nature of bureaucratic rationality. He sees the ruling experts as opposed to, or in tension with, human nature. The managerial class, he writes, “hate and fear the idea of ever leaving anything to operate outside their surveillance,” because human beings “unlike machines, are inherently messy: inscrutable, willful, unpredictable, unsafe, unmanageable.” For these technocrats, “the mystery of the human soul is a dark well of utmost horror.”

That seems to me to be entirely wrong. In fact, I would argue that so far from being “unsafe” or “horrifying,” the liberation of idiosyncratic passions and lifestyle choices made by fully autonomous individuals is the principal object of bureaucratic government properly understood. This points to one last problem, which I will mention briefly before turning to what I think is a more coherent explanation.

By emphasizing the centrality of managerial proceduralism, Lyons has to underplay the ideological dimension of left-wing tyranny. If the managerial elite is so procedurally competent, why does it engage in so much hectoring demagoguery? 

Lyons recognizes that one can’t make sense of our current situation without connecting the oligarchic elite to America’s long, ongoing culture war; but he does so by demoting wokeness to a kind passing fancy that is cynically exploited by corporate climbers. Wokeness, he says, is “best thought of as primarily a massive jobs program for the ever-expanding managerial class.” But this ignores the millions of social justice warriors who genuinely believe in the cause; and it downplays the serious damage done by those who demonize and censor any dissent. Lyons’s analysis leaves out all those college students, sanctimonious suburban white women, pop culture celebrities, and others who are zealously devoted to the woke cause without being managers themselves, or deriving any direct economic benefit from their fanaticism. 

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Let me now fill in the missing pieces by presenting a somewhat different version of how the administrative state emerged. It is, of course, similar to Lyons’s analysis, but corrects what I think are some serious omissions, and it shows how the apparently disparate elements of leftist tyranny fit together. 

At the end of the Industrial Revolution, it was not just the size or scale of mass society that inaugurated a new understanding of politics and government. Rather, modern philosophers believed they had uncovered for the first time the true principles of Science and History. From these claims, an entirely new conception of politics, human nature, and of reason or rationality emerged, which would transform the whole western world. 

In the nineteenth century, G.F.W. Hegel and his student Karl Marx believed they had discovered the scientific laws of history, which guided the progressive development of western civilization from ancient Greece and Rome up to the present day. Hegel argued that the destiny of mankind at the End of History culminates in the rational state: a society in which all human problems can be solved through perfected rational insight, which has superseded all previous understanding and therefore becomes the only legitimate form of knowledge. Crossing the Atlantic in the late 1800s, a version of this belief was adopted by the American Progressive movement, which launched what has now become our administrative or “deep” state. 

The discovery of the principles of the rational state means that all the basic moral and political questions have been answered. (Let me again stipulate that Lyons correctly mentions some of this, but without filling in the whole picture.) With the general spread of historical enlightenment there is nothing left to argue about. What remains is merely implementing the rule of properly trained experts, who will solve the various technical problems that arise in a complex society with a methodological solution. Pollution, crime, racism, and pronoun discrimination are all essentially equivalent: they represent neutral wrinkles in an otherwise sound system, arising from misaligned incentives or lack of information. To the degree that any of these problems have a moral connotation — racism, in particular — this merely represents a certain impatience or annoyance at the fact that enlightenment has not yet reached every corner of society. (I return to this in a moment.)

All social/economic/political glitches can be cured by allowing the experts to correct what are essentially problems of ignorance, poor self-esteem, or lack of opportunity, through counseling, persuasion, community development programs, and, if necessary, indoctrination. This is why consent ceases to be a relevant political principle. It isn’t rejected so much as dismissed as outdated. Since liberalism represents the most enlightened form of government, and since no reasonable person could be in favor of pollution or crime or racism, there is nothing that would require the people’s consent.

The discovery or arrival of the rational state means that whatever minor disagreements remain in the moral realm are essentially matters of subjective preference. And indeed, now that the structure of the just society has been put in place, individual preferences can finally be allowed to flourish without inhibition. The End of History means the total freedom of the autonomous self. As a practical matter, the expert class will reflect the evolving consciousness of the community, as society perfects its sensitivity to the demands of personal self-expression. 

The unfortunate and occasional need to push along some of the more recalcitrant by force arises because even in the rational society, there will remain lingering elements of backwards thinking. This explains the attitude of irritated exasperation that the Left shows toward anyone who fails to bow before the latest demands of cultural conformity: “Why can’t you just get with the program?!”

From this perspective, I think we now have a much clearer understanding of the inherent connection between the ruling oligarchy and the ideology of identity politics, which I don’t believe is captured by the managerialism template. And it allows us to come back to a question that Lyons’ speech doesn’t really answer. That the managerial elite exploits the levers of power to strengthen and enrich itself is accurate enough (self-interest being, contra Hegel, a permanent feature of human nature). But it doesn’t explain why this corrupt arrangement enjoys so much support from many Americans who are not actually part of the ruling class, yet see themselves as culturally and psychologically aligned with it. 

Various policies pursued by the Left — such as inflation, rising crime, and mass immigration — don’t, in any evident way, benefit the upper-middle-class whites who still make up a large segment of the Democrats’ voter and donor base. If, however, we see the rational state and the rule of experts as an ideological conceit shared by all the “enlightened” members of society, we understand why so many college-educated Americans are eager to signal their solidarity with the knowledge class. 

Let me conclude by expressing my hearty agreement with Lyons’s closing recommendation: “To fully reclaim our true sovereignty — and our democratic liberty — we thus have no choice but to first recover our soul, and with it our courage and our humanity.” 

My only caveat would be to remind readers that, especially in the case of courageous combat, thinking must precede action. We need to become more aware of how deeply the ideology of historical progress and scientific rationality has seeped into our unconscious opinions. This applies, in its own way, to the Right as much as the Left. How exactly we can overcome these deeply rooted errors and recover our intellectual freedom, to make possible the recovery of our political freedom, must be the subject of another essay. 

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