Against Strong Gods
Historical goldfishishness is letting us drift to the false security of a closed society.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our new series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we’ll feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
Do you have a book that really shaped you, that you read and you got to the end and you thought, yeah this is what I think? For a lot of people, that book is scripture, and the white light goes off with, say, lots of hands in the air in the pews next to them, but, for me, I suppose, that book was Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. I was in some undergraduate library, really struggling with all the other so-called great thinkers, the Kants and Hegels and Platos and the other megalomaniacs of metaphysics, and got to Popper’s more modest, more delicate political vision, and—in a very low-key, Popperian way—figured that that was pretty much my worldview.
The key idea of Popper’s, as I understood it, was “pluralism,” and this seemed to cut its way through the stale debate club arguments about relativism versus absolute truths. The point was that it isn’t as if there is only one truth, just as there isn’t one way of tying a tie, but that the ways of tying ties aren’t infinite either—that there may be a series of different systems that are each true, or, maybe better to say, workable. The task of political philosophy then becomes not about looking for truth—there will always be different contenders for that—but about triangulating and triaging between the different viable systems that present themselves within a given society. The society in its architecture leaves itself open to differing influences, which settle themselves in the marketplace of ideas, and then are implemented or discarded through a flexible, endlessly self-questioning process. The culmination of this process is the “open society,” which Popper calls “a civilization which might perhaps be described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom, a civilization which is still in its infancy … and which sets free the critical powers of man.”
Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945 and he had a very sharp sense of what he was arguing against. The post-World War I world had allowed itself to drift into a set of competing certainties. In the logic of the ‘30s, you were either for fascism or for communism. Both, in Popper’s view, participated in the same historicist view of history—and both were, for that reason alone, utterly repugnant. Between that Scylla and Charybdis, a very narrow path had been found, above all in wartime England and the United States, where an open, pluralist society had not chosen one determinative ideology or another—the democratic process continued even with the war; the Britons somehow managed to oust their own wartime leader at the very moment of his triumph—but both had shown an impressive ability to be muscular when the moment called for it, to produce their own war machines that had, in the final analysis, outperformed Hitler’s.
All of this to me, then, became the foundation of my political worldview—the flexible-yet-strong liberal state that was rooted in open markets, the open exchange of ideas, and, at the core of cores, in an epistemic humility: a willingness to hear from anybody and to do what worked.
If any more proof were needed of the merits of that approach, it seemed to be supplied by the outcome of the Cold War, where—like from the back of some economics textbook—the centralized, planned economy of the USSR showed itself to be just as inefficient as it was repressive, and the open market won World War III without a shot being fired.
So with the theorems of Popperism so clearly established, imagine my surprise to spend my life watching Popper’s worldview lose on one front after another. After ten years of enthusiastic toasts to international friendship, the Russians kicked the liberal reformers back to where they’d come from and introduced a strange brew of a managed economy and increasingly-closed state without having to force anybody to learn the words to The Internationale. The Chinese stopped Popperism in its tracks by massacring anybody in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and then instituting a new type of managed economy and making nary a concession to human rights. One country after another—Venezuela, Hungary, El Salvador, arguably India—has made its journey into the illiberal fold, usually without even bothering to change the forms of democracy. The United States—with the National Guard on city streets and comedians booted off the airwaves and immigrants rounded up by masked cops on their way to court dates and tariffs coming down any day now—is apparently well on its way to joining the new trend. And last week, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling Israel a “super-Sparta,” claimed that it was also essentially an “autarkic” state and would have to be responsible for its own arms manufacturing and outside the ambit of the international community.
But what’s so bizarre and bewildering about this turn of events is that it’s very far from clear what the new order even is. The term “illiberalism,” which is what’s used most to describe this sensibility, is almost perfectly unhelpful, since it defines itself only in contrast to philosophical liberalism. “Illiberalism” sounds like a negation, like it’s just filling in the blank spaces of liberalism, while it seems time to acknowledge—with this new ideology ascendant everywhere—that it represents a distinct worldview. What I would propose instead of “illiberalism” is “the closed society.” And—in true Popperite fashion—we can view the Closed Society with respect, on its own terms, not as some kind of back-of-the-class jeering at liberalism (even if it often seems to be that) but as a philosophy of statecraft that also, in its own way, works.
So what would we say are the components of the Closed Society? (This list of course comes with the caveat that not all closed societies share equally in all the traits or beliefs below, but—taken together—we can see the outlines of a philosophy based in a certain conception of psychology and statecraft.)
1. A sense of unity according to a conception of the common good. “Communities should have one thing that is common and the same for all members, whether they share in it equally or unequally,” wrote Aristotle in a definition that is unlikely to be bested.
2. A common good built around rock-hewn similarities of constitution or worldview or ethnicity. “Blood and soil” is the traditional way of looking at this (the term, by the way, is usually attributed to Oswald Spengler). That conception was a bit discredited by, like, the Holocaust and the murder of 50 million people in World War II through ultra-nationalist sensibilities, but a different, more palatable version of it has returned recently. The theologian R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, calls his vision of shared affinity the “strong gods”—“the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”
3. A view of a society as a collective that, in the end, needs to be led. There is a pronounced tendency within the Closed Society to adopt metaphors of the natural world or the family and to take the hierarchies that seem so natural there as a necessity of organization. In the framework of the “strong gods,” the process of arriving at any kind of a decision or policy is far less important than the fact that a decision is arrived at and firmly implemented.
4. A view of human psychology as being fixed and immutable. The Closed Society has a way of, for instance, seeing gender differences as absolute and inclines to the view that the deepest truths of human relations have been worked out in cultural traditions, and, usually, were settled a long time ago.
5. A pronounced tendency to close themselves off. “Language, borders, and culture” is the long-time slogan of the conservative radio host Michael Savage, who—probably more than anybody else—articulated the ideology that was then implemented by Trump. Any society that has taken on the logic of the common good tends to draw a sharp line against anything or anyone that falls outside that common good. All the adherents of the Closed Society itemized above have at some point or other pursued policies aimed at closing borders, ostracizing immigrants, homogenizing language and behavior, diminishing dissent, and—in the latest trend, adopted by Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, by Trump with the tariff talk, and most recently by Israel in Netanyahu’s statement—turning towards self-sufficient, autarkic economies. The reason for that is fairly obvious. If you have a belief in a shared common good, built on insuperable commonalities of worldview, if not blood, and a fixed in-group and out-group, you are inevitably going to reach a psychological place where, even in matters of trade, you prefer only to deal with people who share the common trait that you do.
From the way I’m writing about this, it’s probably more than clear how I feel about this set of views, but let’s give the devil his due and admit that they represent a coherent, viable understanding of statecraft. Clearly, different societies may have different traits from the above list at different times, but we are dealing with polarities here, and the Closed Society wraps itself above all around a particular conception of human nature and of how societies form. The underlying premise—if you’ve seen the way Putin smirks in one of his press conferences, that summarizes it better than anything else really can—is that this simply is the way the world works and how human psychology is constituted. It’s tribalism as the basic unit of social organization; and then it’s “follow the leader” all the way down.
As I was putting together the idea for this piece, I briefly entertained the possibility that I had come up with a critical idea in political philosophy—the “closed society” not as a pejorative term but as an apt description of a whole political philosophy and worldview. But The Google set me straight. It turns out the terminology of the “open society” and “closed society” comes originally from Henri Bergson (as a hot tip: if you come across some idea and you can’t figure out where it originated, it usually turns out to be Henri Bergson) and his surprisingly neglected 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Bergson held that the “open society” and the “closed society” are antimonies, polar opposite ways of conceiving of statecraft. For Bergson, the “closed society” corresponds roughly to childhood. Its “essential characteristic is … to include at any moment a certain number of individuals and to exclude others.” What it does, on the level of psychology, is to identify human beings entirely with their social role. “The closed society is that whose members hold together, caring nothing for the rest of humanity, on the alert for attack or defense, bound, in fact to a perpetual readiness for battle.” He argues that this is the natural state: “man was made for this society as the ant was for the ant-heap.”
The Closed Society is contrasted with the Open Society, which is understood to be universalist, humanistic, with an individual moving beyond their immediate tribe to embrace their consciousness as part of humanity as a whole—“the open society is the society which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.” The nearest available Freudian would pop up at this moment to claim that the shift to the “open society” is analogous to the psychological “separation,” to the fraught moment of leaving one’s parents behind and stepping out, alone, into a wider world. Bergson, interestingly, attaches a Christian reading to the notion of the Open Society and sees the conceptual turn that accompanies the advent of Jesus Christ as generating a new universalism: “The dynamic religion which thus springs into being is the very opposite of the static religion born of the myth-making function, the same way as the open society is the opposite of the closed society,” he writes. Popper was uncomfortable with what he viewed as Bergson’s “Hegelianism” and, in his own adaptation of the “open society,” substituted for that unfolding, “dynamic religion” a more modest view of “fallibility” that placed the “open society” in line with the scientific method as opposed to some sort of Hegelian Weltgeist. But the basic antimony of the open versus closed society was left unchanged.
Our debates on these questions long seemed to be settled on V-E/V-J Day, if not by the tearing-down of the Berlin Wall—the great twentieth century-long A/B test of autocracy v. Open Society seemed to demonstrate, if nothing else, the rigidity and slowness to adapt of the Closed Society—but recently this topic has come up for renewed discussion. And I find myself grateful to Reno for outlining in strikingly clear form the views that I find most abhorrent. Taking issue directly with Popper, Reno, in his Return of the Strong Gods, writes:
We must stop acting as if it were 1945. The postwar census is decadent. It is high time that we recognize our intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom from the traumas that so affected our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth.
For Reno, the threat is not totalitarianism but weakness—power so diffused within a culture that it finds itself incapable of strength of purpose. “The postwar era saw a shift in our metaphysical dreams to openness and a lightness of being in response to the decades of catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century,” he writes. “In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening, who open things up.”
In Reno’s worldview, then, the solution becomes putting all chips on a shared common good. As Reno writes, “I’d like to see a widespread revival of Christianity in the West,” but since even he seems to recognize that the Church Militant is a slightly lost cause, he’s happy to settle on nationalism or populism. “When seventy thousand football fans rise for the national anthem, their reverence is repaid with pride—pride in their country,” he writes, with the soundtrack all but swelling off the page.
What Reno of course leaves unanswered is what happens to the people who don’t like football, or large crowds, or anthems—are they then excluded from the body politic that’s based on the lusty affirmation of shared affinity? The answer probably is yes. He also leaves unanswered whether at some point football might more profitably be swept out for, say, torchlight processionals. And that’s not being glib. Reno explicitly claims that the thing to do is to forget all about World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, and the Gulag as the hang-ups of the 20th century and not our problem. Which is one of the more jaw-dropping things I’ve ever read—how is this goldfishishness meant to pass for wisdom? How is it possible for an intelligent, thoughtful person to be as short-sighted as this?
The reality is that very little has changed since 1945. We still have states with massive nuclear arsenals pointed at one another. Large states are still capable of commanding fervent obedience and engaging in world-convulsing, militaristic adventures—as Russia more than demonstrated in Ukraine. And, as Popper well knew, the dynamics of openness and closedness weren’t related only to some unfortunate turn of events in the middle of the 20th century: they were an eternal struggle of antimonies. The Closed Society, with its celebration of likeness, had a pronounced tendency towards a tyranny of the majority—a problem that Reno doesn’t come close to considering—and the massacres of ethnic minorities in Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, Sudan, etc., capably show, if proof were needed, that the tyrannies of ethnic majorities weren’t somehow a quirk of the mid-20th century.
Like a blast of fetid air, Reno helps to remind those of us who believe in pluralism and the Open Society exactly what we are against. The basic issue at the moment is that 1945—and also, really, 1989—are long enough ago that people have allowed themselves to forget their lessons. Mass populations with daddy issues are willing to place their trust in strongmen. Identities based on likeness are easier to organize around than identities based on the somewhat abstruse arguments of pluralism. And everything seems good for a while—national anthems are sung, Putin looks pretty striking with his shirt off on TV, the strong gods are pleased with their sacrifices. But the thing about strong gods is that—as our forefathers learned and we seem to have forgotten—their appetite for sacrifices really is immense and, in the end, insatiable. Russians, in Putin’s era, have learned this to their peril in the “meatgrinder” of Ukraine; and the grown-up children playing around with “post-liberalism” on the American right are about to learn the same thing.
This is not, however, to say that the “open society” will stand ascendent, as it briefly seemed to at the end of World War II and then again at the end of the Cold War. A conclusion like that would be antithetical to the subtle spirit of the Open Society. It is more that the Closed Society and the Open Society are eternal antimonies. In Bergson’s metaphor, the two are like childhood and adulthood, entirely different orientations towards the world. Each can give the other the respect of recognizing that they are both coherent, viable political entities—even as, at the same time, all of us have a choice to make between the political systems, just as all of us have a choice about whether we want to remain children forever or one day grow up.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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I absolutely agree that we need an open pluralistic society where divergent, intellectually diverse views and politics are not merely tolerated but seen as essential. Robust even heated debate over ideas is essential to making the best decisions- as a society, through the messy process of politics, elections, legislation.
So, although a registered democrat, I voted for Trump in 2024. I was shocked and red pilled by the covid authoritarian paradigm. A virus doesn't cancel the bill of rights and democratic debate. I saw credentialed scientists, like Jay Bhattacharya, censored on social media when they criticized the lockdowns and school closures. The government mandated a brand new mrna vaccine platform with NO Long term safety studies. But discussion of this was taboo in all left or center left media. Also taboo is questioning the transgender ideology as it pertains to children.
We know from the case Murty vs Biden that the Biden admin pressuring social media companies to censor speech criticizing their covid policies.
Fast forward. Now I am very disappointed that the Trump team is censoring both Pro Palestine speech and anyone who makes mean comments about Charlie Kirk. However, I do see a lot of MAGA people and Republicans criticizing and pushing back. Whereas with the Democrats I didnt see any tolerance for divergent views. Remember when Seth Moulton said he didnt want his daughters playing high school sports against biological men? Has ONE democrat said anything critical of the Biden admin vaccine mandates? Or of gender surgeries on children?