A Conversation with The Upheaval’s N. S. Lyons (Part 1 of 2)

At his great Substack newsletter, The Upheaval, and elsewhere, the pseudonymous N. S. Lyons’ wide-ranging, historically informed, and insightful writing examines that which has given rise to three simultaneous revolutions affecting all of our lives—along with their consequences. They are the rise of China, the ideological revolution roiling the Western world, and the technological advances aggravating each of the first two.

In a City Journal article earlier this year, for example, Lyons writes,

America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress.” Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

That article caught our Giving Review eye for its implications about Big Philanthropy, as did Lyons’ earlier, April speech to the National Conservatism conference in Brussels about the idea of a “parallel polis.” As an example of a parallel polis, he cited Hungary’s Civic Circles movement—which “focused on establishing community organizations across the nation to bring people together in grassroots civic action, volunteer work, and education in practical self-governance,” as he described it. Around the world, movements like these have stood in opposition—first by their mere existence, but also by their activities—to top-down, centralized bureaucracies that exercise power and authority over people, who properly resent and act against it.

Our fellow co-editor Bill Schambra recognized the concept as one put into practice by the grantmaking of the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, on the program staff of which we all used to work. Schambra wondered whether there might already be something of a parallel polis in America—one worthy of more support from conservative philanthropy, in the form of grants to local, neighborhood-based, grassroots organizations essentially doing the same thing as the Civic Circles groups.

At the subsequent National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., in July, Lyons and Schambra both participated in a panel about the idea and its implications.

Lyons was kind enough to join the two us for a recorded conversation last month. The just less than 20-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. In the first part, we talk about The Upheaval, Gnosticism, progressive managerialism, the Ford Foundation, philanthropy’s role in the ideological revolution, and what could perhaps be done about it.

“The dominant ideology of our time, which could be simply described as this managerial progressivism, has this approach to the world that attempts to, let’s say, create heaven on Earth here, in the here and now,” Lyons tells us.

It’s Utopian and it believes that we can reconstitute matter on Earth in order to make everyone happy and fulfilled and so on. This is very similar to these ancient ideas, these heresies of the Christian church, about Gnosticism—which is this idea that the world is evil, that matter is evil, only the spirit is good. … Humans are imprisoned in [the world]. The practical implication is that you should be working to build heaven on Earth.

In discussions about philanthropy, according to Lyons—while he cautions against overstating the historical analogy— “when we talk about something like the Ford foundation and their self-adopted mission, I think you can actually relate it to those kind of yearnings for a for building a Utopia that we see also in these other movements of the past that have tried to do that.”

What Ford and “other big foundations represent is a managerial worldview,” he continues. “The managerial worldview is fundamentally that everything can and should be managed—like, everything. So, we see in recent years, just to take one example, the pandemic. The dominant idea was that we need to manage everything in society to try to solve this problem.

“People at the foundations,” Lyons says, “like the Ford Foundation—for a long time now, at least from the ‘60s—really believe … a better world is possible and that they are the ones who can do this, the elect, who will impose their order on the rest of the world.” He notes that “there’s a temptation, even when you have a conservative foundation, for that foundation to adopt a managerial approach, which is very easy because their whole existence is to accomplish goals.”

Lyons sees some “lines of effort” against philanthropic progressive managerialism. “The first is to use state power to hold these organizations accountable, because what we’re talking about when we talk about foundations, these big left-wing foundations, is that they are transmuting oligarchic money into left-wing policy as a way to avoid democratic accountability.”

He says

it would be perfectly reasonable, if conservatives were to take power, in a sustained way to use the power of the state to bring these foundations to heel. … The laws for 501(c)(3) nonprofits are intended … if I’m getting this right, for only for charitable, religious, and educational purposes. They’re explicitly banned from political activity, and yet there’s so many nonprofits in the United States and the foundations that fund these nonprofits that basically carry out very political activity. I think in many cases, the government should look at stripping those nonprofits of their untaxed status or at least threatening to do so.

Another project would be “more journalistic—just better documenting and exposing to the American people exactly what these foundations are doing,” according to Lyons. “There are some organizations doing that, but they’re pretty limited, and very few journalists are tackling” the issues necessary to “hold these foundations more accountable” and “let the people know what what’s happening”

In the conversation’s second part, he discusses the deeper, underlying concept of a parallel polis to stand against progressive managerialism, whether such polei are political, whether there might already be one or the beginning of one in America, and how conservative philanthropy could and should support one.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on September 3, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-the-upheavals-n-s-lyons-part-1-of-2/