Different starting points, foreign nations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Brandis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girton College, now coeducational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parallel lives, different worlds?

 I saw the following brief exchange on social media this morning:

The idea being put forward here is that we fail to truly comprehend the opposite sex because we do not adequately comprehend how different the minds of men and women are.

I'd like to try to contribute something to addressing this issue. Before I do I need to point out that anything said on this topic is likely to be a generalisation lacking nuance, and that this type of discussion is mostly observational and therefore more tentative than, for instance, a discussion about the logical outcomes of political principles.

Men and women both clearly experience thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites. What I would propose is that men are more likely to have a self-awareness that leads them vertically toward "logos" - the ordering principle to be found within reality. A man's sense of self, therefore, is not centred in what he is thinking or feeling at any given time. It lies at a layer immediately above this, allowing men to disassociate to a degree from what is happening at the level of emotion and thought. A man might watch his thoughts and emotions rather than inhabiting them as his "self". 

What this means is that it is possible to disagree with a man's thoughts or opinions without it much affecting his sense of self. It is very rare for a man to talk about not being "validated" or "seen" by someone who fails to agree with him. Men are more likely to fear the consequences of a lack of self-mastery, as reflected in a lack of real world competency. 

Men too are more likely to consider things from a wider ordering principle than are women. Feminists, for instance, have never really moved beyond considering the sectional interests of women. They have shown little interest in coming up with a vision of society which considers how all the different parts might be arranged to serve a larger good.

The success or failure of the male mind runs largely along a vertical axis. When working best, the male mind is receptive enough to comprehend the higher things above the self, including logos (when in the state of the "porous self"). But it is also able to look down on thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites and order them, so that the lower serves the higher. To be actively engaged in this task should lead to self-knowledge, and a sense of how the order of the larger world (the macrocosm) is reflected in that of the self (the microcosm). 

Again, when this is operating at its best, the sense of the self serving a higher good, and being ordered to it, is linked to the heroic virtues in men - of harnessing one's strengths and powers to defend something greater than oneself. When the masculine self is working well it tends toward a selflessness of purpose.

But the vertical axis can be broken. Western men are not as good as they once were at perceiving a higher level of existence - there has been a flattening of horizons. When there is nothing above the self, there can still be oversight of thoughts and feelings, and attempts at self-mastery, but toward lower ends and with a stunted growth toward wisdom.

Similarly, men can fail at using their self-awareness to order their thoughts, feelings and appetites, to the point that they lose "right mind". In older phraseology, they become slaves to their passions. Their awareness is trapped at their own thoughts and appetites, unable to move upward along the axis. 

Women's sense of self is located more at the level of their thoughts and feelings. That is perhaps why women have such a strong need to have their thoughts and feelings validated. If your sense of self is closely tied to what you are thinking and feeling, then a failure of another to validate these things will feel destabilising or perhaps even be perceived as demonstrating a lack of love or care for who you are. 

When a woman's mind is working well the movement is more along a horizontal axis than a vertical one. Because her sense of self is centred on her thoughts and feelings, she will be sensitively attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At its best, the female mind might be perceptive about the thoughts and feelings of others, and gradually come to a type of self-knowledge and wisdom via this faculty. This is a type of close in, sideways movement of the mind - from one's own thoughts and feelings to someone else's. 

However, things can go very wrong. If the horizontal axis is broken, a woman can be trapped within her own emotions and thoughts. Not only does she lose her ability to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, she can become solipsistic, and see others only in terms of what she herself is thinking and feeling. She might "merge" the other person with these thoughts and feelings and not recognise them as having a mind of their own. She might mistakenly view them as experiencing whatever she is experiencing. (I wonder, too, if this helps to explain why a woman might sometimes believe that a husband should be able to read her mind - because of a failure on her part to recognise him as fully differentiated). 

Which brings me to the main point I'd like to raise, namely the issue of how we guide our behaviour. If what I have said is true, at least as a broad generalisation, then men can potentially step outside of their own thoughts and feelings along a vertical axis to engage with logos, and the higher ordering principles. This means that there are guiding principles that are not outside of, or alien to, the workings of the male mind.

If women's sense of self is centred more on what they are feeling and thinking, and the movement is sideways toward what others are thinking and feeling, then women do not have the same engagement with logos. Left to themselves, they can be guided instead by what heightens their sense of feeling (e.g. a film that triggers their sense of pity or empathy or indignation) or (when her mind is working well) by a sensitivity to what others might feel by a word or an action. But there is not the same sense of what ultimately orders a person or a society to a longer term good. 

And so women are, in at least some respects, in need of guidance. Where might this come from? In modern society, mostly from two sources. First, therapists. This is not a very effective source of guidance. Therapists are not really supposed to advise clients on what to do. Women often use therapists instead as an expensive form of validation. The use of therapy has the advantage for women that it is "validation with a qualification" - the therapist is supposed to be a trained expert, so even if the therapist is a young woman with little life experience, her validation has a stamp of authority which gives it a special standing (I am not rejecting therapy here in all circumstances - it might well be helpful for those in real need. I just don't think it is adequate in terms of moral guidance or to supply prudential reasoning.)

The second source of guidance in modern society comes from other women, for instance, via social media. Modern technology has created "bubbles" in which women can network and socialise with each other without much input from anyone or anything else. Again, this is often a poor source of guidance, as women often understand what other women primarily need to be validation.

In traditional societies there were various sources of guidance women could have recourse to. Social norms were important and also effective in guiding women's behaviour, due to the conscientiousness of women and also women's sensitivity to their standing within social groups (the "inclusion/exclusion" axis). There were also the wiser sort of older women with life experience who were willing to dispense genuine advice rather than validation. But most of all there were men that a woman might trust and lean on for guidance: priests, brothers, husbands and fathers.

I find it interesting that the wiser sort of women on social media are often the ones who accept this masculine role in their lives. It supplies something for them, that then allows them to develop further than other women. It does not constrain them but allows them to push further forward in their self-development.

I think women are aware of what I am trying to describe here. That is why the issue looms so large for women. A woman can find a man she trusts and cooperate with his efforts to order life toward a higher good, or she can reject this masculine element of life and rely on the workings of her own mind alone. Women are increasingly going for the second option. How this works out varies, because the quality of the female mind varies, but there is a trend toward a more chaotic experience of life, manifested in high rates of anxiety and depression in younger women and instability in relationships and family life. 

One final point. I have argued that the male and female minds work differently, along a different kind of axis, and that men can usefully provide a masculine element when it comes to the pursuit of the good. Some men who agree with me on this take the argument too far, and believe that it means that only men are accountable for what happens in society. I disagree. People have different resources for making moral choices for all sorts of reasons (their level of life experience, their upbringing, their intelligence, their personality traits). Nonetheless, we still have free will and a conscience, and we are therefore still ultimately accountable for the choices we make and for what we make of ourselves. If anything we need to return to the idea of women having their own significant moral mission in life.

Postscript

I'm not the first to suggest the importance of the masculine in accessing the vertical axis. Lawrence Auster, coming at the issue from a different angle, once wrote:

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.

And the Danish historian Henrik Ibsen also made these connections in his book The Fatherless Society:

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.

I thought it interesting as well that the following interview dropped on social media this morning (with actresses promoting the film Wicked). It is an unusually intense expression of the female mind, and sweet in its own way, but almost completely devoid of masculine influence. There is self, emotion, sensitivity, vulnerability and validation. A culture cannot run on this alone, not without the more bracing influence of the masculine: