Different starting points, foreign nations

The recent debate about the ordo amoris once again made clear that moderns conceive the world very differently to traditionalists. It did so particularly in reference to the relationship between the individual and the communities that the individual belongs to. It helps, I think, to try to understand why things that seem painfully destructive to those of us in the traditionalist camp can make sense to a modern.

A starting point is to consider the modern anthropology that made its appearance in the seventeenth century. It is described by James R. Wood as follows:

In this state of nature, society does not yet exist; rather, the basic unit out of which society is constructed is the detached, pre-social individual, shorn of all prior contexts, natural or social. These abstract, autonomous individuals emerge as naked wills, auto-originating and constructing everything around them driven by rational self-interest. Relations are not there from the outset, and they are entered into only voluntarily.

What does seeing things this way lead to? First, it means that the individual is prior to his or her social relationships. Therefore, these relationships do not help to constitute the self. The individual is already in place, is already self-constituted. Second, whatever social bodies do form are constructed rather than being natural or divinely appointed. Third, they are constructed for utilitarian purposes, as vehicles through which individuals can better pursue their individual interests or desires. 

An Australian liberal politician, George Brandis, gave voice to this understanding of the individual and society in 1984:

It is the distinctive claim of liberalism that the individual person is the central unit of society and is therefore prior to and of greater significance than the social structures through which he pursues his ends.

Note that social bodies here are described as structures; that the individual is prior to these structures and so is not constituted by them; and that the purpose of the structures is the pursuit of our own individual ends.

George Brandis

I'd like you to imagine now that you are someone with this kind of mindset. Consider how this would affect your understanding of nation. It would not matter much to you if there were, for instance, decades of open borders and rapid demographic change. You would feel little sense of loss. It might hardly register at all. After all, your membership of a nation would not constitute part of your identity, as you are self-constituted. All that you are precedes any membership of a nation. And the nation for you would only be a structure through which you pursue your own individual goals. It would not have deeper emotional resonances. As long as the structure is operating to allow you to pursue these goals, then all is well. 

And there's a further aspect to all of this. Let's say you're a modern who has this mindset. You might not want to think of yourself as a selfish individualist. So you would adopt certain "pro-social" stances, to show your more idealistic commitments to society. What might they be? Well, on the left it often takes the form of advocating for the rights of the marginalised and dispossessed. What this means is that instead of just having the attitude that you yourself will pursue your own ends or desires via the social structures you live within, that you wish for others who are somehow excluded from this to be able to do the same. Everyone can join the party. And, again, if this means years of demographic change, it won't seem a difficulty to you, it won't register as an issue, because the nation is only a structure through which people pursue individual ends. There will not be significant change.

The difference between the traditional and modern mindset comes out in another way. If I as a traditionalist see myself as constituted, in part, by being a member of a family and a nation, then I will see them positively as allowing me to fulfil my ends and to more fully express who I am. Moderns however see themselves as being self-constituted. Therefore, the idea that we are formed within and grow and develop within these social bodies will provoke the negative response that this lowers the standing and status of the individual (that it makes the individual "derivative" in a negative sense) and that it limits an individual path of development.

You can see the flipping from the traditional mindset to the modern one in the following quote from a Girton College student. In 1869 Girton College was established as the first women's college at Cambridge University. In 1889, one of its young female students explained the new mindset she developed at the college this way:

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family ... One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

She puts the modern view in clear terms. There is no positive take here on having been formed by and grown up within a family. This makes someone, in her words, an "excrescence" - a pejorative way to describe something that grows out of something else. An excrescence is just a superfluous or abnormal outgrowth. She does not want to see herself as being constituted in part by her membership of a family. Instead, she is to develop solo, as "an individual and independent unit". She has fully modernised.

Girton College, now coeducational

Similarly, George Brandis chose to characterise the two philosophies he thought of as rivals to liberalism this way:

The conservative sees society as a naturally ordered, harmonious hierarchy; while in the eyes of the socialist, the basic structures of society are irreconcilably hostile classes...Both agree that individual persons are but incidents of larger entities

He uses the word "incidents". For Brandis, if the individual is not prior to the structures of a society, he or she is merely a minor or subsidiary outcome of that larger entity. It is a kind of inversion of the traditional view, which held that the entities that gave us our existence (that we are positively derived from) were to be justly honoured. Brandis casts this the other way: that an individual cannot be constituted by these entities because that would make us derivative and therefore lesser.

And so it is not possible to leave the defence of nation, as traditionally understood, to those with the modern view. To put this another way, we have to understand that when a modern uses the word "nation" it has a very different meaning to what we would understand. And this difference goes back all the way to the anthropology that was developed in the seventeenth century.

Nor should we assume that everyone understands our own approach. We need to be able to make the contrast between our understanding and that of the moderns. We can argue, in our attempt to do this, that social bodies are coterminous with our existence as humans, that they have always been, in some form, a part of human existence, and are in this sense natural rather than being later "constructs". We were social creatures from the beginning. 

We are not prior to these bodies, and self-constituted, but our self-identity, our sense of belonging, and our deeper social commitments are partly formed through our membership of these communities. We are members of these bodies in a profound way, such that maintaining their integrity matters deeply to us. 

Social bodies often have a familial character. Therefore, membership of any particular social body cannot be universal. Nor are they to be defined by the common to all purpose of being vehicles for the pursuit of individual self-interest. Extending or equalising the right to participate in this pursuit is therefore not the right approach to being pro-social.

We should act for the common good of the particular family or nation that we are members of through the close bonds of a shared history, culture, ancestry and language. We can do this whilst still recognising a common humanity, and contributing to this good, including the exercise of hospitality and charity to others who are not members of our own communities.

One significant reason for acting for the common good of our own family and nation is that because we are partly constituted by these social bodies, we must uphold them in order to remain integrated in who we are. We lose an aspect of who we are, and the ability to grow to full spiritual and emotional maturity, if we become atomised and rootless. In this sense, a living soul will want to exist as part of a loving family and a closely knit national community - a community that allows a person to feel a connectedness to people and place, to a history and culture, and to generations across time. 

Being more than whatever

Jacinta Allan is currently the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria. She was asked by a journalist about Donald Trump's executive order declaring that only two genders would be recognised, male and female. 

Her response included the following:

Every Victorian should have the right to practise their faith, whatever that faith may be...and to love who they love and to be who they are....we've got to focus on supporting people to be who they are, to love who they want to love, and to practise their faith, whatever their faith may be.

 

Jacinta Allan is a Labor politician, and therefore a social democrat. Nonetheless, what she is saying here is foundational to a liberalism that goes back hundreds of years. It is the type of thinking that is shared by all kinds of liberals, both of the right and the left. It is a deeply flawed way of looking at things.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that had no clear winner. This led ultimately to a focus on religious tolerance, but it also helped to usher in a new metaphysics, devised by men like Thomas Hobbes.

In this metaphysics, there are only individual desires and aversions. Something becomes the good because we desire it, evil because we are averse to it. Each one of us is determined differently, and so we have different subjective goods that are known only to ourselves. We are self-interested in the pursuit of our own individual goods. Freedom is not so much freedom of will to choose between different goods, but a freedom of will to pursue, without external constraint, the particular subjective good determined for us. The good exists at the individual level: we only contract to form associations and governments so that our peaceful and secure individual existence might be upheld. 

Once you adopt this metaphysics, certain things follow. For instance, there is no longer an "essence" to different types of creatures. There is, in other words, no longer a certain quality given to us as part of our created nature that we might develop along and try to perfect. Nor is there a "telos" or a "final cause" - there are no common ends or purposes to life that we have been created for. Nor do we need to cooperate with others to fulfil aspects of our own nature: we do not need to contribute to a common good in order to realise our own individual good. There is only our own individual good upheld via individual rights or via our contract with the state.

So when Jacinta Allan says that we have a right to "be who we are", she is adopting the mental framework of the Hobbesian metaphysics. We are supposed to assume, in accepting her comment, that there are no qualitative differences in what we might be. One thing is as good as another. Nothing is more, nothing is less. Nothing is higher, nothing is lower. Nothing is more meaningful, nothings is less meaningful. We are just individually determined to be....whatever. And who can say what we are? Well, it is known only to ourselves, so my declaration that "I am x" settles the matter.

There is a passage from St Paul that I think is relevant here. He wrote "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15). Paul attributed this inability to do what he really wanted to do to the presence within him of sin. It is a recognition that it is easy for the human personality to be disordered by uncontrolled desires or impulses - by our vices - so that we do not really live up to being or doing what we know we really should do or be. 

So it is glib to say that people should just be who they are. This does not recognise that what we are in practice can be disordered by our own inability to be virtuous and to live up to the standard of the good, or even just to standards that we set for ourselves. And there is a danger that, in being told to be "who we are", we collapse into our own disordered self and begin to identify with our own vices.

Nor is it the case that "who we are" is something arbitrary and unknowable to others. We have a created nature as men and women which gives us what used to be called a "quiddity" - qualities that make us distinct in our being, an inherent nature. These are now usually termed essences. As I mentioned earlier, modern metaphysics tends to deny the existence of these essences. The classic articulation of this is from Judith Butler, who denied that the masculine or the feminine were real qualities within male and female nature:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

And yet we do, in our everyday lives, recognise a feminine quality in women and a masculine quality in men. And we do want to admire feminine qualities in women and masculine qualities in men: in fact, when we are young and romantically minded we are likely to idealise and love the more attractive expressions of these qualities, and actively seek them out in a spouse. They are real to us in a way that matters, and they can even inspire in us a sense of a transcendent good that ennobles human life.

It is true that such essences are likely to be expressed a little differently according to our individual personalities. But they are not infinitely elastic. There is a limit where we might say of a woman "she is acting mannishly" or of a man "that is coming across as effeminate". There is a range, but also a point at which the quality is lost or diminished.

So if we have this given nature, one part of our telos in life is to develop it so that we might express our own potential being more fully and so that we might embody an aspect of a transcendent good in who we are. 

Who we are and what we do might also be guided by our understanding of objective moral goods. If there are standards of what is morally right or wrong, then our actions and how we identify ourselves should ideally conform to these. A Hobbesian mindset is blind to this because it rests upon the idea that there are only subjective goods, so that when we desire a thing, that thing then becomes the good. So someone with a Hobbesian mindset can blandly assert that a person should just be whatever it is that they happen to be at a particular moment in time, but someone with a sense of objective moral goods would want that person to continue to develop toward a better self that is more in line with moral goods - in part, because this is how we grow to be more fully ourselves.

We might also aim in a positive way toward a certain understanding of purity. By this I do not mean abstaining from any sexual experience. What I am referring to is that as well as developing along the givens of our nature, so that we more fully express our higher potential, that we also have the task of maintaining intact aspects of our original form. The point here is to retain our integrity in what we choose to be or to do, rather than damaging or degrading or making something lower of ourselves. It can sometimes be difficult to get back what we have lost. Again, people need encouragement in this task, rather than the false reassurance that they should just be whatever. 

Finally, Jacinta Allan's approach also fails because it does not recognise that many of the more important things we want to be or to do can only be achieved at a supra-individual level. I might want to be a loving husband, respected within my family. I cannot achieve that alone at a purely individual level. I need a quality wife for this to be realised, and my chances of meeting such a woman will depend, in part, on what happens within the culture, which is itself the product of the choices of many thousands of individuals. 

The message of just be whatever is not going to help me much here. If we all just follow our own individual desires, seeking our own subjective goods, without much concern for our significant social roles, or our impact on the wider society, or of what is required of us to uphold our role in creating a good society, then we will operate within a lower trust society in which it becomes more difficult than it needs to be to realise the goods that are most important to us. 

We exist as part of larger social bodies; our well-being depends on the functioning of these bodies; part of our identity and sense of belonging derives from these bodies; and therefore it is right that we cultivate qualities that allow us to successfully and loyally discharge our duties to these bodies. We need to be more than "whatever".

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 4 - Nation & the liberal paradigm

I am still working my way through Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery (for previous posts on this work see here, here and here).

I have just read through a section on nationalism and I was struck immediately by its prescience - recent debates on social media illustrate exactly the kind of issues raised by Hazony.

Hazony begins by defining conservative politics around a defence of family and nation. We are born into these and they claim our loyalty:

a conservative political theory begins with the understanding that individuals are born into families, tribes and nations to which they are bound by mutual loyalty...Each nation and tribe possesses a unique cultural inheritance carrying forward certain traditional institutions, which can include its language, religion, laws, and the forms of its government and economic life.

From this we understand that the nation is not the same thing as the government or the state that rules over it. A nation can and often does exist without any fixed government established over it...And there are also many governments or states that rule over multiple nations...(p.90)

He leaves out common ancestry as an aspect of nation, but nonetheless his general approach here is sound. What matters to his argument is the comparison he then makes to the way that Enlightenment liberalism has approached the concept of nation:

The liberal paradigm is blind to the nation. Nothing like the nation is to be found in the premises of Enlightenment liberal political theory. In the rationalist political tracts of the Enlightenment, the term "nation" (or "people") is merely a collective name for the individuals who live under the state. On this view, the nation comes into existence with the establishment of the state and is dissolved when the state is dissolved. This is another way of saying that the nation has no real existence of its own. There are only individuals and the state that rules over them. (p.91)

I cannot emphasise this enough. Enlightenment liberals might still use the term "nation". But their philosophy changed what could be understood by this term very radically. Once the liberal philosophical underpinnings were adopted, then political thought and discussion went in a very particular direction, in which traditional nationalism no longer fitted. This is why conservatives who support a traditional nationalism need to rethink the kind of politics that has been inherited in the modern West.

Hazony goes on to develop this line of thought further:

Thus we find that instructors in political theory...avoid discussing the nation...Instead, they discuss the political world using only concepts such as the individual, freedom, equality, government, and consent, which appear in the premises of Enlightenment political theory...But such instruction is powerless to explain many of the most basic phenomena of political life. It has no resources to describe the rivalry among nations and their ceaseless quest for honor, their pursuit of internal unity and cohesion, their struggle to maintain their own language, religion and political traditions, or their insistence on the inviolability of their laws and borders. And indeed, entire generations of political and intellectual figures have been educated in such a way as to leave them blind to the importance of these things. (p.91)

Hazony then gives examples of how policy makers have been blind in practice. He begins with free trade deals with China which he criticises as follows,

This is a policy couched entirely in terms of the individual, the state, and the individual's presumptive freedom to do whatever he and his trading partners consent to do without state interference. It is blind to the nation, and to the bond of mutual loyalty that bind nations and tribes together. Indeed, to the extent that bonds of national loyalty are even mentioned in discussions of free trade, they are described as irrational "market distortions" that may cause inefficiencies.

The consequent offshoring of jobs to China and the stimulus to growth of Chinese manufacturing were a result of policy makers being "blinded by the liberal paradigm" and therefore unable to see, amongst other things, that "abandoning America's manufacturing capabilities would lead workers to regard themselves as betrayed...bursting the bonds of mutual loyalty that had made America a cohesive and internally powerful nation."

The most prescient piece of writing, however, concerns immigration. Hazony observes,

The inability to see tribe and nation as central in political affairs is reflected in debates on immigration as well. Viewed through the lens of Enlightenment liberalism, immigrants and prospective immigrants are indistinguishable from the native individuals of a given country. They are perfectly free and equal, just as the natives are. Nothing in the liberal paradigm justifies depriving them of their freedom of movement into a given country, or the freedom to compete with native individuals for employment and other resources. (p.94)

Earlier in the year all of this burst into open debate when certain figures (on the right) defended the idea that American workers should compete for American jobs against the global workforce. They argued that it would be like "DEI"  (diversity, equality and inclusion) if American workers were given preference for jobs in their own country. American workers were told they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps or perhaps adopt the lifestyle of those living overseas in order to compete against the global workforce.

To me this demonstrated a stunning absence of the mutual loyalty that nations are usually founded on. 

As an example of the debate, in the exchange below we had someone saying "I have zero interest in competing with the entire world for a job" which was met with a dismissive "Very DEI" - as if it would be an intrusion into normal hiring practices for an American employer to train and to employ American workers rather than those from overseas. 

Here is a voice in the debate that is more in line with the paradigm favoured by Hazony:

Finally, Hazony also makes a connection between the lack of support of the nation within Enlightenment liberalism and declining fertility rates. This connection seems obvious to me, but is rarely mentioned in discussion of falling birth rates.

The undermining of family life is explained in two parts by Hazony. First,

A dogmatic belief in the individual's freedom has moved liberals to destigmatize - and eventually, to actively legitimize - sexual license, narcotics, and pornography, as well as abortion, easy divorce, and out-of-marriage births, until finally the family has been broken and fertility ruined in nearly every Western country.

But there is also a connection between the loss of communal loyalties and an unwillingness to raise the next generation:

Paradigm blindness doesn't only affect policymakers and political elites. At every level of society, people no longer feel a sense of responsibility to marry and raise up a new generation of the family, tribe, and nation. Marriage and children are regarded as nothing more than one possible choice within the sphere of individual freedom....too few are left who see their nation as a valuable thing, and even fewer feel called to do their part to sustain it. (p.97)

This is a (very) abridged version of Hazony's argument. Hazony goes on in the next part of the book to do something that really does need to be done, which is to set out an alternative paradigm to the Enlightenment liberal one - but perhaps more on that later.

A mechanical universe?

Edwin Dyga has written an essay for the Observer & Review which explores the role of cinema in post-War Japan ("Cinema as Symptom and Vehicle of Social Re-engineering: A Post-War Japanese Study", Observer & Review Volume 2, Issue 1, Number 2).

Toward the end of the essay, in his concluding remarks, Dyga makes a connection between the assault on the traditional dynamic between men and women and the assault on traditional national identities. It's a connection I've made myself, but Dyga expresses it eloquently in his own way, and I thought it worth sharing.

Dyga begins the excerpt under discussion by noting "a tendency towards the mechanical view of Man and society". 

This tendency was inaugurated in the early modern period of European history. Basil Willey begins his book on The Seventeenth Century World Background by quoting part of a work by Fontenelle, published in 1686. Fontenelle has a philosopher conversing with a countess as follows:

"I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical". "So Mechanical", said I, "that I fear we shall be quickly asham'd of it"; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?"

This was a great shift in world picture from what had gone before. Dyga's essay notes an "aesthetics of dehumanised artificiality" within Japanese cinema as a modern development of this mechanical view. He argues that this is "acutely hostile to the idea that Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding of the human condition."

This is well observed. One way of putting this perhaps is that the new cosmology (of a mechanical universe) does not allow for an older anthropology (in which Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies). 

And here is the key point. Once you set man outside of these natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding, what then is there to ground a sense of who man is and what his telos - his ends or purposes - in life might be? 

For Dyga, the mechanical picture of the world "favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity".

The rejection of inherited essence is prevalent in modern thought. Here, for instance, is Judith Butler putting forward the idea that there are no essences, and that therefore gender is just a performance and a construct:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

If there is no inherited essence, then, argues Dyga, there is no particularity. This is a thought that can be drawn out, and I will do so later in this post. But, as a brief observation, it is true. In a machine like cosmos there are only parts arranged in certain ways to give certain effects - there are not "qualities" that are embedded in reality, that carry inherent meaning and that make groups of things distinctly what they are. 

Judith Butler

Dyga goes on to explain that,

The resulting decomposition of the national polity through the erasure of memory and the distortion or the pathologisation of history is no accident, because it is here that inherited essences and particularity is rooted on a macro level.

In other words, if we are thought to lack inherited essences at the level of who we are as individuals, then these will also be rejected at a higher social level. This will take the form of wanting to erase memory and distort history (think of toppling of statues, or hostility to founders, or strange casting decisions in historical dramas). 

I would add to this that those with the most modernist of minds are often simply blind to the very possibility of traditional national cultures. If someone says to them "I wish to defend my national culture", their answer is often a perplexed "But what is that culture? Does it exist?" I have even heard an Austrian being interviewed in the streets of Vienna, immersed in his own national culture, say "But what is Austrian culture anyway?". This is similar to Judith Butler proclaiming that "gender is not a fact" - despite the observable differences between the sexes being obvious to those with eyes to see.

Dyga finishes the excerpt by writing:

There is a direct interrelationship between the destruction of the individual and his ethne, and the process is catalysed by the intentional rejection of the inherited patrimony through the process of cultural destruction; the assault on the traditional sexual dynamic further enhances that process. The national and sexual 'questions' are therefore profoundly interrelated; they cannot be approached separately...

It makes sense that if the individual is destroyed by the modern world picture, then so too will be his larger community, his ethne.

Some thoughts on how this came to be

I'd like to use part of Dyga's excerpt as a platform to branch off into some thoughts of my own. The relevant quote is the one in which Dyga argues that a machine like understanding of reality,

favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity.

The undermining of essences goes back a long way, perhaps even to the nominalists of the medieval period. But it seems to me that a good starting point is Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes rejected the notion of essences and also what were called "final causes" (the idea that things have a purpose). Instead he held that beings were subject to "efficient causes" (the sources of motion and rest). 

For Hobbes, the focus is on the desires and aversions that move us toward some object or repel us from it. The things we desire we consider good, those that repel us as bad. 

We are acted upon by external causes in our desires and aversions, and so what we desire is determined at an individual level (so that individuals will desire different things). In this sense we have no free will.

But Hobbes is a compatibilist. This means that he believes we have a certain kind of free will, namely to act without impediment to realise the desires that are determined for us. If we can do this then our will is free in the sense of being unimpeded.

So here is the issue. Hobbes's way of dealing with a mechanical cosmos does not initially seem to point to the idea of people being self-defining entities susceptible to recreation at will. After all, who they are is determined by the way the environment acts upon them. 

However, in the Hobbesian view we each have our own unique desires that constitute who we are and the aim is for there to be nothing to hinder us in the pursuit of these desires (except when the strong arm of the state is necessary to preserve our life and our property from others). 

So even though our desires do not come from our own free will, you still end up with an individual who believes "this is what I desire to be, so I should be free to be this without impediment". These desires are conceived to be uniquely determined, so this undermines the idea that they might be derived from distinct and particular qualities that we share with others (essences). 

The Hobbesian view runs against certain aspects of modern science, such as the idea of genetic coding or even of evolutionary adaptation. For instance, humans are dimorphic with clear distinctions between the sexes that are related to different roles throughout the long human prehistory. This dimorphism is biologically coded in relation to chromosomes, hormones, brain structure and so on. 

Those committed to modernist ideas about every individual being uniquely ordered toward their own desires and, in this sense, self-defining, will often downplay this biological coding. They will argue that the only relevant biological differences between the sexes are "what is between the legs" or they will argue fiercely against evidence of brain differences between the sexes or they might claim that the coding is no longer relevant and can be overridden (or even rewritten). 

To give some idea of how influential the kind of view held by Hobbes was in the Anglo tradition, consider the case of Victoria Woodhull, a prominent American feminist of the 1870s. As you might expect, she wanted to abolish the distinctions between peoples and between the sexes, arguing that women should be "trained like men" and that there should be a merging of the races to achieve a unitary world government. Her metaphysics sound very similar to those of Hobbes:

But what does freedom mean? "As free as the winds" is a common expression. But if we stop to inquire what that freedom is, we find that air in motion is under the most complete subjection to different temperatures in different localities, and that these differences arise from conditions entirely independent of the air...Therefore the freedom of the wind is the freedom to obey commands imposed by conditions to which it is by nature related...But neither the air or the water of one locality obeys the commands which come from the conditions surrounding another locality.

Now, individual freedom...means the same thing...It means freedom to obey the natural condition of the individual, modified only by the various external forces....which induce action in the individual. What that action will be, must be determined solely by the individual and the operating causes, and in no two cases can they be precisely alike...Now, is it not plain that freedom means that individuals...are subject only to the laws of their own being.

The Western mind, for a time at least, was also influenced by the German idealist tradition. During the Romantic era, there was a backlash against the machine like understanding of the cosmos. Writing in the late 1700s the poet Novalis complained that,

Nature has been reduced to a monotonous machine, the eternally creative music of the universe into the monotonous clatter of a gigantic millwheel.

Some of the German idealist philosophers reacted against the determinism implied by this world picture (of no free will) by asserting the independence of the absolute "I". But they did so in catastrophic ways. Against the idea that the phenomenal world of existence determined who we are, they asserted that the absolute "I" might posit itself against this world. There was now a kind of hostile relationship between the given world of being and the free self, which later developed into nihilism. Here is a description of a university lecture by the German philosopher Johann Fichte:

As Fichte stood at the podium in Jena, he imbued the self with the new power of self-determination. The Ich posits itself and it is therefore free. It is the agent of everything. Anything that might constrain or limit its freedom - anything in the non-Ich - is in fact brought into existence by the Ich.

 Fichte saw himself as a liberator:

My system is the first system of freedom: just as the French nation is tearing man free from his external chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of external influences.

But this liberated will now stood against phenomenal reality:

My will alone...shall float audaciously and coldly over the wreckage of the universe.

So in reacting against the machine like world picture, these philosophers doubled down on the idea of freedom being an act of self-determining will. Instead of re-picturing external reality, it was defeated to the point of wreckage by the absolute "I". 

Tupper & early Victorian marriage

In 1865 Karl Marx wrote a "confession" in which he set out his personal likes and dislikes. His responded to the category of "aversion" with the name of a long forgotten Englishman, Martin Tupper. 

Who was this man Marx disliked more than any other? He was a poet who wrote an immensely influential work called Proverbial Philosophy (first published in 1838 it went through forty editions and sold over 200,000 copies in the UK).

Tupper as a young boy

For the early Victorians Proverbial Philosophy was regarded as a source of lessons in life and was sometimes gifted to young couples on their wedding day. I thought it might be interesting to read the section on marriage in the book, to gauge the quality of advice being dispensed. I did so and I'm pleased to report that Tupper's approach to marriage is generally very insightful: I think many modern readers would consider him "based" to use a modern term. 

Tupper was a sincere Christian. He is therefore something of a role model for Christians, in the sense that he was able to combine his faith with a high degree of worldly wisdom. He combined an idealism about marriage with a grounded realism. 

Tupper aged 40

I'd like to go through his advice section by section, with some commentary of my own. This will take some time, but I'm confident that readers will find points of interest along the way. 

The advice begins as follows:

Seek a good wife of thy God, for she is the best gift of His providence;
Yet ask not in bold confidence that which He hath not promised:
Thou knowest not His good will:—be thy prayer then submissive there-unto;
And leave thy petition to His mercy, assured that He will deal well with thee.
If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the earth;
Therefore think of her, and pray for her weal; yea, though thou hast not seen her.
They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not:
They grow up leaning on each other, as the olive and the vine.
Youth longeth for a kindred spirit, and yearneth for a heart that can commune with his own;

The significant part of this begins with the line "They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not". It is an observation that at a certain age our youthful passions propel us to want a close connection with the opposite sex and that we are less hardened into a separate self and more able to blend into a common life together.

He meditateth night and day, doting on the image of his fancy.
Take heed that what charmeth thee is real, nor springeth of thine own imagination;
And suffer not trifles to win thy love; for a wife is thine unto death.
The harp and the voice may thrill thee,—sound may enchant thine ear,
But consider thou, the hand will wither, and the sweet notes turn discord:
The eye, so brilliant at even, may be red with sorrow in the morning;
And the sylph-like form of elegance must writhe in the crampings of pain.

This is good advice. Men sometimes do not vet a future wife well, despite the importance of doing so. They can fall for false charms, or their infatuated minds can project qualities onto the woman that aren't really there, or they can be charmed by overly superficial qualities.

O happy lot, and hallowed, even as the joy of angels,
Where the golden chain of godliness is entwined with the roses of love:
But beware thou seem not to be holy, to win favour in the eyes of a creature,
For the guilt of the hypocrite is deadly, and winneth thee wrath elsewhere.
The idol of thy heart is, as thou, a probationary sojourner on earth;
Therefore be chary of her soul, for that is the jewel in her casket:
Let her be a child of God, that she bring with her a blessing to thy house,—
A blessing above riches, and leading contentment in its train:
Let her be an heir of Heaven; so shall she help thee on thy way:
For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil.

This is the kernel of the advice that Tupper gives. He believes that a genuinely godly wife is more likely to bring "a blessing to thy house". He uses a poetic line to express this "For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil". It is similar to the advice given by a much earlier English poet, Sir Thomas Overbury in his poem of 1613 titled "A Wife". Overbury thinks a man should most value "good" in a wife rather than birth, beauty and wealth: "For good (like fire) turnes all things to be so./Gods image in her soule, O let me place/My love upon! not Adams in her face....By good I would have holy understood,/So God she cannot love, but also me".

It is difficult to disagree. Marriage cannot rest on ordinary feeling alone, as this is prone to be unstable. When our commitments instead are tied to our deeper faith, then they are much more likely to be durable. 

Take heed lest she love thee before God; that she be not an idolater:
Yet see thou that she love thee well: for her heart is the heart of woman;
And the triple nature of humanity must be bound by a triple chain,
For soul and mind and body—godliness, esteem, and affection.

The first line is also good advice. If a woman loves you "before God" she is likely to expect the things from you that rightly belong to God - and that you cannot possibly deliver. I have written about this previously - that there are women who expect a husband to be a divine therapist who can release her from core childhood wounds (omnipotence), or who expect a husband to intuit her needs before she herself knows she has them (omniscience). This places too great a weight upon the marriage, a weight it will not be able to bear. 

And the last line is also well expressed. There ideally will be godliness when it comes to the soul; esteem (respect) for the husband when it comes to the mind; and affection (physical love) when it comes to the body. If any of these are missing there is a weak link that will prove detrimental. Think, for instance, of women who settle for men they have no physical affection for, and what kind of marriages usually result. 

How beautiful is modesty! it winneth upon all beholders:
But a word or a glance may destroy the pure love that should have been for thee.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price:—it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
If the character within be gentle, it often hath its index in the countenance:
The soft smile of a loving face is better than splendour that fadeth quickly.

He is being realistic here in acknowledging that men are attracted to beauty in women. He is warning, though, that physical beauty eventually fades, and he notes something that others have observed, namely that a gentle character in women comes to be written on the face. The famous author Roald Dahl wrote along similar lines that,

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Tupper continues,

When thou choosest a wife, think not only of thyself,
But of those God may give thee of her, that they reproach thee not for their being:
See that He hath given her health, lest thou lose her early and weep:
See that she springeth of a wholesome stock, that thy little ones perish not before thee:
For many a fair skin hath covered a mining disease,
And many a laughing cheek been bright with the glare of madness.

The Victorians were aware of hereditary traits. Tupper is warning that we are to consider the traits we will pass on to our children. We should look for physical health in her family, but also an absence of mental illness (the word "mining" is used here in an older sense of "ruin in a subterranean way").

Mark the converse of one thou lovest, that it be simple and sincere;
For an artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
Observe her deportment with others, when she thinketh not that thou art nigh,
For with thee will the blushes of love conceal the true colour of her mind.

This is an early version of "see how she treats the wait staff". Tupper hits on something important here in the last line. Most women will treat a man well in the early stages of courtship, when you are promising her something that she seeks, and when her disposition to you will be at its most favourable. What is more revealing are the longer term trends in her character, as revealed in her past history (though it can be difficult to estimate this history based on her own testimony). 

Hath she learning? it is good, so that modesty go with it:
Hath she wisdom? it is precious, but beware that thou exceed;
For woman must be subject, and the true mastery is of the mind.
Be joined to thine equal in rank, or the foot of pride will kick at thee;

Interesting. Tupper thinks it good for a woman to have learning and wisdom, but that it can be a problem if a woman exceeds her husband in this, because if she is mentally superior to her husband he will not be able to lead. What Tupper is getting at here is something like the concept of hypergamy, in which a woman wants to marry up, i.e., to be with a man she can look up to and admire. If she cannot do this, there is a risk she will lose respect for him and with it her capacity to love.

And look not only for riches, lest thou be mated with misery:
Marry not without means; for so shouldst thou tempt Providence;
But wait not for more than enough; for Marriage is the DUTY of most men:

He strongly cautions against marrying for money. Men should have some resources before marrying, but not wait too long. The one thing I'd note here is that this runs against the feminist narrative that marriage at this time was based on financial considerations alone - here we have a leading Victorian influencer telling his readers that money should not be a primary concern.

Grievous indeed must be the burden that shall outweigh innocence and health,
And a well-assorted marriage hath not many cares.
In the day of thy joy consider the poor; thou shall reap a rich harvest of blessing;
For these be the pensioners of One who filleth thy cup with pleasures:
In the day of thy joy be thankful: He hath well deserved thy praise:
Mean and selfish is the heart that seeketh Him only in sorrow.
For her sake who leaneth on thine arm, court not the notice of the world,
And remember that sober privacy is comelier than public display.

This is a more difficult passage. One message here is to turn to God in thanks for your blessings in marriage, rather than only turning to God when things are difficult. The last line perhaps reflects an earlier belief that public displays of affection are unseemly and should be kept private.

If thou marriest, thou art allied unto strangers; see they be not such as shame thee:
If thou marriest, thou leavest thine own; see that it be not done in anger.

The first line reflects an earlier ethos in which poor individual behaviour reflected badly not only on the individual, but might also damage the reputation of the family. So Tupper wants his readers to consider the character not only of the wife, but also of her wider family that the husband will be associated with.

Bride and bridegroom, pilgrims of life, henceforward to travel together,
In this the beginning of your journey, neglect not the favour of Heaven:
Let the day of hopes fulfilled be blest by many prayers,
And at eventide kneel ye together, that your joy be not unhallowed:
Angels that are round you shall be glad, those loving ministers of mercy,
And the richest blessings of your God shall be poured on His favoured children.
Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen,
And reverence well becometh the symbol of dignity and glory.

I like the line here "Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen". The word "earnest" means "a foretaste of what is to follow". 

Keep thy heart pure, lest thou do dishonour to thy state;
Selfishness is base and hateful; but love considereth not itself.
The wicked turneth good into evil, for his mind is warped within him;
But the heart of the righteous is chaste: his conscience casteth off sin.

There is a lot in these four lines. First, that marriage requires both spouses to consider the good of the other. I have argued this many times on social media, often without success. For instance, there was a trend a while ago for women to argue that wives should never do things for their husband. I objected as follows: 

But I failed to persuade my opponent:

Even more significantly, Tupper is aware that much hinges on the quality of mind of the spouses - that a mind can be "warped" and so turn good into evil. This is why the original choice of spouse is so important, as the goodness of one spouse can fall onto barren ground and the marriage can fail regardless of their efforts. This is a much more realistic view than the commentary you sometimes hear that "all you have to do is to be nice and your efforts will be rewarded many times over".

If thou wilt be loved, render implicit confidence;
If thou wouldst not suspect, receive full confidence in turn:
For where trust is not reciprocal, the love that trusted withereth.
Hide not your grief nor your gladness; be open one with the other;
Let bitterness be strange unto your tongues, but sympathy a dweller in your hearts:
Imparting halveth the evils, while it doubleth the pleasures of life,
But sorrows breed and thicken in the gloomy bosom of Reserve.

The first part of this passage is about marriage being a high trust institution. This is why the experience of betrayal hurts the institution so much - it leads to "emotional unavailability" and an unwillingness to make the commitments that marriage requires. In the second part of the passage, Tupper counsels that the spouses be open with each other. I think this is true in the context he gives: that issues should be aired and communicated rather than held in reserve and allowed to fester. But it may not be true that men should communicate everything about themselves openly to their wife. Women sometimes find it more attractive if the man retains a part of himself that is more difficult to read. 

YOUNG wife, be not froward, nor forget that modesty becometh thee:
If it be discarded now, who will not hold it feigned before?

Froward means "difficult to deal with". Tupper is suggesting to young wives that if they change in this way after the marriage that people will assume that a kind of underhanded "bait and switch" has been employed. 

But be not as a timid girl,—there is honour due to thine estate
A matron's modesty is dignified: she blusheth not, neither is she bold.
Be kind to the friends of thine husband, for the love they have to him:
And gently bear with his infirmities: hast thou no need of his forbearance?

The last line is interesting. Tupper is reminding women that they should be a little forgiving of their husband's faults, as he surely must also be forgiving of hers. 

Be not always in each other's company; it is often good to be alone;
And if there be too much sameness, ye cannot but grow weary of each other

This is good advice - that there is a right amount of time to be together and time to be apart. I would add to this that in a balanced life we would spend a certain amount of time in male spaces (or for women female spaces) and a certain amount of time with our families.

Ye have each a soul to be nourished, and a mind to be taught in wisdom,
Therefore, as accountable for time, help one another to improve it.
If ye feel love to decline, track out quickly the secret cause;
Let it not rankle for a day, but confess and bewail it together:
Speedily seek to be reconciled, for love is the life of marriage;
And be ye co-partners in triumph, conquering the peevishness of self.

You sometimes hear the claim that until very recent times marriage was just about property and that women were nothing more than chattel. Yet here we have a very influential Victorian era writer asserting that "love is the life of marriage" and that it is therefore important not to allow resentments to build that might undermine this love.

Let no one have thy confidence, O wife, saving thine husband:
Have not a friend more intimate, O husband, than thy wife.
In the joy of a well-ordered home be warned that this is not your rest;
For the substance to come may be forgotten in the present beauty of the shadow.
If ye are blessed with children, ye have a fearful pleasure,
A deeper care and a higher joy, and the range of your existence is widened:
If God in wisdom refuse them, thank Him for an unknown mercy:
For how can ye tell if they might be a blessing or a curse?
Yet ye may pray, like Hannah, simply dependent on His will:
Resignation sweeteneth the cup, but impatience dasheth it with vinegar.
Now this is the sum of the matter:—if ye will be happy in marriage,
Confide, love, and be patient: be faithful, firm, and holy.

There is a positive attitude to parenthood here, as a blessing that brings both a deeper care and a higher joy and that widens the range of existence.

That concludes Tupper's advice to newlyweds. Tupper, like other early Victorian writers I have read, took marriage very seriously, enough to think through what was required to make a marriage work. There was no easy Disney "happily ever after" that was simply owed to someone. Marriage required prudence in choice of spouse, and thereafter it required an active orientation to virtue and faith.

Finally, please note that Tupper did not believe that women were incapable of moral guidance. Tupper appealed to both sexes in giving his advice and understood women to have a share in the mission to create loving marital unions.

The levelling down of Western culture

I attended a seminar recently and listened to the keynote speaker for just a few minutes before predicting that he would be left-wing. Sure enough, later in the presentation he spoke about how important anti-sexism and anti-racism were to him and how sincerely he supported Aboriginal issues.

Why was I confident in predicting this? It was because of the way his mind operated. I wrote recently about how men's minds tend to run along a vertical axis, so that they are able to orient upwards toward things that are above one's own thoughts and feelings. Women's minds, in contrast, often run sideways along a horizontal axis and so can be attuned in a close in way to what others are thinking and feeling.

This man was intelligent, had masculine interests, and had a masculine systematising mind. But he was painfully sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of those in the audience. He worried that we might be upset about some of the things he would speak about, and he assured us we could take leave and go outside if we ever felt uncomfortable. At one point in the presentation he talked about the importance of safe spaces and the need to practise self-care. 

His mind was so attuned to that more feminine horizontal axis that I knew the vertical axis would be undeveloped. And without a vertical axis, I don't think it's very likely that a person will be genuinely traditionalist. It's not that everyone with that more upwardly oriented mind will be traditionalist, but it does have considerable predictive power.

And here's the issue. Most of the Anglo intellectual men I know are lacking in this power of the mind. They are masculine in certain respects; they are intelligent; and they are intellectually curious. But they have been deprived of any growth along the vertical axis. And this is at least a part explanation of why they are so hard to draw into a traditionalist politics.

So how might a society be organised so that this masculine power of the mind were better developed? The most direct path would be to explicitly teach a more traditional metaphysics. But this is not what I want to focus on. I want to consider what a culture that draws out this aspect of the mind might look like.

The basic principle here is that anything that draws our mind upwards to something higher than us, or larger than our own individual self, to which we are indebted, or which creates a sense of reverence or awe or love or respect, is helping to cultivate a power of the mind along that vertical axis.

I'm not going to attempt a complete list of what fits this criteria or put them in any kind of rank. But I would include a sense of pride in our own origins. If we feel connected to our own tradition, to our culture and to the achievements of our own people, then we have a love for something that extends across time through many generations; we respect the achievements of our forebears; and we feel a sense of duty to uphold standards that have been set for us. This is something that lifts us spiritually up along that vertical axis, to a good that exists independently of us but that draws out our commitments.

It is no accident that those who wish to embed a modernist "leveller" metaphysics so ruthlessly attack this sense of pride in origins. It is one of the key battles in any culture war. Here in Australia we lost that battle some decades ago and were made to feel ashamed. When I talk to young left-wing men it is obvious that this has had a considerable impact.

I would also point out that this type of patriotic feeling helps to develop masculine spirituality. For this reason, it is unwise for the churches to regard it negatively or to undermine it. As a positive example of how the churches have supported this higher aspect of the mind consider the Catholic catechism which teaches that the fourth commandment "requires honour, affection, and gratitude toward elders and ancestors".

A culture that develops the upward motion of the mind will also be oriented toward the heroic. Why? Because the heroic involves a selfless commitment to a larger good that we are willing to courageously defend. Or it denotes a kind of inspired action, sometimes via a test of skill or strength, that distinguishes character and leadership and which draws admiration. 

To illustrate how flattened our sense of the heroic has become consider these statues located very close to each other in the Melbourne CBD. The first is of the explorer Matthew Flinders. Erected in 1925, it shows a dignified and determined man with the sailors on either side pushing the boat forward representing strength and endurance. 

The second group of statues was commissioned in 1994 to honour three of Melbourne's founding fathers, namely Batman, Swanston and Hoddle. It is, at best, whimsical.

The point of embedding the heroic within a culture is not to encourage self-aggrandizement, or to focus on the achievement of fame as a life goal. It is to encourage that sense men have of wanting to push into the higher reaches of their own nature and to achieve some higher good in doing so. It is an encouragement toward a nobility of character and purpose. And, in setting high standards, it pushes men to consider higher goods embedded within the reality of existence that a man might embody. 

Architecture can reflect the kind of axis that a community is most oriented toward. It is notable that traditional church architecture here in Melbourne emphasised spires, presumably reflecting an upward orientation, as with St Patrick's Cathedral:

Whereas the modern parish churches look more like halls, which perhaps might encourage a sideways orientation on fellowship, but not reverence or awe:

While on the topic of churches, worship itself can potentially develop that upward orientation of the mind. Worship helps develop the vertical power of the mind when it is reverent, when it encourages a sense of the sacred, and when it expresses gratitude and indebtedness to God. There is room too for cultivating fellowship in worship, which represents the more horizontal axis of the mind, but if this is made dominant, then there is a loss of balance, i.e., the modernist "levelling" influence has made itself felt.

The attitude a society has to male authority figures will also reveal how much it has succumbed to a leveller ethos. The father is the most common male authority figure, and he represents the larger ordering principles within society and within reality. As Lawrence Auster put it:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father.

This explains why children who rebel against their own father will often similarly rebel against the larger society. It is notable, for instance, how many leaders of second wave feminism did not have a good relationship with their fathers, often because those fathers were absent: 

Germaine Greer: wrote a book titled Daddy We Hardly Knew You.

Kate Millett: her father abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old.

Eva Cox: her father left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".

Jill Johnston: her father left when she was a baby. She wrote a book titled: Mother Bound: Autobiography in Search of a Father.

Gloria Steinem: she said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year".

Rebecca West: her father left when she was three, both she and her two sisters became radical feminists.

Mary Eberstadt explained much of the fury of the BLM riots in the USA in 2020 along these lines:

Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.

That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period...It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.

She connects the leaders of the BLM movement to a history of fatherlessness:

The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age two. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact, also when she was two. The author of another bestseller, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action, was raised by his grandmother. Colin Kaepernick’s biological father left his mother before he was born, but he was then adopted and raised by a white family. James Baldwin, a major inspiration for today’s new racialist writers, grew up with an abusive stepfather; his mother left his biological father before he was born. The list could go on.

So the father is a symbol for a larger order that includes family, faith and patria ("fatherland"). Our word "piety" is derived from the Latin word "pietas" which included honouring not only your own father but all those responsible for your existence, including God and your own people. So Mary Eberstadt is expressing a long tradition in Western thought when she connects filial piety not only to a respect for our own father but also a loyalty toward God and country as well.

Our society clearly has issues with male authority figures. Since about the 1980s, fathers have been portrayed in popular culture as, at best, loveable but harmless figures of fun. Worse has been the attitude of certain feminists, who have portrayed fathers as figures of violence and oppression, as did Kate Gilmore when appointed to lead the Keating Government's gender campaign in 1994:

You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.

When we level down society, by casting down male authority figures, we lose access to the vertical structure of reality, in particular through the undermining of filial piety. It is important to note, however, that there is a balance here too between the vertical and the horizontal. Fathers, for instance, will not be held in esteem if they only claim a place in their children's lives through being in a position of authority. Fathers need to build warm human relationships with their children as well. Similarly, those men who occupy positions of authority in society need to be careful not to abuse their power or else trust will be catastrophically lost.

What else indicates the distinction between vertically oriented traditional societies and horizontally oriented modernist ones? Well, certain types of standards. For instance, most traditional cultures recognise different degrees of formality. This makes sense if you have a hierarchical understanding of reality, i.e., one that points upwards. It also makes sense in a society which believes in honour, i.e., in showing respect and in keeping faith. 

And so a traditional society will maintain distinctions of sorts. There might be certain courtesies. There might be titles of address. There might be ceremonies and rituals. Different levels of politeness, including of speech. 

There is a balance to be held here as well. Too much of this can be stifling and create too much social distance (and provoke a backlash). But the general trend in modern societies is, again, to level things down. We have lost the courtesies between men and women. School students increasingly address teachers by their first name. Formal dress standards are not what they once were. This might not seem much in itself, but the issue is what it points to. By continuing to collapse "degrees and distinctions" we are losing access to one dimension of reality.

Standards of conduct are also relevant here, or at least when they uphold a genuine moral good or virtue. When we abide by these we are acknowledging a higher good that has a claim on us - we are lifting the horizons of the reality we inhabit. And so in traditional societies there will be social norms and taboos that will be generally respected as meaningful. 

Again, the general trend in modern levelling societies is toward a loss of standards. If anyone doubts this I suggest they listen to the lyrics of many of the popular songs of today. What is expressed is undeniably crude, as if there were no meaningful standards, which, if true, would mean no higher moral dimension standing above us. There would be a flattening of the reality we inhabit.

I don't believe traditionalists need to go to any extremes in countering all this. What I'm suggesting is that the metaphysics that young intellectual men are brought up with leads them to an understanding of the world that lacks a vertical dimension, and that this is then reflected in the culture and in their politics (with the cultural changes then reinforcing the difficulties they have in relating to traditional ways of being). It is one reason why they come across at times as "mentally blind", in the sense of not being able to comprehend what it might be like to have a sense of loyalty or of patriotic feeling, or, for that matter, to genuinely register the transcendent experiences of life.

Parallel lives, different worlds?

 I saw the following brief exchange on social media this morning:

The idea being put forward here is that we fail to truly comprehend the opposite sex because we do not adequately comprehend how different the minds of men and women are.

I'd like to try to contribute something to addressing this issue. Before I do I need to point out that anything said on this topic is likely to be a generalisation lacking nuance, and that this type of discussion is mostly observational and therefore more tentative than, for instance, a discussion about the logical outcomes of political principles.

Men and women both clearly experience thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites. What I would propose is that men are more likely to have a self-awareness that leads them vertically toward "logos" - the ordering principle to be found within reality. A man's sense of self, therefore, is not centred in what he is thinking or feeling at any given time. It lies at a layer immediately above this, allowing men to disassociate to a degree from what is happening at the level of emotion and thought. A man might watch his thoughts and emotions rather than inhabiting them as his "self". 

What this means is that it is possible to disagree with a man's thoughts or opinions without it much affecting his sense of self. It is very rare for a man to talk about not being "validated" or "seen" by someone who fails to agree with him. Men are more likely to fear the consequences of a lack of self-mastery, as reflected in a lack of real world competency. 

Men too are more likely to consider things from a wider ordering principle than are women. Feminists, for instance, have never really moved beyond considering the sectional interests of women. They have shown little interest in coming up with a vision of society which considers how all the different parts might be arranged to serve a larger good.

The success or failure of the male mind runs largely along a vertical axis. When working best, the male mind is receptive enough to comprehend the higher things above the self, including logos (when in the state of the "porous self"). But it is also able to look down on thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites and order them, so that the lower serves the higher. To be actively engaged in this task should lead to self-knowledge, and a sense of how the order of the larger world (the macrocosm) is reflected in that of the self (the microcosm). 

Again, when this is operating at its best, the sense of the self serving a higher good, and being ordered to it, is linked to the heroic virtues in men - of harnessing one's strengths and powers to defend something greater than oneself. When the masculine self is working well it tends toward a selflessness of purpose.

But the vertical axis can be broken. Western men are not as good as they once were at perceiving a higher level of existence - there has been a flattening of horizons. When there is nothing above the self, there can still be oversight of thoughts and feelings, and attempts at self-mastery, but toward lower ends and with a stunted growth toward wisdom.

Similarly, men can fail at using their self-awareness to order their thoughts, feelings and appetites, to the point that they lose "right mind". In older phraseology, they become slaves to their passions. Their awareness is trapped at their own thoughts and appetites, unable to move upward along the axis. 

Women's sense of self is located more at the level of their thoughts and feelings. That is perhaps why women have such a strong need to have their thoughts and feelings validated. If your sense of self is closely tied to what you are thinking and feeling, then a failure of another to validate these things will feel destabilising or perhaps even be perceived as demonstrating a lack of love or care for who you are. 

When a woman's mind is working well the movement is more along a horizontal axis than a vertical one. Because her sense of self is centred on her thoughts and feelings, she will be sensitively attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At its best, the female mind might be perceptive about the thoughts and feelings of others, and gradually come to a type of self-knowledge and wisdom via this faculty. This is a type of close in, sideways movement of the mind - from one's own thoughts and feelings to someone else's. 

However, things can go very wrong. If the horizontal axis is broken, a woman can be trapped within her own emotions and thoughts. Not only does she lose her ability to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, she can become solipsistic, and see others only in terms of what she herself is thinking and feeling. She might "merge" the other person with these thoughts and feelings and not recognise them as having a mind of their own. She might mistakenly view them as experiencing whatever she is experiencing. (I wonder, too, if this helps to explain why a woman might sometimes believe that a husband should be able to read her mind - because of a failure on her part to recognise him as fully differentiated). 

Which brings me to the main point I'd like to raise, namely the issue of how we guide our behaviour. If what I have said is true, at least as a broad generalisation, then men can potentially step outside of their own thoughts and feelings along a vertical axis to engage with logos, and the higher ordering principles. This means that there are guiding principles that are not outside of, or alien to, the workings of the male mind.

If women's sense of self is centred more on what they are feeling and thinking, and the movement is sideways toward what others are thinking and feeling, then women do not have the same engagement with logos. Left to themselves, they can be guided instead by what heightens their sense of feeling (e.g. a film that triggers their sense of pity or empathy or indignation) or (when her mind is working well) by a sensitivity to what others might feel by a word or an action. But there is not the same sense of what ultimately orders a person or a society to a longer term good. 

And so women are, in at least some respects, in need of guidance. Where might this come from? In modern society, mostly from two sources. First, therapists. This is not a very effective source of guidance. Therapists are not really supposed to advise clients on what to do. Women often use therapists instead as an expensive form of validation. The use of therapy has the advantage for women that it is "validation with a qualification" - the therapist is supposed to be a trained expert, so even if the therapist is a young woman with little life experience, her validation has a stamp of authority which gives it a special standing (I am not rejecting therapy here in all circumstances - it might well be helpful for those in real need. I just don't think it is adequate in terms of moral guidance or to supply prudential reasoning.)

The second source of guidance in modern society comes from other women, for instance, via social media. Modern technology has created "bubbles" in which women can network and socialise with each other without much input from anyone or anything else. Again, this is often a poor source of guidance, as women often understand what other women primarily need to be validation.

In traditional societies there were various sources of guidance women could have recourse to. Social norms were important and also effective in guiding women's behaviour, due to the conscientiousness of women and also women's sensitivity to their standing within social groups (the "inclusion/exclusion" axis). There were also the wiser sort of older women with life experience who were willing to dispense genuine advice rather than validation. But most of all there were men that a woman might trust and lean on for guidance: priests, brothers, husbands and fathers.

I find it interesting that the wiser sort of women on social media are often the ones who accept this masculine role in their lives. It supplies something for them, that then allows them to develop further than other women. It does not constrain them but allows them to push further forward in their self-development.

I think women are aware of what I am trying to describe here. That is why the issue looms so large for women. A woman can find a man she trusts and cooperate with his efforts to order life toward a higher good, or she can reject this masculine element of life and rely on the workings of her own mind alone. Women are increasingly going for the second option. How this works out varies, because the quality of the female mind varies, but there is a trend toward a more chaotic experience of life, manifested in high rates of anxiety and depression in younger women and instability in relationships and family life. 

One final point. I have argued that the male and female minds work differently, along a different kind of axis, and that men can usefully provide a masculine element when it comes to the pursuit of the good. Some men who agree with me on this take the argument too far, and believe that it means that only men are accountable for what happens in society. I disagree. People have different resources for making moral choices for all sorts of reasons (their level of life experience, their upbringing, their intelligence, their personality traits). Nonetheless, we still have free will and a conscience, and we are therefore still ultimately accountable for the choices we make and for what we make of ourselves. If anything we need to return to the idea of women having their own significant moral mission in life.

Postscript

I'm not the first to suggest the importance of the masculine in accessing the vertical axis. Lawrence Auster, coming at the issue from a different angle, once wrote:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

And the Danish historian Henrik Ibsen also made these connections in his book The Fatherless Society:

The masculine — which Henrik calls the “father” — is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture.

He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority.

That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship — which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two.

I thought it interesting as well that the following interview dropped on social media this morning (with actresses promoting the film Wicked). It is an unusually intense expression of the female mind, and sweet in its own way, but almost completely devoid of masculine influence. There is self, emotion, sensitivity, vulnerability and validation. A culture cannot run on this alone, not without the more bracing influence of the masculine: