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.
