The therapeutic turn

One book I would like to read is The Fatherless Society by the Danish academic Henrik Jensen. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available in English, so I'm limited to descriptions of it from other sources.

Take, for instance, the following from The Therapeutic Turn by Ole Madsen. In a discussion on how Western culture changed its emphasis from duties to rights, Madsen writes:

In 2006 the Danish historian Henrik Jensen's monumental work The Fatherless Society was published, a work that depicts the current culture of rights as a clear departure from former civilisations' authoritative patriarchal cultures of obligation. Jensen, like Rieff and Carroll before him, sees signs of a moral crisis in Denmark and in the West in general. Late modernity is characterised by what he calls 'mother rule' and which indicates that the citizen is apparently liberated from all forms of authorities and duties, and the only guidelines imposed on him or her is the welfare state's encouragement of its citizens to pursue self-centred, self-actualisation. The social hierarchy in the West up to the present day has been organised around a vertical cosmos, while today we live in a horizontal culture, Jensen maintains,.. (p.59)

This reminded me of a talk I had with my father when I was a young adult. I happened to mention the word "duty" as part of the conversation and my father stopped me and told me with concern "there is no such thing as duty". It seems that my father (a classical liberal in his values) had already accepted the cultural shift described above, the change in mindset in which there is no vertical dimension we look up to as being authoritative and from which is derived duty or obligation. Instead, there is only the striving toward our own individual "self-actualisation".

The discussion then turns to the downside of this shift to a "horizontal culture":

On the flipside lies the pitfall of the culture of rights, if it should become an overly unilateral, self-stimulating, mass individualised victim culture, Jensen argues...

Where the individual in the culture of guilt is indebted to God, the parents or society, the opposite is the case in the rights culture: the victim has an eternal claim to recompense...

The second main problem with 'the fatherless society' which Jensen identifies is the fatigue effect. This is a type of crisis of meaning which finds expression in the form of an increased feeling of emptiness, loss of direction and meaning, particularly among the younger, adolescent generation, in that the individualistic culture does not offer access to anything outside themselves...

Self-actualisation is hard work and fewer external reference points make this project confusing and potentially exhausting for many people...

The paradox is that the therapeutic ethos invites people to understand their lives in terms of suffering because pain provides a basis which enables psychologists to give their knowledge legitimacy and construct stories about individuality. The greater the number of causes for suffering that are situated in the self, the more the self is understood on the basis of its predicament. (pp. 59-61)

There is a lot in this quote. The first two paragraphs describe one of the shifts between traditional and modern cultures. In the former, the individual is indebted to those who formed him (God, parents, nation/ethny) - and therefore it was thought right that he should have the virtue of piety in honouring them. The individual might be subject to feelings of guilt if he did not live up to what was expected of him from these sources of authority in his life. In modern culture, when this vertical dimension is lost, and there is only the individual existing as part of a mass, there are no longer obligations to external sources of authority (duties), but individual rights to oneself that might not be adequately upheld, leaving the individual in the role of a victim. The focus shifts from what we owe to others to what is owed to ourselves - and therefore our focus is more likely to be not on our failure to adequately serve but on how we have been failed in what is owed to us as a right - on ourselves as victims.

The next two paragraphs are also very interesting. In traditional societies the individual was connected to transcendent goods that were a source of meaning, purpose and identity in his life. Some of these goods held inherent meaning and were a stable source of support in an individual's life. For instance, if there was an inherent meaning in masculinity, and I was a man, then my sense of self had something positive to rest on. Similarly, if I were English, and there were admirable qualities associated with this, and a collective memory of achievements, then this too might be a stable support for my sense of self - independently of what I achieved personally in life as an individual. Yes, there were ways in which these sources of meaning did require the individual to live up to a certain standard, so there was a possibility of having a sense of personal failure, but these standards were at least known to the individual.

The self-actualisation ethos can be harder on individuals, because everything comes down to finding some inner, unique, hidden aspect of the self to be "actualised" that then will then put things right, i.e. adequately provide meaning or that might justify our existence. Most people seem to interpret this in terms of career success bringing validation - I know a few people who when they made it in their careers suddenly became more settled in themselves. It does make things particularly difficult, though, on adolescents who haven't yet even chosen such a path, let alone travelled down it. Failure, too, is immense in this outlook as there aren't other given aspects of our nature that provide meaning or identity.

I found the final paragraph interesting simply because it does seem to describe some moderns, particularly those on the left. The phrase "the more the self is understood on the basis of its predicament" describes people I know for whom their "oppression" is inextricably linked to their sense of self. If you go on social media, and engage with some on the left, you get a sense that the greater part of the mindset is organised around this. I doubt if this is entirely to do with a turn to therapeutic culture but it could be part of the explanation.

Again, to make the contrast clear, it is more common for traditionalists to focus on aspects of the self that are connected to either pride or service, e.g. to manhood/womanhood, to national/ethnic identity, to fatherhood/motherhood, to membership of a church etc. But the more you head leftward, the more likely it is that people will organise their approach to life around coping with victimhood, e.g. from being a particular sex or ethnicity, or else they will speak about being "triggered" in their mental health from exposure to things they find difficult to cope with. For instance, if you go all the way leftward to the Democratic Socialists of America you get this:

The Pope on rights

This week came the news that Pope Benedict is to retire. So one of his last addresses will be the one he made in January to members of the diplomatic corps.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the address. Reading it you get the sense that the Pope wants the Church to speak in the same terms as that of the secular world and to contribute to a common mission together.

And yet that secular world is allowing less and less room for the Church in the public sphere.

So in the address the Pope does pause to argue that the terms used in the secular world should be understood in a way that isn't hostile to the Church.

For instance, human rights legislation is being used in some European countries to restrict public expression of Christian faith. So the Pope said of human rights:

Sadly, especially in the West, one frequently encounters ambiguities about the meaning of human rights and their corresponding duties. Rights are often confused with exaggerated manifestations of the autonomy of the individual, who becomes self-referential, no longer open to encounter with God and with others, and absorbed only in seeking to satisfy his or her own needs. To be authentic, the defence of rights must instead consider human beings integrally, in their personal and communitarian dimensions.
 

I find that interesting as I too see "exaggerated manifestations of the autonomy of the individual" as being a key problem in the modern West.

Also, the alternative put forward by the Pope is a promising one. He wants rights to be considered not just in terms of a self-referential individual (what I have previously called an abstracted, atomised individual) but more "integrally" including a person's life within a community (what liberals call the "encumbered" self).

It's a pity the Pope didn't draw this out more. What, for instance, would be some examples of rights that a person considered integrally would have? Wouldn't a person, considered in their communitarian dimension, have a right to preserve the communal identity from which he derives a significant aspect of his identity and his commitment to a larger society?

The American Catholic Church doesn't think so, holding instead that there is a right to immigrate:

Persons have the right to immigrate and thus government must accommodate this right to the greatest extent possible, especially financially blessed nations.
 

 To sum up:

a) It's a positive that the Pope is willing to make criticisms of the exaggerated emphasis on autonomy in the secular world.

b) It's a positive too that the Pope wants the individual to be considered integrally, in his personal and communitarian dimensions.

c) The Church, however, is inconsistent in defending such a concept of the human person.

d) I doubt if it's a good strategy for the Church to practise outreach to the secular world by adopting the terminology of that world, and then trying to draw a line when the terminology becomes overtly hostile to the Church. From what I've observed of suburban Catholicism, one negative effect of this strategy is that priests start to see themselves as representatives of a liberal social order (i.e. as lending their authority to that order). In other words, instead of the liberal concepts being Christianised, the Christian institution at the ground level gets colonised by the dominant priorities and understandings of liberalism.

Just who do rights serve?

In Australia there's a debate about bringing in a bill of rights. Opponents argue that a bill of rights would undermine the ability of parliament to pass laws in the national interest and transfer power instead to unelected judges.

Here's some very strong evidence that this is a valid concern. Australia is currently experiencing a mining boom. There's a particularly strong demand for our mineral resources in China. But the Chinese aren't content just to buy the minerals. The Chinese want the mines (and the farms) and are now even wanting to replace local Australian workers with Chinese ones:

HUNDREDS of Chinese contract workers will be brought to Queensland by mining boss Clive Palmer.

Mr Palmer revealed yesterday that up to 10 per cent of the construction workforce for his planned $8 billion coal development in the Galilee Basin of central-west Queensland would come from China. This fly-in contingent would number up to 600, many of them engineers.

The proposed coalmine, a 500km railway and port are being pursued by Mr Palmer in conjunction with the Metallurgical Corporation of China.

He said yesterday MCC would be the main contractor on the project, with three of its government-owned subsidiaries each having responsibility for the mine, the railway and the port. Each would sub-contract to Australian firms, Mr Palmer said, and he expected about 60 per cent of the work to go to foreign companies and 40 per cent to Australian companies.

MCC is also building Mr Palmer's $5.2bn Sino Iron project in Western Australia, and the magnate said the 60-40 division of operations on that project would be replicated in Queensland.

But Mr Palmer told a Brisbane press conference yesterday he expected about 10 per cent of the workforce on the ground in his Queensland project would be Chinese workers.

"In Western Australia, in our projects there, we've had something like 10 per cent who are Chinese people on site," he said.

"We've had 7000 workers, we've had about seven or eight hundred Chinese engineers who are directing the work. It would probably work out something like that" in Queensland. The three parts of the project are expected to generate 6000 jobs during construction and 1500 jobs when fully operational. A spokesman for Mr Palmer said after the press conference that much of the work would be prefabricated overseas.

Mr Palmer, the biggest political donor in Australia and an active member of Queensland's Liberal National Party, said the only hurdle to the project going ahead was the Queensland Labor government's approvals process.

What does the generally right-liberal Australian newspaper think of all this? It blames, wait for it .... low migration levels!:

We report today that Queensland mining boss Clive Palmer expects to bring in about 600 Chinese engineers to build his new $8 billion coal project in the Galilee Basin ... Low migration and tight labour laws have created the perfect storm ... Labor added to workplace rigidity and costs with retrograde industrial laws before adopting a "small Australia" approach to migration...

C'mon guys. Immigration is being run at massive levels, about 250,000 a year. You can't blame "low migration" for the Chinese bringing in their own workers to run things.

Anyway, it gets worse. David Marr is an old-style Australian left-liberal journalist, one of the "luvvies" as they are sometimes called. He gave the official human rights oration this year.

It's a curious thing, but the speech he delivered differs in one respect from that reported in the papers. What was reported in the papers includes a line that was left out of the official transcript. I'm guessing that he provided a transcript to the papers but then had second thoughts about this particular line and left it out.

And I'm not surprised he left it out. Because in the newspaper version of the speech, Marr complains that:

In 2010 there is nothing in law to stop Western Australia closing its iron mines to Chinese workers.

So David Marr, a left-liberal luvvy, thinks we need a bill of rights so that the Chinese Government gets to determine who works in our mines rather than our government. He wants to deprive our parliaments of the power to determine migration policy.

It's an attempt to lock in a liberal, individualistic, internationalist view of how things should be, to effectively place it beyond political contest. No doubt Clive Palmer and other mining bosses will be pleased, as will the Chinese Government. Human rights legislation will serve some very powerful interest groups seeking material gain, rather than ordinary Australians.

We should be wary of those pushing the rights agenda.

Reality vs Orthodoxy

Minette Marrin has written a very interesting column on the issue of human rights.

She begins by suggesting that "the great post-war left-liberal ascendancy may be beginning to question its own certainties".

Her chief exhibit is David Goodhardt, a self-confessed "sensitive member of the liberal elite." Goodhardt recently abandoned left-wing orthodoxy by writing about human rights that:

People are not born with rights ... Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of institutions. You and I have rights not as human beings, but mainly because we belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.

It's remarkable for someone from the left to declare such a thing. Usually the left trumpets the idea of abstract, universal rights. Minette Marin herself offers a good criticism of this left-wing tendency to base politics on claims of abstract rights when she writes,

This approach is incoherent ... it offers no explanation of what mysterious entity has conferred such rights or how they are to be enforced or who is to decide between conflicting rights.

There's one more worthwhile part of Minette Marin's column. She criticises the proposal that immigrants to EU countries should swear an oath of allegiance to EU laws, rather than to their nation of residence. She complains,

You almost have to pinch yourself at the folly of it. All across Europe, governments and bureaucrats and so-called community leaders have been forced, most painfully, to try to think more deeply and more critically about identity and the fragility of the ties that bind us in a shared sense of belonging and how best to strengthen them; their lazy, unexamined platitudes about immigration and celebrating diversity have been blasted, quite literally, away.

And what does Brussels come up with? A proposal that is quite astounding in its lack of the slightest understanding of feeling, sentiment, social solidarity, place, custom, ritual, symbolism or national tradition ...

This is not quite traditionalist conservatism, as it doesn't recognise ties of kinship as being one important aspect of national identity. It does, though, realistically accept the fact that questions of identity and belonging are important to individuals, can't be taken for granted and require a respect for the traditional life of a community.