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:

Trying to set things right

The issue of marital stability is an important one but is often treated simplistically on social media. The argument is often that a husband just has to be nice to his wife and she is certain to reciprocate, or else he just has to be masculine and she will revere him for life.

I was reading a particular case study recently, that of Dr Ashley Solomon, an American psychologist. She gave what seems to me to be a more typical account of modern divorce, at least amongst the professional classes: 

A few friends joked that a decade or two beyond the wedding season of life, we were now in the divorce era. As I looked around at the community of newly single women around me, that certainly seemed to be true. We weren’t all the same age, but there were some other obvious similarities. We all had children, mostly ones that were potty trained but still quite dependent on us. We all had careers, not just jobs, and we cared a lot about the work we did. And, with some particular exceptions, we had exes who by and large were decent humans, but were not the right humans for us. And, I realized, we’d all been the person in our marriages to choose to divorce.

Her circle of female friends all chose to divorce largely decent men when the youngest child was becoming semi-independent (toddler/preschool age). That is also the pattern I have observed amongst my own colleagues.

What is particularly interesting about Dr Solomon is that she is determined to make her second marriage more successful than her first, and so she gives an honest account of where she herself may have gone wrong. 

Her first insight is the most significant. She writes of her efforts to improve her own relationship skills that,

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying AF to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

This is sometimes referred to as solipsism - a difficulty in seeing a reality outside that of your own mind. My own theory is that it is connected to a lack of self-awareness, this being the ability to stand above your own immediate thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites - and to successfully direct and regulate these through the use of our reasoning powers. 

What I suspect is that many women, even obviously intelligent ones like Dr Solomon, can struggle with self-awareness. Their sense of self is centred more in their thoughts and feelings, rather than in the directing power of the mind standing above them, and so it is those thoughts and feelings they need validated to feel secure and "seen" in who they are.

It is not that Dr Solomon does not have self-awareness, but, as she herself puts it, when experiencing "tension" the emotions would take over and she would struggle to regulate them, so that her partner would no longer be perceived to be "distinct" but would be "merged". 

Note too the way that Dr Solomon talks about truth. She talks about "my truth". Even in her attempt to improve her understanding, the best she can offer is to try to balance out her truth with his truth. She is caught in a kind of subjectivism that is different to the way that men generally think about things. Most men would not say "well, this is my truth" - it would not make sense to men to pitch things this way. There is a truth that the reasoning power is trying to grasp, so there is either truth or falsity in doing so. 

What larger conclusion can we draw from this? Well, it is important to recognise that the level of self-awareness that a person has, whether man or woman, will run along a continuum. It will not be the same for each. I think we should acknowledge that when a woman has low self-awareness that this is likely to contribute to the difficulties present within a marriage. If she does not see him as a distinct person, but is caught within her own subjective emotional states and can only frame the marriage through these, then there will be errors in perception that he will have little control over. She might, if she truly merges him with her mind, believe that he is thinking and experiencing the same things that she is - the same unhappiness or discontent or anxiety or doubt.

I think this is why it is so important for a girl to have a loving upbringing in a stable home and with a close and supportive relationship with her father. If she is subject to her flow of emotion, then a marriage is more likely to succeed if these emotions are mostly warm and positive ones, and if there is less of the "tension" that moves a woman away from self-awareness.

The second relationship skill that Dr Solomon is working on is not expecting a husband to read her mind:

I make direct requests rather than expecting him to read my mind or anticipate my needs.

Smart people and relationship experts have been proclaiming this forever, but it took me a while to get over the hump. Writer Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” And therapist Terry Real says, “Great relationships mean more assertion up front and less resentment on the backend.”

When I got messily honest with myself, I realized how little I actually communicated my needs to my first partner, passive aggressiveness notwithstanding...

Relationship books will tout this one often, reminding us to ask for what we want. But I want to go a layer deeper. Because for me, acknowledging the need to ask was part of the challenge. And that was hard for me – and, I believe, for many of us – because I was holding on to a fantasy in which my partner was supposed to be so attuned to me that he could know my needs without me having to make them known. We could think of this as the fantasy of having a fully emotionally available parent, someone who not only meets our needs, but anticipates them. For those of us who didn’t have this, which is perhaps most of us, this need can feel unresolved, and we might be seeking it in our partner. But, of course, because they are human and in fact, not our parents, they will stumble even with the best of intentions.

Resolving this means, to me, acknowledging the wish for a fully mind-reading, selfless partner who will meet every need before I know I have it, and then turning to my real partner and thanking him for just doing his best.

Many married men will have experienced this. The idea is "if you were the right one, you would know what I need even before I do". It does significant damage, because when the husband inevitably fails, the wife then draws the conclusion that he is not the right one after all. 

Where does this come from? Dr Solomon puts it down to a need for reparenting, and that is a very reasonable explanation. Another possible explanation is that the husband is being subject to "apotheosis". Just as men sometimes see the transcendent through the form of an actual woman ("you are an angel"), women can see men as representing some aspect of the divine. The problem is when the balance between the real all too human man and what he represents of the transcendent is lost, and he is expected to become something like a divine therapist who can wash away the sins of the world for his wife. A real husband cannot be omniscient (knowing her wants or needs before she does) or omnipotent (having the power to heal all hurts even those stemming from childhood traumas). 

Again, a woman who grew up in a loving, stable family home and who had a happy childhood will be less likely to need either reparenting or to vainly seek trauma healing from her husband. It might possibly help as well if a woman is brought up with a sincere religious belief so that she places the omniscient and omnipotent power where it truly belongs rather than with her husband.

What I'd like to finish with is the importance of men learning to harness their self-awareness in order to take control of a culture and guide it toward the good.

When we look at a workplace culture it is considered acceptable for there to be a mission for that company, and for there to be professional standards for all employees to respect and adhere to, and even consequences for those employees who act in ways that damage the company and its mission. There exists, in other words, a "form" or "shape" to the company and its culture that people who sign on to that company, and who expect to benefit from it, must adhere to.

I don't think it's surprising that women are, in modern life, often more successful in their role of employees of a company than of being wives. It is because there is a clear form to workplace life, one that gives external direction to what must be done to succeed within that culture. In a corporate culture it is expected that we self-regulate our thoughts, emotions and actions to serve the larger mission of that company.

But in modern family life? This is now understood to be the realm of pure emotion. And so a lack of self-awareness becomes fatal, because there is no external form or shape to keep things in check. It becomes a more chaotic and unstable realm, despite its importance to the good of the individual and the good of the larger community.

How can the family have better shape? Well, we could re-emphasise the significance of the mission of each family. Part of that would be a more positive view of the "offices" of husband and wife and father and mother, i.e., an understanding that these roles allow us to express aspects of our manhood and womanhood that then fulfil a part of our telos in life - our ultimate purposes. 

It would help also if men were encouraged to make the best use of their own faculty for self-awareness, so that they could assume some degree of leadership within the family, one which requires a level of maturity and wisdom to truly achieve.

A genuinely religious dimension might also help. If we are motivated in our duties to other members of our families by a love of God and a desire to serve God, and therefore a deeper sense of doing what is right, then there will be a more stable form to family life.

Finally, it would help if some of the politically motivated attacks on men were to cease. A woman with low self-awareness is always going to have problems with authority because she doesn't have the sense that there is a logos embedded within reality, and she will not then see that a vision of the good might be based on objective reality. And so any assertion of shape or form might seem to her an external imposition rather than something she can discern as an aspect of her own reality. So low self-awareness women have a choice. They can rebel along Jezebel lines or they can submit to something despite it seeming to be external to them. 

Of course, it matters that what they submit to represents a genuine good. And, if it is a genuine good, it matters that these women can respect the men who attempt to lead with it. That is made difficult when there is a "man bad, woman good" narrative, as we currently have, or when there is an assumption that all social interactions are based on the pursuit of self-interest. Men need to act for the good of the communities they belong to, including their families, and to be respected for doing so, if we wish to give family life a shape that pure emotion cannot achieve. 

Self-awareness: an Achilles heel of liberalism?

The sociologist Robert Nisbet, writing in 1953, blamed much of the decline in the 1900s on the liberalism inherited from the 1800s. He characterised this liberalism as a belief that "natural" man, once shorn of conventional morality, had the "innate resources" as an atomised individual to pursue truth, happiness and justice.

Nisbet noted that this is in contrast to the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who famously wrote in criticising revolutionary France that:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

I agree with Burke but would like to sketch, rather tentatively, an argument that this Burkean position can be taken much further.  It is not just the private stock of reason that is too small in each man, but even more significantly the stock of self-awareness. Liberalism, in other words, assumes that each individual has sufficient self-awareness to successfully pursue an autonomous life course. I think this assumption needs to be, at the very least, questioned.

What is self-awareness? I consider it to be that quality of mind that allows us to step outside of and observe our own fleeting thoughts, feelings and impulses. 

Self-awareness is a significant attribute to possess because it allows us to have a stable sense of self. Imagine if all you are conscious of are your immediate feelings and thoughts. You could still respond to these, but they would continually change and you would not have a strong sense of an overriding stable centre of who you are.

Are there people who lack a sense of self? Yes. As strange as it may seem, I have known people who were curious that I had a sense of self, given that they lacked one. They wanted to know what it was like.

Self-awareness also seems to be part of what allows us to be aware of others as distinct entities with distinct perspectives. After all, if I myself lack a self-directing oversight of my own mental processes, then it will be difficult to see others as having this quality of personality. It is possible that I will become solipsistic in the sense of seeing the other person only in reference to the state of my own mind. 

Ashley Solomon is an American woman whose first marriage failed and in attempting to think through how to make her second marriage a success she identified solipsism as a problem she had to overcome:

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

What I suspect is that self-awareness is not given to everyone equally. There is an ascending order that perhaps goes something like this:

a. The lowest level are those who have no sense of self. Such people struggle to direct their thoughts and impulses and so can be either impulsive or subject to thinking errors. They will tend to have unstable relationships of all kinds.

b. The next level up are those who do have a sense of self but tend, to some degree, toward solipsism. They struggle to connect to an external reality outside of their own mind. They therefore lack an orientation toward objective truth, using language more to manipulate toward self-chosen ends. They tend to "externalise" in the sense of having an external locus of control - they will not think of themselves as being able to successfully self-direct, nor to be accountable for what happens to themselves or to the communities they belong to. One expression of this inability to self-direct will be a reliance on, say, therapists for external guidance, even when not in a crisis. 

c. At a higher level of self-awareness are those capable of rationally self-disciplining the processes of their own minds - their impulses, drives, thoughts, appetites and feelings. Here there is an internal locus of control, and some ability to direct the self toward higher ends. There is a beginning of self-knowledge at this level.

d. The highest level is a metaphysical awareness of the place of the self within a cosmic order. It requires a sincere effort to understand the truth of the reality we inhabit, & is helped by a careful reading of a wisdom literature inherited from past generations. 

Where do most people sit in this hierarchy? I am going to bring down fire upon myself for saying this, but a significant number of women seem to sit at Level B, whilst many men are attempting to make progress at Level C. However, this is very much a generalisation. There do exist women at Level C, but they fall into two groups. There are those who adopt a kind of masculine life path requiring self-mastery and self-discipline. This can have the negative consequence of a loss of feminine identity, which then undermines the self rather than raising it. There are other women, however, who seem able to hold the two things together: an orientation toward their own feminine self that includes prudential self-direction.

I would suggest as well that more is expected of men when it comes to self-awareness, as men are more specifically tasked with representing logos within human life (by logos I mean something like the principle of divine order that can be discerned within given reality). Men too are more expected to act for the larger good, i.e., to find a point at which things can be harmonised within a common good, which itself requires a higher level of accountability and self-awareness. It is also difficult to see any civilisation prospering without a certain number of men operating, at least partially, at Level D. 

So, to bring this back to my starting point, the issue then is whether those "optimistic" nineteenth century liberals were correct that natural man has the innate resources to successfully and rationally pursue truth, justice and happiness at a purely individual level.

I don't think so, in part, because the level of self-awareness is unevenly distributed and without it there is a difficulty in operating as a self-directing, autonomous agent. Furthermore there is an entropy written into reality that tends to draw things apart rather than organising them into integrated wholes. So even the best individuals will struggle at times to maintain an integrity of self.

What this means is that the natural man with his innate resources will most usually not be adequate to the task. Not only will he need grace, but some level of external discipline, guidance and exhortation, provided for instance through social norms, i.e., the "conventions" so looked down on by the nineteenth century liberals, as well as by the influence of culture, custom and education.

Wet liberals & classicide

The Victorian Labor Government has just announced its new housing policy. It is going to override current planning laws to build high-rises of up to 20 storeys around train stations (within a 1km radius). This is to accommodate the massive population growth Australia is experiencing from immigration.

One notable feature of this policy is that some of the most beautiful heritage suburbs of Melbourne have been targeted, including Brighton, Hawthorn and Malvern. These are upper-middle class suburbs, with a well-established way of life that is now likely to radically change. 

The Anglo upper middle class in these suburbs are mostly "Teal" in their politics. They are what was once known as liberal wets, being socially liberal but less committed to laissez-faire economics than the liberal "dries". 

The identity of this class was based in part on certain status markers having to do with wealth and lifestyle (a holiday home in Portsea, overseas holidays, designer renovations, and especially children attending expensive private schools). But it was also based, especially for the wives, on holding socially liberal views. This has proven to be tragic, because one consequence of holding to these views is that it makes it impossible to defend your own class existence. It is a class marker that fatally undermines your own existence. It is a "classicide". 

Oddly, the Anglo upper middle class was too conservative - in the bad sense of the word. It failed to adapt quickly enough. When it was clear that social liberalism was the wrong path, it did not abandon it in time in order to secure its own future. It stubbornly clung to the one thing it needed to be rid of.

I want to try to explain one aspect of why socially liberal views were self-sabotaging. To do so I am going to go back to one of the Australian wet liberals of the 1980s, George Brandis. Brandis wrote extensively about his political philosophy, so he is a useful political figure to focus on.

My basic argument is that the liberal wets inherited a political philosophy from the nineteenth century (particularly from John Stuart Mill) that is overly individualistic. Their idea was that the core human good is a freedom to be an autonomous individual, so that we self-determine our own unique purposes in life. Here is a sample of Brandis writing about autonomy:

the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives.

Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life 

Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...

There is a kind of metaphysical basis to this kind of thinking which Brandis touches upon here:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

I firmly believe that this is a faulty metaphysics. It emphasises the idea that our identities, needs and aspirations are unique and wholly individual. This is a view that derives from the early moderns, such as Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes explicitly rejected the earlier view that each kind of creature has a "quiddity", i.e., an essence that gives it a particular nature distinct from other kinds of creatures and therefore at least some commonality in identity, needs and purposes. Instead, his theory was that we are determined at the atomic level to either desire things or be averse to them, and that these determinations are unique to each individual. 

A nineteenth century liberal feminist, Victoria Woodhull, advanced a similar sort of argument:

Now, individual freedom...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.

Now, one problem with taking this view is that it makes a common moral language very difficult, as there is no way to predict the good for any particular individual, and it also makes the idea of a common good very difficult, because there only exist individual goods known only to the individuals themselves. Language about the good tends to be expressed instead in terms of pluralism or diversity or tolerance or non-discrimination.

The alternative view is to see humans, like other creatures, as having a certain nature, so that it then makes sense that there might be a common telos (end or purpose) in seeking to embody the best aspects of this nature. This does not exclude this nature having a somewhat different expression according to personal traits, but nonetheless it exists as an underlying essence of what makes us recognisably men and women.

The idea of a wholly unique individual nature also distorts the relationship between the individual and society. It makes liberals frame this relationship as either "the individual comes first and society is derived from this fact" (the "good" liberal option) or "society comes first and the individual is merely derivative" (the "bad" non-liberal option). In either case, there is a sundering of individual and community.

Here again is Brandis:

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism. Firstly, conservatism and socialism have in common the belief that the basic units, the 'building blocks', of human society are structures much vaster than the individual.

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...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.

The better alternative is to recognise that there is, as Francis Bacon put it, a "double nature of the good". In other words, we fulfil our nature as men and women partly through ourselves as individually embodied and ensouled beings, but also through our membership of communal bodies. These other bodies help to carry certain aspects of our own good, such as our identity, our roles (e.g. as fathers and mothers), our loves, our social commitments, our attachments to people and place, our connection to generations past, present and future, our close connection to a particular culture and so on.

The individual good is not therefore somehow set apart from the good of the communal bodies we belong to. In contributing to the common good, we are advancing our own good as an individual. Nor do the communal bodies render us somehow derivative or incidental. They exist, in part, so that we can be more fully ourselves. 

Are liberal wets entirely individualistic? In the sense I have outlined above, yes. They cannot truly connect the individual to the communities he or she belongs to. However, liberals sometimes do, in a superficial way, concede that society does merit some attention. They might, for instance, add on the word "responsibilities" to their political formulas (for instance, here in Victoria we have something called the "Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities"). They might sometimes invoke the necessity of maintaining social cohesion, which is a weak and inadequate way of trying to counterbalance liberal individualism, but even this was too much for Brandis. He complained (of the former Liberal PM John Howard) that:

...in qualifying the Liberal Party's commitment to the freedom of the individual as its core value, and weighing it against what he often called social cohesion, Howard made a profound departure from the tradition of Deakin and Menzies.

Most significantly, liberal wets like to see themselves as being less selfish than liberal dries, despite being committed to a radically individualistic politics. How do they manage this? By emphasising the idea that they are committed to equal rights for all people. This is something very big for the Teal types. They will see themselves in individualistic terms as having little connection to any community or tradition of their own. But they are fierce in promoting the idea of the rights of those seen as somehow marginalised. It comes across as a pathological altruism, but I think it's one of the few ways that they are permitted to transcend their own individualistic politics and claim what they believe to be the moral high ground.

Where does the Anglo upper middle class go from here? Well, they will either merge into the new high-rise, densely packed multiculture or they will leave the former heritage suburbs for somewhere else. But I hope that a few younger ones might read this and consider being more politically adaptable, in the sense of letting go of liberalism as a class marker and instead adopting an alternative that makes it possible to defend a way of life.

Forward to Eden?

Why do liberals treat primitive societies as more legitimate than modern Western ones? In my last post, I made an argument that radical liberals have long been dismayed by the Christian claim that human nature is fallen and that it is therefore not possible to return to an Edenic existence of equality, freedom and plenty. Against the Christian view, the radical liberals argued that human nature has been corrupted by power structures through which some humans come to dominate others. If these can be deconstructed, then humanity will return to its original state of innocence.

What this means is that pre-civilised societies have often been treated by radical liberals as examples of original human societies free from class structures or exploitation. 

But this then raises a question. If primitive societies are superior to civilised ones, then why would progressives see history as a march of progress? 

I understood a possible solution to this more clearly after re-reading a post I once wrote about the sociologist Robert Nisbet. Nisbet, writing in the early 1950s, felt that his age was focused on issues of personal alienation and cultural disintegration. He thought these the products of the previous century. In the nineteenth century, there was a "temper of mind" which found:

the essence of society to lie in the solid fact of the discrete individual - autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable - and the essence of history to lie in the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past.

Here already is an answer to the problem I set out above. Progress was held by the liberals of the era to mean an emancipation of the individual from any status not derived from the autonomous, self-sufficient individual. In other words, the progress of society was toward the deconstructing of social hierarchies and distinctions. That is how the primitive could be reconciled with the progressive.

Nisbet wrote further:

Competition, individuation, dislocation of status and custom, impersonality, and moral anonymity were hailed by the rationalist because these were the forces that would be most instrumental in liberating the individual from the dead hand of the past and because through them the naturally stable and rational individual would be given an environment in which he could develop illimitably his inherent potentialities. Man was the primary and solid fact; relationships were purely derivative. All that was necessary was a scene cleared of the debris of the past

What does Nisbet mean by "relationships were purely derivative"? Well, consider the following claim by a Girton College girl in 1889:

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

This girl, already by 1889, saw family relationships as merely "derivative" rather than as something constitutive of the self.

You can understand, in part, why the nineteenth century mind moved in the direction it did. There was in progress a disruption of older, more local and more personalised forms of community toward more "massified" forms of urban life. You might think this far from Edenic, but for the radicals it had the advantage of busting up the traditional life they thought was corrupting human nature. Out of the disorder and dislocation, they hoped, would emerge a social life free from traditional distinctions and statuses.

It's worth pondering this, because I think it explains why some traditionalists instinctively wish to push back on some of this "massification" and to recreate to at least a degree more stable, personalised and local forms of community. 

Nisbet then adds the following:

This was the age of optimism, of faith in the abstract individual and in the harmonies of nature. In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, what we are given...is the matchless picture of a child of nature revolting against the tyrannies of village, family, and conventional morality...In the felicities and equalities of nature Huck finds joyous release from the cloistering prejudices and conventions of old morality. Truth, justice and happiness lie in man alone.

In many areas of thought and imagination we find like perspectives. The eradication of old restraints, together with the prospect of new and more natural relationships in society, relationships arising directly from the innate resources of individuals, prompted a glowing vision of society in which there would be forever abolished the parochialisms and animosities of a world founded upon kinship, village, and church. Reason, founded upon natural interest, would replace the wisdom Burke and his fellow conservatives had claimed to find in historical processes of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.

Kinship, village and church are rejected as parochialisms and are to be replaced by the individual following his "natural interest". Nisbet goes on to quote a nineteenth century Russian sociologist Ostrogorski who wrote:

Henceforth, man's social relations "were bound to be guided not so much by sentiment, which expressed the perception of the particular, as by general principles, less intense in their nature perhaps, but sufficiently comprehensive to take in the shifting multitudes of which the abstract social groups were henceforth composed, groups continually subject to expansion by reason of their continual motion."

Ostrogorski sees a shift in which traditional relationships and loyalties were relegated to the merely sentimental. What was replacing these merely sentimental bonds were "general principles" which were applied to continually expanding abstract social groups. Ostrogorski concedes that the newer relationships might be "less intense in their nature" but were nonetheless more comprehensive.

Finally there is this from Nisbet:

Between philosophers as far removed as Spencer and Marx there was a common faith in the organizational powers of history and in the self-sufficiency of the individual...Both freedom and order were envisaged generally in terms of the psychology and politics of individual release from the old.

We see this in the social sciences of the age. What was scientific psychology but the study of forces and states of mind within the natural individual, assumed always to be autonomous and stable? Political science and economics were, in their dominant forms, concerned with legal and economic atoms - abstract human beings - and with impersonal relationships supplied by the market or by limited general legislation.

Above everything towered the rationalist's monumental conviction of the organizational character of history - needing occasionally to be facilitated, perhaps, but never directed - and of the self-sufficing stability of the discrete individual.

History was moving - it was progressing - thought the nineteenth century intellectuals, towards a self-sufficient individual who needed only the resources within himself and who represented "natural man" liberated from the personal and the particular. This was the way that humans were going to travel forward to Eden, leaving behind the "the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past" (which helps to explain the poet Shelley's idea of biological sex - the fact of being male and female - as one of the "detestable distinctions" that would "surely be abolished in a future state of being".)

The hostility to the traditional is here overwhelming and it is not surprising that the political parties which formed by the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth were so little concerned to genuinely conserve.

Why is the West treated differently?

I'm currently reading the first issue of Observer & Review, a new Australian magazine aimed at the intellectual right. I've begun with an essay by Edwin Dyga titled "Prospects for Paleoconservatism". One part of this essay that particularly interested me concerns the inconsistent treatment within modern culture of Western and non-Western identities (p.49). Whereas it is thought wrong to claim that "America's settler class remains the bedrock of its present core culture" this would be "uncontroversial if expressed by an anthropologist describing the cultural primacy of any other foundational people outside the Eurosphere". 

How do we explain the discrepancy? Dyga thinks it is a result of critical theory: 

This inconsistency can only be explained as a function of critical theory, which is subversive when applied to one group but not another.

Critical theory is the attempt to reveal and challenge power structures. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes one of its adherents, Horkheimer, as follows:

"The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination.

Now, this is interesting as I have discussed this issue with others in the Melbourne Traditionalists and the consensus has generally been that the inconsistency reflects a belief in the longstanding trope of the "noble savage". In other words, pre-civilised societies are thought to be egalitarian and non-oppressive, and therefore they are treated by the left as legitimate in a way that civilised societies are not.

Max Horkheimer

However, I think it is possible that these two explanations overlap. This becomes clearer if it is remembered that something like critical theory long predates the Frankfurt School of the mid-twentieth century.

You have to go back to when a Christian worldview dominated the West. In this worldview, man's nature was fallen and therefore human society was inevitably imperfect. We were expelled from an Edenic existence by our own sinful nature. This worldview did not please those who were bent on achieving social utopias. They preferred to believe that the imperfection of human nature was due to the existence of power structures which "enslaved" men. If we could be liberated from these forms of domination, the theory went, then man's nature could be regenerated and we could return to an Edenic existence of innocence, equality and plenty.

The first power structure to be targeted was the ancien régime, the old order governing France before the revolution of 1789. Dennis Diderot, a French revolutionary, is supposed to have declared that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." 

Dennis Diderot

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical liberal of the early 1800s, wrote poetry about a New Man who would be created once all power structures had been overthrown, leaving only the man who was "king over himself":

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

Here is Shelley talking about power:

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches

Mary Shelley, his wife and the author of Frankenstein, had this to say about her husband's beliefs:

The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled...

He followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence, used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil...

Percy Shelley's fierce rejection of power structures extended even to God. He thought Milton's Satan a heroic character for rejecting God's rule:

Shelley found in Milton’s Satan a noble characterization of the champion of the oppressed, or mankind, fighting against God, the omnipotent monarch, like his own Prometheus against Jupiter.

And from an article about Percy Shelley's "Utopian desire":

[Shelley] desires to change the world to Eden before the fall of man. His idealism is based on the elimination of all sorts of tyranny and oppression

If we move on to Marx and Engels, we get the following conundrum. After the ancien régime was overthrown, there was not a return to a primitive Eden. Instead, a new power structure emerged in which the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class. Marx came up with the argument that if the working class were to take power, there would be no other class below them to exploit. In other words, there would no longer be a class based power structure. Engels, for his part, popularised a theory of primitive communism (i.e., a belief that primitive, pre-civilised societies had been egalitarian and non-oppressive) which he described this way:

What an admirable constitution this kind organization! No soldiers, gendarmes or policemen, no nobility, no kings or governors, no prefects or judges, no prisons (…) All are equal and free – including women. 

He goes on to claim that it was a "degradation" that ushered in the new civilisation. One critic of this view characterises it as follows: 

Primitive communism...endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness.

Engels was already at this time complaining about "patriarchy" and advocating for "sexual liberation" and in this he was a visionary as the left has mostly left behind their interest in social class and instead identified race and sex as the basis for power structures in society. What is thought to be standing between humanity and the achievement of equality and freedom is the need to deconstruct whiteness and patriarchy.

Friedrich Engels

Little wonder then that any form of specifically white identity is thought to represent an illegitimate "supremacy" that is based on oppressing the non-white other. 

What I would reiterate is that there is a long history in radical political thought in which primitivism (the noble savage) is identified positively with an Edenic world of freedom and equality, which was degraded by civilisation through the emergence of power structures, which tainted human nature and corrupted and enslaved Man. 

In this sense, critical theory and the noble savage are at least partly intertwined. 

You can see as well how seriously those who follow these ideas will be in their opposition to any form of traditional Western identity and why they might think it "progressive" for these identities to be abolished. 

I would hope as well that Christians might understand how far outside of their own tradition this aspect of modern culture is. The hope that by abolishing whiteness man's nature will be regenerated and there will be ushered in a wholly secular, this worldly version of Eden is not in line with a Christian anthropology.

Why would a woman think this way about marriage?

The latest thing to emerge on social media is the idea that it is wrong for wives to do things for their husbands. Why? Apparently, this represents a wife "mothering" a "man-child". The argument extends even to stay at home wives whose children are at school. They, too, are never to do anything for a husband, and he should take over the domestic work on his return from his paid job.

Here is an example of the mindset:

Now, obviously there is a terrible logic to this claim. If women cannot do wifely things for a husband, because it is "mothering" them, then there is no longer any meaning to the word "wife" - it has been emptied of any real content. It will no longer signify anything of value. And, of course, there is no longer the same level of reciprocity in a marriage. Men will go out to work, will then come home to more work, but cannot expect anything from their "wife" because that would make them a man-child.

How did we get to this point? Well, one reason is that the modernist mindset is to believe that life is about the pursuit of self-interest. When it comes to relationships this means that I should attempt to get my relational needs met to the maximum, whilst only being required to meet the needs of the other to the minimum.

So, specifically this means that a woman will want maximum effort, energy and attention from a man, whilst having few requirements to provide comfort, support or sex; whilst a man will want comfort, support and sex, with the minimum level of effort, energy and attention. Men with this mindset might angle for "situationships" or "friends with benefits", women might want a marriage in which they are not required to do homemaking, or "emotional labour", or to have sex. 

You might ask, if women want marriage to be run according to their own self-interest, why would a man sign on the dotted line? The answer is that women who think the world revolves around self-interest, assume that men think the same way and that marriage has been set up to benefit men. They claim that men get all the benefit from traditional marriage, so they are only righting the scales now to make marriage all about female self-interest. 

To justify this approach, they commonly cite debunked research by Paul Dolan that marriage improves happiness levels for men but sinks them for women. He misinterpreted some data, and has since corrected his original claims (see here). It turns out that married women with children are happier on average than all other categories of women:

To give an example of what these online debates look like, here is an exchange with a woman calling herself Alakazam. She began with the usual claims that wives "mother" their husbands and that men are happier in marriage than women.

I pointed out to her that the research she was relying on had been debunked and then replied with the following:

Her response? Exactly as might be predicted:

I tried to persuade her to retreat from this position by asking her if we should put our own self-interest ahead of our children. But she was happy to answer yes:

There is a positive side to all this. This can be changed. We are choosing to live in a world created by men like Thomas Hobbes. We don't have to. We could return to a different approach, one in which spouses will the good of the other. In a marriage in which both spouses have been formed along these lines, this would mean less focus on what we maximally get from the other, and more on what we have to give as husbands and wives. This is a healthier mindset, because we reach the better aspects of our own nature through acts of familial love. It would allow men to think positively of what they can gift a wife as a man; but similarly it would raise the status of what women might gift a husband as a woman.

Missing from view

Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad, wrote a post on X this week which I think is worth a read. The first part runs as follows:

The worst thing about every single person who considers themselves as "liberal" or "left wing" is that they are raging against the very soul of humanity with no understanding of what it is they are vanquishing with every step they take. It's so embedded in everything they do it is invisible to them, beyond their comprehension, absurd to even contemplate. It's just babble, to them, to speak of honour, heroism, sacrifice. It's been observed for a long time, but we're reaching the true reification of this paradigm now. These people cannot think or speak of anything other than negation, impulse, and a kind of grasping immediacy that makes them seem at once ludicrous, unsensible and, when viewed from a certain perspective, the terrible footsoldiers of a world order that will destroy the very spirit of man--indeed, they themselves have had their own spirits torn from them before they were even able to properly spell their own names. They were baked into a uniform human type, with uniform lifeless terminology, so that they communicate with each other like ants. No extraneous information is transmitted, just the base material of communication alone.

Look at what they're offering: a dead, flat world, lacking in vitality, energy, fidelity, passion, righteousness. They have no parallel concepts to explain these dimensions of the human soul, either. These things are all nonsensical sounds to them. They simply don't have the language required to be able to explain dimensions of the human experience that have been forever closed off to them by their upbringing and belief system, but the result is making them miserable and isolated, forced to live as something less than human. 

Carl Benjamin

Benjamin is here noticing the absence of the vertical dimension of reality within modernity (hence the idea of a "dead, flat world"). In other words, there are no longer qualitative distinctions between the high and the low. There has instead been a levelling or a flattening of existence. This stands in stark contrast to the longer pre-modern Western tradition which was an aspirational one, in which the human soul was directed to the higher and more noble aspects of human existence. St Paul gave voice to this tradition in the following passage:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things and the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8)

Benjamin goes on to make the following interesting observation:

This is why everything about their worldview is designed to be therapeutic, rather than curative or restorative. The world in which they exist is bad and they go to therapists to brainwash themselves into accepting the negative normal because it is literally beyond them to conceive that there might be an alternative to the personal torment they inhabit. This is why they're all on antidepressants and go to therapists in the first place. The very nature of "therapy" is to trap you in this paradigm.

Leaving aside the issue of whether therapy does or does not help people, it is interesting how therapy has become the "go to" for so many people. There is some legitimacy to the claim that we live in a therapeutic culture, and that this is connected to a worldview in which the higher aspects of reality, and of personhood, are placed out of view and out of reach. 

He continues:

It's also why they're so desperate to protect their "rights". They don't have any frame of reference for any alternative; what else is there in life, if not my personal rights? It's inconceivable that people might have been happy, purposeful, contented, successful without them. They can't even fathom it. No, the past was evil, my right to X or Y has determined this must be so because those people had an absence of this right. 

But they had something you don't even know exists. They had nonmaterial possessions which the average lib can't even recognise as having an existence, let alone having value.

However, the lib does know they've lost something. As soon as they come across a metaphysical culture, they venerate it as if they were zookeepers who have been given a particularly rare species of animal. Oh we must not interrupt their sacred rites because there is something they possess which we, the Westerners, don't!

They don't understand that, actually, we did indeed possess our own sacred rites. They died when we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals, and not part of the civilisation that birthed us. When we had something metaphysical to carry forth with us through the ages, we were just like them, only the liberal feels disgust at this concept, bringing them back down to time and place, and in their arrogance believes they've transcended their own particularities, when instead they have slipped beneath them into the morass of common filth that such metaphysics raised us out of in the first place.

Benjamin addresses two issues here. First, he identifies the problem of autonomy being the first principle of Western society ("we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals"), therefore placing ourselves outside of "the civilisation that birthed us".

Second, he raises the issue of the veneration of aboriginal peoples. I have heard different theories for this veneration. Benjamin's explanation is possible, albeit somewhat complex. It involves Western liberals on the one hand not wanting a metaphysical culture for themselves, because they are proud to have "transcended their own particularities" but on the other hand sensing that the aboriginal peoples have a connection to the sacred that they themselves do not - and, as such, being bearers of something significant. As a possible example of this mindset, here is the left-liberal Australian academic, Robert Manne, defending the traditional Aboriginal way of life as being,

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

Another theory (that some of my colleagues at the Melbourne Traditionalists prefer) is that it comes back to Rousseau's notion that man is corrupted by civilisation, i.e., it is a form of primitivism, in which organised, civilisational building religion is thought to be corrupting, but primitive forms of religion, at the very least, get a pass. As one colleague noted:

Witness the bizarre fascination that some feminists have for astrology, witchcraft, and other "spiritualities" that allegedly pre-date the invention of writing, patriarchy etc.

Benjamin finishes by prophesying that,

The lib is thereby doomed to be a singular "global citizen", unloved and unplaced, forever belonging to nowhere and appreciated by no-one, until they eventually expire like Rousseau's savage, "without anyone noticing that they have ceased to exist, and almost without noticing it themselves."

One final consideration. Benjamin has in the past described himself as a classical liberal. He seems to have gone beyond the usual limits of right-wing liberalism in what he has written (and now describes himself as a postmodern traditionalist). Right liberals generally have a low view of human nature, seeing people as being motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, and their world view is often focused on the pursuit of economic self-interest on both the individual and national level, rather than on higher, spiritual values.

I can only hope that the descent of Western culture is encouraging men like Benjamin to look outside the current right and left liberal political paradigm, and to consider the source of error as being more foundational, i.e., as being connected to faults in the underlying metaphysics of modernity.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 3

I'm still only a little way into Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Already, though, some of the strengths, and a possible weakness, of the book have emerged, which I think are worth covering.

The strengths are easier to describe, so I'll start there. Hazony identifies conservatism with a Burkean political philosophy. He presents a case, persuasively in my view, that this Burkean conservatism not only has a long pedigree, but also was influential for a long time in Anglo cultures. Conservatism, therefore, has not always been the philosophy that always loses.

Some of the key figures in this tradition are new to me. Sir John Fortescue, born in the fourteenth century, is described by Hazony as the "first truly outstanding expositor" of Anglo conservatism. Richard Hooker, who I was already familiar with, is mentioned as the next great figure, followed by "the greatest conservative", John Selden, who lived in the early seventeenth century and who was described by John Milton as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land". Only then does Hazony get to Edmund Burke, the famous critic of the French Revolution in the later 1700s.

Sir John Fortescue

Hazony delineates the difference between these conservative men and their opponents as a difference between those who are empirically minded, i.e., who take seriously what has been learned through long experience, and those who are rationalists, i.e., who think that society can be remade from scratch through abstract reason. 

Richard Hooker

There is much to be said for making this distinction. For instance, the conservatives in this tradition noted that it was difficult for those wanting to start from abstract principles to really know the longer term consequences of what they were proposing. As Hazony summarises Burke:

The more general and abstract the principle proposed, the more certain one may be that its consequences will not be confined to what has been discussed and foreseen. (p.28)

Burke has been proven right on this score over and over. For instance, it has been a constant theme of my own writing, that those who proposed to make individual autonomy the ruling principle did not understand where this principle would ultimately lead. 

The Burkean conservatives are also on strong ground when they express scepticism that the reason of one person is sufficient for rejecting an entire tradition and starting over (as the French revolutionaries did, deciding that 1792 would become Year 1). In Burke's own words,

The science of government being therefore...a matter which requires experience and even more experience than any one person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society. (p.26)

So why then am I still a little uneasy in wholeheartedly embracing this tradition? It is not because I believe that anything it represents is false - in fact, I think it has much to teach us - but that it leaves too much out. It is too limited in what it seeks to conserve, and in what it is willing to positively describe and adhere to.

I think this comes out a little in a section of the book detailing the historical empiricism of John Selden. Hazony quotes Selden as follows:

The way to find out the Truth is by others' mistakings: For if I [wish] to go to such [and such] a place, and one had gone before me on the right-hand, and he was out, [while] another had gone on the left-hand, and he was out, this would direct me to keep the middle way that peradventure would bring me to the place I desired to go. (p.17)

 Hazony follows up the quote by adding:

Selden thus turns to a form of pragmatism to explain what is meant when statesmen and jurists speak of truth.

The problem that immediately struck me on reading this is that although this might instruct you in how to get to a certain place the best way, it has little to say in where you should be going. For instance, if what you want is to secure the rule of a political elite, and to keep wages and conditions low for the workers, then a policy of divide and rule may well be, at a pragmatic level, a time-tested way of achieving this aim. It would then represent a "truth" of politics.

Yazony seems to be aware of this problem because he then states,

Selden recognised that in making these selections from the traditions of the past, we tacitly rely upon a higher criterion for selection, a natural law established by God, which prescribes "what is truly best" for mankind in the most elementary terms. 

So we now have a "higher criterion for selection" than historical empiricism, which is natural law. I have no issue with this approach, i.e. of using natural law to decide "what is truly best" and then historical empiricism to determine what works over time, but there is a further problem.

Yazony states that when we make selections we tacitly rely on natural law, and that we do so in the most elementary terms. I don't think this works out well in practice. The forces of liberal modernity are so great, that you need to declare what you are defending explicitly and in some detail.

You can see this from the work of Selden himself. Hazony describes Selden's approach to natural law in the following passage:

In his Natural and National Law, he explains that this natural law has been discovered over long generations since biblical times and has come down to us in various versions. Of these, the most reliable is that of the Talmud, which describes the seven laws of the children of Noah prohibiting murder, theft, sexual perversity, cruelty to beasts, idolatry and defaming God, and requiring courts of law to enforce justice. The experience of thousands of years has taught us that these laws frame the peace and prosperity that is the aim of all nations, and that they are the unseen root from which the diverse laws of all the nations ultimately derive. (p.17)

This is simply too elementary to have much force. Most liberals could accept most of this (except perhaps the prohibition of sexual perversity). And it still doesn't give clear guidance on what exactly is being conserved. If the ultimate aims are peace and prosperity, then does this justify the "Economic Man" approach to national policy, in which what matters ultimately is GDP growth? 

There is another problem with leaving the goods you are seeking to conserve only tacitly understood in elementary form. The critical issue for a period of time may have been the one outlined by Hazony, namely that of historical empiricists defending existing national institutions versus abstract rationalists seeking to completely remake society on the basis of universal rights. But it is not the only dividing line. 

One aspect of liberalism is its radical individualism. Many liberals do not recognise objectively existing values that a community can orient itself toward. Instead, they emphasise the idea of individuals autonomously choosing their own goods and allowing others to do the same. This then leads to a certain kind of permissive society that at the same time intrusively enforces a political moral code centred on non-interference, i.e., on non-discrimination, tolerance, openness and diversity.

There are different ways that liberals ground this approach to politics. It can be done via something similar to an historical empiricism, namely on the grounds that privatising concepts of the good is necessary to avoid conflict, as occurred at times in European history. But it also reflects certain metaphysical beliefs, such as that there are no objective values embedded in reality, with value coming instead either from acts of will or perhaps from having individual desires or pleasures satisfied. 

The point is that it is not clear that Burkean conservatism directly confronts these aspects of liberal modernity. The task for those who wish to conserve becomes more complicated. Conservatives have to make a multi-faceted assertion, namely that objective values do exist, that they can be discerned and rationally justified, that they can be held in common within a society, and that without a notion of a common good, there is considerable detriment to the good of individuals.

In making these assertions, it is necessary for conservatives to be very open in identifying the goods they wish to uphold within a community, and to go beyond broad concepts like "peace" or "prosperity" and instead to think through and describe a workable framework that takes into account different aspects of nature and reality, as well as to order the different kinds of goods (i.e., what is higher, what is lower) that are present to us.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 2

I'm reading the book Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. In the first post on this topic I focused on Hazony's dismay that conservatism was often understood to mean conserving Enlightenment liberalism and I illustrated his point with the following social media post:

Rebecca is one of those people that Hazony is frustrated with. She identifies conservatism with the liberal principle of individual autonomy, of a freedom "to be who we want and do as we wish".

Interestingly, quite a few readers challenged Rebecca's claim that Christianity was set against the American political founding. Rebecca often argues that Christianity is a source of authoritarianism and therefore does not fit in with the "constitution, freedom and liberties". Her opponents had this to say:

And this:

Which raises the interesting question of what role Christianity had in making the American political system successful or not. My own view is that America would have floundered without it, but that it is nonetheless not sufficient in itself as a basis for a successful political conservatism.

Why did America need Christianity? Well, Christianity provided something of a limit to the worst features of political liberalism. If liberalism says "what matters is that I am free to be who I want and do as I wish" then all that matters is that I do not interfere with others doing the same. The moral focus tends to be on non-interference: on openness, tolerance, non-discrimination and on on. But otherwise there is a very permissive society in which anything goes.

But Christian metaphysics introduces a different kind of principle. If God created the world, including us, then there is a good in the reality that we inhabit that we can discipline ourselves to follow. Value does not simply come from the act of choice itself; what we choose matters. There are qualitative distinctions between what is higher and lower within our character and within our actions. Christian metaphysics upholds the ancient Western characteristic of thinking of some things as having a noble quality and others as base.  

And so, even if political liberalism was permissive, the Christian culture that was embedded in American life was not. It had standards of decency, and positive ideals of human character. However, once the influence of Christianity ebbed, then the dissolving logic of political liberalism was able to unfold, to the detriment of American social life. There was no longer a clear way to define the good, or to acknowledge any form of authority outside of our own wills (expect what was defined formally by the law). 

Which raises a further question. Could the formula of Christianity plus political liberalism ever be a viable one? I don't think so. First, it is inevitable that those raised in a public culture that is liberal will chafe against the restraining influence of Christianity. If you believe that what matters is individual preference, then the standards once set by Christianity, which are accorded an authority outside of our own wills, will come to be looked on negatively as "authoritarian". In recent times this way of thinking has become more extreme with some on the left worried about a tyrannical Christian theocracy:

At the same time, if liberalism is installed as the system through which public life is organised, then it is likely to exert an influence on the Christian churches, making them increasingly liberal over time. This is a widespread issue, not just affecting American churches. In 1975 the Catholic Church made reference to the problem in a document titled Persona Humana:

What the Catholic Church recognised here is a tendency to erase qualitative distinctions in our character and acts, and therefore to collapse into secular liberal values, by appealing to the idea of everyone having equal dignity as images of God and/or that the only thing that matters is that we love one another (the "all you need is love" mantra). 

Finally, there are aspects of tradition that are not as clearly or definitively upheld in the Bible as they might be, and therefore a political conservatism or traditionalism is needed alongside Christianity to defend them. For instance, the Bible does assume that people belong to nations, i.e., that these are the expected forms of human community that derive from and that are blessed by God (see here). However, the defence of nations is not an overt focus of the New Testament, and so it is not likely that a Christian culture, by itself, would prove adequate to this particular cause - at least not in the modern era when such powerful forces are dedicated to a globalist order.

And so I don't think the combination of an Enlightenment liberalism, restrained by a Christian culture, was ever likely to hold. There needed instead to be a mutually reinforcing relationship between a certain type of conservative politics and Christianity. What that conservative politics would look like then becomes the key issue.