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.