Marcuse's Utopia

In 1971 John Lennon released his famous song Imagine. It is a song that calls on us to imagine a certain kind of utopia, one in which there are no nations and no religions but only a global solidarity, a brotherhood of man. 

From what intellectual milieu did this song spring from? It's hard to ignore the influence of a leading intellectual of this period, Herbert Marcuse. 

Marcuse was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, studied Marxism as a young man, came under the influence of Heidegger, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. He ended up emigrating to the United States in 1934. He was a leading theorist for the New Left in the 1960s, but his influence subsequently waned. 

Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse was a self-proclaimed leftist utopian. As such, he stands in a tradition that goes back to at least the later 1700s. Marcuse absorbed a great deal of thought from the past. Evident in his writing is the influence not just of Marx, but of Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Hegel, amongst others.

Leftist utopianism has certain common characteristics. It often involves a belief that you can achieve an absolute form of autonomous individual freedom, of perfect equality and lasting peace; that you can and should have solidarity between people, but only at a universal, global level; that human nature can be remade to make possible these achievements, so that you bring into being a New Man; and that human nature is currently corrupted by the institutions of civilisation, so that change requires an attack on these institutions and a subverting of culture and religion.

It is interesting to me just how similar the basic underpinnings of Marcuse's worldview of the 1960s are with that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1810s. Marcuse's ideas considerably overlap with Shelley's, albeit expressed in the language of Marx and Freud. Leftist utopianism has been remarkably stable over a long period of time.

The aims

What was Marcuse aiming for? He did not present this in an entirely systematic way, but it's possible to identify certain themes. 

First, he believed in "liberation", by which he meant, in part, absolute individual autonomy. He wrote:

Liberty is self-determination, autonomy...It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do

This is a standard aim across most modernist political currents. It's noteworthy that Marcuse, who identified as a socialist, should share this belief with liberals of all stripes. 

If you want to be completely free as an autonomous individual, then there will be nothing that might limit what you determine for yourself. Nor will you be defined by anything outside of your own individual choice. You will not be defined by nation or class, nor by family or sex. You will not be limited in your choices by religious belief. There will be nothing above you and nothing below you. There will just be you, a discrete individual, existing on the same plane as everyone else and everything else.

Here is how Shelley puts his vision of the new autonomous man:

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

However, Marcuse did not entirely reject the idea of solidarity. But the only kind of solidarity that was permissible was a global, universalist one, that of humanity. He wrote of how the revolution had the aim of "creating solidarity for the human species" and said of happiness that "its validity depends on the real solidarity of the species “man,” which a society divided into antagonistic classes and nations cannot achieve".

He used Freudian concepts to try to make this scientific. Freud had claimed that Eros represented a life force that aimed at higher unities of life. Marcuse used this theory to argue that prior to all social forms of morality, there was a biological, instinctual one that aimed to create unities at the highest level possible (i.e., ultimately at the universal level, that of humanity):

Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a “disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unities” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.

But solidarity was not, in Marcuse's view, to impinge on our individual autonomy. He praised the student rebellion of the 1960s for not creating any hierarchy of leadership or any stable forms of organisation:

Socialist solidarity is autonomy: self-determination begins at home…. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.

Another angle to liberation for Marcuse was that surrounding the Marxist concept of alienation. Marcuse followed the idea that man is formed through his productive labour, but that he is alienated from this self-formation under the conditions of capitalism. His labour is treated as a kind of commodity, and he does not control the conditions of his labour, nor does he receive all of his productive output. He is forced to spend his life toiling for others. 

Marcuse thought there was a way out of this. Modern capitalism had raised industrial output to such a level that if this output was distributed more equally, there could be a great reduction in the need to work for necessity. 

The general aim here of reducing working hours is easy to support. The issue is whether Marcuse's political orientation was likely to help achieve this aim or not. My own belief is that he unintentionally made things worse (I will explain this further on). I would just note, for now, that one component of Marcuse's ideal of liberation, and the achievement of individual autonomy, was overcoming alienation from our labour.

A third aspect of Marcuse's utopia is more difficult to explain. Marcuse had a lifelong interest in aesthetics. It led him to the idea that in a utopia reality would be remade along artistic lines. He believed that if a repressive form of reason could be overturned that, "The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man." Art would no longer be a separate sphere of life, the whole of life and reality would be art. In Marcuse's utopia, the distinctions between science and art, logic and imagination would no longer exist:

Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.

For Marcuse, the imagination was a liberating force. Reason by itself would not liberate people, because it was too bound to current conditions of life. Marcuse therefore strongly supported the surrealists, and thought that dreams and the poetic imagination could envisage a different and better way of life. He quoted a leading French surrealist, Benjamin Péret, who held that a poet "can no longer be recognized as such if he does not oppose himself by a total non-conformism to the world in which he lives." Marcuse felt that the libertarian possibilities of the revolution,

are “sur-realistic”: they belong to the poetic imagination

The ideal for Marcuse was a world in which "mediations" would,

...reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism. Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream.

Note the similarity to the beliefs of Percy Bysshe Shelley back in the 1810s:

Shelley’s poetry often expresses a utopian vision of a better society...Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world. Through his writings, Shelley encourages readers to tap into their creative faculties, to dream, and to envision a more just and compassionate society. His emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination resonates with readers, reminding them of their capacity to bring about positive change.

And think too of John Lennon's song, with its title "Imagine" and the line "You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one".

A fourth aspect of Marcuse's utopia was the idea that we could not really know what the utopia might be like. He ends his "Essay on Liberation" on this note:

And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.

Marcuse was aware of the problem of describing his alternative vision. He refused to set out a blueprint for his utopia:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.

He recognised, though, that it was reasonable for people to ask for some vision of the new before committing to destroying the old:

However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action.

Marcuse did sketch out a vague and abstractly intellectual picture of what the organising principles of his utopia would be. But it is still striking how willing he was to subvert the traditions of his society, even what he terms the "most sublime manifestations of traditional culture", in favour of a roughly drawn, unlikely utopia.

How would Marcuse's utopia come about? Like other leftist utopians he thought that human nature was malleable. What was corrupting this nature was the influence of oppressive and exploitative institutions, and so there is much mention in his writings of the need to subvert these institutions.

He thought, as well, that it was both possible and necessary to create a type of new man and that this would not happen automatically as a result of institutional change. Marcuse suggested that if there were revolutionary changes to morality, that this might reach into the "biological" nature of man (by which he meant that the organism of man would be reconditioned so that it could only function along the lines of the new morality):

To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological" dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.

Marcuse did not believe that the working-class was likely to initiate revolutionary changes. He looked instead to social movements of his time, such as those of Black Americans and feminists. He placed particular hope in the feminist movement, because one other aspect of his utopia was the ideal of peace (Lennon: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace"). 

It makes sense for someone on the left side of modernity to emphasise peace. The original wave of liberalism had based its politics on an anthropology of conflict, making the starting point the claim that man in a state of nature would engage in a war of all against all. Marcuse makes reference to this in his Essay on Liberation, in which he notes the existence of classes and nations, and the absence of universal solidarity, and claims that,

As long as this is the history of mankind, the “state of nature,” no matter how refined, prevails: a civilized bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], in which the happiness of the ones must coexist with the suffering of the others.

And this is where his excitement about the radical feminist movement comes in. Marcuse believed in the Freudian idea that Eros, or libidinal energy, was the Life Instinct, that was locked in battle with aggressive energy, the Death Instinct. Marcuse identified feminine qualities (receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness) with the Life Instinct and masculine ones (aggression, dominance, performance, assertiveness, competitiveness) with the Death Instinct. He hoped that the feminist revolution would ultimately make traditionally feminine qualities universal, thereby ushering in an androgyny, in which men and women were equally feminine:

No other rational meaning can possibly be attributed to the idea of androgynism than the fusion, in the individual, of the mental and somatic characteristics, which in patriarchal civilization were unequally developed in men and women, a fusion in which feminine characteristics, in cancellation of male dominance, would prevail over their repression.

Marcuse was aware of the disorder and pain that such a transition would involve: "This will be struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment and suffering (mental and physical)". But it was his answer to the issue of creating an anthropology of peace - human nature would be remade to be universally feminine. 

A brief reply

Marcuse's utopia can be criticised from many different angles. I want to focus on just one, his concept of solidarity.

Marcuse thought that you could position solidarity at the universal level of humanity, rather than, say, at the level of family or nation. I would argue that this is not realistic and is ultimately detrimental to the good of individuals.

Marcuse believed in the concept of reification, i.e., that under capitalism people are treated more as objects or things, and that relationships between people are treated as relationships between things. Marcuse was also critical of the "performance principle" in which the norms and values of a society are geared toward economic competition and acquisition.

I would argue that the family used to put certain limits on these things. Yes, the family has had a certain economic function in history, either as a household economic unit or, at the aristocratic level, via the arranging of marriages for economic and social advancement. 

The family, however, has also been held up as a haven from the competitive pressures of the outside world, particularly following on from the industrial age. A well-functioning family was envisaged as being, ideally, a place where a certain kind of peace might be sought. 

Rather than being "reified", relationships between family members were to be highly personalised, and based on mutual loyalty and natural affection. There was to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the common good of family life, rather than a competitive and self-seeking dynamic between family members.

The solidarity of family life, based on mutual support, was intended to help buffer individuals against the indifference of the outside world, and to make them less vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.

The feminism of the 1970s, which Marcuse championed as "liberation", pushed things in the wrong direction. It emphasised the idea of men and women as contending political classes, which not only undermined solidarity between the sexes, it represented a shift toward aggression and competitiveness in human relationships rather than away from it. It destabilised family life, with the rise in unmarried adults rising from 28% in 1970 to 47% by 2019. These adults do not have the same level of economic or emotional support (for instance, a married couple will accrue three times more household wealth than an unmarried adult, similarly 80% of married women express confidence in being able to retire comfortably compared to only 50% of unmarried and divorced women). 

Nor did 1970s feminism push back against reification. If anything, this has intensified. Consider the feminists who complain about having to "perform" what they call "emotional labour" in marriages. 

It seems likely, as well, that relationships between the sexes have become more, rather than less, transactional since the 1970s. It is not uncommon now to hear women argue that, as they don't really need a man (economically), that they will only consider a man who is able to "add value" to their lives. It has become less common to hear either sex talk about a loving spousal union as a primary aim of life. 

It is a similar story when it comes to nation as a source of solidarity. National solidarity places limits on certain types of exploitation. For instance, open borders mean that the workers of one nation must compete for jobs with other workers around the world. If employers have no solidarity with the workers of their own country, they are free to employ whoever will work the longest for the least money. It is noteworthy that wages have stagnated since 1980 whilst GDP growth has continued to rise:

In other words, the share of national wealth going to the working classes has fallen over time as national solidarity has waned. This, in Marcusian terms, means that the alienation of labour has increased - it has gone in the wrong direction - as national solidarity has been undermined. 

Again, when a country has a stable sense of national identity, then relationships between individuals involve a sense of a shared history and culture, with a deeply held connection to place and to a particular tradition. Relationships between people are not mediated as strongly by economics, by a sense of living in a society marked by labour and consumption on a mass scale, of existing within a kind of global entrepôt. In this way, too, national solidarity places limits on the reification that Marcuse so opposed.

The position I am arguing here is that Marcuse's utopia was self-defeating. By making solidarity universal, he increased the degree of alienation and reification, rather than overcoming them.

Which leads me to one final criticism of Marcuse. Marcuse thought that he could abolish the "performance principle", by which reality was shaped by norms of competition and acquisition, by making men and women equally feminine, and therefore androgynous.

Marcuse seems not to have adequately considered the way that women contribute to the drive to acquire material things. One of the reasons that men "perform" is to attract a wife. There are plenty of men who are kept hard at work to afford the renovations or the holidays or the house that their wife desires. Left to themselves, some of these men would most likely choose to live more simply. It is therefore unlikely that abolishing the masculine, if this were possible, would overcome the drive within human nature to be materially acquisitive.

And, to the extent that men do have a provider instinct, this is mostly a beneficial aspect of the masculine. A man might leverage some of his "aggression" to succeed in this role, but it is motivated by his love for, and commitment to, his family and it helps to create material comfort and security for his wife and children. To abolish the masculine would mean a loss of this provider instinct and the benefits to family life that go with it.

But, most importantly, the masculine cannot be reduced to these material functions. At its best, the masculine is able to discern the higher ordering within reality and then frame society in a way that is most conducive to human flourishing. 

It is true that this creates a kind of hierarchy, as it involves a serious engagement with the vertical dimension of reality, where not all things are equal, but where we can aspire to higher things within our nature and within the nature of the reality we inhabit. It also requires a serious engagement with forms, with the essences of things, and therefore with their distinct natures and ends. 

It is true, I think, that men need a certain type of receptivity, a quality identified as feminine by Marcuse, to best perform this highest of masculine tasks. In other words, if a man were entirely unreceptive he would find it difficult to discern "logos" - the ordering principles within reality. However, this is a refining of the masculine, rather than a turn to androgyny. 

Men have largely been lacking in recent times in contributing this sort of masculine leadership. Perhaps part of the reason is that the New Left and second wave feminism, both influenced by Marcuse, managed to successfully malign the masculine, and to stamp it with negative associations, as being merely a social construct that unleashes aggression into society and that represses the life instinct.

It is time to move beyond Marcuse and the intellectual frame he helped to create.

Orbiting ourselves vs being needed

I saw the following post on social media and thought it worthwhile recording it here. It describes, I think, a type of archetypal experience that we have as men and women.

It reminded me of a passage I read years ago from a biography of Alice James, the sister of the novelist Henry James. She lived alone as a spinster. In 1889, she was visited by her brothers:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left, Alice was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

As the "Feminist Turned Housewife" points out, modern liberal culture is pushing people toward this kind of solitude. In part, this is because the aim of life is held to be a freedom defined as maximal individual autonomy. This assumes that we can develop solo, outside of relationships with others, and that stable relationships can be sacrificed to autonomous choice.

Another reason is that the dynamic described in the post, one in which the man feels that his masculine qualities and efforts are needed by his family, and the woman feels that her feminine nurturing presence is needed, requires higher aspects of our nature to be successfully maintained. We have drifted a long way from a concept of virtue, of cultivating the higher qualities of our nature. Instead, there is an ethos of "empowerment" in which we are encouraged to act in any direction we choose, without negative judgement, as long as we uphold the same right for others. In this modern ethos, it is assumed that individuals are pursuing their own wants and desires, and therefore rejecting the idea of service to others.

And so there is little concept of a common good of family life that a man and a woman might deliberately seek to uphold. After all, for men to commit to the role described in the post, they would need to have some confidence that their wife would be both loyal and appreciative (and, also, to have some level of respect for him as a man). The wife, for her part, would need some confidence that she would be loved and supported, and that the man would use his position within the family for the good of its members (i.e., that he really would achieve a strength and steadiness in his presence within the family).

This represents a mission for both the husband and wife, one that tests their character and their commitment to the higher goods of family life. And it requires that both spouses deliberately orient themselves to this mission, rather than one alone.

It can be done, because it is such a deeply embedded aspect of our natures as men and women. But it's not easily done within the current cultural frame. 

Can we reason about the good?

Someone posted an AI generated image on X showing a 40-something single woman crying into a birthday cake she had to make herself. Which prompted this response:

I replied with:

Predictably it drew a rebuke:

This is a common mindset on social media and is worth picking apart a little. What it assumes is that there is no common nature to things and that therefore it is not possible to reason about the human good. Once this assumption is in place, others follow, including the belief that anyone who does reason about the human good does so maliciously.

It's not possible to move forward with this attitude. Aquinas once defined law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has the care of the community". But if it is an act of malice to reason about the good, then law must be understood differently, perhaps as an external imposition. 

Origins?

Why might someone believe that it is not possible to reason about the human good? People who think this way see only one part of reality, namely a uniquely individual calling in life. Of course, this can and does exist. But what they fail to see is the nature we share, from which we can make general observations about the human good.

One possible reason for a person not recognising this shared nature is the influence of nominalism. Nominalism arose a long time ago in the Medieval era. I found the following treatment of it by Robert Reilly helpful:

This change started taking place in the late Middle Ages. William of Ockham is one of the most prominent thinkers who proposed this nominalist and voluntarist way of thinking, that was the obverse of Thomas Aquinas, and the synthesis of faith and reason that he had achieved.

The key to this is theological. As Aquinas said, God’s divine intellect is primary to the divine will. It’s the intellect that conceives, or knows, and it is the will that executes. The reason logos is primary, because it is reason in God’s essence, and will secondary or instrumental, is because it obeys the intellect.

Now, what William of Ockham does is he flips that relationship, he makes God’s will primary, and the divine intellect secondary. It is the will that decides, and there is nothing constraining the will, it can decide anything. The intellect is, then, just an executor, finding the best way for the will to reach its end, its decision, and it is unconstrained. William of Ockham was upset that this Pagan philosopher, Aristotle, who had infected Thomas Aquinas, was constraining the omnipotent God. And Ockham was going to set Him free, you see, by removing these restraints. But he had to do so at the price of reason and nature. Now that the will is primary and God can do anything, what happens to the essences of things?

In other words, things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature? Ockham says that we can’t know any of this, because there are no essences anymore.

[with nominalism]....the words you use for things....don’t relate to anything out there. There’s no correlation between the name you give things and what they are because you can’t really know what they are. There’s no order in nature, because there’s no nature. This is a terribly radical teaching, and you can see how this ontology of the will unmoors everything...There is nothing right or wrong in itself, other than God says it’s right. 

It is possible as well that the mindset derives, in part, from the expressive individualism embedded in modern culture. Robert Bellah defines this as follows:

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

In short, the emphasis is on each of us having a "unique core of feeling" that must be socially expressed. There is, again, no room here for reasoning more generally about the human good. After all, we cannot know what the unique core of feeling for billions of humans is. So we have no way of reasoning about what the good might be for each of them. We have to, in one sense, be indifferent to the good of others, as we cannot know it. There cannot be prudence or guidance or social norms or inherited wisdom or learning from past experience. There cannot be any kind of preferring one thing over another at the social or public level. There has to be a learned indifference, in which we do not even register the possibility that someone's life situation may be less than ideal, the assumption being "this is how the person is choosing to express themselves, therefore I must affirm it as legitimate for them". 

Let's say, though, that we do accept the existence of a shared nature. This does not in itself resolve the issue of reasoning about the human good. It is precondition rather than a solution.

There have been a number of approaches to connecting nature to morality in the modern period. In what follows, I'll attempt to sketch some of them, but obviously this is not a complete picture.

One radical approach has been to deny that nature provides any guidance for human behaviour. As a case in point, Yuval Noah Harari has argued that Charles Darwin changed our understanding of morals, because his theory undermined the idea that there are any purposes in nature. If nature has no purposes, then there is nothing that might be considered against nature. The end result is that anything goes:

A different approach was taken by the natural rights theorists. They did not want protections for the individual to be thought of as being granted by governments, but to be inherent and inalienable. This theory has been immensely influential in the modern world, but it has its limitations. It is a defensive approach to morality that sees a potential threat to individual life from governments and seeks to restrict how governments may act toward the individual. It does not, therefore, have a significant focus on how individuals themselves might guide their own behaviour and contribute to the social bodies that help constitute what the individual is. And, although the theory claims to rest on natural law, this has been done somewhat abstractly, with claims, for instance, that such truths are simply self-evident.

There have also been moderns who have sought to base morality on clear and distinct ideas that would be acceptable to all across denominational lines. They wanted a morality that could be grounded according to modern scientific principles. In doing so, they often tried to base their moral theories on some very basic observations about human nature, for instance, that people have a survival instinct and want to stay alive, or that people want to maximise pleasure and avoid pain, or that people have desires and prefer to have their own desires fulfilled rather than someone else's. Some of these thinkers accepted that this starting point led to very unconventional moral positions, but others tried to justify existing moral codes on the new foundations. 

These "scientific" moralities have not borne good fruit. They were too crudely reductionist; and they sometimes had too fixed an anthropology - they identified certain negative traits within human nature, such as people being greedy and selfish, and attempted to leverage these for pro-social ends. Sometimes, as well, the anthropology was based not so much on nature but on a fictional nature, such as Hobbes's theorising about a state of nature in which people begin as individuals and then contract (defensively) to form human societies. 

My own preferred option is necessarily more complex. It's an "order, frame, develop, maintain" approach to morality. The ordering is necessary because human nature has within itself the potential for both higher and lower expressions of who we are. This was a key aspect of the traditional Western understanding of the moral life, namely that we could act in ways that were either more noble or more base. There are qualitative differences, and so the lower has to be made subordinate to the higher. 

Framing is necessary because there is a tripartite order of being. Lawrence Auster explained this as follows:

The order of being means the tripartite order of existence in which we live: the natural order, the social order, and the divine order—the biological, the cultural, and the spiritual. Everything that exists is a part of one or more of those realms, with man in the middle, a part of them all and experiencing them all.

When we consider human flourishing we have to take into account these different orders, so that they are harmonised as much as is possible. It is better, if possible, if they work together rather than against each other. If, for instance, we were to think through what kind of moral norms should apply to family life, it would make little sense to ignore the biological distinctions between men and women, nor basic biological drives involving sexuality and reproduction; but there would also be a consideration of the spiritual, such as the virtue of fidelity and the significance of sexuality as a procreative act; and, finally, there would need to be a realistic understanding of some of the social considerations that apply to marriage and family life, such as the significance of a husband's social status, the need to provide certain kinds of social supports to the wife and so on.

What this means is that a morality has to be framed in such a way that the pieces fit together and the larger framework is able to hold. 

The "develop" aspect of morality acknowledges that we do have purposes given to us, in part, by our nature as men and women, and that part of the moral life is to develop in ways that allow us to give full expression to these purposes. If we are men, for instance, then one of our purposes is to develop the higher qualities of manhood, i.e., to fully express the higher aspects of the masculine, including in our roles as husbands and fathers. 

The "maintain" aspect recognises that one moral aim in life is to preserve our original integrity of being. This is a difficult task as we are all subject to entropy, i.e., that aspect of reality in which an ordered state declines into disorder or chaos. The traditional moral language of the West often reflected this aim of maintaining an integrity of being. We were to avoid being dissolute, dissipated, licentious, decadent, debauched, incontinent, promiscuous, profligate and abandoned. This is the moral sphere in which purity is valued, i.e., being unblemished or uncorrupted. This aspect of the moral life is little valued today, and is sometimes cast negatively as being a denial of fun or of life experience. But it should be understood very differently as holding together our ability to live more fully and freely as ourselves - as not losing any of our capacities and in having a higher level of control over what we choose to do. 

There is a final approach to morality that requires a person to have a religious worldview. It is one in which there is a sense that within the larger given nature of reality there is specifically a Logos, or a divine or sacred order. Again, this is a very longstanding tradition within Western thought. This order can be discerned through reason and revelation. There is an appeal to this approach in the declaration by the Catholic Church on sexual ethics called Persona Humana (1975):

there can be no true promotion of man's dignity unless the essential order of his nature is respected. Of course, in the history of civilization many of the concrete conditions and needs of human life have changed and will continue to change. But all evolution of morals and every type of life must be kept within the limits imposed by the immutable principles based upon every human person's constitutive elements and essential relations-- elements and relations which transcend historical contingency.

These fundamental principles, which can be grasped by reason, are contained in "the Divine Law--eternal, objective and universal- -whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community, by a plan conceived in wisdom and love. Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of Divine Providence, he can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth." This Divine Law is accessible to our minds.

Hence, those many people are in error who today assert that one can find neither in human nature nor in the revealed law any absolute and immutable norm to serve for particular actions other than the one which expresses itself in the general law of charity and respect for human dignity. As a proof of their assertion they put forward the view that so-called norms of the natural law or precepts of Sacred Scripture are to be regarded only as given expressions of a form of particular culture at a certain moment of history.

But in fact, Divine Revelation and, in its own proper order, philosophical wisdom, emphasize the authentic exigencies of human nature. They thereby necessarily manifest the existence of immutable laws inscribed in the constitutive elements of human nature and which are revealed to be identical in all beings endowed with reason.

One of my readers once framed modern politics in terms of how people responded to such a natural order:

I have long defined modern liberalism as the denial and the defiance of an immutable natural order of being, which traditionalist conservatism accepts and embraces along with the necessary constraints and trade-offs.

The transcendentals, such as truth, goodness and beauty, could also be included within this aspect of moral thinking.

One final point: I think it's a mistake to think only in terms of a finis ultimus - of the one ultimate end of human life. This is a worthy thing to ponder, but it seems better to me to recognise a range of life purposes. 

For example, if it is accepted that we have a given nature as men, then one purpose derived from this is to develop along the highest masculine lines, so that we are fully formed as men. But this too generates specific purposes: we will need to cultivate masculine virtues; to develop intellectually, physically and spiritually; to become wise and loving as fathers and husbands; to reassure and inspire those around us with the masculine strengths available to us and so on. 

And, if we accept a traditional anthropology, in which we are constituted in part by the social bodies we belong to, then manifold purposes flow from this as well. We must then have regard to the health of those social bodies, and contribute as best we can to them, whether this is family, local community, church or nation.

Formless modernity

Patrick Deneen, in a conversation with Albert Mohler, made the following observation that has, I believe, a great deal to it:

I often think of a line in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in which he says Americans, that is liberal democrats, will find forms to be abhorrent, they will always be opposed to forms. And what did he mean by that? 

Forms are that which create a shape or are a shape. Forms are all of the ways that, especially in nature but also not in nature, we draw distinctions. So you're [speaking to Mohler] dressed in a nice jacket and tie, I'm business casual, we would say you're more formal and I'm more informal and if I were my students I'd be wearing a hoodie and the tendency is to move toward the more informal in liberal democracy. 

And so the same mechanism that leads us to have informal Fridays or informality in address or not to be addressed as professor or doctor but as Patrick or hey you or dude, all of these are manifestations of the same phenomenon that leads to the decrial of borders, that's a form, the nation is a form; that leads to the decrial of religion as opposed to spirituality; liturgy as opposed to just simply feeling and emotion that I have, or connection or spirituality that I have; and of course it leads to the denunciation of the idea that there is somehow in nature a man and a woman. 

So it seems an odd thing to claim but the move toward informality is not disconnected in its deepest philosophical form.

[From a YouTube video, "Regime Change? A Future Beyond Classical Liberalism and Its Legacy? - With Patrick J Deneen", from 50:28, see here]

In short, a denial of form in philosophy leads, logically, both to informality but also to "formlessness", i.e., to a rejection of distinction. And so we see things "ratchet" within liberal modernity toward both of these things.

Just to underline this connection, consider the etymology of the word "formal". It first made its appearance in the late 14th century:

"pertaining to form or arrangement;" also, in philosophy and theology, "pertaining to the form or essence of a thing," from Old French formal, formel "formal, constituent" (13c.) and directly from Latin formalis, from forma "a form, figure, shape"

So the word "formal" originally had a sense of the form or essence of things, i.e., of the quality that constituted a particular thing. So what then happens when you get an early modern philosophy that stridently denies the existence of forms or essences? You will get a gradual shift to the "informal" and from there an effort to overthrow distinctions that once constituted "form".

Professor Patrick Deneen

This happened very gradually in Western culture but was already being noticed in the early 1800s. Professor Deneen cited Tocqueville describing the US in the 1830s. It was exactly in this decade that the American feminist Sarah Grimke decried the existence of distinctions between the sexes:

We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes...the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female...Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society

Similarly, in 1811 the English poet Shelley wrote a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener in which he prophesied of differences between the sexes that,

these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

In 1792 the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that,

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society

In 1820, the Austrian statesman Metternich observed of the liberals of his era that,

...one of the sentiments most natural to man, that of nationality, is erased from the Liberal catechism, and that where the word is still employed, it is used by the heads of the party as a pretext to enchain Governments, or as a lever to bring about destruction. The real aim of the idealists of the party is religious and political fusion.

The drive toward "fusion", i.e., toward a kind of oneness, is perhaps also a manifestation of the ratcheting of liberal modernity toward "informality" in the sense of indistinction. 

In recent times, the drift toward informality is clear enough. I can see it in my own profession of teaching. Students now mostly call teachers by their first name; the wearing of uniforms is becoming less common; teachers themselves often dress casually; and some schools have even stopped using the word "teacher" preferring terms like "facilitator". 

You can see the informality too in the way that girls often dress. Fashion is still a major interest to girls, but the way it is expressed is often casual and at least semi-androgynous. Teenage girls might typically dress in hoodies and tracksuit pants. These are clothes that do not express "form" in the sense of highlighting anything distinctly feminine. The lack of feminine form goes hand in hand with a casual sensibility ("relaxing into formlessness").

It's interesting to compare this with the traditional clothes worn in rural Europe ("Tracht" in the German speaking countries). These were very formal in the sense of making distinctions. The particular "Tracht" that was worn might show a person's occupation, marital status, social class, religion and home town, as well as being very distinct in terms of one's sex.

This topic also reminds me of a video I saw a few years ago in which a glamorously dressed woman (showing "form") walked through a shopping mall in a European city filled with very indistinctly dressed people, who looked at her with a degree of perplexity. 

The many and the few

Professor Deneen sometimes talks about a tradition in classical thought (going back to Aristotle) which focuses on the problem any society faces of balancing the influence of the elite and the majority. Aristotle termed a society ruled by the few, but for the common good, an aristocracy, and a society ruled by the few for their own self-interest, an oligarchy. 

Clearly we have drifted in the modern West more toward an oligarchy. Our elites have chosen to define themselves against their own working classes. The elite only allows itself to be distinct, as a class, in terms of having values that the working-class does not. If the working classes are patriotic, they are globalist and so on. 

In the past, the elite were more aristocratic, in the sense that they held to an ethos of noblesse oblige, in which their privilege obligated them to certain responsibilities toward the larger society. And, in a society in which form was still possible, the elite could aim to be distinct through what was called "good form". Good form referred to the polite customs of dress, of speech, of manners and such like that a gentleman was thought to adhere to. This good form could be intricate, and might be thought burdensome by modern standards (an American was able to write an entire book about it in 1888), but it is a better way for an elite to identify itself than to set itself against its own majority, and it reflects something positive, namely that the culture still recognised form, rather than being committed to dissolving things into a formless mass.

Traditional Australia

It is possible that traditional Australian culture was more informal than elsewhere, at least in certain respects. There is a good side to this: it can make for friendly, sincere and relaxed social relationships. The traditionally warm and laid back Australian culture has its appeal.

Perhaps, though, we need to find a balance in this. A healthy society will inevitably have form, and therefore generate some level of formality. This is particularly true in certain social settings, for instance, in the interaction of men and women; in religious observance; in public office; in public ceremonies; in the arts; and in professional settings. 

Individuality

If you lived in nineteenth century England, when formality was still more present in society, it might have seemed that the rules of society were stifling to your individuality. To rebel against form, and to live like a Bohemian or a non-conformist, might have been thought to promote a freely expressed individuality.

But time has proven this false. We now live in a more formless age. And it has not led to a flowering of individuality. Rather, we have become uniformly formless. We have been made fungible: we live as interchangeable units of a mass society. Our sex no longer stands for much, nor does any part of our identity. 

In rejecting form we have jettisoned the aspects of self that connect us to the transcendent and that make us meaningfully distinct in our personhood. 

John Lennon wanted all the world to live as one; Shelley wanted to abolish distinctions; Metternich warned that liberal moderns wanted to abolish nationhood in favour of religious and political fusion. This is not the pathway to genuine individuality. We have travelled far enough down this road to know this. 

Forms represent essence and carry purpose and meaning. There must therefore be degrees of formality and distinctions in a healthy, well-functioning society. To become indistinct is not a welcome fate, but something to be firmly resisted.

Pleasantly surprised

 A woman on social media asked the following question:

I was not expecting much illumination in the replies. In our times, masculinity is often described as toxic or else it is redefined as being something much more akin to the feminine. So I was pleasantly surprised when one woman proffered the following list:

It's not a bad list. It could be added to, but it does capture aspects of the masculine personality. What's especially surprising is that this woman is not anything like a traditionalist. Though married, she is generally critical of men, and she has a materialistic, transactional view of relationships (her husband is supposed to enable the luxurious lifestyle she desires). Her life aim is to always get what she wants, and though she wants children she denigrates the motherhood role as being beneath her:

Some of the women in the discussion then challenged her to come up with a list of feminine traits. Again, she immediately produced a set of qualities that does seem to capture aspects of the feminine personality:

I would query the idea of magnanimity as being a more feminine quality, but apart from that it seems like a reasonable effort to me.

Just a couple of further points. First, if you read the social media timeline of this woman, she is at the most disagreeable end of the female personality spectrum. This makes her come across badly, but it has the benefit of allowing her to speak her mind freely, which perhaps explains why she did not just resort to the usual liberal platitudes when this topic was raised.

Second, a few thoughts occur to me regarding female sensitivity. This is a quality that can have both negative and positive expressions. On the negative side of the ledger, women can sometimes be overly sensitive to criticism. It can be a tough job for a husband to criticise his wife. No matter how diplomatically he frames the criticism, the response can be something along the lines of "This is a day that will live in infamy...." Similarly, women can be overly sensitive to tone, and can overdo the "tone policing" at times.

Nonetheless, sensitivity is part of the making of a woman. Women can be sensitive to the moods and emotions of others, which then supports their ability to nurture. There is a connection too, I think, between a sensitivity of feeling and a delicacy of manners and mores in women. You notice this sometimes in women who are more brashly insensitive - there is not the refinement that you normally expect in a feminine personality. Finally, men respond to women who are at least a little more emotionally sensitive than themselves. This is part of the quality of expressiveness listed above. It might lead a woman to react more emotionally, for instance, to a sad scene in a film or to express compassion for a person or animal in distress. When done well, it balances men's greater level of emotional reserve.

Deeper feminist regret

There is a genre of confessional writing that might be called "feminist regret". I have chronicled many examples of this genre over the years, but I came across the most thoughtful one just this week. It is called "A Requiem for the Patriarchy" and is written by Darlene Lev. 

Darlene Lev has also discussed her thoughts in a long interview with Leslie Boyce (see here) and I will be using this as well to draw out some of her ideas.

It's helpful to begin with some biography. Darlene Lev was born in 1961 and grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was Christian and her mother Jewish (though she seems to have been raised Christian). Her mother discouraged her from being a homemaker and she was influenced by the changes in popular culture in the 1970s to think that she could do whatever a man did (she says that TV series like Charlie's Angels had this effect). When the pill became available, she and her friends took this as a freedom to be sexually promiscuous. She did eventually marry but chose to divorce her husband. She supported herself through her work as an academic. She is now in her mid-60s and childless.

Darlene Lev

She describes herself as someone who experienced two different worlds. The world she grew up in before the influence of second wave feminism and then the feminist one that followed. Surveying her life experiences she has come to a principled, and deep, rejection of feminism. 

What made her change her mind about feminism? Well, in comparing culture as it was in her youth to what followed she sees an emerging wasteland. Both family and local community have disintegrated during the course of her lifetime. This has left herself and many of her peers single, unsupported, childless and socially isolated. 

To her credit she does not take the option of blaming men. She has a more interesting analysis which I will break down into three parts.

1. Patriarchy

Darlene Lev draws a distinction between the patriarchy she grew up in and the present day matriarchy. By patriarchy she means something like a family structure in which men are present within the family, are respected for what they bring to family life, and who create stability and security for all those within the family. By matriarchy, she is referring to a social system in which this role of men has been dispensed with.

She does not have a naive view of the older family culture. She acknowledges that a small number of women were abandoned, and that some marriages were unhappy. Nonetheless, she has a sense that the masculine principle is necessary to uphold social life. Without it, communities lose a connection to both order and meaning. And, absent the masculine presence, women are less able to create local community as they once did.

She does not pull her punches in introducing this argument:

The ‘patriarchy’ was a fertile time. Life seemed to spill out of every door. The lively suburban street I grew up on had a patriarch in every home, and enough children, in most households, to form a chorus or one of those dad-trained acrobatic families who performed on the Ed Sullivan show.

But death is the essence of the matriarchy in which we now live, a time when abortion is labeled ‘health care’—the Democrats’ primary promise of a conduit to an ideal existence. Meanwhile, we’re in a fertility crisis that could bring the country to its knees; yet the matriarchy, with its tyranny of ‘care,’ scolds us as ‘right wing’ for caring about the fact that we’re not generating enough new life. 

She develops the argument by listing the people she knows with chaotic family lives or who disavow having children as a matter of principle. I understand her completely in this. My parents' generation had stable marriages and many children. My own did not. To experience this decline can be bewildering. I think, for instance, of my best friend at school who had four sisters. None of them married. None of them had children. This has always seemed tragic to me - and unsettling, suggesting some deeper social malaise.

Darlene Lev seems to be reaching toward an argument I have made myself before, namely that men bring into social life the vertical structure of reality. This is how Lawrence Auster describes it:

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

Without this, there is not the same conviction of participating in a reality that is, as Auster puts it, fundamentally good. And therefore there is not the same openness to creating new life. 

2. Choice

I recently read an essay by Ted Sadler in the Observer & Review (Volume 2 Issue 2, Number 3) titled "Suicide of the West: Towards a Universal Homogeneous Superstate".  Sadler views contemporary liberalism as a continuation of a longer project that had taken definite shape by the Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century looked to a new cosmopolitan super-culture that would replace Christianity: individuals would be uprooted not only from their national or ethnic or local traditions - which could only be the source of prejudices - but also from the similarly cosmopolitan super-culture of Christianity. The new mature enlightened individual would stand naked and proud 'above' all tradition, needing only his 'freedom' and prosperity. (p.236)

By modern times this project was expressed in terms of building a social order upon material prosperity and individual choice:

The homogenization process of the universal homogeneous state means that society is defined as an indiscriminate aggregate of individuals stripped of any other cultural identity: ethnicity, nation, tradition and religion...All individuals, it is assumed, are capable of taking their place in the economy as workers, consumers, tax-payers and benefit-recipients....The assumption is that the social and cultural identity of the universal homogeneous state is nothing in particular: this absence of identity is called 'multi-culturalism', a euphemism for the cultural vacuum that is liberalism....

Liberals themselves, of course, do not say they are affirming a vacuous negativity, but insist that their supreme virtue is freedom. The ideal liberal state is supposed to provide not just economic well-being for everybody, but the freedom of individuals to do what they like, say what they like, think what they like, live however they like, providing it does not infringe on the freedom of others. (pp. 232-33)

Sadler goes on to describe the drift of liberalism toward intolerance. Darlene Levy approaches things from a different angle. She has already identified the disintegrating effect of this project on social bodies like the family and local community. But she also questions whether the project really delivers meaningful choice the way it claims to do.

In her interview, she says (at 22:05) that:

From the moment I hit puberty all that I could think about was having babies. That was my instinct. That's what I wanted to do.

Despite this being what she most wanted to choose, it never happened. She had to contend with her mother pushing her toward careerism. But more than this, there was by this time a dating culture based around casual hookups rather than a culture of courtship as had existed in previous generations. People socialised in bars and at concerts and she found it a difficult environment to assert her desire for a more committed relationship (it had become "shameful and humiliating" to have to admit to the man she was with that she wanted more than something casual). On the occasions she did give voice to this "they would say that that's not what they wanted". 

She is describing a flaw in the liberal model. Some of our more profound life choices cannot be made through our own volition alone. They are more likely to be realised in certain cultural environments and they depend on the choices other people make. In her social milieu, there were no longer rituals of courtship leading to marriage and then to children. The expectation was that encounters were to be casual. Yes, it might still have been possible to find a way through this, but her choice was made much more difficult to realise than it once would have been.

Her solution to this is interesting. She says that,

In my generation we were fumbling around, not knowing how to get what we deep down really wanted...And the lack of community oversight also lends itself to that. You are alone in the middle of nowhere and no-one's really watching you...But if we have to decide what really is better for everyone, perhaps it would be more connection around community...that we are all families that live in this place and we collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in. 

This too highlights an issue within liberalism. If there are no objective goods that contribute to human well-being, but only subjective preferences, then there will develop over time an "indifference to the good". But this then leads to the kind of abandonment that Darlene Lev complains about. There cannot be "community oversight" if there are no agreed upon outcomes to be achieved. If, for instance, you were to say to a liberal "is it not unusual for all four sisters to remain unmarried and childless?" the most common answer you will receive is "well, that is just what they chose to do". As if there were "nothing to see here" and therefore no real concern for what might have led to such an outcome.

Darlene Lev also seems to be reaching toward the idea of a common good - the idea that we might "collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in". What is being recognised here is that our own individual good often depends on the health of the social bodies we are members of. So it does matter to us that others choose in ways that uphold the good of this larger body (an aspect of living in a high trust community - we can trust that others will do the right thing). 

Leslie Boyce, the interviewer, makes a similar point when the two women discuss one of Darlene Lev's female students who has chosen to be a prostitute. Leslie Boyce observes that (1:02:54),

There's a bit of a paradox here because on the individual level we tend to respect choices, let people do things and we're not going to look too hard at what they're doing. And then on the zoom out social level, it's the aggregate of these kinds of choices that end up creating exactly the trends that we're sitting here describing today.

The choices people make matter not only to themselves but to others, because the aggregate of these choices forms the culture we all inhabit. And none of us can claim to live entirely isolated from our own culture. 

3. Disposability

One of the problems identified by Darlene Lev is that marriage has become less durable, in part, because relationships with men are increasingly seen as being disposable. For instance, she writes that,

Most of the women I work with are childless, and destined to remain so. Most are not married, nor are they in lasting relationships. The relationships that I’ve heard about were generally ended by the woman because he didn’t measure up in some way.

She also recounts the story (at 33:58) of going for a walk in the park one day with a female friend and her baby. The husband of this friend had started a new restaurant and was working long hours to establish it. The wife felt aggrieved that he was not home more, but Darlene Lev pointed out that he was a faithful husband whose work was allowing her to spend time with her child. Years later the friend told Darlene that her words had helped save her marriage as her other friends had all advised her to leave. 

This shift to seeing relationships as disposable was noted by one of the first writers of the feminist regret genre, the Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger. In 2002 she wrote a newspaper article titled "The Sins of our Feminist Mothers" in which she confessed that,

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

We should not be at all surprised by this trend. It is not possible for loyalty to be a feature of a society like ours. If the primary and overriding good is a freedom to choose in any direction, then loyalty becomes a vice not a virtue. Loyalty means declining choice. It means renouncing options. When we are loyal there are choices we will not even consider, that are ruled out.

Worse yet if the loyalty is to a cultural identity or tradition that the homogenizing state is set against. This is then doubly an offence. Little wonder that our politicians do not feel the moral weight of betrayal. 

And little wonder that a modern day marriage therapist would argue with me as follows on the topic of what might be reasonable grounds for divorce:

She believes that the very foundation of marriage is the freedom to leave. This is our culture travelling to topsy turvy land, where the meaning of things is put upside down. Instead of a focus on fidelity, or religious commitment or even spousal love as foundations of marriage, it is the freedom to leave which takes centre stage. The notion of marriage vows would then seem to be redundant.

Depth

Some of the women who write feminist regret literature eventually lapse back into feminism. Their discontent relates to their failure to have children; once they reconcile themselves to this, they resume their former ideological commitments. Germaine Greer is something of an example of this. In 1991 she wrote "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child," and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year." As well observed as this might be she nonetheless remained broadly within the feminist camp.

It doesn't seem likely that Darlene Lev will end up in this group of women. There is more than personal regret at her own feminist choices, there is also a recognition that something is deeply wrong at a wider social level, to the point that there is a closure to new life and to community. And she is reaching toward explanations that put her well outside of the Enlightenment project, with its limiting of values to material prosperity and individual choice. 

She clearly believes that a masculine principle is needed to provide a stabilising element within human relationships and even to provide the sense of meaningful order - the goodness - within which a commitment to future life is more likely to be made. 

And she has reached beyond the idea of a society made up of a mere agglomerate of individuals, toward something like a common good, in which communities intentionally set out to uphold the conditions for human flourishing and in which people are supported in realising the more important aspects of life, such as forming a family.

Staying on course

I was reading up on the origin of the word "sin". We often use the word today when referring to a person who breaks a moral law (emphasising the idea of transgression). However, the origin of the word for sin (both the Hebrew word in the Old Testament and the Greek word in the New Testament) means something like "missing the mark". I find this interesting as it describes something we all experience in life. 

One aspect of our inner life is the effort to stay "on course". We try to build habits in our everyday behaviour that keep us "on target" in terms of what we should be, i.e. in terms of our integrity as a person and the kind of qualities we should ideally be developing. If we fail in this we find that we suffer a kind of "dis-integrity" - we experience disintegration.

This is where the idea of cultivating virtue and avoiding personal vices is at its most relevant. It is part of the effort to avoid the waywardness or crookedness of human nature and to remain ordered toward the good (and to avoid slipping away into an alienation from it). 

Which is where the clash with aspects of liberal modernity arises. If you want to remain "on target" then there needs to be an aim. There needs to be an account of the good that you either hit or miss. Liberal modernity tends to deny that there is such an aim, at least one that exists outside of our own desires or subjective reality. 

An example of this would be a man who begins to identify as a woman. In previous societies, this would have been thought to be, at an objective level, an example of waywardness, of going off course and therefore needing to be corrected. But liberal modernity claims that identity is self-defined. And so there is no larger picture of what it might mean to develop in an integrated way as a man. And therefore no possibility to take cues as to our own success or failure in steering a particular course.

It is a similar case when it comes to womanhood. The most "progressive" moderns famously will not define what a woman is. This is true for both the terf feminists and those who support transgenderism. The first group limit the definition of woman to "adult human female" and deny that it can mean anything more than this. The second group are often left confused and rattled when asked to define what a woman is. They sometimes say something like "a woman is whatever someone who identifies as a woman takes it to be". 

For both groups, there is no possibility of an objectively ordered good within womanhood that represents an aim to be either hit or missed. There is no course toward a feminine integrity of personhood that a woman might be either steering closer to or further away from. There are no virtues associated with being a woman to be cultivated, no vices to be avoided.

There is a challenge here for traditionalists in putting forward an alternative to this aspect of liberalism. It doesn't make sense to be a lazy traditionalist and to reduce life to one or two "clear and distinct" ideas. Yes, we could talk about ultimate aims, such as an ever closer union with God, or remaining in a state in which we are receptive to grace and so on. But there is no avoiding for us an account of what it means to live an ordered, virtuous life and this is not easily reducible to sound bites. What does it mean, for instance, to be a good father? Or a good wife? How do we rightly order the different loves we might have and the duties corresponding to these? What aspects of masculine character do we consider virtuous? In what contexts?

Traditionalists therefore can be ideology busters but not ideology makers. This does not mean failing to set out a positive vision. It does not mean we just let things take their course absent corrupting ideology. We are not writing abstract ideologies but trying to observe, discern and describe what an integrated personhood looks like and requires, and how we might frame or harmonise the sometimes contending claims of different goods upon us. This is a complex task that our own individual reason can only partly grasp and that therefore requires some element of humility when we undertake it. But seeking this kind of understanding, to the extent we are able, is commendable.

Social bodies

Something similar is at play when we consider the social bodies that we belong to (that make up a part of who we are, and that carry part of the good that we participate in). 

There is still a requirement to keep these bodies "on course" so that they do not dis-integrate. Let's take family as an example. For a family to hold together, the marriage needs to be stable. Marriage, in its very nature, is meant to be as stable as possible: that is part of the aim of married life.

But it is difficult for liberal moderns to concede this. For them, the focus is on maximising the autonomy of the individuals within the family. And so they will be increasingly reluctant to define marriage as requiring stable commitments, not if this is thought to limit individual choice. As an example, take the following exchange I had on social media with a marriage therapist. In the context of a discussion about marriage and divorce she wrote:

She is arguing that a woman doesn't need a good reason to divorce her husband. It is her choice to leave at any time, even if the reason is shallow and superficial. I pointed out in response that this position alters the very nature of the institution itself:

There is not, and cannot be, for this woman any real content to the term "marriage" because this would mean putting a limitation on individual autonomy. And so the social body of family automatically dis-integrates in theory, because it has no definite quality to it anymore, and increasingly in practice as well, because it is no longer possible to set marital stability as the aim that individuals and the wider culture might try to stay "on course" with. 

And what of the social body of nation? This is an interesting one because when you have a traditional ethno-nation it will develop along the lines of a particular people. There will be, in other words, a degree of particularity when it comes to lines of development, because this will reflect the different temperaments and histories of each people. For instance, the joyous style of religious worship of some Caribbean groups might feel very alien to some Northern European nations which seek dignity and solemnity as part of worship. Anglo-Saxons might prefer a village style of habitation (even when living in cities) compared to the willingness of those on the subcontinent to live in close proximity in densely packed urban areas. The greater tendency toward rule oriented living in parts of Northern Europe can seem a little alien even to those with a British heritage, but both groups are more oriented to creating high trust communities than in some other countries.

What this means is that there are two potential ways for such social bodies to dis-integrate. The first is internal: some of those within the nation might put things off course by introducing aspects of culture that undermine the true spirit of that nation. Here in Australia, for instance, I would suggest that the high rise housing commission towers that were built in the 1960s and 70s were alien to local sensibilities. Similarly, Anglo-Australian culture developed for a long time around outdoor leisure pursuits, which the shift toward a more Japanese style corporate work culture has also undermined.

The second path toward dis-integration is the one we have today of combining different cultures together. It's not possible to organise public spaces and a public culture around the differing sensibilities of many different peoples. A Western liberal would most likely not recognise this as a problem as their mindset is to think only in terms of individuals pursuing their own aims, with "society" being conceived of as a multitude of individuals within a state - with the expectation that the state will give individuals equal opportunity to pursue these aims.

But nonetheless the issue can't be ignored, even by those who accept the liberal framework. What kind of housing is to be built? The garden suburbs with bungalows beloved of the Anglo population? Or fortress style housing closed off to the street popular elsewhere? Or the more densely packed high rise housing more common in East Asia? How are young men to interact with young women in public? Where is the level of trust to be set? The level of rule following? Of privacy? Of conformism? Of statism?

What I am suggesting is that each people is likely to develop a way of life and that the aim is for this way of life to best represent the good as reflected through the particular temperament, history and nature of that group of people. The development of each culture can, to a varying degree, either stay on or go off course, leading to higher levels of integration or to dis-integration. Even Western liberals will ultimately notice the effects of dis-integration, because the truth is that societies are more than conglomerations of individuals within a state. 

Lysenkoism

R.J. Stove has an essay in the latest issue of the Observer & Review titled American Academy's Khrushchev Moment. In it he mentions a Russian scientist called T.D. Lysenko and claims that Lysenko "probably slew more people than any other individual who ever lived".

I was intrigued and looked up Lysenko. It turns out that he is a significant figure who should be better known on the right. In short, there was a debate in Soviet Russia between the followers of Lysenko and the "geneticists". Lysenko believed that an organism could pass on traits acquired during its lifetime to its offspring. The geneticists believed that the characteristics of an organism are passed down through inherited genes. 

Lysenko in 1938

Stalin backed Lysenko. First, because Lysenko was of peasant background, and Stalin wanted to create a new intellectual class from the workers and peasants. Second, because Lysenko promised miraculous results in food production. Third, the genetic account did not fit in well with the Marxist Leninist state ideology:

Lysenko claimed that the concept of a gene was a "bourgeois invention", and he denied the presence of any "immortal substance of heredity" or "clearly defined species", which he claimed belong to Platonic metaphysics rather than strictly materialist Marxist science. Instead, he proposed a "Marxist genetics" postulating an unlimited possibility of transformation of living organisms through environmental changes in the spirit of Marxian dialectical transformation, and in parallel to the Party's program of creating the New Soviet Man and subduing nature for his benefit.

To understand the significance of this, consider the premodern approach to Man and nature as described by Patrick Deneen:

Premodern political thought...understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order. Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was required to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world.

The Soviet metaphysics is modern rather than premodern in the sense that there is a rejection of essences that might give a stable and recognisable form to species and provide them with a distinct place within a natural order and with given ends and purposes. Instead, nature - including human nature - was to be directed to the ends that we ourselves determined. The Soviets had the intention of creating a New Soviet Man - a new and improved type of human - and so the idea that we might have genetically inherited traits was not approved by the Soviet leadership.

But this had momentous consequences. First, there was a purge of those scientists who held to the genetic view rather than the one promoted by Lysenko. I find this interesting because the left likes to claim that it is the Catholic Church who persecuted scientists several hundred years ago, but here is a much more recent case of an atheist state persecuting scientists on an industrial scale. The first wave of persecution was in the late 1930s:

While the Great Purge was at its peak, Lysenko openly accused geneticists of hampering his methods and named N.I. Vavilov and G.D. Karpechenko, who both perished later. A meeting of the VASKhNIL Presidium was held in April 1937, and Lysenko complained that VASKhNIL leaders supported his work poorly and that he was forced to ask for help. The VASKhNIL president, A.I. Muralov, and his deputies, A.S. Bondarenko and G.K. Meister, were shot soon afterward. Of the 52 VASKhNIL academicians, 12 were shot on false charges in 1936–1938.

Another purge took place in the late 1940s:

Academician Vladimir Strunnikov, head of the Commission for the History of the Development of Genetics in the Soviet Union at the USSR Academy of Sciences, wrote: “In autumn 1948 alone, 127 teachers, including 66 professors, were dismissed. The total number of those who had been dismissed, demoted, or removed from leadership positions after the session of the VASKhNIL of 1948 amounted to several thousands of people”

The persecution had a much wider effect on scientific research within the Soviet Union:

The decisions of the August session had a ripple effect within the total scientific community, affecting areas distant from genetics, as well as biology in general. In 1950, sessions on physiology, cytology, and microbiology were held in the USSR Academies of Sciences and Medical Sciences to condemn the most important achievements in biology, and glorify the “experiments” of Olga Lepeshinskaia, who claimed to have observed cells emerging from unstructured vital substances, or Gevork Bosh’ian, who claimed to have “demonstrated” that viruses turn into bacterial cells, and bacteria into viruses and antibiotics. Cybernetics, mathematical logic, certain fields of physics and chemistry, sociology, economics, and even philology were jeopardized. Party ideologists chose a “Lysenko” as the sole holder of true knowledge for each discipline.

But why does Stove make the bold claim about Lysenko killing more people than any other individual? It's because Lysenko had such influence over Soviet agriculture at a time when there were shortages of food. Lysenko is thought to have worsened and prolonged the great famine of 1932-33 (6 million deaths), and also that of  1946-47 (2 million deaths). Furthermore, Lysenko influenced the Chinese communists and so played a part in the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 (30 million deaths). 

If you're interested there is a good article on Lysenko setting all this out in more detail here.