#matthew crawford

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—Matthew Crawford, “Covid Was Liberalism’s Endgame”

If I may reassert my old theme: to achieve this goal we will have to restore the aesthetic education that co-evolved with liberalism to prevent its decay into the Hobbesian reduction Arendt saw at the origin of totalitarianism. 

This education tends to reinforce both through its content—works of the imagination—and its form—exploring the plurality of interpretation these works provoke—an anthropology for which the human being has flexible imaginative sovereignty over the social rather than being its ward or toy. 

And while we’re familiar with conservative challenges to such a curriculum, the more novel threat has come from today’s illiberal left-liberalism. For these partisans, texts without transparency are elitist, while pluralism is the alibi of the malefactor, even the fascist. So the only appropriate material for instruction, they conclude, is didactic children’s literature. 

This superficially surprising development is rooted in the natural or structural totalitarianism of the intellectual class going back to Plato, generally a left-wing phenomenon in the modern era. But we should recall that the leftist-Platonist Shelley replaced the philosopher-king with the poet-legislator to supplant a ruler with a representative and an issuer of authoritative images with a provider of open-ended ones. 

To whatever extent we can read our way out of the present dilemma in which liberalism has become total rule by the expert class, we will need to read more than the philosophers. For an image to meditate on, here’s the banner I put on the first page of my Brit Lit II syllabus over a decade ago, the first year I decided contemporary syllabi needed illustrations:

Reno Gold