Forward to Eden?

Why do liberals treat primitive societies as more legitimate than modern Western ones? In my last post, I made an argument that radical liberals have long been dismayed by the Christian claim that human nature is fallen and that it is therefore not possible to return to an Edenic existence of equality, freedom and plenty. Against the Christian view, the radical liberals argued that human nature has been corrupted by power structures through which some humans come to dominate others. If these can be deconstructed, then humanity will return to its original state of innocence.

What this means is that pre-civilised societies have often been treated by radical liberals as examples of original human societies free from class structures or exploitation. 

But this then raises a question. If primitive societies are superior to civilised ones, then why would progressives see history as a march of progress? 

I understood a possible solution to this more clearly after re-reading a post I once wrote about the sociologist Robert Nisbet. Nisbet, writing in the early 1950s, felt that his age was focused on issues of personal alienation and cultural disintegration. He thought these the products of the previous century. In the nineteenth century, there was a "temper of mind" which found:

the essence of society to lie in the solid fact of the discrete individual - autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable - and the essence of history to lie in the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past.

Here already is an answer to the problem I set out above. Progress was held by the liberals of the era to mean an emancipation of the individual from any status not derived from the autonomous, self-sufficient individual. In other words, the progress of society was toward the deconstructing of social hierarchies and distinctions. That is how the primitive could be reconciled with the progressive.

Nisbet wrote further:

Competition, individuation, dislocation of status and custom, impersonality, and moral anonymity were hailed by the rationalist because these were the forces that would be most instrumental in liberating the individual from the dead hand of the past and because through them the naturally stable and rational individual would be given an environment in which he could develop illimitably his inherent potentialities. Man was the primary and solid fact; relationships were purely derivative. All that was necessary was a scene cleared of the debris of the past

What does Nisbet mean by "relationships were purely derivative"? Well, consider the following claim by a Girton College girl in 1889:

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

This girl, already by 1889, saw family relationships as merely "derivative" rather than as something constitutive of the self.

You can understand, in part, why the nineteenth century mind moved in the direction it did. There was in progress a disruption of older, more local and more personalised forms of community toward more "massified" forms of urban life. You might think this far from Edenic, but for the radicals it had the advantage of busting up the traditional life they thought was corrupting human nature. Out of the disorder and dislocation, they hoped, would emerge a social life free from traditional distinctions and statuses.

It's worth pondering this, because I think it explains why some traditionalists instinctively wish to push back on some of this "massification" and to recreate to at least a degree more stable, personalised and local forms of community. 

Nisbet then adds the following:

This was the age of optimism, of faith in the abstract individual and in the harmonies of nature. In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, what we are given...is the matchless picture of a child of nature revolting against the tyrannies of village, family, and conventional morality...In the felicities and equalities of nature Huck finds joyous release from the cloistering prejudices and conventions of old morality. Truth, justice and happiness lie in man alone.

In many areas of thought and imagination we find like perspectives. The eradication of old restraints, together with the prospect of new and more natural relationships in society, relationships arising directly from the innate resources of individuals, prompted a glowing vision of society in which there would be forever abolished the parochialisms and animosities of a world founded upon kinship, village, and church. Reason, founded upon natural interest, would replace the wisdom Burke and his fellow conservatives had claimed to find in historical processes of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.

Kinship, village and church are rejected as parochialisms and are to be replaced by the individual following his "natural interest". Nisbet goes on to quote a nineteenth century Russian sociologist Ostrogorski who wrote:

Henceforth, man's social relations "were bound to be guided not so much by sentiment, which expressed the perception of the particular, as by general principles, less intense in their nature perhaps, but sufficiently comprehensive to take in the shifting multitudes of which the abstract social groups were henceforth composed, groups continually subject to expansion by reason of their continual motion."

Ostrogorski sees a shift in which traditional relationships and loyalties were relegated to the merely sentimental. What was replacing these merely sentimental bonds were "general principles" which were applied to continually expanding abstract social groups. Ostrogorski concedes that the newer relationships might be "less intense in their nature" but were nonetheless more comprehensive.

Finally there is this from Nisbet:

Between philosophers as far removed as Spencer and Marx there was a common faith in the organizational powers of history and in the self-sufficiency of the individual...Both freedom and order were envisaged generally in terms of the psychology and politics of individual release from the old.

We see this in the social sciences of the age. What was scientific psychology but the study of forces and states of mind within the natural individual, assumed always to be autonomous and stable? Political science and economics were, in their dominant forms, concerned with legal and economic atoms - abstract human beings - and with impersonal relationships supplied by the market or by limited general legislation.

Above everything towered the rationalist's monumental conviction of the organizational character of history - needing occasionally to be facilitated, perhaps, but never directed - and of the self-sufficing stability of the discrete individual.

History was moving - it was progressing - thought the nineteenth century intellectuals, towards a self-sufficient individual who needed only the resources within himself and who represented "natural man" liberated from the personal and the particular. This was the way that humans were going to travel forward to Eden, leaving behind the "the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past" (which helps to explain the poet Shelley's idea of biological sex - the fact of being male and female - as one of the "detestable distinctions" that would "surely be abolished in a future state of being".)

The hostility to the traditional is here overwhelming and it is not surprising that the political parties which formed by the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth were so little concerned to genuinely conserve.

For love alone?

I've been looking recently at ideas within the culture that undermine marriage. One of them is the notion that a husband must "make" his wife happy and if he doesn't that this then justifies divorce (see here). Another idea that is common on social media, and equally destructive, is a variant of the old notion of "free love". It's the belief that women once entered into marriage not for love but for material security. Now society has progressed to the point that women no longer need men for their material well-being. Therefore, they can marry for more "elevated" reasons, i.e., for love alone.

I'll explain why this idea has undermined marriage further on. Here is how the idea is commonly put:

Note the assumption here. The claim is that women did not in past times believe that marriage was about love, but that it was entered into for material purposes alone. There is a more hostile and radical version of this theory, i.e. that in past times women were brutally subjugated and treated like chattels by men, but now women can finally enter into a more elevated vision of marriage as equals:

There is an ugliness to this idea. It wipes out all of the sacrifices men have made for women throughout history, and also degrades the role that women played throughout history as wives and mothers. 

As it happens, it is difficult to summarise the marital practices of the past because they varied according to time, place and social class. However, even amongst the European nobility, in which marriages arranged for pragmatic dynastic reasons were the norm, it is still false to suggest that young people did not want affection and concord within marriage. The historian Judith Hurwich writes that by the mid-sixteenth century:

....children did have a larger role in choosing their spouses...and children had the right to veto. The potential for affection was acknowledged as a relevant consideration even in the aristocracy...interest and emotion were not necessarily opposed to each other and family interests and personal preferences formed what Marshall calls an intricate "mesh of interests and motivations" in the selection of marriage partners...(Noble Strategies, p.129)

I won't dwell on this, because the problem is not really the mistaken notion that marriage was only ever about material interests without any consideration for affection. The problem is the idea that you can base a marriage on "love" alone, i.e. that love alone is a sufficient foundation for a culture of marriage.

This is a problem, first, because of the understanding of what marital love is. There are types of love that do not endure and therefore cannot ground lifelong commitments. For instance, some people associate the heady, romantic phase of falling in love with love itself. When this phase is over, they move on and end up practising something like serial monogamy - which itself cannot last because the human psyche can only endure a certain number of attachments and break ups. 

There is a type of love, namely caritas love, that is more enduring. This is a love that is settled in the will and that wills the good of the other person. I have in the past attempted to explain this type of love to women on social media by using the example of the love that parents have for their children. Our loving commitment to our children is not based on a fleeting feeling, but endures even in times of stress and difficulty. But the women are inclined to scoff at the comparison between this kind of caritas love for their children, and the love they might have for a spouse.

However, even if marital love were understood the right way, it would still not be a strong enough foundation for a culture of marriage. For instance, the lack of distinct roles for men and women harms marriage, because it becomes more difficult to practise a "gift exchange" model of marriage, in which men and women contribute different things for each other they cannot provide for themselves. What you often hear instead is women saying "I can do this for myself, so it doesn't mean much to me if a man does it, he has to find other ways to add value". The ordinary masculine things a man does no longer count for as much; there is less gratitude, and less sense of things being gifted and so more dissatisfaction and greater tension within relationships. Equality understood as sameness (i.e. gender role convergence) doesn't end up purifying or elevating relationships.

A serious level of religious belief within a culture also helps marriage. If we commit to our marriage as part of our commitment to God, then there will be a deeper, inward motivation to hold firm to our vows. Sir Thomas Overbury recognised this in his poem "A Wife" written some time before 1613:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,
The law requires our words and deeds be good,
Religion even the thoughts doth sanctifie

It will also help the cause of marriage if there exists, within the culture, a notion of a common good. If it is understood that we express our own higher nature through the offices of being a husband or wife, then my own good rests on the larger good of the family I belong to. Marriage cannot survive in a culture that is based around a principle of purely individual self-interest, nor goods that are pursued at an individual level alone. There will be, inevitably, a decline in trust in societies that cannot see beyond individual self-interest, and this too will degrade rather than elevate relationships between the sexes.

Some dialling down of promiscuity in youth also helps with marriage. This is true for both sexes, but it is particularly significant with young women, who can most easily garner many different sexual partners. If women have sexual experiences with high status men as young women, it can be difficult for them to avoid a sense that they are settling with the man they do eventually secure commitment from. Again, this does not lead to a pure type of love, beyond material concerns, but to the phenomenon of women marrying men they are not deeply attracted to but who they believe will be stable provisioners.

More generally, a culture needs a normative commitment to the institution of marriage itself. By this, I mean a recognition that the health of the institution is important and should generally be upheld by members of a community. This might include a recognition that stable family life is important for the well-being of children; that it provides an important source of support for individuals; that it provides companionship in old age; and that it provides future generations for the ongoing life of a community. In this context it makes sense that the mores of a society are supportive of those who work hard to uphold family life and that there is some degree of disapproval for those who act selfishly to undermine it. 

So, to return to the original question, is it really the case in the most advanced, wealthy nations that relationships have become more elevated and pure as a matter of human progress? It is surely the opposite. There is a higher level of conflict between the sexes, higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and lower fertility rates. In popular culture, there is a coarser and cruder treatment of relationships that is often focused on hook ups and break ups rather than on elevated love. The narrative is not working the way that it is supposed to and needs to be challenged.

Why the dysfunction in relationships?

In "The Load-Bearing Relationship" Cat Orman sets out to explain the dysfunction in modern relationships. She begins with the statistical trends:

In 2000, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 21%. By 2018, the share of never-married adults climbed to 35%. The median age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men in 2000; by 2022, it was 28 and 30. Today, 41% of Americans ages 18-29 are single, and about a third of never-married single adults say they have never been in a committed romantic relationship.

Her explanation for the decline in relationships is what she calls the "contractual moral framework":

Traditional societies held that we are born into our roles and responsibilities. You owed certain social and practical tributes to your neighbors, siblings, and countrymen, even though you didn’t sign up for them. Confucianism and stoicism made these systems of reciprocal obligations explicit in “role ethics.” Abrahamic religions treated one’s responsibility to the community as part of their obligation to God. Hinduism and the related traditions of the Indian subcontinent contain injunctions from dharma, the personal and social moral duties expected of every spiritually upright individual. While the roles and responsibilities differed greatly across time and place, all of these societies agreed on the necessity and even nobility of fulfilling unchosen roles and responsibilities.

As a consequence, doctrines of how to be a good person centered on the idea that we hold a positive duty of care to others, be it through tithing, caring for sick family members, or raising our neighbor’s barns on the frontier...

The last decade is defined by a shift away from a role ethic and towards a contractualist one. In a contractual moral framework, you have obligations only within relationships that you chose to participate in—meaning, to the children you chose to have and the person you chose to marry—and these can be revoked at any time. You owe nothing to the people in your life that you did not choose: nothing to your parents, your siblings, your extended family or friends, certainly nothing to your neighbors, schoolmates, or countrymen; at least nothing beyond the level of civility that you owe to a stranger on the street.

This is well put. It is part of the shift toward seeing individual autonomy as the highest good in life (which itself has a connection to "voluntarism" in the sense of seeing the will as the ultimate source of value). If it is my autonomy, i.e. my ability to choose as I will in any direction, that is the highest good, then stable commitments to others are a limitation on this good, a kind of fetter or chain, that I should seek to liberate myself from. The focus becomes my freedom to revoke my commitments, rather than my obligations to fulfil my given roles in life. It is not surprising that this focus would lead to a lower trust society with less stable patterns of family life.

Cat Orby goes on to make an interesting observation, namely that if we cannot rely on the support we once received from our unchosen forms of relationships, then too much comes down to the support from a spouse, placing excessive burdens and expectations on that one relationship. 

One small criticism I have of Cat Orby's piece is that the shift toward moral contractualism is much older than she realises. The idea that human society is governed by a "social contract" voluntarily entered into goes back to the proto-liberalism of the seventeenth century. Again, the first wave feminists of the nineteenth century emphasised the idea of maximising autonomy for women, which meant valorising independence rather than family commitments. A female student at Girton College in the 1880s expressed this ethos by stating that,

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

Unsurprisingly, the same dysfunctions in relationships we see today were also present toward the end of first wave feminism, including delayed family formation and a low fertility rate.

Another minor criticism is that Cat Orby might have extended her argument to go beyond that of obligations. For instance, if what matters is an autonomous freedom to choose in any direction, then the qualities that we are born with, rather than choosing for ourselves, will also seem to be constraints that limit us as individuals. This includes our given sex. And so instead of cultivating the positive qualities of our own sex, it is common for moderns to think negatively of these qualities. Modern women, for instance, have a difficult relationship with their own femininity. This too disrupts heterosexual relationships.

Then there is the issue of equality. It is common now for people to conceive of the very categories of man and woman as political classes vying against each other for power in a zero sum game, where if men win women lose and vice versa. There is little sense of men and women realising themselves more fully in relationship with each other and therefore having a mutual interest in upholding family life as a common good. 

Another way of framing this is that there is no longer a sense of unity governing the relations between men and women. Instead there is fragmentation and the only way of overcoming this fragmentation, within the current way of thinking, is a non-reciprocal one in which either men must strive to meet women's needs and desires or vice versa (or else, as suggested in the recent Barbie film, the sexes achieve equality by going their own way).

To be fair, if there were an emphasis again on role ethics, then this would challenge some of these other problems, because there would once again be a consideration of what we owe to others in virtue of our given roles and responsibilities. What Cat Orby emphasises is therefore not a bad starting point for tackling the current malaise.

Dating & disorder

I've read a few posts by a young English writer for Vogue magazine by the name of Annie Lord. She writes on relationships and gives some insights into the state of dating culture among young people in the UK.

Much of what she describes is familiar. Annie Lord wants to date hot guys, but these men tend to trifle with her and so she ends up disappointed. She has occasional casual hook ups; is worried at the age of 27 about hitting the wall; and is starting to feel jaded with the whole dating scene.

To her credit, she does take some accountability. She understands that she too is undermining the culture by dismissing men on the most trivial and unreasonable grounds. It is also a positive that she acknowledges that there is something wrong with the way dating culture works today, i.e. that things are disordered.

Annie Lord

In theory, liberalism does not order human goods. For liberals, in asserting that some goods are to be preferred to others, we limit what people might choose to do or to be, i.e. we discriminate or exclude. It is therefore the case that some liberal moderns would not acknowledge a state of disorder, because they have no ordering principle, so they cannot distinguish between order and disorder.

In practice, liberals do rank goods. The highest ranked good for many liberals is individual autonomy, understood to mean having the power to act as a free agent and to enact whatever arbitrary choice one wishes to make.

Ever since the very first wave of feminism, Western women have had to choose between this good of individual autonomy and that of love and family. This has put young women in a difficult position, because the instinct toward love and family is a strong one, but it is pitted against an equally strong ideological commitment to autonomy. 

You get a picture of the ensuing internal division in Annie Lord's writing. She clearly would like to find her man, at times to the point of obsession, but she also belongs to a culture which she describes this way: 

Nowadays, for many people I know, love is the last priority. The idea of putting a relationship over your friend or career is presented like the craziest thing you could ever do. “Don’t do that for a man!” friends say because now you must do everything for yourself. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

This is a nice description of the "non serviam" attitude I discussed in my last post, in which women reject the idea of ever doing things for a spouse. Interestingly Annie Lord goes against the usual script by adding the following thought:

But what if doing something for a man is doing something for yourself?

This is interesting as it is a rejection of the zero sum game attitude to relationships, in which it is thought that if one sex gains the other must lose. It suggests, correctly I think, that we develop through what we give as men or as women to family life.

My social milieu is dominated by the most left-liberal of women, so I have some understanding of their approach to relationships. Listening to them can be disheartening. They tend to believe that women should be able to follow any passion or prompting and that men should just fall into line. For instance, if a wife suddenly decides she would like to live in Finland, there should be no barriers to her carrying through with this and that it is her husband's role to follow along. 

Oddly, they see this as a movement toward equality between men and women, because they have persuaded themselves that men are already empowered to do whatever they have a mind to do. The reality is that their concept of equality gives absolute supremacy to the arbitrary will of women; it is like a version of The Handmaid's Tale but with the sexes swapped around.

Unsurprisingly, the relationship success rate amongst these women hovers close to zero percent. 

We do need to order goods. This does not mean claiming that one good is always and in every respect a blessing, and others always evil. It is "ordering" - making a decision about what is the higher good and what is the lower. And it is not just individuals who need to order in this way. As Annie Lord's writings make clear, it doesn't work for just one individual to order rightly if the entire culture has become disordered. There are certain aspects of life that we cannot succeed in alone and that need to be ordered at the communal level.

The focus on individual autonomy has one other negative effect. It encourages a highly individualistic mindset, in which the only unit of society is the individual. Within this mindset, the concept of a spousal union is entirely lost - it no longer registers. A husband and a wife no longer act together for a common purpose, with united interests. For my left-liberal female acquaintances, if a husband acquires anything, this is considered to be to the detriment of his wife. He has gained something, therefore she has lost out. It is assumed that he will put this resource to the purpose of empowering himself, for his benefit, leading to her disempowerment and loss of control and standing. Again, this is in the most striking of ways a zero sum game approach to relationships.

How did we get to this state of affairs? It goes all the way back to metaphysics. We have inherited an understanding of man and the world from a variety of sources, much of it from the early modern period. You can recognise, for instance, the influence of Hobbes in some of this. Hobbes was very strongly materialistic and thought that everything we did was materially determined. Even so, he believed in a certain kind of freedom, namely that of having the power to enact our own individual passions rather than others having the power to have us enact theirs. 

If you accept such an Hobbesian framework, then relationships do necessarily become a zero sum game. It is no longer the case that men and women, as social creatures, fulfil their telos - their ends or purposes - in relationship with each other, as a common good. Instead, what matters is my individual "empowerment" in enacting whatever materially determined passions or desires happen to arise within my will.

The metaphysics needs to be reset.

Technocracy vs tradition?

Why are the elites so hostile to traditional ways of life? One common answer is that the elites are committed to running society along technocratic, rather than traditional, lines. I don't believe that this is the only factor involved, but it does seem to be part of the problem.

The independent journalist Auron MacIntyre has written a piece for The American Mind on this issue. He begins by summarising the ideas of the writer James Burnham:

In 1941 James Burnham published The Managerial Revolution to explain the fundamental transformation of society around the world. While it appeared that communism, fascism, and liberal democracy were competing for supremacy on the world stage, Burnham noted that these systems shared a common trait of empowering highly-specialized managers who operate a network of large bureaucracies with the goal of standardizing and planning their societies from the top down. This dynamic was easier to observe in the hard totalitarian states where official state organs dictated social and economic behavior. The tight grip of the managers in those societies drove them to collapse, but in the liberal West managers used a gradual approach that proved more resilient.

James Burnham

I think Burnham is right to note the similarities between different kinds of modernist political movements. I'll give examples later of technocratic attitudes in both communist Russia and liberal democratic Australia. First, though, it's helpful to continue with MacIntyre's account of technocracy and why it is so at odds with traditional ways of life:

The political formula of the managerial class is based on its expertise in the operation of large organizations and the efficiency they produce. In order to reliably deliver efficiency through massive bureaucratic institutions managers must impose uniformity. Small businesses, regional governments, and community organizations can mold themselves to the character of the people they serve and cater to the individual needs and tastes of their culture. Mass organizations, in contrast, generate their power due to scale, and to achieve that scale they require mass production and mass consumption. The cultural and moral particularities of a specific community, region, or even nation are a hindrance to the goal of maximizing the efficiency of mass production and consumption. Because those regional particularities represent a hindrance to the applications of managerial techniques, cultural homogenization is a key aspect of the managerial political formula.

I'd like to hone in here on just two characteristics of technocracy identified by MacIntyre: size and expertise. As we will soon see, those who wish to manage society along technocratic lines have a contempt for smaller-scale social institutions run by amateurs. Technocrats prefer to operate on a mass scale but with authority invested in a small class of experts (so the vision, despite being oriented to a mass scale, is nonetheless elitist).

I'll include just one more quote from MacIntyre explaining why the ideologies of the left have been so readily adopted by large economic corporations:

The radical left is a nexus of ideologies designed to break down the traditional structures of society. Structures like family and religion are the institutions through which troublesome regional particularities tend to be expressed and perpetuated. The deracinated individual stripped of all connection to faith, family, culture, or even gender serves as the perfect employee and consumer. Woke ideology may pay lip service to diversity but it dissolves the particularities that generate actual diversity. Total cultural homogenization is the logical consequence of progressivism and serves as the perfect medium for the fungible worker and consumer that larger managerial corporations crave.

The rest of MacIntyre's piece is very good and I encourage you to read it. For now, though, I am going to focus on reinforcing some of the points he has already made.

If we go back to the year 1932, we find the communist leader Leon Trotsky defending the attempt to abolish the family in the years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution...The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note some of the key features of the technocratic mindset here. Trotsky doesn't like the scale of the family ("petty enterprise"). And he wants it to be replaced entirely by professional organisations ("a finished system of social care"). Trotsky, then, was as much a technocrat as the managerial class we have in the West today - despite the difference in political ideologies. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that the modern West has adopted much of the Bolshevik revolutionary programme, albeit in a more reformist way.

Fast forward to Australia, 1942, just a year after Burnham's book on the managerial revolution was published. This was the year that the decision was made to end the Anglo-Australian identity and to replace it with a more heterogeneous population (but still European). What is noteworthy is that the decision was made, in part, by a group of technocrats, such as economists and planners, in an "Inter-Departmental Committee". They had growth targets they wanted to meet and they believed that the fertility rates (depressed in the 1920s and 30s at the end of the long first wave of feminism) in Australia were too low to meet these targets. 

It is also noteworthy that the politician most in favour of the change, Arthur Calwell, believed that maintaining the status quo would leave Australia as "a dull inbred country of predominantly British stock" - which expresses a similar mentality to Trotsky in his complaint that the traditional family was archaic, stuffy and stagnant. The technocrats want a more open or "opened-up" social field to work on - not "inbred" or in Trotsky's words "shut in". 

Let's move forward to 1993. An American secular humanist by the name of Thomas Flynn, just like Trotsky, wished to see the end of the family. Why? 

We expect specialists to build our cars, raise our buildings, make our clothing, write our software - the list is endless. Perversely, only society's most precious products - us - are still entrusted to cottage industry. If society is falling apart as conservatives charge, perhaps the blame lies not with "alternative family structures" (more accurately, non-familial households) but simply with parents, single or married, rich or poor, for whom parenting could never be more than a hobby - pursued in naive isolation, abandoned just when one threatens to get good at it. While procreation and parenting remain yoked, most children are doomed to be raised by amateurs...

The family, our last cottage industry, must go!

Looking Backwards - Issuing A Challenge

In 1888 Edward Bellamy published the utopian novel Looking Backwards, 2000-1887. Bellamy predicted that by the 21st Century capitalism, home, and family would be forgotten. Generations of reformers imbibed Bellamy's vivid images of happy workers who lived in dorms and ate in refectories, of children raised in large cohorts by gifted mentors, and dreamt that this was the shape of things to come. Science-fiction masters like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and others portrayed futures in which the family had been eclipsed by licensed, professionalized alternatives. Many progressives simply assumed that one day, if not too soon, parenting would be a career like any other. Those most capable of it would be trained to mentor armies of children not their own.

Flynn has gone all out here to put things on a technocratic footing. He wants the small-scale unit of the family to be replaced by "children raised in large cohorts" and by happy workers who lived not in homes of their own but in dorms. And who would be in charge? Not a loving father and mother but "licensed, professionalized alternatives".

(I can't help but note here that Flynn's dream is being increasingly adopted in our education system. There is a gradually increasing expectation that teachers will not just teach a specialist academic subject but will take on an ever more ambitious mentoring role, i.e. teachers are being "trained to mentor armies of children not their own".) 

So what are we to do? Some thoughts.

1. Rejecting a technocratic mindset doesn't mean going completely the opposite way. There are some things that have to be done to a certain scale, and expertise is necessary in some domains of human life.

2. There are, most likely, deeper beliefs underlying the technocratic mindset. For instance, if you believe in equality of outcomes in a radical way, then it will be difficult to accept the lack of uniform outcomes that occur in more traditional social settings. If people are raised mostly in a family setting, then some children will experience a better childhood than others and it will be difficult to "fix" this via bureaucratic interventions. Similarly, if you have a faith that science can be applied in all contexts to create desired social outcomes, you will most likely think in technocratic terms. 

3. Perhaps even more important is the issue of our telos (our ends) as men and women. If you think, along more traditional lines, that these are realised significantly within a family and national setting, then this places limits on the value of technocratic organisation. Technocracy in some senses presupposes a radically individualistic view of human purposes. To adopt a technocratic mindset you need to see the core purposes of human life as being based not on the roles, identities and loves that arise within the family or nation, but on individual purposes within a mass setting (or, alternatively, you need to abstract the mass institution and pursue its measurable external goods - wealth or power - as an aim in itself).

What I am suggesting is that you cannot maintain the larger metaphysics of modernity and hope to permanently curb the worst aspects of technocracy. You can only defend the role of family and nation if it makes sense to do so within your larger world picture. 

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Links:

Auron MacIntyre on social media

Articles on the changes to Australian policy in the 1940s (here and here)

The problem of solidarity

I have finished reading The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory. There is a great deal I could usefully comment on, but I'd like to focus on a single argument that Gregory makes in the conclusion. Gregory believes that whatever the successes of liberal modernity that it has internal contradictions which are undermining it.

One of these contradictions runs as follows. In liberal modernity there is no shared, substantive common good; instead "individuals self-determine the good for themselves within liberalism's politically protected ethics of rights". But this raises an issue. How do you hold together a society in which there are "incompatible views about what is good, true and right".

Liberalism found an answer, in part, by encouraging individuals to focus on the "goods life". Instead of publicly contesting the answers to the Life Questions, individuals would acquisitively seek out material wealth. Liberalism also relied for its stability on a legacy of shared commitments that were, in part, drawn from Christianity.

However, these two ingredients of the "cultural glue" helping to stabilise a liberal society ultimately work against each other. The focus on individual acquisitiveness undermines the social ties within which the cultural legacy was practised and sustained. But it is difficult in a liberal order to reject the pursuit of the "goods life", no matter how much it harms social solidarity, because it is a means by which the problem of hyperpluralism is tackled.

Gregory puts the argument as follows:

As a result, public life today, perhaps especially in the United States, is increasingly riven by angry, uncivil rivals with incompatible views about what is good, true and right. Many of these views and values are increasingly distant from substantive beliefs that derived most influentially from Christianity and that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained much more widely shared, notwithstanding inherited early modern confessional antagonisms. But the rejection of such answers to the Life Questions has led to the current Kingdom of Whatever partly because of the dissolution of the social relationships and communities that make more plausible those beliefs and their related human practices.

Most visibly in recent decades, this dissolution owed and continues to owe much to the liquefying effects of capitalism and consumerism on the politically protected individuals within liberal states, as men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfilment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them. Which means, of course, that the solidity of these social "solidarities" is better understood as liquidity, if not vaporosity. 

Nevertheless, these same liberal states continue to depend on the widely embraced pursuit of consumerist acquisitiveness to hold together the ideological hyperpluralism within their polities. Hence modernity is failing, too, because having accepted the redefinition of avarice as benign self-interest...it relies for cohesion on a naturalized acquisitiveness that simultaneously undermines other shared beliefs, common values, and social relationships on which the sustainability of liberal states also depends. (p.378)

Four types of female love

First a disclaimer. I'm always a bit hesitant in publishing these kinds of posts, because they are based on my own, necessarily limited, experiences and observations. I put them forward more as ideas for others to work with, rather than as cast iron, unassailable expressions of truth. 

It seems to me that there are at least four types of female love. The reason for trying to understand each type is that female love for men is not always as stable as that of men for women. Men's love has the advantage that it tends to trigger the male protector/provider instinct, and so men will feel that they are fulfilling a basic aspect of manhood in directing their strengths toward supporting their family. It is an anchor point. Men also seem better able than women to find a transcendent aspect in their love. The male mind is able to combine a love for an individual and flawed woman with an experience of what is transcendent in feminine beauty and goodness. And men experience this love for a woman as a higher expression of their own nature. All this can be powerful enough to motivate men to remain attached to the same woman throughout the course of a life. Yes, there are other factors that push the other way. Men do have an instinct for sexual variety. Nor are men wholly immune to becoming too emotionally damaged for stable attachments. Nonetheless, it is generally easier for a man to attach in a stable way to a woman than for a woman to a man.

So what are the four types of female love? 

1. Libidinal love

This is love that is based on sexual attraction. When women have this feeling, they often describe it in terms of a physical response, rather than an emotional one ("I had butterflies in my stomach"). It is a strongly visceral response in women, one that has little to do with higher, transcendent aspects of mind. 

What triggers this kind of love? Unsurprisingly, primal, visceral instinct. For this reason, it can seem baffling to high minded men. Women might, for instance, respond to men who trigger a sexual thrill, perhaps by being bold, or looking menacing, or breaking the rules, or having a certain arrogance. Libidinal love favours bad boy qualities.

You get a sense of this by reading female "romance" novels. These novels are designed to trigger this libidinal love feeling in women. They are extraordinarily primal. They evoke ancient "bride capture" customs: the hero will often simply force himself in some way onto the reluctant heroine. The hero himself is untamed and outside of polite society (but, in a nod to the next type of love, also someone who has inherited tremendous wealth and status).

Female libidinal love is problematic for society. Libidinal love often doesn't last. It leads women to engage in either one night stands or serial monogamy in their party years. Its impact on men is mixed at best. At its worst it encourages a player type culture amongst men, or perhaps even a "gangsta" one - or an imitation of it. It is not a basis for successful, lifelong marriage.

2. Opportunistic love

Women, more than men, have a capacity to love opportunistically. A woman might reach a certain age, want a wedding, a house, children and financial support, and set out to find a man on this basis. If she finds a man who can provide these things, she might then be willing to embark on a relationship, even if there is little genuine sexual attraction (libidinal love).

There have no doubt been countless marriages based on opportunistic love. But there are three problems with these marriages. First, the lack of sexual attraction is likely to be a cause of frustration on both sides, perhaps even eventually leading to the collapse of the marriage. Second, if the woman secures the things she wanted - the wedding, the house, the children, the financial support - the basis for her love diminishes and she may opt out of the marriage. Third, these marriages often have an unhealthy beta dynamic in which the husband must always qualify himself to his wife.

In the days before easy divorce, opportunistic love would not have broken up marriages, but it would have undermined the happiness of the relationship.

3. Altruistic love

This was the type of love most characteristic of my mother's generation of women (those who married in the early 1960s). It was described well by Marie Robinson in 1958:

Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it. It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrium, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life's continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

I think this is exactly right. This distinctly feminine type of altruistic love was, for most of the women in my mother's social circle, able to hold at bay the resentment and self-pity that women can be prone to, and carry with it a warmth and joy of feminine personality well into old age. 

The damage done by the absence of this kind of love can be seen in an excerpt from a biography of Alice James, the sister of novelist Henry James. Alice, a spinster who lived alone, was visited by her two brothers in 1889:

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

When her brothers left she was plunged again into solitude:

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

This aspect of womanhood is not so evident today, perhaps because it stood in the way of the liberal aim of creating a society based on individual autonomy. But it remains a potential within female nature, one that provides a stronger basis for lifelong marriage.

(There does exist a masculine version of this, in which men act for others - but it has a different quality to the feminine version. It is more a case of men using their masculine strengths to create a protected and secure space for their family, and to provide for the material needs/wants of their family.)

4. Caritas love

This is a love (that both sexes can experience) that is more likely to be found among those with serious religious commitments. It could be described like this: my love of God, and my willingness to serve Him, leads me to love and to will the good of my spouse and my children. This is a love, therefore, that is settled in the will. As a matter of deep conscience, I will remain faithful to my spouse, as to God, and I will serve Him through service to my family. I do not need my spouse to be perfect to retain my commitments, and I will seek to overcome my own weaknesses and temptations that might undermine the promises that I have made. I might see marriage as a sacred commitment, a sacrament that it is not mine to break. I might see family as a sacred community, one in which I am charged with the deep mission of the spiritual welfare of my spouse and children. I will actively orient myself to the love of my spouse.

This is the most profound basis for marital commitments, but realistically it won't ever be universally held within a society. It has declined as a serious orientation to Christianity has diminished. It works best, of course, if both the husband and wife hold to it; a marriage can still fail if only one spouse is motivated by caritas. 

It was the type of love that the poet Sir Thomas Overbury advocated as a true basis for marriage in his poem of 1613 titled "The Wife". Although he did want a passionate love, he recognised that this was no guarantee of a wife's loyalty. He thought, therefore, that even though beauty was an important quality, it was most important to look for "good" in a wife. He wrote:

Gods image in her soule, O let me place
My love upon! not Adams in her face.

Good, is a fairer attribute then white,
’Tis the minds beauty keeps the other sweete;

 And what did he mean by "good"? He explains:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,

He is recognising that the firmest ground for marital commitments is the one founded upon the caritas type of love.

Conclusion

You might think that the aim of a society should be to reject the first two types of female love, the libidinal and the opportunistic, and work instead with altruistic and caritas forms of love. That, though, would be a mistake. The first two are fundamental aspects of female nature that cannot be glossed over. 

For instance, it is much better if a man is sexually attractive to his wife. We know that if a man is too agreeable, or too nice, that he won't trigger this attraction. We don't want the attraction to be triggered by a race to see which man can cover himself with the most tattoos, or best imitate a bikie. But there are other ways a society can help men to be more sexually attractive to women.

How can a decent man trigger sexual attraction in a woman without going gangsta? Well, he can be physically fit and muscular. He can be self-confident. He can have ambition. He can be rough around the edges. He can show competence in things that women consider masculine (e.g. fixing things, building things, outdoorsy things). He can avoid fawning and simping, and have a sense of his own masculine attractiveness. He can be dedicated to a mission in life outside of marriage and family. He can lead adeptly.

As politically incorrect as it is to say it, men can aim to demonstrate forms of masculine power and dominance and competence. And a society can help this along. For instance, it is normal and natural for mothers to instil in their infant sons some "caring and sharing" values. This is an important part of the socialisation of boys. But after about the age of seven it should be mostly complete, and it then becomes more important that boys are socialised in a masculine way within male spaces. A society should take care to give fathers time to spend with their sons in active masculine pursuits. And between the ages of about seven to sixteen, it is helpful for boys to be educated at boys' schools with a largely male staff. These male environments can be challenging for the more gently natured boys, and some might even come out worse for the experience (by never successfully adapting), but for most boys it will have the positive effect of instilling a more spirited and competitive masculine mindset (e.g. by learning to stand up for yourself, to learn better how to keep boundaries, to hold frame when under duress etc.).

As for opportunistic love, this too needs to be understood as a matter of policy making. Society once did this in a blunt way. Marriage allowed a young woman to leave her parents' house and form one of her own, i.e. to be independent. It gave her children and material security. If she divorced she had only a limited claim to these things. Our society has, with equal bluntness, gone the opposite way by associating independence with being single, and by rewarding women with the children, house and money on divorce. A society needs to get the balance of this right if it wants marital stability.

And how do we restore "essential female altruism"? That requires a rolling back of a number of things. Because liberalism wants to make our sex not matter (as being a predetermined quality), liberals aim at a gender role convergence in which men and women play the same role within the family. This undermines a woman's sense that she might give to her family in a unique way as a woman. Similarly, the liberal emphasis on autonomy means that women are raised to believe that an independent career is what matters and that work done for family is therefore to be thought of negatively as an oppressive limitation, a burden that must be shared equally between men and women or else outsourced.

Marie Robinson thought this to be the case, even back in 1958. She described one of her clients, who was cut off from this feminine altruistic love, as follows:

The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (a la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is. Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man.

Finally, there is the issue of caritas. In a secular society, with a materialistic world view, this understanding of love will not prosper. What I would urge men to understand, even those men without religious belief, is that this is not without negative consequences. The churches did once help to create a more secure setting for family life.

Why does Sophie Lewis want to abolish the family?

Sophie Lewis is a radical feminist who is trying to revive the idea of abolishing the family. The website Vice gave her a glowing review in a piece titled "We can't have a feminist future without abolishing the family".

Her plan is straightforward enough:

"In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other."

Apparently there won't be any fathers, just mothers of both sexes. And our mothers won't be those who gave birth to us ("gestators" is her term for those who fulfil this role, children are "neonates"). That's why Sophie Lewis refers to her own mother as her "closest bio-relative"; her "mothers", after all, could be any number of men and women who form some sort of loose care-giving circle.

Her ideas do fit in well (in a radical way) with the state ideology. If liberals want us to be self-defined, then deconstructing unchosen kinship relationships will be thought of as progressive. But this still leaves the question of why someone like Sophie Lewis is attracted to this modernist mindset. No one, after all, is forcing her to push the liberal worldview to ever more radical outcomes.

I do think I can explain why she thinks the way she does. But you'll have to permit me a little philosophical detour. In the recently published book Our Borders, Ourselves, Lawrence Auster asserts that the father represents more than just himself as an individual man:

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.

The Danish historian Henrik Jensen has a similar view. His view of the "father" is described as follows:

The masculine — which Henrik calls the “father” — is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture.

He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority.

That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship — which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two.

If we do not accept the father in this larger symbolic sense then we are unlikely to accept the "structuring principles of human life" as described by Auster and Jensen.

This is an especially acute problem for women. A woman cannot as easily, on her own, approach this "structuring source of reality" - she won't have the same strength of instinct for it as a man. Women often describe their inner life as being more like an "ocean" - something undifferentiated and difficult to control or order.

So a woman is likely to be pushed to extremes on this issue. On the one hand, she needs men to uphold this vertical dimension within society, to provide the structuring source that is outside of herself. Hence women are often more devoted to institutions like the church than are men.

On the other hand, the authority is more alien to a woman than it is to a man and so, without trust, a woman can more easily lurch into rebellion. She can reject the whole vertical dimension of life as an evil patriarchal conspiracy against women.

If a woman is in rebellion (as men can be too) it is likely that she won't just reject one aspect of the vertical dimension, but that she will reject what she perceives to be the "structuring source of reality" as a whole. And for many women today the symbol of this is the white male. We stand as the symbol for the whole vertical dimension of life.

When you come across women like Sophie Lewis you can predict two things. First, that her relationship with her father will be troubled. Second, that there will be a denial of the entire realm of structuring principles, i.e. a denial that there is a nature to things or that there is an "essential" existence to things.

In terms of her relationship with her father, Sophie Lewis quotes from a book titled Daddy Issues by Katherine Angel:

The anger and rage we might feel towards a father . . . is not something we can expel, once and for all, and nor does it yield a clear solution. Rage has instead to be folded into everything else we may simultaneously feel; it does not simply burn itself out.

And this is how she looks back on her relationship with her father when she was a child:

My dad taught both his children by example to treat Mum with contempt—and this, I later realized, was of course also a profound form of contempt for us. Of the innumerable cutting quips generated over the years by this man’s delectable talent for cruelty, perhaps the pithiest is one he typed in a wink-wink nudge-nudge email to my partner, five years ago, calling me an arrogant know-it-all...

To do full justice to the pain I’m talking about would be beyond the remit of this essay. I will not, whatever I imagine to the contrary, have exorcised it simply by writing the above paragraphs. I will burn a cord this weekend, with my friends, and meditate, once more, on letting go. But my suspicion is I cannot, in the end, stuff all my hurt into a sacrificial body and watch it go up in smoke.

Her rejection of the white male is alluded to by her interviewer in this anecdote:

She made us green tea, pouring mine into a mug that read “I’ve got 99 problems and white heteronormative patriarchy is basically all of them.”

The writer that Sophie Lewis admires most is Donna Haraway who wrote "A Cyborg Manifesto". Read the following description of this essay and look out for the attempt to break down traditional "structuring principles of reality":

Haraway begins the "Manifesto" by explaining three boundary breakdowns since the 20th century...

Haraway highlights the problematic use and justification of Western traditions like patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism (among others). These traditions in turn allow for the problematic formations of..."antagonistic dualisms" that order Western discourse...She highlights specific problematic dualisms of self/other, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man (among others).

Haraway's cyborg theory rejects the notions of essentialism...and asserts that "cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism."

What do we take from all this? The "horizontally inclusive world of mothering" is of course indispensable to any society. But so too is the vertical dimension that men are responsible for. The female journalist who described Henrik Jensen's views went on to say about feminised Nordic societies that:

I found it surprising and almost counterintuitive to discover that placing so much priority on nurturing and mothering functions — caring for the special needs of each child, ensuring that each person grows in his or her unique way — does not lead to a close-knit and deeply connected society. Not in our day and age. Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, the result is hyperindividuation, which leaves us self-focused, isolated, and victimized.

Liberalism is a terrible vehicle for men to uphold the vertical structure as it is so dissolving of the institutions and culture of a society. It is little wonder that the vertical structure has thinned out so much, and little wonder that this thinning out has led to contempt and rebellion among Western women.

(Liberals are by nature in rebellion even when they dominate a society, which explains why they see themselves as rebels even when they have become the establishment.)

It is also true that fathers who fail to bring up their daughters with loving care and guidance often produce young women who rebel - not just against them personally as fathers, but against the whole notion of a structuring principle of reality.

Civilisations don't just keep running of themselves. They are actively upheld by men who understand the importance of their role in maintaining the vertical structure. It is not the case that women will always be repelled by this - women need men to provide a structuring source and there will be intelligent women in any age who will lend their support to this project.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Can feminism be reformed?

PragerU, a classical liberal website, has published a video on feminism. The argument made in the video is that feminism has done great harm to society but only because it has veered away from its founding, liberal principles. Therefore, a new feminism is needed which returns to these principles.

Although I find it encouraging that a right-liberal organisation is so clearly acknowledging the damage done by feminism, it's not difficult to show that the larger argument is wrong and that modern day feminism is a logical development of those foundational liberal principles. Returning to them is just starting over and repeating the process. What's needed instead is a rethink of those early liberal principles.

Here is the video itself:

Tammy Bruce, herself once a leading feminist activist, sets out the first principles when she says:

Dignity is at the core of what feminism should always be about. Dignity means that a woman should always be able to freely choose her own path in life.

Liberalism was an attempt to create a post-Christian philosophy for the West. It argued that human dignity rested on man's ability to live according to self-determining choice, i.e. on his autonomy. Feminism applied the same principle to the lives of women.

Tammy Bruce believes that modern feminism has betrayed this principle. Her complaint is that:

Feminism has downplayed the desire for women to have a family and hyped the rewards of career and casual sex.

She goes on to complain about modern sexual mores as witnessed in music videos and the hookup culture.

However, if the aim is dignity, and dignity means always being able to choose freely what we do, then it is logical that women will reject traditional family roles of being a wife and mother and focus instead on careers. It is also logical that sexual mores will become increasingly libertine.

Let's start with sexuality. I wrote a post some months ago on the popular singer Cardi B. She made a music video showing a dozen or so women twerking - the kind of thing Tammy Bruce is complaining about. One woman on social media did criticise Cardi B for doing this. Cardi B defended her video on the grounds that,

It says to women that I can wear and not wear whatever I want. Do whatever I want and that NO still means NO.

She is defending her twerking video based on the very liberal principle that Tammy Bruce wants to base a "reformed" feminism on, namely that it displays women choosing for themselves as an act of empowerment.

A legion of other women chimed in as well to defend the video for much the same reason. A selection:

Leah: It's because we're free to do what we want with our bodies.

Fatimata: It shows that women can do whatever they want with their bodies...Encouraging women to be themselves and act as they please...

The Hoarse Whisperer: You seem troubled by women having autonomy over what they choose to do with their bodies...

Ahkweah: It shows that as women we can do whatever we want.

The mistake is to see dignity not as a quality in itself to be upheld as a matter of character but as something we gain as through the act of choosing or through self-defining our own good.

This is a debate that goes back quite some way within Western culture. I wrote another post earlier this year about a pamphlet published in 1620 on the topic of transvestism. In the pamphlet there is a woman who chooses to dress like a man and she initially defends this choice on the basis that it represents a genuine freedom. In her mind we are not free if we are subject to any "restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire".

Yes, it's old-fashioned language but it's the same argument being put forward by the followers of Cardi B.

Her opponent in the debate rejects the notion that freedom is a liberty to choose as we please, as this encourages "unbridled appetite" and a "wilfull liberty to do evil":

...what basest bondage, or what more servile baseness, than for the flattering and soothing of an un-bridled appetite, or delight, to take a wilfull liberty to do evil, and to give evil example? This is to be Hells Prentice, not Heaven’s Free-woman.

There was a pre-liberal understanding in the West that we achieved dignity not by asserting our power to choose as we pleased, but by rejecting the baser aspects of our nature in favour of the nobler ones. The debate ends with the male character declaring:

From henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell...we will live nobly like ourselves...ever worthy: true men and true women.

Let me reiterate the basic point I am making here. If what matters is dignity, and dignity is based on a freedom to choose as we will, then you are going to end up in the long run with Cardi B, because that is what the "I will not be restrained or limited in what I choose to do" looks like. If you prefer a culture that has some level of modesty attached to it, then you need something besides the liberal definition of dignity to support it.

And what about women being wives and mothers? At one level, this sounds like it fits the liberal principle logically. If it's about dignity to choose, then why shouldn't some women choose to prioritise family over career?

But there's a catch. If what matters is my own autonomous choice, then I should, as a matter of principle, choose to do things that maximise this choice. And being a wife and mother fails this test. First, it is based on a predetermined gender role, i.e. on an aspect of self that is not self-determined. Second, it is not uniquely chosen but is based on a biological aspect of human nature that is shared by all women. Third, it is based on a notion of interdependent, complementary roles within the family, rather than on independent and individual self-achievement. Fourth, because stable, lifelong commitments place restrictions on who we might choose to live with.

For all these reasons, feminist theorists have often looked down on women choosing to prioritise family. Many have gone so far as to denounce the family as a patriarchal construct that oppresses women. And those who have accepted the family often want to reconstruct it so that it allows for female autonomy, for instance, by delaying family formation; or by having gender neutral roles within the family; or by outsourcing the traditional maternal role to the state; or by having easy divorce laws that favour women.

So you cannot uphold the family on the principle that human dignity rests upon a freedom of autonomous choice. Instead, you have to reassert the idea that we bring our own natures as men and women to fulfilment, in part, through participating in the offices of being a husband/father or a wife/mother, or that we express the principle of sacrificial love through what we give of ourselves to our families as husbands/fathers and wives/ mothers, or that we uphold the common good for ourselves and our progeny through the transmission of our own distinct culture, tradition and lineage through our willingness to uphold a culture of family life.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that some of the failings of modern feminism that Tammy Bruce criticises were in evidence from the very start of first wave feminism. It was not unusual for the leading figures of first wave feminism to believe that free love should replace marriage, or that the distinctions between men and women should be dissolved, or that women should prioritise independence via career rather than marriage and motherhood. First wave feminists were also criticised for hating men whilst nonetheless copying them, just as modern feminists are.

I can't give a complete account of this in a single post, but one general point I'll make is that once intellectuals accepted the liberal principle that they should not be subject to the will of another, only their own, they rapidly drew the conclusion that there should be a levelling of society, in which distinctions between people were abolished, so that there was something like an equality of sameness. It was thought to be "bigotry" for distinctions to matter.

Here, for instance, is a founding theorist of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, wanting women to become more man-like:

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society ... For this distinction ... accounts for their [women] preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

Wollstonecraft was a believer in free love, travelled to Paris during the French Revolution in the 1790s and had a love child there with an American businessman (though when he abandoned her she tried to drown herself in a river).

Wollstonecraft later had another child, Mary, with William Godwin - himself a believer in free love. This child ran away at age 16 to live with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley too wanted to abolish sex distinctions in society. He wrote in 1811:

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

Shelley was also a free love enthusiast who abandoned his first wife Harriet when she was pregnant with their second child. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine River. Shelley's reasons for opposing marriage are exactly the liberal ones you would expect:

That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

If we jump forward to 1837 we have the early American feminist Sarah Grimke also complaining about the existence of sex distinctions:

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

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

John Stuart Mill was an influential first-wave feminist. In 1833 he theorised that higher character was androgynous rather than distinctly masculine and feminine:

...is there really any distinction between the highest masculine and the highest feminine character?

In the 1860s, Eliza Linton addressed the feminists of her era as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate" and as the "bad copies of men who have thrown off all womanly charm".

In 1889 a student of Girton College, a feminist college at Cambridge established in 1869, summed up the spirit of her education as follows:

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

Here you have the idea that what matters is developing as an independent individual rather than as an interdependent member of a family. Note the negative terminology applied to family roles: "mere parts - excrescences".

By the early twentieth century the radical wing of first wave feminism was just as extreme as that of today. Alexandra Kollontai, for instance, grew up understanding feminism to mean:

That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model ... I could help my sisters shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice ... I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

Therefore, as you might predict, she disliked the idea of sex distinctions, wanting them to be levelled away. She gave public lectures in which she prophesied that even the physical differences between men and women would, as a matter of progress, dissolve. A record of one lecture recounts how she,

...longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible...

She even thought that love itself should be subordinated to the objective of individual autonomy:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life...

We are stuck in a loop. We adopt an inadequate principle for our society, it does damage, we retreat a little but still keep to the principle and then we suffer another wave of harm. At some point in time we need to reconsider the underlying principle itself, the one that keeps setting us down the wrong path.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

A comment on Godwin

Before I resume telling the ill-fated story of the free love advocates of the British enlightenment, I want to do something I don't often do and highlight a comment to my original post.

My first post sketched out the philosophy of William Godwin (1756-1836). I noted that Godwin's philososophy established a gulf between man's being in the world and the pursuit of a common good that was only uneasily bridged.

For Godwin, it was "natural" for man to follow the dictates of his own mind. In doing so, he would extend the sphere of knowledge and this would then improve moral standards - autonomous man would, via pure reason, choose to act selflessly and benevolently for the benefit of mankind as a whole.

This philosophy led Godwin to denounce marriage and the family as these placed controls over who we chose to establish relationships with. By the logic of Godwin's philosophy, to marry was to engage in an artificial, selfish and prejudiced act in which we treated others as property.

Godwin had not given up on a common good. He connected a radically individualistic mode of being (we act according to the dictates of our own mind without constraint) to a highly abstract common good (by acting so we come to choose, via pure reason, to act selflessly and benevolently for the good of our fellow man - i.e. for humankind).

A reader observed:

I am convinced that the "valid" realms of human pursuits are for liberals relegated to the individual or the global abstract, while the stations in between are dismissed or denounced.

With enough brainwashing, the individual can be convinced he is master of himself, and liberal elites (the brainwashers) can dictate universal values. It is family, community, church, ethnicity, etc., that represent a threat to this binary. They give people some measure of influence in managing their particular interests and connecting with others in meaningful ways. Liberals seem to believe, therefore, that those venues, in which their revolutionary ideas have little control or influence, must be made irrelevant or destroyed.

I have bolded the two thoughts that I think are particularly well put. I would only add to the first that the conceit of being a "master of oneself" might contribute to the liberals of today believing that they are anti-establishment free thinkers when in fact they are conforming to a state ideology that has been entrenched for generations.

As for the second observation, it rings true when you consider the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers like Godwin. By rationalism I mean the belief that a society could be refounded (literally "re-formed") on the basis of rational principles formulated by intellectuals like Godwin himself.

If you have this mindset, you will instinctively dislike the "measure of influence" that institutions like the family give to ordinary people in "managing their particular interests and connecting with others in meaningful ways" because this then limits the "ground zero" approach to re-forming society along the "rational" and "unprejudiced" principles favoured by intellectuals.

In stark contrast, traditionalists instinctively admire the "little kingdom" aspect of family life, i.e. the way that family allows us to perform offices that express and fulfil our natures (even if they involve burdens) and, in so doing, create unique human communities based on very personal ties, loves and loyalties. Our instinct is that this is a better foundation on which to build the wider expressions of human community than any philosopher's abstract formula.

Locke & the family

Dr Allan Carlson believes that the English philosopher John Locke set the template for the modern family back in the late 1600s. According to Carlson, Locke thought that the traditional role of fathers in the family was unnatural. All men wanted to do, by nature, was to survive as individuals and beget children (and then leave). Therefore, men were given power and authority over women and children as a way of luring them into family life.

And so, for Locke, the traditional paternal role was not only narrow in purpose, but politically damaging as it was used to justify the rule and authority of kings. Therefore, it had to be reformed:

"Since his overall project demanded an end to Patriarchy at the political level, so as to undermine the claims of kings, Locke deemed it necessary to bring an end to Patriarchy within the family as well. His alternative was the “liberal” marriage – of limited purpose and authority – where men might find compensatory satisfactions in friendships with a wife and children. Locke understood that, while it ran against his premise of gender equality, he still needed to cast the father as the presumed head of the family, which in industrial society evolved into the “breadwinner” role."

Being the "presumed head of the family" did not mean as much as it once did. As Dr Carlson points out, the paternal role was increasingly dominated by the demands of paid work. Even so, liberals eventually came to believe that even this "soft patriarchy" conflicted too much with liberal beliefs about gender equality. And so Locke's voluntary marital contract, in which women are tied to family by their natural connection to children, and men by their "artificial" role as head of the family, breaks down:

However, some in the liberal order eventually saw that as too great a price. To gain the promised equality, they said, women must instead overcome their maternal instincts and break their affective ties to children and to nature itself. At that point, the contract breaks down. As women renounce their innate purpose, men lose their artificially created one, and the liberal marriage system dissolves.

This overtly feminist step did not take place until the second half of the nineteenth century, but it had its origins in Locke:

While John Stuart Mill, writing in the mid-19th century, was among the first to describe this feminist imperative, its roots lay in Locke. Indeed, he readily acknowledged the validity, in certain societies, of the single-parent family, where “the children are left to the mother, follow her, and are wholly under her care and provision”.

So also with polygamy: systems of one man with multiple wives or one woman with multiple husbands. These too, Locke said, could serve as household forms adequate to the tasks of rearing children as “free and rational creatures”. Such matters were subject solely to cultural acceptance, what Locke called “fashion”. 

It would be interesting to follow this observation further. If Locke's end goal really was simply to raise children as "free and rational" creatures, then you could do this in a variety of settings, including state institutions. The traditional family is then put on shaky ground. An alternative approach would be to think of the offices of husband/father and wife/mother as being part of the social context within which we best fulfil our given purposes as men and women. It would also see the traditional family as an aspect of society itself, as its own little commonwealth, with a distinct culture, and with a set of economic, educational, religious and leisure functions that are foundational to the larger society.

Carlson does discuss the problem of the family losing its larger functions in society. According to Carlson, this was something deliberately aimed at by Locke:

Locke’s “Conjugal Society” rested on a “voluntary compact between men and women” that was limited to the “things of their common interest and [common] property”. Under Patriarchy, the economic lives of men and women had been merged, wholly and completely. As expressions of pre-industrial life, such households were also characterised by a great array of productive activities. The sexual and the economic merged fully here.

Locke aimed at families stripped of most functions, economic or otherwise. Property could be held separately, by husband and wife. Since the purposes of marriage were only procreation and the socialisation of small children as rational creatures, and since marriage was always provisional, a strong home economy was neither necessary nor desirable.

I've been thinking about exactly this issue lately. Modern society is rendering men and women increasingly less necessary to each other - at least in terms of social function. Not only is there gender role convergence, in which men and women end up doing much the same thing in society, but so many aspects of life are being outsourced, that it's much more possible for people to survive without the support of family.

To the extent that we can, we need to "un-Locke" the family. The family will not rest well on the basis provided for it by Locke and his successors (which is increasingly limited to a provisional friendship between "partners" of any sex). It needs to widen once again its functions within society and the paternal role needs to be grounded on fundamental aspects of masculine nature, identity, social roles and telos/purposes.

Lady Hale: what is a family?

Lady Hale

Lady Hale (Baroness Hale of Richmond) is President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Prospect magazine has named her one of the world's top 50 thinkers. So she has some clout in the field of law.

Last month she gave a speech on the topic "What is a 21st Century Family?". It's an interesting speech as it illustrates clearly one aspect of the way that liberal moderns think about such issues.

To explain, though, I need to turn briefly to a post written by Andrew Willard Jones. He notes that Christians often call liberals moral relativists. And yet liberals do clearly have a strong belief in right and wrong:

The entire ideological edifice of liberalism rests on the conviction that it is just plain wrong to intervene in the individual’s pursuit of desire fulfillment, and that to do so is a violation of justice, the paradigmatic moral principle. You will find no group of people more certain of the rightness of their convictions and more willing to force others to comply with them than those who congregate on university campuses. There is, obviously, no shortage of right-and-wrong in late liberalism’s woke culture. And yet, many Christians continue to talk about moral relativism. Why?

The pursuit of individual autonomy, and the concept of justice flowing from this, does provide liberals with categories of right and wrong. But here is the critical point. Within the liberal framework the actual term or category "moral" is indeed limited to the issues that society has a relatavistic stance toward:

in the everyday liberal vernacular, the word “moral” is restricted in application to things that society is more-or-less relativistic about.

Liberalism sets up the binary of moral/political. The moral is my own subjective, irrational and private beliefs on issues that the state is indifferent toward. Once an issue is thought to involve public policy, however, it becomes part of the morally neutral political and economic realm that the state then seeks to regulate.

Lady Hale's speech makes sense within this liberal framework. On the one hand, she praises the shift toward autonomy within modern family life:

...three things stand out from the developments of the last 50 years. The first is an increasing desire and respect for individual autonomy in adult decision-making – by both men and women. So we try and facilitate or at least acknowledge the family life created between same sex couples, through informal partnerships, through assisted reproduction, adoption and surrogacy. At the same time, we increasingly respect their decisions to bring their adult relationships to an end and their autonomy in deciding upon the financial consequences of doing so

On the other hand, she is quick to identify the purpose of family life as a political/economic one. She believes that the family originally had very limited purposes, being established to provide a legitimate male heir for the transmission of property. However, it was the role of the family in providing economic support for its members that gave it a more significant reason for existence. As a mini welfare state, it relieved the state itself of some of its financial burdens:

As I have said before, the conjugal family is its own little social security system, a private space, separate from the public world, within which the parties are expected to look after one another and their children. The more the private family can look after its own, the less the state will have to do so...Perhaps it was for this reason that the narrow view of family relationships began to expand.

She believes it to be a "narrow view" to see family relationships as being based on kinship. This makes sense if the purpose of the family is simply to be "its own little social security system" as kinship is irrelevant to this aim.

She is also critical of attempts to reform family law in the UK by limiting alimony to five years. She questions how the reforms,

can possibly fulfill the role of the family in shouldering the burdens which it has created rather than placing them upon the state. 

Again, given her view that the very reason for the existence of the family is to relieve the state of a potential financial burden, you can understand why this decides the matter for her.

There are two main points to draw from all this. First, if the family exists as a social technology then it doesn't really matter what form it takes. It could be three adult men and five children as long as it is performing its economic role of being "its own little social security system". That is what matters to a liberal state that only admits to determining public policy on "morally neutral" economic and political grounds, but within the larger understanding of justice as being based on maximising individual autonomy.

Second, most people currently see aspects of family law as being gravely unjust. For instance, a wife can unilaterally and without any grounds divorce her husband and yet the state will still compel him to support her financially whether it be through alimony or child support. She can elect not to work, not to provide for herself, but still compel her now ex-husband to work on her behalf as if he were still her husband. It seems mad.

However, it makes sense within the liberal framework. First, this framework seeks, in Lady Hale's words, "individual autonomy in adult decision-making" including to "respect their decisions to bring their adult relationships to an end". Therefore, the liberal state is committed to easy divorce.

At the same time, the liberal state sees the family as a social technology that has the function of acting as a mini social security system. Therefore, the state wants the husband to be an economic provider - that is his permitted social function. The liberal state wants to have its cake and eat it too, by emphasising autonomy and easy divorce, as well as men working as providers - even after they have been rejected as husbands by their wives.

This is not a viable approach in the long term for a number of reasons:

1. The emphasis on autonomy can only undermine family commitments. If the aim is to maximise our ability to pursue our desires without impediment, then you cannot have lifelong monogamous marriage. Serious commitments require trust, shared moral commitments, and a willingness to act for the greater good and for higher principle rather than for our own immediate interests and impulses.

2. The emphasis on autonomy tends, over time, to expand the role of the state in supporting individuals, rather than having them supported more cheaply, but with greater interdependence, within the family. It is already the case that a woman can, if she so chooses, raise children with the support of the state rather than with the support of a husband.

3. The view of the family as a social technology is too limited. Yes, social function matters and no doubt played a role in shaping the family. But this ignores the way that aspects of our natures are fulfilled within closely bonded familial relationships, particularly those based on kinship that span generations. This ought to be acknowledged as part of the "common good" that a society seeks to uphold, rather than relegated to the field of private moral goods that the state is indifferent toward.

4. The contradiction between easy, no fault divorce and the justification for the family as a mini welfare state will not so easily be solved by compelling ex-husbands to continue their former provider role even after the dissolution of their families. Over time this will erode confidence in marriage as an institution.