Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?

Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities

Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is:

R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “strong Gods” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.

However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.

In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.

On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them.

It’s worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp