Centrally Planning the Culture

I have always been intrigued by the ways some social conservatives have such clear-eyed understanding of the pitfalls of a centrally planned economy and yet such arrogant, unthinking confidence in their own efforts to centrally plan the culture.

“From each according to his ability to each according to his need.”

This was my earliest understanding of socialism. Even as a child, I rebelled. In the past I have said I was born a libertarian and would die one. This remains true. But with the wisdom of adulthood comes deeper perspective. At a level I didn’t understand then and couldn’t have articulated, but in a profound and important way already knew to be true, the world and I were going to have fundamental disagreements about the nature of my needs and abilities and almost certainly my wants.

I still feel this way. Perhaps we could centrally plan such an economic system. But at what cost if we cannot centrally plan human flourishing? Any system that categorically permits severance of fruits of labor from the fruits of soul seems self-evidently immoral to me. I’m not willing to sacrifice the people whose flourishing demands they do something less than what provides the most benefit to society.

Later I learned more technical definitions about common ownership/regulation of the means of production. To be honest, this remained my working definition until the age of social media. Then I began to understand that people use the word to refer to so many different concepts it is all but useless in having a meaningful exchange of ideas. Some people basically mean anything that redistributes wealth in the direction of the working class. Others mean something like a European-style social democracy with broad safety nets and less crony capitalism.

Cede the semantics whenever possible, folks.

What’s important here is that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” is a fair encapsulation of how the more authoritarian strains of social conservatives would like to conduct the culture—with themselves as central planners thereof. This at its essence is the foundation of the culture war.

It’s what was behind the histrionics over “happy holidays”. Emergence of inclusive greetings meant they’d lost control. They were no longer the central planners of culture. To them it felt then and now like no one is running the show and everyone is doing it wrong.

Well, that’s capitalism, baby. Laissez-faire culture participants spewing inclusive holiday greetings into the marketplace of ideas, completely unregulated and no one to stop them.

Think of them as Howard Roark.

That feeling of having lost their positions as central planners of the culture is also what’s behind the recent Don’t Say Gay laws. They’ve lost the military and retreated to the schools. If LGBTQ+ plus people can exist openly and without public censure, including and especially in schools, it becomes normalized. Then they have to explain it to their kids. They have to teach their kids to be polite about ‘those people’. Letting their kids see ‘those people’ existing and teaching their kids they must be as polite to ‘those people’ because ‘those people’ are as culturally valid as anyone else plants ideas in their kids’ heads. They might think it’s okay to be ‘those people’.

That’s no way to run a centrally planned culture.

In a centrally planned culture, wise elders (often faith leaders, almost always men and usually white men) figure out (often from reverse-engineered interpretations of scriptures) how each person can best serve the goals (proscribed, again, by the wise leaders, again based on the goals they’ve unilaterally derived from subjective interpretation of scripture) of the community. In return for going along, everyone else is promised a fair place in the culture and protection from the dangers of man and nature. One need only survey the sex scandals in faith communities across denominations to see how the promised protection functions in practice.

I believe many of these people truly, truly believe they have the best interests of all at heart. They understand some people are going to have to be non-conformers. Some people are just too gay/trans/whatever to make conformance work. These well-intenders would insist they don’t actually want anyone to be so miserable they die from suicide.

They just don’t want to put ideas in their own kids’ heads,

They want to strongly encourage new generations away from such choices. They want those who can’t refrain to remain in the closet, or at least quietly away from the public eye. On the few and far between occasions when public acknowledgement can’t be avoided, they want it to be whispered about disapprovingly, explained to children in somber, concerned tones. That is how best these non-conformers can serve the good of the whole taking their own needs into account, according to the would-be planners.

The entire reason some branches of the right increasingly embrace authoritarianism is that they see no remaining possibility to regain their roles as central planners of the culture without some use of government power.

My question for them is how they can see so clearly the spiritual harm of economic socialism (as they understand it) and remain so blithely in denial about the spiritual harm of a centrally planned culture. Is it any less evil because it is a communism of the spirit and the culture instead of the economy?

We keep talking about things-adjacent instead of the thing itself. I don’t believe we really have deep-seated differences of opinion about whether good parents should have some involvement in their kids’ curriculum. That’s thing-adjacent. The thing itself is a deep, existential argument about the relationship of individuals to society, the trade-offs between individualism and community, how much non-conformance the culture should tolerate, how to accommodate cultural minorities, etc.

We should ask the questions on these terms, place debate in this framework. If you know we can’t centrally plan peoples’ jobs, why do you think we should attempt to centrally plan their genders or their lovers or what type of life they would find most fulfilling?