Sunday, May 27, 2018

The rape of nature, left and right

I'm re-reading Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. One of the arguments Deneen makes is that when proto-liberals reconfigured the Western understanding of liberty in the early modern period, one prong of their attack was an attempt to overcome "the dominion and limits of nature." The proto-liberals favoured a belief "in an expanding and potentially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world."

Deneen argues that there were two phases in this attempt to assert dominion over nature. In the first wave, the emphasis was on the conquest of the natural world:
Liberalism...embraced and advanced as well an economic system - market-based free enterprise - that similarly promoted human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable - human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered. (p.36)

By the later 1800s, however, a second wave of liberal thinkers criticised the earlier view by asserting that human nature itself could be conquered or mastered. Deneen goes on to make the following interesting distinction:
First-wave liberals are today represented by "conservatives," who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends...[my emphasis]. Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Deneen writes further that,
Liberalism...seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions - its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature - created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity. [my emphasis]

It is this second revolution, namely the liberal insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature, that I want to focus on.

I attended a victory celebration today. Some "conservative" (i.e. right-liberal) councillors gained the upper hand in the last council election and suddenly announced that they were going to sell off 17 public reserves in my suburban area of Melbourne, with the idea being that they would be sold to developers to build more units.

A lot of us were shocked to hear the news. Why would anyone want to sell off these pockets of nature within suburbia just for short-term profit? Well, the mentality of these councillors fits in with the description provided by Deneen of first-wave liberals: they assume that human nature is self-interested and that nature is there to be exploited for utilitarian ends.

But there are a lot of lefties in the area I live in. They campaigned against the sell-offs, mobilised public support and ultimately saved most of the reserves (hence today's victory party). In my dealings with these left-wingers, I noticed that they were genuinely non-utilitarian in their attitude to the natural environment. They spoke at times about the importance of the beauty of nature and of its spiritual effects.

But here's the thing. When it comes to human nature, the left-liberals are no better than the right-liberals. They are just as willing to slash and burn, and to tread all over whatever there is of beauty and spirit within human nature, in order to assert a conquest and dominion over it.

They are no better - it is just that the focus of their efforts differs.

For prime evidence of this have a read of how left-liberalism operates in Sweden's preschools. The teachers at these schools have, as their prime mission, to eradicate distinctions between the boys and the girls. They are fiercely dedicated to this aim of destroying one significant aspect of human nature. They do not care if, by doing so, they eradicate what is beautiful within womanhood or what is strong and admirable within manhood. Just like the right-liberals, they assume that humans should stand separate to and in opposition to nature - to our nature as men and women.

From the New York Times article:
Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

It is normal, in many Swedish preschools, for teachers to avoid referring to their students’ gender — instead of “boys and girls,” they say “friends,” or call children by name. Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture

This began in 1996 in Sweden when Ingemar Gens, a journalist, realised that preschools were a good place to suppress sex distinctions:
Preschool struck him as the right place to do this. Swedish children spend much of their early life in government-funded preschools, which offer care at nominal cost for up to 12 hours a day starting at the age of 1.

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

The teachers are expected to watch videos of how they interact with the students, to pick up on any subtle differences in how they treat the boys and girls:
“It was hard at first to see patterns,” she said. “We saw more and more, and we were horrified at what we saw.”

In Sweden the idea that any distinctions based on sex might still exist is considered "horrifying".

One trainee teacher so much dislikes it when she sees her friends dressing their children as boys or girls that she makes a point of trying to re-educate them:
Ms. Gerdin’s friends have begun to have babies, and they post pictures of them on Facebook, swathed in blue or pink, in society’s first act of sorting. Ms. Gerdin gets upset when this happens. She feels sorry for the children. She makes it a point to seek her friends out and tell them, earnestly, that they are making a mistake. This feels to her like a responsibility.

Finally, you can see in all of this an error that is often made in politics. The left-liberals reacted to something they didn't like in right-liberal politics, but opposed it from within the same political framework. They weren't able to think outside of the framework itself.

You have to be careful that you don't become merely reactive to the thing you have grown to dislike. What should exist instead is an independent orientation to the truth.

Traditionalists do not want to live outside of nature, whether that refers to the natural world or to human nature. We want to be connected to it, deeply, and to draw from it what is best within the human experience. We orient our lives, in part, through our place within a natural order (an order of existence that encompasses the biological, the social and the spiritual). That does not mean rejecting efforts to employ technology for useful purposes, but this is not the principle we live by, or that we wish society to be ordered by, or that we measure progress by.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

11 comments:

  1. Good news to hear. I've been reading MacroBusiness about the immigration-driven real estate bubble in Oz. It would be a tremendous loss if your country follows the path of California's overdevelopment and demographic displacement, enough to be called the Alsace-Lorraine of the US.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tim, I'm afraid that the tremendous loss you speak of is happening. Melbourne is becoming congested and demographic displacement is noticeable, though it varies a bit by suburban area. We need a capable alternative party here in Australia.

      Delete
  2. Excellent. Thank you for this review of the dichotomy between the sanctity of nature in situ, and the boundless putty that is H. sapiens. I'm always happy to see writing on the relationship between traditionalists and nature. The Left has monopolized the narrative of caring about the environment for generations but this need not be so.

    Here is Auster on a portion of this subject:

    "...it is not belief in the transcendent God of the Bible that leads to the human destruction of nature, but the rejection of God and the elevation of the human will, no longer restrained by God, over the world."

    http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/012435.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the Auster quote - it meshes well with Deneen's position. Deneen, I think, would put a very similar thought a little differently, by arguing that the human will was no longer restrained because of an anthropology in which individuals were thought to be, by nature, unconstrained and that it was only through a need to make a voluntary social contract, to protect life, liberty and property, that some part of this liberty was ceded. Therefore, the only real constraints were those enforced by the state as law. Instead of seeing themselves as part of a natural order, the early moderns instead advanced the idea that humans were abstracted and atomised individuals motivated by self-interest and by a desire for dominion over the world in order to expand the sphere of autonomous control.

      Delete
  3. Very well said. Just to add to your last point, it isn't that liberals support technological progress and traditionalist are opposed, but rather we have a different understanding of the purpose of technology. We believe that true progress is technology directed towards our natural ends whereas the liberal wants to use technology to distort and pervert our natural ends. Thus technology that helps people see, hear, walk, cure illness, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and so on is progress, whereas technology used to murder unborn children and mutilate the human body is not. I have yet to read the book, but you have convinced me to do so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, agreed. I think Deneen's position is that if a technology helps the life of a community then it should be accepted, but that currently people see themselves as directed by technology, no matter what its effects. I would be delighted if you did end up reading the book - I don't think you'll be disappointed as there is much of interest on a range of topics.

      Delete
  4. It's true. The takeover of right of centre politics by free market obsessives allowed the left to take over the issue of conservation (which is naturally conservative) and turn it into the current mutant beast that environmentalism has become.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is a remarkably valuable insight that you have (re) discovered. Right liberalism as the conquest of nature (to exclude human) and left liberalism as the addition of conquest of human nature.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The mass "gender" psychosis infecting our immunodeficient societies is spread easily (no active resistance) with strategies and tactics repeatedly proven reliable. It is modern liberals (lefties/left wingers) who are getting things done and having all the fun. Actions make their words, words of action. They do the procedural work that gets their action-words embedded into our institutions, codified into law and built into our cultures like mental keystones and cornerstones, while we vape into the cloud.

    Mark's example is perfect. He "attended a victory celebration". They [my emphasis] ["the lefties/left-wingers"] campaigned against the sell-offs, mobilized public support and ultimately saved most of the reserves (hence today's victory party)."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Buck, good comment. I agree with you about the lack of resistance and that leftists are the ones setting the agenda. I do want to clarify, though, that I did personally play a significant role in the campaign - I was active throughout and came up with one of the key arguments against the sell-offs, so helped frame what was done. I have to acknowledge, though, that in terms of numbers and overall leadership, it was the local lefties who were easily preponderant.

      Delete
  7. This is one of the best articles I have read on this subject. I've thought about it a lot. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete