The politics of plenitude

Reason, August-Sept, 1998 by Grant McCracken

The right acts as if the many groups thrown off by plenitude harbor an anarchic tendency, that people have become gays, feminists, or Deadheads in order to escape morality. This is not the logic of plenitude. These people have reinvented themselves merely to escape a morality, not all morality. New communities set to work immediately in the creation of new moralities. Chaos does not ensue; convention, even orthodoxy, returns. Liminality is the slingshot that allows new groups to free themselves from the gravitational field of the old moralities they must escape. But liminality is almost never the condition that prevails once this liberation has been accomplished.

The right is inclined these days to declare itself the true friend of tradition, and to declare tradition the path to civic virtue and public morality. It presents itself as champion of practices and values tested by time. But the truth of the matter is that plenitude is a Western value and indeed the very author of many of the traditions now being claimed by the right. The Protestant traditions the right holds so clear come out of the spirit of plenitude that created first a church distinct from Rome and then successive, ever more radical versions of Protestantism. Plenitude was there in the beginning. A return to tradition will not make it go away. It is tradition.

But there is perhaps a more pressing and personal reason for the right to rethink its attitude towards plenitude. It is that every member of the right must live in the world that plenitude has created for them. They must endure families that change shape and form. They must endure a workplace that is constantly reinventing itself. They must somehow manage their own lives as notions of gender change continually, as notions of the self come and go. The inhabitants of the right must live in the world that plenitude has wrought.

What the right needs is what we all need - the ability to shift perspectives, honor differences, embrace the generative powers of plenitude. For these generative powers cannot be diminished. They will continue to fill up the world, to work and rework the body politic so that it becomes a web of endless possibilities. New groups, entertaining new assumptions, creating new values, refusing all exclusions - these are inevitable. We need the intellectual and moral flexibility to live in such a world. There is no retreat to a single point of view. There is only movement forward into a world with many points of view.

The left has made a great deal of its sensitivity on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, diversity, and multiculturalism - a sensitivity, it typically claims, the right cannot imagine. In fact, the left has misapprehended and mismanaged these issues almost as consistently as the right - with consequences every bit as grave.

The left has not always claimed a sensitivity on this score. Plenitude was regarded by some as a barrier the revolution would have to sweep away. In the words of the English anthropologist Ernest Gellner (recently deceased), "[T]he Marxists ... thought universal and liberated man would emerge in the more tragic melting-pot of an impoverished proletariat, stripped by alienation of all specific attributes, and discovering, and implementing, true humanity through this historically imposed social nakedness."