Different starting points, foreign nations

The recent debate about the ordo amoris once again made clear that moderns conceive the world very differently to traditionalists. It did so particularly in reference to the relationship between the individual and the communities that the individual belongs to. It helps, I think, to try to understand why things that seem painfully destructive to those of us in the traditionalist camp can make sense to a modern.

A starting point is to consider the modern anthropology that made its appearance in the seventeenth century. It is described by James R. Wood as follows:

In this state of nature, society does not yet exist; rather, the basic unit out of which society is constructed is the detached, pre-social individual, shorn of all prior contexts, natural or social. These abstract, autonomous individuals emerge as naked wills, auto-originating and constructing everything around them driven by rational self-interest. Relations are not there from the outset, and they are entered into only voluntarily.

What does seeing things this way lead to? First, it means that the individual is prior to his or her social relationships. Therefore, these relationships do not help to constitute the self. The individual is already in place, is already self-constituted. Second, whatever social bodies do form are constructed rather than being natural or divinely appointed. Third, they are constructed for utilitarian purposes, as vehicles through which individuals can better pursue their individual interests or desires. 

An Australian liberal politician, George Brandis, gave voice to this understanding of the individual and society in 1984:

It is the distinctive claim of liberalism that the individual person is the central unit of society and is therefore prior to and of greater significance than the social structures through which he pursues his ends.

Note that social bodies here are described as structures; that the individual is prior to these structures and so is not constituted by them; and that the purpose of the structures is the pursuit of our own individual ends.

George Brandis

I'd like you to imagine now that you are someone with this kind of mindset. Consider how this would affect your understanding of nation. It would not matter much to you if there were, for instance, decades of open borders and rapid demographic change. You would feel little sense of loss. It might hardly register at all. After all, your membership of a nation would not constitute part of your identity, as you are self-constituted. All that you are precedes any membership of a nation. And the nation for you would only be a structure through which you pursue your own individual goals. It would not have deeper emotional resonances. As long as the structure is operating to allow you to pursue these goals, then all is well. 

And there's a further aspect to all of this. Let's say you're a modern who has this mindset. You might not want to think of yourself as a selfish individualist. So you would adopt certain "pro-social" stances, to show your more idealistic commitments to society. What might they be? Well, on the left it often takes the form of advocating for the rights of the marginalised and dispossessed. What this means is that instead of just having the attitude that you yourself will pursue your own ends or desires via the social structures you live within, that you wish for others who are somehow excluded from this to be able to do the same. Everyone can join the party. And, again, if this means years of demographic change, it won't seem a difficulty to you, it won't register as an issue, because the nation is only a structure through which people pursue individual ends. There will not be significant change.

The difference between the traditional and modern mindset comes out in another way. If I as a traditionalist see myself as constituted, in part, by being a member of a family and a nation, then I will see them positively as allowing me to fulfil my ends and to more fully express who I am. Moderns however see themselves as being self-constituted. Therefore, the idea that we are formed within and grow and develop within these social bodies will provoke the negative response that this lowers the standing and status of the individual (that it makes the individual "derivative" in a negative sense) and that it limits an individual path of development.

You can see the flipping from the traditional mindset to the modern one in the following quote from a Girton College student. In 1869 Girton College was established as the first women's college at Cambridge University. In 1889, one of its young female students explained the new mindset she developed at the college this way:

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

She puts the modern view in clear terms. There is no positive take here on having been formed by and grown up within a family. This makes someone, in her words, an "excrescence" - a pejorative way to describe something that grows out of something else. An excrescence is just a superfluous or abnormal outgrowth. She does not want to see herself as being constituted in part by her membership of a family. Instead, she is to develop solo, as "an individual and independent unit". She has fully modernised.

Girton College, now coeducational

Similarly, George Brandis chose to characterise the two philosophies he thought of as rivals to liberalism this way:

The conservative sees society as a naturally ordered, harmonious hierarchy; while in the eyes of the socialist, the basic structures of society are irreconcilably hostile classes...Both agree that individual persons are but incidents of larger entities

He uses the word "incidents". For Brandis, if the individual is not prior to the structures of a society, he or she is merely a minor or subsidiary outcome of that larger entity. It is a kind of inversion of the traditional view, which held that the entities that gave us our existence (that we are positively derived from) were to be justly honoured. Brandis casts this the other way: that an individual cannot be constituted by these entities because that would make us derivative and therefore lesser.

And so it is not possible to leave the defence of nation, as traditionally understood, to those with the modern view. To put this another way, we have to understand that when a modern uses the word "nation" it has a very different meaning to what we would understand. And this difference goes back all the way to the anthropology that was developed in the seventeenth century.

Nor should we assume that everyone understands our own approach. We need to be able to make the contrast between our understanding and that of the moderns. We can argue, in our attempt to do this, that social bodies are coterminous with our existence as humans, that they have always been, in some form, a part of human existence, and are in this sense natural rather than being later "constructs". We were social creatures from the beginning. 

We are not prior to these bodies, and self-constituted, but our self-identity, our sense of belonging, and our deeper social commitments are partly formed through our membership of these communities. We are members of these bodies in a profound way, such that maintaining their integrity matters deeply to us. 

Social bodies often have a familial character. Therefore, membership of any particular social body cannot be universal. Nor are they to be defined by the common to all purpose of being vehicles for the pursuit of individual self-interest. Extending or equalising the right to participate in this pursuit is therefore not the right approach to being pro-social.

We should act for the common good of the particular family or nation that we are members of through the close bonds of a shared history, culture, ancestry and language. We can do this whilst still recognising a common humanity, and contributing to this good, including the exercise of hospitality and charity to others who are not members of our own communities.

One significant reason for acting for the common good of our own family and nation is that because we are partly constituted by these social bodies, we must uphold them in order to remain integrated in who we are. We lose an aspect of who we are, and the ability to grow to full spiritual and emotional maturity, if we become atomised and rootless. In this sense, a living soul will want to exist as part of a loving family and a closely knit national community - a community that allows a person to feel a connectedness to people and place, to a history and culture, and to generations across time. 

Being more than whatever

Jacinta Allan is currently the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria. She was asked by a journalist about Donald Trump's executive order declaring that only two genders would be recognised, male and female. 

Her response included the following:

Every Victorian should have the right to practise their faith, whatever that faith may be...and to love who they love and to be who they are....we've got to focus on supporting people to be who they are, to love who they want to love, and to practise their faith, whatever their faith may be.

 

Jacinta Allan is a Labor politician, and therefore a social democrat. Nonetheless, what she is saying here is foundational to a liberalism that goes back hundreds of years. It is the type of thinking that is shared by all kinds of liberals, both of the right and the left. It is a deeply flawed way of looking at things.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that had no clear winner. This led ultimately to a focus on religious tolerance, but it also helped to usher in a new metaphysics, devised by men like Thomas Hobbes.

In this metaphysics, there are only individual desires and aversions. Something becomes the good because we desire it, evil because we are averse to it. Each one of us is determined differently, and so we have different subjective goods that are known only to ourselves. We are self-interested in the pursuit of our own individual goods. Freedom is not so much freedom of will to choose between different goods, but a freedom of will to pursue, without external constraint, the particular subjective good determined for us. The good exists at the individual level: we only contract to form associations and governments so that our peaceful and secure individual existence might be upheld. 

Once you adopt this metaphysics, certain things follow. For instance, there is no longer an "essence" to different types of creatures. There is, in other words, no longer a certain quality given to us as part of our created nature that we might develop along and try to perfect. Nor is there a "telos" or a "final cause" - there are no common ends or purposes to life that we have been created for. Nor do we need to cooperate with others to fulfil aspects of our own nature: we do not need to contribute to a common good in order to realise our own individual good. There is only our own individual good upheld via individual rights or via our contract with the state.

So when Jacinta Allan says that we have a right to "be who we are", she is adopting the mental framework of the Hobbesian metaphysics. We are supposed to assume, in accepting her comment, that there are no qualitative differences in what we might be. One thing is as good as another. Nothing is more, nothing is less. Nothing is higher, nothing is lower. Nothing is more meaningful, nothings is less meaningful. We are just individually determined to be....whatever. And who can say what we are? Well, it is known only to ourselves, so my declaration that "I am x" settles the matter.

There is a passage from St Paul that I think is relevant here. He wrote "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15). Paul attributed this inability to do what he really wanted to do to the presence within him of sin. It is a recognition that it is easy for the human personality to be disordered by uncontrolled desires or impulses - by our vices - so that we do not really live up to being or doing what we know we really should do or be. 

So it is glib to say that people should just be who they are. This does not recognise that what we are in practice can be disordered by our own inability to be virtuous and to live up to the standard of the good, or even just to standards that we set for ourselves. And there is a danger that, in being told to be "who we are", we collapse into our own disordered self and begin to identify with our own vices.

Nor is it the case that "who we are" is something arbitrary and unknowable to others. We have a created nature as men and women which gives us what used to be called a "quiddity" - qualities that make us distinct in our being, an inherent nature. These are now usually termed essences. As I mentioned earlier, modern metaphysics tends to deny the existence of these essences. The classic articulation of this is from Judith Butler, who denied that the masculine or the feminine were real qualities within male and female nature:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

And yet we do, in our everyday lives, recognise a feminine quality in women and a masculine quality in men. And we do want to admire feminine qualities in women and masculine qualities in men: in fact, when we are young and romantically minded we are likely to idealise and love the more attractive expressions of these qualities, and actively seek them out in a spouse. They are real to us in a way that matters, and they can even inspire in us a sense of a transcendent good that ennobles human life.

It is true that such essences are likely to be expressed a little differently according to our individual personalities. But they are not infinitely elastic. There is a limit where we might say of a woman "she is acting mannishly" or of a man "that is coming across as effeminate". There is a range, but also a point at which the quality is lost or diminished.

So if we have this given nature, one part of our telos in life is to develop it so that we might express our own potential being more fully and so that we might embody an aspect of a transcendent good in who we are. 

Who we are and what we do might also be guided by our understanding of objective moral goods. If there are standards of what is morally right or wrong, then our actions and how we identify ourselves should ideally conform to these. A Hobbesian mindset is blind to this because it rests upon the idea that there are only subjective goods, so that when we desire a thing, that thing then becomes the good. So someone with a Hobbesian mindset can blandly assert that a person should just be whatever it is that they happen to be at a particular moment in time, but someone with a sense of objective moral goods would want that person to continue to develop toward a better self that is more in line with moral goods - in part, because this is how we grow to be more fully ourselves.

We might also aim in a positive way toward a certain understanding of purity. By this I do not mean abstaining from any sexual experience. What I am referring to is that as well as developing along the givens of our nature, so that we more fully express our higher potential, that we also have the task of maintaining intact aspects of our original form. The point here is to retain our integrity in what we choose to be or to do, rather than damaging or degrading or making something lower of ourselves. It can sometimes be difficult to get back what we have lost. Again, people need encouragement in this task, rather than the false reassurance that they should just be whatever. 

Finally, Jacinta Allan's approach also fails because it does not recognise that many of the more important things we want to be or to do can only be achieved at a supra-individual level. I might want to be a loving husband, respected within my family. I cannot achieve that alone at a purely individual level. I need a quality wife for this to be realised, and my chances of meeting such a woman will depend, in part, on what happens within the culture, which is itself the product of the choices of many thousands of individuals. 

The message of just be whatever is not going to help me much here. If we all just follow our own individual desires, seeking our own subjective goods, without much concern for our significant social roles, or our impact on the wider society, or of what is required of us to uphold our role in creating a good society, then we will operate within a lower trust society in which it becomes more difficult than it needs to be to realise the goods that are most important to us. 

We exist as part of larger social bodies; our well-being depends on the functioning of these bodies; part of our identity and sense of belonging derives from these bodies; and therefore it is right that we cultivate qualities that allow us to successfully and loyally discharge our duties to these bodies. We need to be more than "whatever".

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 4 - Nation & the liberal paradigm

I am still working my way through Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery (for previous posts on this work see here, here and here).

I have just read through a section on nationalism and I was struck immediately by its prescience - recent debates on social media illustrate exactly the kind of issues raised by Hazony.

Hazony begins by defining conservative politics around a defence of family and nation. We are born into these and they claim our loyalty:

a conservative political theory begins with the understanding that individuals are born into families, tribes and nations to which they are bound by mutual loyalty...Each nation and tribe possesses a unique cultural inheritance carrying forward certain traditional institutions, which can include its language, religion, laws, and the forms of its government and economic life.

From this we understand that the nation is not the same thing as the government or the state that rules over it. A nation can and often does exist without any fixed government established over it...And there are also many governments or states that rule over multiple nations...(p.90)

He leaves out common ancestry as an aspect of nation, but nonetheless his general approach here is sound. What matters to his argument is the comparison he then makes to the way that Enlightenment liberalism has approached the concept of nation:

The liberal paradigm is blind to the nation. Nothing like the nation is to be found in the premises of Enlightenment liberal political theory. In the rationalist political tracts of the Enlightenment, the term "nation" (or "people") is merely a collective name for the individuals who live under the state. On this view, the nation comes into existence with the establishment of the state and is dissolved when the state is dissolved. This is another way of saying that the nation has no real existence of its own. There are only individuals and the state that rules over them. (p.91)

I cannot emphasise this enough. Enlightenment liberals might still use the term "nation". But their philosophy changed what could be understood by this term very radically. Once the liberal philosophical underpinnings were adopted, then political thought and discussion went in a very particular direction, in which traditional nationalism no longer fitted. This is why conservatives who support a traditional nationalism need to rethink the kind of politics that has been inherited in the modern West.

Hazony goes on to develop this line of thought further:

Thus we find that instructors in political theory...avoid discussing the nation...Instead, they discuss the political world using only concepts such as the individual, freedom, equality, government, and consent, which appear in the premises of Enlightenment political theory...But such instruction is powerless to explain many of the most basic phenomena of political life. It has no resources to describe the rivalry among nations and their ceaseless quest for honor, their pursuit of internal unity and cohesion, their struggle to maintain their own language, religion and political traditions, or their insistence on the inviolability of their laws and borders. And indeed, entire generations of political and intellectual figures have been educated in such a way as to leave them blind to the importance of these things. (p.91)

Hazony then gives examples of how policy makers have been blind in practice. He begins with free trade deals with China which he criticises as follows,

This is a policy couched entirely in terms of the individual, the state, and the individual's presumptive freedom to do whatever he and his trading partners consent to do without state interference. It is blind to the nation, and to the bond of mutual loyalty that bind nations and tribes together. Indeed, to the extent that bonds of national loyalty are even mentioned in discussions of free trade, they are described as irrational "market distortions" that may cause inefficiencies.

The consequent offshoring of jobs to China and the stimulus to growth of Chinese manufacturing were a result of policy makers being "blinded by the liberal paradigm" and therefore unable to see, amongst other things, that "abandoning America's manufacturing capabilities would lead workers to regard themselves as betrayed...bursting the bonds of mutual loyalty that had made America a cohesive and internally powerful nation."

The most prescient piece of writing, however, concerns immigration. Hazony observes,

The inability to see tribe and nation as central in political affairs is reflected in debates on immigration as well. Viewed through the lens of Enlightenment liberalism, immigrants and prospective immigrants are indistinguishable from the native individuals of a given country. They are perfectly free and equal, just as the natives are. Nothing in the liberal paradigm justifies depriving them of their freedom of movement into a given country, or the freedom to compete with native individuals for employment and other resources. (p.94)

Earlier in the year all of this burst into open debate when certain figures (on the right) defended the idea that American workers should compete for American jobs against the global workforce. They argued that it would be like "DEI"  (diversity, equality and inclusion) if American workers were given preference for jobs in their own country. American workers were told they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps or perhaps adopt the lifestyle of those living overseas in order to compete against the global workforce.

To me this demonstrated a stunning absence of the mutual loyalty that nations are usually founded on. 

As an example of the debate, in the exchange below we had someone saying "I have zero interest in competing with the entire world for a job" which was met with a dismissive "Very DEI" - as if it would be an intrusion into normal hiring practices for an American employer to train and to employ American workers rather than those from overseas. 

Here is a voice in the debate that is more in line with the paradigm favoured by Hazony:

Finally, Hazony also makes a connection between the lack of support of the nation within Enlightenment liberalism and declining fertility rates. This connection seems obvious to me, but is rarely mentioned in discussion of falling birth rates.

The undermining of family life is explained in two parts by Hazony. First,

A dogmatic belief in the individual's freedom has moved liberals to destigmatize - and eventually, to actively legitimize - sexual license, narcotics, and pornography, as well as abortion, easy divorce, and out-of-marriage births, until finally the family has been broken and fertility ruined in nearly every Western country.

But there is also a connection between the loss of communal loyalties and an unwillingness to raise the next generation:

Paradigm blindness doesn't only affect policymakers and political elites. At every level of society, people no longer feel a sense of responsibility to marry and raise up a new generation of the family, tribe, and nation. Marriage and children are regarded as nothing more than one possible choice within the sphere of individual freedom....too few are left who see their nation as a valuable thing, and even fewer feel called to do their part to sustain it. (p.97)

This is a (very) abridged version of Hazony's argument. Hazony goes on in the next part of the book to do something that really does need to be done, which is to set out an alternative paradigm to the Enlightenment liberal one - but perhaps more on that later.