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.

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.

A mechanical universe?

Edwin Dyga has written an essay for the Observer & Review which explores the role of cinema in post-War Japan ("Cinema as Symptom and Vehicle of Social Re-engineering: A Post-War Japanese Study", Observer & Review Volume 2, Issue 1, Number 2).

Toward the end of the essay, in his concluding remarks, Dyga makes a connection between the assault on the traditional dynamic between men and women and the assault on traditional national identities. It's a connection I've made myself, but Dyga expresses it eloquently in his own way, and I thought it worth sharing.

Dyga begins the excerpt under discussion by noting "a tendency towards the mechanical view of Man and society". 

This tendency was inaugurated in the early modern period of European history. Basil Willey begins his book on The Seventeenth Century World Background by quoting part of a work by Fontenelle, published in 1686. Fontenelle has a philosopher conversing with a countess as follows:

"I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical". "So Mechanical", said I, "that I fear we shall be quickly asham'd of it"; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?"

This was a great shift in world picture from what had gone before. Dyga's essay notes an "aesthetics of dehumanised artificiality" within Japanese cinema as a modern development of this mechanical view. He argues that this is "acutely hostile to the idea that Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding of the human condition."

This is well observed. One way of putting this perhaps is that the new cosmology (of a mechanical universe) does not allow for an older anthropology (in which Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies). 

And here is the key point. Once you set man outside of these natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding, what then is there to ground a sense of who man is and what his telos - his ends or purposes - in life might be? 

For Dyga, the mechanical picture of the world "favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity".

The rejection of inherited essence is prevalent in modern thought. Here, for instance, is Judith Butler putting forward the idea that there are no essences, and that therefore gender is just a performance and a construct:

... 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...

If there is no inherited essence, then, argues Dyga, there is no particularity. This is a thought that can be drawn out, and I will do so later in this post. But, as a brief observation, it is true. In a machine like cosmos there are only parts arranged in certain ways to give certain effects - there are not "qualities" that are embedded in reality, that carry inherent meaning and that make groups of things distinctly what they are. 

Judith Butler

Dyga goes on to explain that,

The resulting decomposition of the national polity through the erasure of memory and the distortion or the pathologisation of history is no accident, because it is here that inherited essences and particularity is rooted on a macro level.

In other words, if we are thought to lack inherited essences at the level of who we are as individuals, then these will also be rejected at a higher social level. This will take the form of wanting to erase memory and distort history (think of toppling of statues, or hostility to founders, or strange casting decisions in historical dramas). 

I would add to this that those with the most modernist of minds are often simply blind to the very possibility of traditional national cultures. If someone says to them "I wish to defend my national culture", their answer is often a perplexed "But what is that culture? Does it exist?" I have even heard an Austrian being interviewed in the streets of Vienna, immersed in his own national culture, say "But what is Austrian culture anyway?". This is similar to Judith Butler proclaiming that "gender is not a fact" - despite the observable differences between the sexes being obvious to those with eyes to see.

Dyga finishes the excerpt by writing:

There is a direct interrelationship between the destruction of the individual and his ethne, and the process is catalysed by the intentional rejection of the inherited patrimony through the process of cultural destruction; the assault on the traditional sexual dynamic further enhances that process. The national and sexual 'questions' are therefore profoundly interrelated; they cannot be approached separately...

It makes sense that if the individual is destroyed by the modern world picture, then so too will be his larger community, his ethne.

Some thoughts on how this came to be

I'd like to use part of Dyga's excerpt as a platform to branch off into some thoughts of my own. The relevant quote is the one in which Dyga argues that a machine like understanding of reality,

favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity.

The undermining of essences goes back a long way, perhaps even to the nominalists of the medieval period. But it seems to me that a good starting point is Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes rejected the notion of essences and also what were called "final causes" (the idea that things have a purpose). Instead he held that beings were subject to "efficient causes" (the sources of motion and rest). 

For Hobbes, the focus is on the desires and aversions that move us toward some object or repel us from it. The things we desire we consider good, those that repel us as bad. 

We are acted upon by external causes in our desires and aversions, and so what we desire is determined at an individual level (so that individuals will desire different things). In this sense we have no free will.

But Hobbes is a compatibilist. This means that he believes we have a certain kind of free will, namely to act without impediment to realise the desires that are determined for us. If we can do this then our will is free in the sense of being unimpeded.

So here is the issue. Hobbes's way of dealing with a mechanical cosmos does not initially seem to point to the idea of people being self-defining entities susceptible to recreation at will. After all, who they are is determined by the way the environment acts upon them. 

However, in the Hobbesian view we each have our own unique desires that constitute who we are and the aim is for there to be nothing to hinder us in the pursuit of these desires (except when the strong arm of the state is necessary to preserve our life and our property from others). 

So even though our desires do not come from our own free will, you still end up with an individual who believes "this is what I desire to be, so I should be free to be this without impediment". These desires are conceived to be uniquely determined, so this undermines the idea that they might be derived from distinct and particular qualities that we share with others (essences). 

The Hobbesian view runs against certain aspects of modern science, such as the idea of genetic coding or even of evolutionary adaptation. For instance, humans are dimorphic with clear distinctions between the sexes that are related to different roles throughout the long human prehistory. This dimorphism is biologically coded in relation to chromosomes, hormones, brain structure and so on. 

Those committed to modernist ideas about every individual being uniquely ordered toward their own desires and, in this sense, self-defining, will often downplay this biological coding. They will argue that the only relevant biological differences between the sexes are "what is between the legs" or they will argue fiercely against evidence of brain differences between the sexes or they might claim that the coding is no longer relevant and can be overridden (or even rewritten). 

To give some idea of how influential the kind of view held by Hobbes was in the Anglo tradition, consider the case of Victoria Woodhull, a prominent American feminist of the 1870s. As you might expect, she wanted to abolish the distinctions between peoples and between the sexes, arguing that women should be "trained like men" and that there should be a merging of the races to achieve a unitary world government. Her metaphysics sound very similar to those of Hobbes:

But what does freedom mean? "As free as the winds" is a common expression. But if we stop to inquire what that freedom is, we find that air in motion is under the most complete subjection to different temperatures in different localities, and that these differences arise from conditions entirely independent of the air...Therefore the freedom of the wind is the freedom to obey commands imposed by conditions to which it is by nature related...But neither the air or the water of one locality obeys the commands which come from the conditions surrounding another locality.

Now, individual freedom...means the same thing...It means freedom to obey the natural condition of the individual, modified only by the various external forces....which induce action in the individual. What that action will be, must be determined solely by the individual and the operating causes, and in no two cases can they be precisely alike...Now, is it not plain that freedom means that individuals...are subject only to the laws of their own being.

The Western mind, for a time at least, was also influenced by the German idealist tradition. During the Romantic era, there was a backlash against the machine like understanding of the cosmos. Writing in the late 1700s the poet Novalis complained that,

Nature has been reduced to a monotonous machine, the eternally creative music of the universe into the monotonous clatter of a gigantic millwheel.

Some of the German idealist philosophers reacted against the determinism implied by this world picture (of no free will) by asserting the independence of the absolute "I". But they did so in catastrophic ways. Against the idea that the phenomenal world of existence determined who we are, they asserted that the absolute "I" might posit itself against this world. There was now a kind of hostile relationship between the given world of being and the free self, which later developed into nihilism. Here is a description of a university lecture by the German philosopher Johann Fichte:

As Fichte stood at the podium in Jena, he imbued the self with the new power of self-determination. The Ich posits itself and it is therefore free. It is the agent of everything. Anything that might constrain or limit its freedom - anything in the non-Ich - is in fact brought into existence by the Ich.

 Fichte saw himself as a liberator:

My system is the first system of freedom: just as the French nation is tearing man free from his external chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of external influences.

But this liberated will now stood against phenomenal reality:

My will alone...shall float audaciously and coldly over the wreckage of the universe.

So in reacting against the machine like world picture, these philosophers doubled down on the idea of freedom being an act of self-determining will. Instead of re-picturing external reality, it was defeated to the point of wreckage by the absolute "I". 

Tupper & early Victorian marriage

In 1865 Karl Marx wrote a "confession" in which he set out his personal likes and dislikes. His responded to the category of "aversion" with the name of a long forgotten Englishman, Martin Tupper. 

Who was this man Marx disliked more than any other? He was a poet who wrote an immensely influential work called Proverbial Philosophy (first published in 1838 it went through forty editions and sold over 200,000 copies in the UK).

Tupper as a young boy

For the early Victorians Proverbial Philosophy was regarded as a source of lessons in life and was sometimes gifted to young couples on their wedding day. I thought it might be interesting to read the section on marriage in the book, to gauge the quality of advice being dispensed. I did so and I'm pleased to report that Tupper's approach to marriage is generally very insightful: I think many modern readers would consider him "based" to use a modern term. 

Tupper was a sincere Christian. He is therefore something of a role model for Christians, in the sense that he was able to combine his faith with a high degree of worldly wisdom. He combined an idealism about marriage with a grounded realism. 

Tupper aged 40

I'd like to go through his advice section by section, with some commentary of my own. This will take some time, but I'm confident that readers will find points of interest along the way. 

The advice begins as follows:

Seek a good wife of thy God, for she is the best gift of His providence;
Yet ask not in bold confidence that which He hath not promised:
Thou knowest not His good will:—be thy prayer then submissive there-unto;
And leave thy petition to His mercy, assured that He will deal well with thee.
If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the earth;
Therefore think of her, and pray for her weal; yea, though thou hast not seen her.
They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not:
They grow up leaning on each other, as the olive and the vine.
Youth longeth for a kindred spirit, and yearneth for a heart that can commune with his own;

The significant part of this begins with the line "They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not". It is an observation that at a certain age our youthful passions propel us to want a close connection with the opposite sex and that we are less hardened into a separate self and more able to blend into a common life together.

He meditateth night and day, doting on the image of his fancy.
Take heed that what charmeth thee is real, nor springeth of thine own imagination;
And suffer not trifles to win thy love; for a wife is thine unto death.
The harp and the voice may thrill thee,—sound may enchant thine ear,
But consider thou, the hand will wither, and the sweet notes turn discord:
The eye, so brilliant at even, may be red with sorrow in the morning;
And the sylph-like form of elegance must writhe in the crampings of pain.

This is good advice. Men sometimes do not vet a future wife well, despite the importance of doing so. They can fall for false charms, or their infatuated minds can project qualities onto the woman that aren't really there, or they can be charmed by overly superficial qualities.

O happy lot, and hallowed, even as the joy of angels,
Where the golden chain of godliness is entwined with the roses of love:
But beware thou seem not to be holy, to win favour in the eyes of a creature,
For the guilt of the hypocrite is deadly, and winneth thee wrath elsewhere.
The idol of thy heart is, as thou, a probationary sojourner on earth;
Therefore be chary of her soul, for that is the jewel in her casket:
Let her be a child of God, that she bring with her a blessing to thy house,—
A blessing above riches, and leading contentment in its train:
Let her be an heir of Heaven; so shall she help thee on thy way:
For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil.

This is the kernel of the advice that Tupper gives. He believes that a genuinely godly wife is more likely to bring "a blessing to thy house". He uses a poetic line to express this "For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil". It is similar to the advice given by a much earlier English poet, Sir Thomas Overbury in his poem of 1613 titled "A Wife". Overbury thinks a man should most value "good" in a wife rather than birth, beauty and wealth: "For good (like fire) turnes all things to be so./Gods image in her soule, O let me place/My love upon! not Adams in her face....By good I would have holy understood,/So God she cannot love, but also me".

It is difficult to disagree. Marriage cannot rest on ordinary feeling alone, as this is prone to be unstable. When our commitments instead are tied to our deeper faith, then they are much more likely to be durable. 

Take heed lest she love thee before God; that she be not an idolater:
Yet see thou that she love thee well: for her heart is the heart of woman;
And the triple nature of humanity must be bound by a triple chain,
For soul and mind and body—godliness, esteem, and affection.

The first line is also good advice. If a woman loves you "before God" she is likely to expect the things from you that rightly belong to God - and that you cannot possibly deliver. I have written about this previously - that there are women who expect a husband to be a divine therapist who can release her from core childhood wounds (omnipotence), or who expect a husband to intuit her needs before she herself knows she has them (omniscience). This places too great a weight upon the marriage, a weight it will not be able to bear. 

And the last line is also well expressed. There ideally will be godliness when it comes to the soul; esteem (respect) for the husband when it comes to the mind; and affection (physical love) when it comes to the body. If any of these are missing there is a weak link that will prove detrimental. Think, for instance, of women who settle for men they have no physical affection for, and what kind of marriages usually result. 

How beautiful is modesty! it winneth upon all beholders:
But a word or a glance may destroy the pure love that should have been for thee.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price:—it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
If the character within be gentle, it often hath its index in the countenance:
The soft smile of a loving face is better than splendour that fadeth quickly.

He is being realistic here in acknowledging that men are attracted to beauty in women. He is warning, though, that physical beauty eventually fades, and he notes something that others have observed, namely that a gentle character in women comes to be written on the face. The famous author Roald Dahl wrote along similar lines that,

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Tupper continues,

When thou choosest a wife, think not only of thyself,
But of those God may give thee of her, that they reproach thee not for their being:
See that He hath given her health, lest thou lose her early and weep:
See that she springeth of a wholesome stock, that thy little ones perish not before thee:
For many a fair skin hath covered a mining disease,
And many a laughing cheek been bright with the glare of madness.

The Victorians were aware of hereditary traits. Tupper is warning that we are to consider the traits we will pass on to our children. We should look for physical health in her family, but also an absence of mental illness (the word "mining" is used here in an older sense of "ruin in a subterranean way").

Mark the converse of one thou lovest, that it be simple and sincere;
For an artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
Observe her deportment with others, when she thinketh not that thou art nigh,
For with thee will the blushes of love conceal the true colour of her mind.

This is an early version of "see how she treats the wait staff". Tupper hits on something important here in the last line. Most women will treat a man well in the early stages of courtship, when you are promising her something that she seeks, and when her disposition to you will be at its most favourable. What is more revealing are the longer term trends in her character, as revealed in her past history (though it can be difficult to estimate this history based on her own testimony). 

Hath she learning? it is good, so that modesty go with it:
Hath she wisdom? it is precious, but beware that thou exceed;
For woman must be subject, and the true mastery is of the mind.
Be joined to thine equal in rank, or the foot of pride will kick at thee;

Interesting. Tupper thinks it good for a woman to have learning and wisdom, but that it can be a problem if a woman exceeds her husband in this, because if she is mentally superior to her husband he will not be able to lead. What Tupper is getting at here is something like the concept of hypergamy, in which a woman wants to marry up, i.e., to be with a man she can look up to and admire. If she cannot do this, there is a risk she will lose respect for him and with it her capacity to love.

And look not only for riches, lest thou be mated with misery:
Marry not without means; for so shouldst thou tempt Providence;
But wait not for more than enough; for Marriage is the DUTY of most men:

He strongly cautions against marrying for money. Men should have some resources before marrying, but not wait too long. The one thing I'd note here is that this runs against the feminist narrative that marriage at this time was based on financial considerations alone - here we have a leading Victorian influencer telling his readers that money should not be a primary concern.

Grievous indeed must be the burden that shall outweigh innocence and health,
And a well-assorted marriage hath not many cares.
In the day of thy joy consider the poor; thou shall reap a rich harvest of blessing;
For these be the pensioners of One who filleth thy cup with pleasures:
In the day of thy joy be thankful: He hath well deserved thy praise:
Mean and selfish is the heart that seeketh Him only in sorrow.
For her sake who leaneth on thine arm, court not the notice of the world,
And remember that sober privacy is comelier than public display.

This is a more difficult passage. One message here is to turn to God in thanks for your blessings in marriage, rather than only turning to God when things are difficult. The last line perhaps reflects an earlier belief that public displays of affection are unseemly and should be kept private.

If thou marriest, thou art allied unto strangers; see they be not such as shame thee:
If thou marriest, thou leavest thine own; see that it be not done in anger.

The first line reflects an earlier ethos in which poor individual behaviour reflected badly not only on the individual, but might also damage the reputation of the family. So Tupper wants his readers to consider the character not only of the wife, but also of her wider family that the husband will be associated with.

Bride and bridegroom, pilgrims of life, henceforward to travel together,
In this the beginning of your journey, neglect not the favour of Heaven:
Let the day of hopes fulfilled be blest by many prayers,
And at eventide kneel ye together, that your joy be not unhallowed:
Angels that are round you shall be glad, those loving ministers of mercy,
And the richest blessings of your God shall be poured on His favoured children.
Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen,
And reverence well becometh the symbol of dignity and glory.

I like the line here "Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen". The word "earnest" means "a foretaste of what is to follow". 

Keep thy heart pure, lest thou do dishonour to thy state;
Selfishness is base and hateful; but love considereth not itself.
The wicked turneth good into evil, for his mind is warped within him;
But the heart of the righteous is chaste: his conscience casteth off sin.

There is a lot in these four lines. First, that marriage requires both spouses to consider the good of the other. I have argued this many times on social media, often without success. For instance, there was a trend a while ago for women to argue that wives should never do things for their husband. I objected as follows: 

But I failed to persuade my opponent:

Even more significantly, Tupper is aware that much hinges on the quality of mind of the spouses - that a mind can be "warped" and so turn good into evil. This is why the original choice of spouse is so important, as the goodness of one spouse can fall onto barren ground and the marriage can fail regardless of their efforts. This is a much more realistic view than the commentary you sometimes hear that "all you have to do is to be nice and your efforts will be rewarded many times over".

If thou wilt be loved, render implicit confidence;
If thou wouldst not suspect, receive full confidence in turn:
For where trust is not reciprocal, the love that trusted withereth.
Hide not your grief nor your gladness; be open one with the other;
Let bitterness be strange unto your tongues, but sympathy a dweller in your hearts:
Imparting halveth the evils, while it doubleth the pleasures of life,
But sorrows breed and thicken in the gloomy bosom of Reserve.

The first part of this passage is about marriage being a high trust institution. This is why the experience of betrayal hurts the institution so much - it leads to "emotional unavailability" and an unwillingness to make the commitments that marriage requires. In the second part of the passage, Tupper counsels that the spouses be open with each other. I think this is true in the context he gives: that issues should be aired and communicated rather than held in reserve and allowed to fester. But it may not be true that men should communicate everything about themselves openly to their wife. Women sometimes find it more attractive if the man retains a part of himself that is more difficult to read. 

YOUNG wife, be not froward, nor forget that modesty becometh thee:
If it be discarded now, who will not hold it feigned before?

Froward means "difficult to deal with". Tupper is suggesting to young wives that if they change in this way after the marriage that people will assume that a kind of underhanded "bait and switch" has been employed. 

But be not as a timid girl,—there is honour due to thine estate
A matron's modesty is dignified: she blusheth not, neither is she bold.
Be kind to the friends of thine husband, for the love they have to him:
And gently bear with his infirmities: hast thou no need of his forbearance?

The last line is interesting. Tupper is reminding women that they should be a little forgiving of their husband's faults, as he surely must also be forgiving of hers. 

Be not always in each other's company; it is often good to be alone;
And if there be too much sameness, ye cannot but grow weary of each other

This is good advice - that there is a right amount of time to be together and time to be apart. I would add to this that in a balanced life we would spend a certain amount of time in male spaces (or for women female spaces) and a certain amount of time with our families.

Ye have each a soul to be nourished, and a mind to be taught in wisdom,
Therefore, as accountable for time, help one another to improve it.
If ye feel love to decline, track out quickly the secret cause;
Let it not rankle for a day, but confess and bewail it together:
Speedily seek to be reconciled, for love is the life of marriage;
And be ye co-partners in triumph, conquering the peevishness of self.

You sometimes hear the claim that until very recent times marriage was just about property and that women were nothing more than chattel. Yet here we have a very influential Victorian era writer asserting that "love is the life of marriage" and that it is therefore important not to allow resentments to build that might undermine this love.

Let no one have thy confidence, O wife, saving thine husband:
Have not a friend more intimate, O husband, than thy wife.
In the joy of a well-ordered home be warned that this is not your rest;
For the substance to come may be forgotten in the present beauty of the shadow.
If ye are blessed with children, ye have a fearful pleasure,
A deeper care and a higher joy, and the range of your existence is widened:
If God in wisdom refuse them, thank Him for an unknown mercy:
For how can ye tell if they might be a blessing or a curse?
Yet ye may pray, like Hannah, simply dependent on His will:
Resignation sweeteneth the cup, but impatience dasheth it with vinegar.
Now this is the sum of the matter:—if ye will be happy in marriage,
Confide, love, and be patient: be faithful, firm, and holy.

There is a positive attitude to parenthood here, as a blessing that brings both a deeper care and a higher joy and that widens the range of existence.

That concludes Tupper's advice to newlyweds. Tupper, like other early Victorian writers I have read, took marriage very seriously, enough to think through what was required to make a marriage work. There was no easy Disney "happily ever after" that was simply owed to someone. Marriage required prudence in choice of spouse, and thereafter it required an active orientation to virtue and faith.

Finally, please note that Tupper did not believe that women were incapable of moral guidance. Tupper appealed to both sexes in giving his advice and understood women to have a share in the mission to create loving marital unions.