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. 

Wet liberals & classicide

The Victorian Labor Government has just announced its new housing policy. It is going to override current planning laws to build high-rises of up to 20 storeys around train stations (within a 1km radius). This is to accommodate the massive population growth Australia is experiencing from immigration.

One notable feature of this policy is that some of the most beautiful heritage suburbs of Melbourne have been targeted, including Brighton, Hawthorn and Malvern. These are upper-middle class suburbs, with a well-established way of life that is now likely to radically change. 

The Anglo upper middle class in these suburbs are mostly "Teal" in their politics. They are what was once known as liberal wets, being socially liberal but less committed to laissez-faire economics than the liberal "dries". 

The identity of this class was based in part on certain status markers having to do with wealth and lifestyle (a holiday home in Portsea, overseas holidays, designer renovations, and especially children attending expensive private schools). But it was also based, especially for the wives, on holding socially liberal views. This has proven to be tragic, because one consequence of holding to these views is that it makes it impossible to defend your own class existence. It is a class marker that fatally undermines your own existence. It is a "classicide". 

Oddly, the Anglo upper middle class was too conservative - in the bad sense of the word. It failed to adapt quickly enough. When it was clear that social liberalism was the wrong path, it did not abandon it in time in order to secure its own future. It stubbornly clung to the one thing it needed to be rid of.

I want to try to explain one aspect of why socially liberal views were self-sabotaging. To do so I am going to go back to one of the Australian wet liberals of the 1980s, George Brandis. Brandis wrote extensively about his political philosophy, so he is a useful political figure to focus on.

My basic argument is that the liberal wets inherited a political philosophy from the nineteenth century (particularly from John Stuart Mill) that is overly individualistic. Their idea was that the core human good is a freedom to be an autonomous individual, so that we self-determine our own unique purposes in life. Here is a sample of Brandis writing about autonomy:

the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives.

Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life 

Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...

There is a kind of metaphysical basis to this kind of thinking which Brandis touches upon here:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

I firmly believe that this is a faulty metaphysics. It emphasises the idea that our identities, needs and aspirations are unique and wholly individual. This is a view that derives from the early moderns, such as Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes explicitly rejected the earlier view that each kind of creature has a "quiddity", i.e., an essence that gives it a particular nature distinct from other kinds of creatures and therefore at least some commonality in identity, needs and purposes. Instead, his theory was that we are determined at the atomic level to either desire things or be averse to them, and that these determinations are unique to each individual. 

A nineteenth century liberal feminist, Victoria Woodhull, advanced a similar sort of argument:

Now, individual freedom...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.

Now, one problem with taking this view is that it makes a common moral language very difficult, as there is no way to predict the good for any particular individual, and it also makes the idea of a common good very difficult, because there only exist individual goods known only to the individuals themselves. Language about the good tends to be expressed instead in terms of pluralism or diversity or tolerance or non-discrimination.

The alternative view is to see humans, like other creatures, as having a certain nature, so that it then makes sense that there might be a common telos (end or purpose) in seeking to embody the best aspects of this nature. This does not exclude this nature having a somewhat different expression according to personal traits, but nonetheless it exists as an underlying essence of what makes us recognisably men and women.

The idea of a wholly unique individual nature also distorts the relationship between the individual and society. It makes liberals frame this relationship as either "the individual comes first and society is derived from this fact" (the "good" liberal option) or "society comes first and the individual is merely derivative" (the "bad" non-liberal option). In either case, there is a sundering of individual and community.

Here again is Brandis:

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism. Firstly, conservatism and socialism have in common the belief that the basic units, the 'building blocks', of human society are structures much vaster than the individual.

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...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.

The better alternative is to recognise that there is, as Francis Bacon put it, a "double nature of the good". In other words, we fulfil our nature as men and women partly through ourselves as individually embodied and ensouled beings, but also through our membership of communal bodies. These other bodies help to carry certain aspects of our own good, such as our identity, our roles (e.g. as fathers and mothers), our loves, our social commitments, our attachments to people and place, our connection to generations past, present and future, our close connection to a particular culture and so on.

The individual good is not therefore somehow set apart from the good of the communal bodies we belong to. In contributing to the common good, we are advancing our own good as an individual. Nor do the communal bodies render us somehow derivative or incidental. They exist, in part, so that we can be more fully ourselves. 

Are liberal wets entirely individualistic? In the sense I have outlined above, yes. They cannot truly connect the individual to the communities he or she belongs to. However, liberals sometimes do, in a superficial way, concede that society does merit some attention. They might, for instance, add on the word "responsibilities" to their political formulas (for instance, here in Victoria we have something called the "Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities"). They might sometimes invoke the necessity of maintaining social cohesion, which is a weak and inadequate way of trying to counterbalance liberal individualism, but even this was too much for Brandis. He complained (of the former Liberal PM John Howard) that:

...in qualifying the Liberal Party's commitment to the freedom of the individual as its core value, and weighing it against what he often called social cohesion, Howard made a profound departure from the tradition of Deakin and Menzies.

Most significantly, liberal wets like to see themselves as being less selfish than liberal dries, despite being committed to a radically individualistic politics. How do they manage this? By emphasising the idea that they are committed to equal rights for all people. This is something very big for the Teal types. They will see themselves in individualistic terms as having little connection to any community or tradition of their own. But they are fierce in promoting the idea of the rights of those seen as somehow marginalised. It comes across as a pathological altruism, but I think it's one of the few ways that they are permitted to transcend their own individualistic politics and claim what they believe to be the moral high ground.

Where does the Anglo upper middle class go from here? Well, they will either merge into the new high-rise, densely packed multiculture or they will leave the former heritage suburbs for somewhere else. But I hope that a few younger ones might read this and consider being more politically adaptable, in the sense of letting go of liberalism as a class marker and instead adopting an alternative that makes it possible to defend a way of life.

Brandis 4

I've been looking at an attempt to justify right-liberalism by an Australian politician, George Brandis (1984).

In my very first post I criticised the way that Brandis described the individual:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations...

This might seem harmless, but there is a great danger in the belief that we have only unique identities and aspirations. As I wrote in the first post,

if you take the liberal view that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations, then you end up with the liberal idea of society as being a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing ends that can only possibly be known to them.

Brandis himself spells this out in the next part of his essay, when he discusses justice and freedom:

the highest value in a just society is the equal right of every individual to select and pursue his own ends, and to shape his life according to his own conception of what is the best life for him.

If a liberal society is based upon the self-determining individual, it is axiomatic that individuals must have the freedom both to determine their own ends and to pursue them...

It is crucial to appreciate that the liberal believes in freedom because he believes in individual rights, not vice versa. Freedom is one value among several which flow from the liberal's basic commitment to the equal right of all individuals to determine and pursue their ends in accordance with their own conception of the good. Freedom itself is not an absolute value, and the liberal is prepared to qualify it not only to the extent that this is necessary to ensure an equal measure of freedom for others, but also in cases where the limitation of freedom serves liberal values other than freedom, such as equality of opportunity.

You can see the way that assumptions flow into each other here. First, there is the claim that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations. If that is true, then there is nothing connecting individuals except a shared commitment to allow each other to pursue their own uniquely individual ends and to pursue their own concept of the good. This aim then comes to define what is meant by freedom, rights, equality and justice.

You end up with an ideal of an autonomous individual with various rights to self-determination, a commitment to the equal freedom of others, and to an equality of opportunity.

Note the relativism at the heart of the moral life here. For Brandis there is only a self-defined good, a subjective concept of the good that applies to me and my life alone.

Brandis gets things wrong at the very start of his argument. Our identities and aspirations cannot simply be described as unique. Nor are they based simply on subjective preference. For instance, our communal identity is often shared and is based on a real, inherited ethnic tradition. If we are bound together within this tradition, then we have a shared identity and common aims. Our freedom is not then just a freedom to self-define, but to express an identity that we have inherited and that we hold in common with others. What we require is not just an individual right, but a right to exist within a particular community.

The liberal philosophy, as set out by Brandis, is a notably pessimistic and demoralising one. It suggests that there are no goods that can be recognised as valuable within a community and which become a standard within the life of that community. There cannot be ideals of masculinity or femininity, or shared moral standards, or an ideal of family life, or notions of the good that are likely to be acknowledged by most individuals within a community, such as a connectedness to nature or to a family lineage, or to one's own heritage.

And there is no possibility of thinking, within the liberal philosophy, that there is an objective value to any of this, i.e. that the ideals that exist within a community have an inherent quality of goodness that our moral sense is able to discern. Instead, there is just a relative concept of the good, i.e. that I self-determine what is good for me, it is a good because I define it to be so, but it is a good for me alone. The concept of the good is radically squeezed down in the liberal philosophy as set out by Brandis.

Brandis 3

I've been looking at an essay on liberal values by the Australian right-liberal George Brandis. Here's the next section:

Secondly, conservatism and socialism share a theory of social change which owes much to the dogma of historical determinism. Both believe that the forces which shape a society's development - whether those forces are understood according to the conservative's metaphor of society as an organism with its own spontaneous causes of growth and change, or the socialist's more formal theory of dialectical materialism - are impersonal and irresistible. Neither gives any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force. For both, the past determines the present and therefore limits the future. The socialist feels that he is the prisoner of the past; the conservative would like to think that he still lives there.

Liberalism, by contrast, simply rejects historical determinism. It asserts that individuals, acting rationally and with co-operative goodwill can consciously shape the future of their societies so as to avoid the errors of the past and correct the injustices of the present. The reconstructive spirit of liberalism was captured well by Robert Kennedy when he proclaimed that it was 'the shaping impulse' of a liberal society that 'neither fate, nor nature, nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny'.

What does this tell us about Brandis? It suggests to me that Brandis does not feel a positive connection to the past. What matters for him is the idea of individuals rationally following a principle in order to create a just future. In this sense, the individual can only be acting against the past. The past is a kind of foil against which the rational individual sets himself.

I do think that Brandis has accurately described a liberal mindset in all this. Liberals have set themselves to create a new order based on the rational unfolding of a principle that aims at justice.

But there are major problems in taking this approach. First, a society is not built on the basis of a single, clearly enunciated principle. Any society faces the difficult task of coming to a sense of an "order of being" - an order which brings together the natural, the social and the spiritual aspects of life. There is no single principle which can express all of these things. What (ideally) happens instead is that a society gives rise over time to a culture which represents the best efforts of that society to reach a harmonious order of being.

Things are likely to go wrong if you seek to reorder society along the lines of a single principle aiming at justice. First, there is no such single "rational" principle. Second, the negative effect of adopting a false principle, as liberals have done, is radically heightened. Third, once you adopt such a principle there is no way to provide limits to its effects, as it becomes the sole organising principle of a society. The principle is likely to run to much more radical extremes over time than its originators ever intended.

Does this mean that Brandis is right when he claims that traditionalist conservatives do not give "any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force"? It's true that we reject the idea of radically breaking with the past in order to reconstitute society on the basis of an ideological principle. But it's not true that a culture, as an expression of an attempt to create an order of being, is frozen in time. Each generation tries to add to it, to improve and refine it, and this is partly an act of human reason (and conscience and creativity). Traditionalists do have a sense of justice and the good, and we do expect society to aim to measure up to this, but not as a singular, rationalistic principle that serves as its own starting point. We aim to carry forward a culture and a tradition and we look instinctively to the best of what our forefathers achieved to inspire us in reaching toward the good.

One final point. Brandis approvingly quotes Robert Kennedy speaking about "the shaping impulse" of liberalism, an impulse which overrides not only history but also nature. A traditionalist would never set reason against nature in a simplistic way. It's not that nature is sacrosanct. Anyone who has had children knows that they don't come ready civilised. Ruder aspects of their nature do have to be overcome. Even so, principle has to have regard for our created nature. You can't formulate principles about the way that human life is to proceed abstractly and without consideration for what humans are, for both better and worse, in their given natures.

Brandis 2

I've been looking at a statement on liberal belief by George Brandis (1984). Here is the next part of his essay:

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism. Firstly, conservatism and socialism have in common the belief that the basic units, the 'building blocks', of human society are structures much vaster than the individual.

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. Although liberal social theory does not deny the existence or significance of such larger categories, it insists upon the priority of the individual. 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.

Brandis doesn't frame things the right way. If you want to defend the individual then you have to defend the social entities which he belongs to, which express his social nature, which make his social commitments possible, which help to define him and which bring significance and meaning to his life.

So it's not helpful to think of the individual as being either prior to the social entities or subordinate to them.

If your starting point is the autonomous individual as the central unit of society, then you are not doing the individual any favours as you are taking him as an abstract entity and stripping him of important aspects of who he is and of how he fulfils himself in life.

It is a false and artificial starting point.

Brandis: unique identities, individual ends

It's uncommon for members of the right-liberal parties to set out their beliefs in a systematic way. Back in 1984, George Brandis did just this (I am assuming he is now Senator George Brandis of the Australian Liberal Party).

So what did George Brandis set out as his beliefs?

a) The liberal theory of society

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism.     

Traditionalists strongly disagree with this view of human society. We would not use the word "unique" when describing identities and aspirations. The reality is more complex than this: some aspects of our identity and aspirations are uniquely individual, but others are shared and communal.

Is it really unique for instance that I have a male identity? Is it unique that I identify with my ethnic tradition? Is it unique that I aspired as a young man to find an attractive woman to love and with whom I could form a family?

Some aspects of our identity and aspirations, far from being uniquely individual, are part of an eternal human condition. Does that mean that it is all dull conformity? No, because these identities and aspirations are refracted differently within each human personality.

It is important to get this right, because if you take the liberal view that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations, then you end up with the liberal idea of society as being a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing ends that can only possibly be known to them.

What you lose is a sense of the larger social entities which help form individual identity, to which individuals feel a sense of belonging and attachment, and which provide the social context (the framework) for the lives of individuals (i.e. for expressing our nature as men and women).

It is terribly mistaken, in the traditionalist view, to base a theory of society on "the pursuit of individual ends." Let's say that we have a masculine identity and it is a part of this identity to play an effective role as a husband and father and also to uphold the larger communal tradition we belong to. Our "individual ends" cannot then be separated from a number of "social ends" relating to family and community. Our social ends and our individual ends blend together.

That possibly helps to explain why it doesn't feel free to be limited to individual ends. If we are limited in this way, we can't fully pursue some of the more significant ends in life, so part of our personality feels bottled up or stifled.

There's much more to comment on in George Brandis's essay, but I don't like to make these more theoretical posts too long, so I'll resume discussion in a future post.