Wet liberals & classicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here again is Brandis:

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

The conservative sees society as a naturally ordered, harmonious hierarchy; while in the eyes of the socialist, the basic structures of society are irreconcilably hostile classes...Both agree that individual persons are but incidents of larger entities...It is the distinctive claim of liberalism that the individual person is the central unit of society and is therefore prior to and of greater significance than the social structures through which he pursues his ends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Why is the West treated differently?

I'm currently reading the first issue of Observer & Review, a new Australian magazine aimed at the intellectual right. I've begun with an essay by Edwin Dyga titled "Prospects for Paleoconservatism". One part of this essay that particularly interested me concerns the inconsistent treatment within modern culture of Western and non-Western identities (p.49). Whereas it is thought wrong to claim that "America's settler class remains the bedrock of its present core culture" this would be "uncontroversial if expressed by an anthropologist describing the cultural primacy of any other foundational people outside the Eurosphere". 

How do we explain the discrepancy? Dyga thinks it is a result of critical theory: 

This inconsistency can only be explained as a function of critical theory, which is subversive when applied to one group but not another.

Critical theory is the attempt to reveal and challenge power structures. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes one of its adherents, Horkheimer, as follows:

"The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination.

Now, this is interesting as I have discussed this issue with others in the Melbourne Traditionalists and the consensus has generally been that the inconsistency reflects a belief in the longstanding trope of the "noble savage". In other words, pre-civilised societies are thought to be egalitarian and non-oppressive, and therefore they are treated by the left as legitimate in a way that civilised societies are not.

Max Horkheimer

However, I think it is possible that these two explanations overlap. This becomes clearer if it is remembered that something like critical theory long predates the Frankfurt School of the mid-twentieth century.

You have to go back to when a Christian worldview dominated the West. In this worldview, man's nature was fallen and therefore human society was inevitably imperfect. We were expelled from an Edenic existence by our own sinful nature. This worldview did not please those who were bent on achieving social utopias. They preferred to believe that the imperfection of human nature was due to the existence of power structures which "enslaved" men. If we could be liberated from these forms of domination, the theory went, then man's nature could be regenerated and we could return to an Edenic existence of innocence, equality and plenty.

The first power structure to be targeted was the ancien régime, the old order governing France before the revolution of 1789. Dennis Diderot, a French revolutionary, is supposed to have declared that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." 

Dennis Diderot

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical liberal of the early 1800s, wrote poetry about a New Man who would be created once all power structures had been overthrown, leaving only the man who was "king over himself":

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

Here is Shelley talking about power:

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches

Mary Shelley, his wife and the author of Frankenstein, had this to say about her husband's beliefs:

The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled...

He followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence, used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil...

Percy Shelley's fierce rejection of power structures extended even to God. He thought Milton's Satan a heroic character for rejecting God's rule:

Shelley found in Milton’s Satan a noble characterization of the champion of the oppressed, or mankind, fighting against God, the omnipotent monarch, like his own Prometheus against Jupiter.

And from an article about Percy Shelley's "Utopian desire":

[Shelley] desires to change the world to Eden before the fall of man. His idealism is based on the elimination of all sorts of tyranny and oppression

If we move on to Marx and Engels, we get the following conundrum. After the ancien régime was overthrown, there was not a return to a primitive Eden. Instead, a new power structure emerged in which the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class. Marx came up with the argument that if the working class were to take power, there would be no other class below them to exploit. In other words, there would no longer be a class based power structure. Engels, for his part, popularised a theory of primitive communism (i.e., a belief that primitive, pre-civilised societies had been egalitarian and non-oppressive) which he described this way:

What an admirable constitution this kind organization! No soldiers, gendarmes or policemen, no nobility, no kings or governors, no prefects or judges, no prisons (…) All are equal and free – including women. 

He goes on to claim that it was a "degradation" that ushered in the new civilisation. One critic of this view characterises it as follows: 

Primitive communism...endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness.

Engels was already at this time complaining about "patriarchy" and advocating for "sexual liberation" and in this he was a visionary as the left has mostly left behind their interest in social class and instead identified race and sex as the basis for power structures in society. What is thought to be standing between humanity and the achievement of equality and freedom is the need to deconstruct whiteness and patriarchy.

Friedrich Engels

Little wonder then that any form of specifically white identity is thought to represent an illegitimate "supremacy" that is based on oppressing the non-white other. 

What I would reiterate is that there is a long history in radical political thought in which primitivism (the noble savage) is identified positively with an Edenic world of freedom and equality, which was degraded by civilisation through the emergence of power structures, which tainted human nature and corrupted and enslaved Man. 

In this sense, critical theory and the noble savage are at least partly intertwined. 

You can see as well how seriously those who follow these ideas will be in their opposition to any form of traditional Western identity and why they might think it "progressive" for these identities to be abolished. 

I would hope as well that Christians might understand how far outside of their own tradition this aspect of modern culture is. The hope that by abolishing whiteness man's nature will be regenerated and there will be ushered in a wholly secular, this worldly version of Eden is not in line with a Christian anthropology.

Why would a woman think this way about marriage?

The latest thing to emerge on social media is the idea that it is wrong for wives to do things for their husbands. Why? Apparently, this represents a wife "mothering" a "man-child". The argument extends even to stay at home wives whose children are at school. They, too, are never to do anything for a husband, and he should take over the domestic work on his return from his paid job.

Here is an example of the mindset:

Now, obviously there is a terrible logic to this claim. If women cannot do wifely things for a husband, because it is "mothering" them, then there is no longer any meaning to the word "wife" - it has been emptied of any real content. It will no longer signify anything of value. And, of course, there is no longer the same level of reciprocity in a marriage. Men will go out to work, will then come home to more work, but cannot expect anything from their "wife" because that would make them a man-child.

How did we get to this point? Well, one reason is that the modernist mindset is to believe that life is about the pursuit of self-interest. When it comes to relationships this means that I should attempt to get my relational needs met to the maximum, whilst only being required to meet the needs of the other to the minimum.

So, specifically this means that a woman will want maximum effort, energy and attention from a man, whilst having few requirements to provide comfort, support or sex; whilst a man will want comfort, support and sex, with the minimum level of effort, energy and attention. Men with this mindset might angle for "situationships" or "friends with benefits", women might want a marriage in which they are not required to do homemaking, or "emotional labour", or to have sex. 

You might ask, if women want marriage to be run according to their own self-interest, why would a man sign on the dotted line? The answer is that women who think the world revolves around self-interest, assume that men think the same way and that marriage has been set up to benefit men. They claim that men get all the benefit from traditional marriage, so they are only righting the scales now to make marriage all about female self-interest. 

To justify this approach, they commonly cite debunked research by Paul Dolan that marriage improves happiness levels for men but sinks them for women. He misinterpreted some data, and has since corrected his original claims (see here). It turns out that married women with children are happier on average than all other categories of women:

To give an example of what these online debates look like, here is an exchange with a woman calling herself Alakazam. She began with the usual claims that wives "mother" their husbands and that men are happier in marriage than women.

I pointed out to her that the research she was relying on had been debunked and then replied with the following:

Her response? Exactly as might be predicted:

I tried to persuade her to retreat from this position by asking her if we should put our own self-interest ahead of our children. But she was happy to answer yes:

There is a positive side to all this. This can be changed. We are choosing to live in a world created by men like Thomas Hobbes. We don't have to. We could return to a different approach, one in which spouses will the good of the other. In a marriage in which both spouses have been formed along these lines, this would mean less focus on what we maximally get from the other, and more on what we have to give as husbands and wives. This is a healthier mindset, because we reach the better aspects of our own nature through acts of familial love. It would allow men to think positively of what they can gift a wife as a man; but similarly it would raise the status of what women might gift a husband as a woman.

Missing from view

Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad, wrote a post on X this week which I think is worth a read. The first part runs as follows:

The worst thing about every single person who considers themselves as "liberal" or "left wing" is that they are raging against the very soul of humanity with no understanding of what it is they are vanquishing with every step they take. It's so embedded in everything they do it is invisible to them, beyond their comprehension, absurd to even contemplate. It's just babble, to them, to speak of honour, heroism, sacrifice. It's been observed for a long time, but we're reaching the true reification of this paradigm now. These people cannot think or speak of anything other than negation, impulse, and a kind of grasping immediacy that makes them seem at once ludicrous, unsensible and, when viewed from a certain perspective, the terrible footsoldiers of a world order that will destroy the very spirit of man--indeed, they themselves have had their own spirits torn from them before they were even able to properly spell their own names. They were baked into a uniform human type, with uniform lifeless terminology, so that they communicate with each other like ants. No extraneous information is transmitted, just the base material of communication alone.

Look at what they're offering: a dead, flat world, lacking in vitality, energy, fidelity, passion, righteousness. They have no parallel concepts to explain these dimensions of the human soul, either. These things are all nonsensical sounds to them. They simply don't have the language required to be able to explain dimensions of the human experience that have been forever closed off to them by their upbringing and belief system, but the result is making them miserable and isolated, forced to live as something less than human. 

Carl Benjamin

Benjamin is here noticing the absence of the vertical dimension of reality within modernity (hence the idea of a "dead, flat world"). In other words, there are no longer qualitative distinctions between the high and the low. There has instead been a levelling or a flattening of existence. This stands in stark contrast to the longer pre-modern Western tradition which was an aspirational one, in which the human soul was directed to the higher and more noble aspects of human existence. St Paul gave voice to this tradition in the following passage:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things and the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8)

Benjamin goes on to make the following interesting observation:

This is why everything about their worldview is designed to be therapeutic, rather than curative or restorative. The world in which they exist is bad and they go to therapists to brainwash themselves into accepting the negative normal because it is literally beyond them to conceive that there might be an alternative to the personal torment they inhabit. This is why they're all on antidepressants and go to therapists in the first place. The very nature of "therapy" is to trap you in this paradigm.

Leaving aside the issue of whether therapy does or does not help people, it is interesting how therapy has become the "go to" for so many people. There is some legitimacy to the claim that we live in a therapeutic culture, and that this is connected to a worldview in which the higher aspects of reality, and of personhood, are placed out of view and out of reach. 

He continues:

It's also why they're so desperate to protect their "rights". They don't have any frame of reference for any alternative; what else is there in life, if not my personal rights? It's inconceivable that people might have been happy, purposeful, contented, successful without them. They can't even fathom it. No, the past was evil, my right to X or Y has determined this must be so because those people had an absence of this right. 

But they had something you don't even know exists. They had nonmaterial possessions which the average lib can't even recognise as having an existence, let alone having value.

However, the lib does know they've lost something. As soon as they come across a metaphysical culture, they venerate it as if they were zookeepers who have been given a particularly rare species of animal. Oh we must not interrupt their sacred rites because there is something they possess which we, the Westerners, don't!

They don't understand that, actually, we did indeed possess our own sacred rites. They died when we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals, and not part of the civilisation that birthed us. When we had something metaphysical to carry forth with us through the ages, we were just like them, only the liberal feels disgust at this concept, bringing them back down to time and place, and in their arrogance believes they've transcended their own particularities, when instead they have slipped beneath them into the morass of common filth that such metaphysics raised us out of in the first place.

Benjamin addresses two issues here. First, he identifies the problem of autonomy being the first principle of Western society ("we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals"), therefore placing ourselves outside of "the civilisation that birthed us".

Second, he raises the issue of the veneration of aboriginal peoples. I have heard different theories for this veneration. Benjamin's explanation is possible, albeit somewhat complex. It involves Western liberals on the one hand not wanting a metaphysical culture for themselves, because they are proud to have "transcended their own particularities" but on the other hand sensing that the aboriginal peoples have a connection to the sacred that they themselves do not - and, as such, being bearers of something significant. As a possible example of this mindset, here is the left-liberal Australian academic, Robert Manne, defending the traditional Aboriginal way of life as being,

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

Another theory (that some of my colleagues at the Melbourne Traditionalists prefer) is that it comes back to Rousseau's notion that man is corrupted by civilisation, i.e., it is a form of primitivism, in which organised, civilisational building religion is thought to be corrupting, but primitive forms of religion, at the very least, get a pass. As one colleague noted:

Witness the bizarre fascination that some feminists have for astrology, witchcraft, and other "spiritualities" that allegedly pre-date the invention of writing, patriarchy etc.

Benjamin finishes by prophesying that,

The lib is thereby doomed to be a singular "global citizen", unloved and unplaced, forever belonging to nowhere and appreciated by no-one, until they eventually expire like Rousseau's savage, "without anyone noticing that they have ceased to exist, and almost without noticing it themselves."

One final consideration. Benjamin has in the past described himself as a classical liberal. He seems to have gone beyond the usual limits of right-wing liberalism in what he has written (and now describes himself as a postmodern traditionalist). Right liberals generally have a low view of human nature, seeing people as being motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, and their world view is often focused on the pursuit of economic self-interest on both the individual and national level, rather than on higher, spiritual values.

I can only hope that the descent of Western culture is encouraging men like Benjamin to look outside the current right and left liberal political paradigm, and to consider the source of error as being more foundational, i.e., as being connected to faults in the underlying metaphysics of modernity.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 3

I'm still only a little way into Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Already, though, some of the strengths, and a possible weakness, of the book have emerged, which I think are worth covering.

The strengths are easier to describe, so I'll start there. Hazony identifies conservatism with a Burkean political philosophy. He presents a case, persuasively in my view, that this Burkean conservatism not only has a long pedigree, but also was influential for a long time in Anglo cultures. Conservatism, therefore, has not always been the philosophy that always loses.

Some of the key figures in this tradition are new to me. Sir John Fortescue, born in the fourteenth century, is described by Hazony as the "first truly outstanding expositor" of Anglo conservatism. Richard Hooker, who I was already familiar with, is mentioned as the next great figure, followed by "the greatest conservative", John Selden, who lived in the early seventeenth century and who was described by John Milton as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land". Only then does Hazony get to Edmund Burke, the famous critic of the French Revolution in the later 1700s.

Sir John Fortescue

Hazony delineates the difference between these conservative men and their opponents as a difference between those who are empirically minded, i.e., who take seriously what has been learned through long experience, and those who are rationalists, i.e., who think that society can be remade from scratch through abstract reason. 

Richard Hooker

There is much to be said for making this distinction. For instance, the conservatives in this tradition noted that it was difficult for those wanting to start from abstract principles to really know the longer term consequences of what they were proposing. As Hazony summarises Burke:

The more general and abstract the principle proposed, the more certain one may be that its consequences will not be confined to what has been discussed and foreseen. (p.28)

Burke has been proven right on this score over and over. For instance, it has been a constant theme of my own writing, that those who proposed to make individual autonomy the ruling principle did not understand where this principle would ultimately lead. 

The Burkean conservatives are also on strong ground when they express scepticism that the reason of one person is sufficient for rejecting an entire tradition and starting over (as the French revolutionaries did, deciding that 1792 would become Year 1). In Burke's own words,

The science of government being therefore...a matter which requires experience and even more experience than any one person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society. (p.26)

So why then am I still a little uneasy in wholeheartedly embracing this tradition? It is not because I believe that anything it represents is false - in fact, I think it has much to teach us - but that it leaves too much out. It is too limited in what it seeks to conserve, and in what it is willing to positively describe and adhere to.

I think this comes out a little in a section of the book detailing the historical empiricism of John Selden. Hazony quotes Selden as follows:

The way to find out the Truth is by others' mistakings: For if I [wish] to go to such [and such] a place, and one had gone before me on the right-hand, and he was out, [while] another had gone on the left-hand, and he was out, this would direct me to keep the middle way that peradventure would bring me to the place I desired to go. (p.17)

 Hazony follows up the quote by adding:

Selden thus turns to a form of pragmatism to explain what is meant when statesmen and jurists speak of truth.

The problem that immediately struck me on reading this is that although this might instruct you in how to get to a certain place the best way, it has little to say in where you should be going. For instance, if what you want is to secure the rule of a political elite, and to keep wages and conditions low for the workers, then a policy of divide and rule may well be, at a pragmatic level, a time-tested way of achieving this aim. It would then represent a "truth" of politics.

Yazony seems to be aware of this problem because he then states,

Selden recognised that in making these selections from the traditions of the past, we tacitly rely upon a higher criterion for selection, a natural law established by God, which prescribes "what is truly best" for mankind in the most elementary terms. 

So we now have a "higher criterion for selection" than historical empiricism, which is natural law. I have no issue with this approach, i.e. of using natural law to decide "what is truly best" and then historical empiricism to determine what works over time, but there is a further problem.

Yazony states that when we make selections we tacitly rely on natural law, and that we do so in the most elementary terms. I don't think this works out well in practice. The forces of liberal modernity are so great, that you need to declare what you are defending explicitly and in some detail.

You can see this from the work of Selden himself. Hazony describes Selden's approach to natural law in the following passage:

In his Natural and National Law, he explains that this natural law has been discovered over long generations since biblical times and has come down to us in various versions. Of these, the most reliable is that of the Talmud, which describes the seven laws of the children of Noah prohibiting murder, theft, sexual perversity, cruelty to beasts, idolatry and defaming God, and requiring courts of law to enforce justice. The experience of thousands of years has taught us that these laws frame the peace and prosperity that is the aim of all nations, and that they are the unseen root from which the diverse laws of all the nations ultimately derive. (p.17)

This is simply too elementary to have much force. Most liberals could accept most of this (except perhaps the prohibition of sexual perversity). And it still doesn't give clear guidance on what exactly is being conserved. If the ultimate aims are peace and prosperity, then does this justify the "Economic Man" approach to national policy, in which what matters ultimately is GDP growth? 

There is another problem with leaving the goods you are seeking to conserve only tacitly understood in elementary form. The critical issue for a period of time may have been the one outlined by Hazony, namely that of historical empiricists defending existing national institutions versus abstract rationalists seeking to completely remake society on the basis of universal rights. But it is not the only dividing line. 

One aspect of liberalism is its radical individualism. Many liberals do not recognise objectively existing values that a community can orient itself toward. Instead, they emphasise the idea of individuals autonomously choosing their own goods and allowing others to do the same. This then leads to a certain kind of permissive society that at the same time intrusively enforces a political moral code centred on non-interference, i.e., on non-discrimination, tolerance, openness and diversity.

There are different ways that liberals ground this approach to politics. It can be done via something similar to an historical empiricism, namely on the grounds that privatising concepts of the good is necessary to avoid conflict, as occurred at times in European history. But it also reflects certain metaphysical beliefs, such as that there are no objective values embedded in reality, with value coming instead either from acts of will or perhaps from having individual desires or pleasures satisfied. 

The point is that it is not clear that Burkean conservatism directly confronts these aspects of liberal modernity. The task for those who wish to conserve becomes more complicated. Conservatives have to make a multi-faceted assertion, namely that objective values do exist, that they can be discerned and rationally justified, that they can be held in common within a society, and that without a notion of a common good, there is considerable detriment to the good of individuals.

In making these assertions, it is necessary for conservatives to be very open in identifying the goods they wish to uphold within a community, and to go beyond broad concepts like "peace" or "prosperity" and instead to think through and describe a workable framework that takes into account different aspects of nature and reality, as well as to order the different kinds of goods (i.e., what is higher, what is lower) that are present to us.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 2

I'm reading the book Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. In the first post on this topic I focused on Hazony's dismay that conservatism was often understood to mean conserving Enlightenment liberalism and I illustrated his point with the following social media post:

Rebecca is one of those people that Hazony is frustrated with. She identifies conservatism with the liberal principle of individual autonomy, of a freedom "to be who we want and do as we wish".

Interestingly, quite a few readers challenged Rebecca's claim that Christianity was set against the American political founding. Rebecca often argues that Christianity is a source of authoritarianism and therefore does not fit in with the "constitution, freedom and liberties". Her opponents had this to say:

And this:

Which raises the interesting question of what role Christianity had in making the American political system successful or not. My own view is that America would have floundered without it, but that it is nonetheless not sufficient in itself as a basis for a successful political conservatism.

Why did America need Christianity? Well, Christianity provided something of a limit to the worst features of political liberalism. If liberalism says "what matters is that I am free to be who I want and do as I wish" then all that matters is that I do not interfere with others doing the same. The moral focus tends to be on non-interference: on openness, tolerance, non-discrimination and on on. But otherwise there is a very permissive society in which anything goes.

But Christian metaphysics introduces a different kind of principle. If God created the world, including us, then there is a good in the reality that we inhabit that we can discipline ourselves to follow. Value does not simply come from the act of choice itself; what we choose matters. There are qualitative distinctions between what is higher and lower within our character and within our actions. Christian metaphysics upholds the ancient Western characteristic of thinking of some things as having a noble quality and others as base.  

And so, even if political liberalism was permissive, the Christian culture that was embedded in American life was not. It had standards of decency, and positive ideals of human character. However, once the influence of Christianity ebbed, then the dissolving logic of political liberalism was able to unfold, to the detriment of American social life. There was no longer a clear way to define the good, or to acknowledge any form of authority outside of our own wills (expect what was defined formally by the law). 

Which raises a further question. Could the formula of Christianity plus political liberalism ever be a viable one? I don't think so. First, it is inevitable that those raised in a public culture that is liberal will chafe against the restraining influence of Christianity. If you believe that what matters is individual preference, then the standards once set by Christianity, which are accorded an authority outside of our own wills, will come to be looked on negatively as "authoritarian". In recent times this way of thinking has become more extreme with some on the left worried about a tyrannical Christian theocracy:

At the same time, if liberalism is installed as the system through which public life is organised, then it is likely to exert an influence on the Christian churches, making them increasingly liberal over time. This is a widespread issue, not just affecting American churches. In 1975 the Catholic Church made reference to the problem in a document titled Persona Humana:

What the Catholic Church recognised here is a tendency to erase qualitative distinctions in our character and acts, and therefore to collapse into secular liberal values, by appealing to the idea of everyone having equal dignity as images of God and/or that the only thing that matters is that we love one another (the "all you need is love" mantra). 

Finally, there are aspects of tradition that are not as clearly or definitively upheld in the Bible as they might be, and therefore a political conservatism or traditionalism is needed alongside Christianity to defend them. For instance, the Bible does assume that people belong to nations, i.e., that these are the expected forms of human community that derive from and that are blessed by God (see here). However, the defence of nations is not an overt focus of the New Testament, and so it is not likely that a Christian culture, by itself, would prove adequate to this particular cause - at least not in the modern era when such powerful forces are dedicated to a globalist order.

And so I don't think the combination of an Enlightenment liberalism, restrained by a Christian culture, was ever likely to hold. There needed instead to be a mutually reinforcing relationship between a certain type of conservative politics and Christianity. What that conservative politics would look like then becomes the key issue.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 1

I've begun reading Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. As I'd hoped, it is proving an excellent book for stimulating thinking on some important issues. I'm not far in enough to give an overall assessment, but there are already some points I think are worth making.

First, Hazony deplores the way that conservatism is confused with classical liberalism (he calls it Enlightenment liberalism). He wants the two clearly demarcated:

Which brings us to the second remarkable fact about contemporary conservatism: the extraordinary confusion over what distinguishes Anglo-American conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism (or "classical liberalism" or "libertarianism" or, for that matter, from the philosophy of Ayn Rand). Indeed, for decades now, many prominent "conservatives" have had little interest in political ideas other than those that can be used to justify free trade and lower taxes, and, more generally, to advance the supposition that what is always needed and helpful is a greater measure of personal liberty. And if anyone has tried to point out that these are well-known liberal views, and that they have no power to conserve anything at all, he has been met with the glib rejoinder that What we are conserving is liberalism or that Conservatism is a branch or species within liberalism, or that Liberalism is the new conservatism. (p.xvii)

I think he is right. Where I might disagree is that this has gone back further in time than he perhaps realises. But to illustrate his point, take a look at the following comment on social media:

She defines conservatism as "our freedom to be who we want and do as we wish". This is the underlying principle of liberalism. Professor John Kekes defines liberalism as follows:

the true core of liberalism, the inner citadel for whose protection all the liberal battles are waged [is] autonomy … Autonomy is what the basic political principles of liberalism are intended to foster and protect.

And what do liberals mean by the term autonomy? According to Professor Raz,  "Autonomy is an ideal of self-creation, or self-authorship"; similarly, Professor Sumner writes of the "conception of the person as self-determining and self-making".

Does it make sense to think of a "freedom to be who we want and do as we wish" as conservative? No, because, as Hazony points out, this formula "has no power to conserve anything at all". In fact, there is a dissolving logic to it. If the point is to make me as an individual as autonomous as possible, so that I can choose in any direction without negative consequence or judgement, then anything that is not open to individual choice has to be rejected as an oppressive limit on the self that the individual has to be "liberated" from or that needs to be socially "deconstructed".

And so, unsurprisingly, the woman quoted above has some very radical views on family life. She sees the unchosen biological role of women as limiting and oppressive and so looks forward to technology making the family redundant:

This is an admittedly extreme example, but it illustrates my point that people who hold to the formula of maximising a freedom to be who we want and do what we wish are likely to end up with a mindset that is dissolving of society - despite claiming to be conservatives. Rebecca is even willing to dissolve motherhood itself.

If you do not see the good in things, including things given as part of the nature of reality, and therefore wish to conserve them, but only see the good in the act of choice itself, and therefore are focused on removing any constraints on choice, regardless of the consequences, then you are a liberal and not a conservative. And a large majority of politicians in the right-wing parties are liberals and have been for many decades.

I'll finish with one last example of what Yazony is referring to when he deplores the confusion between conservatism and liberalism. Jeremy Boreing is the co-founder of the media company The Daily Wire:

Was marriage about treating women as chattel?

When I debate women on social media it is surprising how often a particular view of the past emerges. There are women who hold firmly to the belief that prior to recent times women were viewed as chattel, i.e., as property, and that marriage as an institution existed as a kind of property transfer of women from one man to another.

I have just finished a book by Judith Hurwich, an adjunct professor specialising in family history. Titled Noble Strategies: Marriage and Sexuality in the Zimmern Chronicle, it focuses on the nobility of southwest Germany in the period 1400 to 1600, though she also makes many comparisons to the family life of nobles elsewhere in Western Europe. 

Recreating the Landshut Wedding of 1475

It should be noted that it is difficult to describe marriage practices exactly as they existed in the European past, because there was variation across time, place and social class. Nonetheless, a solid picture emerges in Judith Hurwich's book about the main motivating factors surrounding marriage in this era.

To summarise, there were two main influences on family life among the nobility at this time. The first was a lay model of marriage based around duty to kin. For the nobility, the main aim was to preserve the noble lineage, both in the sense of producing heirs, but also marrying upward rather than downward. To succeed in this aim was difficult and required a strategy that involved both sexes. 

The second influence, one that apparently grew in power over time, was an ecclesiastical model of marriage, in which the ideal of lifelong, monogamous, harmonious and even affectionate relationships was emphasised. The nobility was less influenced by the Church model than was the urban patriciate, but nonetheless it made inroads into the aristocratic culture of family life.

Dowries & morning gifts

In order for a woman to marry, her family had to pay a very large sum of money, the dowry, to the groom. The amount of money depended on the wealth and status of the family. The bride also brought her trousseau, consisting of clothing, jewelry and silver plate. The groom's family, for their part, provided the bride with a morning gift, usually between one third and one half the value of the dowry. This became the property of the bride and was used by her as income during the marriage. The bride was also entitled to a pension and an estate to live on, if and when she became a widow. The amount of the pension was a return on land equivalent in value to the dowry and morning gift.

The dowry was a sizeable sum of money for noble families - a considerable drain on the family assets. Therefore, it was considered to be a "premortem" inheritance, i.e., an inheritance given to the bride whilst her parents still lived. Daughters receiving a dowry were therefore expected to renounce their right to a postmortem inheritance, though they could do so with conditions attached. For instance, daughters might still inherit the parental estate if they outlived their brothers.

What all this suggests is that financial considerations were indeed an important aspect of marriage, but not in a way that made of women themselves "chattel". 

Noble strategies 

In Germany there was a system of partible inheritance rather than primogeniture. It was considered unfair for the oldest son alone to inherit, and therefore estates would be divided among all the sons. This meant, however, that families needed just the right amount of sons. Not enough and the lineage might die out. Too many and the family estate would lose too much land.

And so there was a system in which many sons were not allowed to marry. The sons who were not chosen to marry might join the church as cathedral canons. They might as unmarried men have concubines, i.e., they might have a long term relationship with a woman of lower social status who would bear them illegitimate children. But these children had no claim on the family estate.

Similarly, a certain number of daughters could not marry. A family had to think strategically. They could give all the daughters a smaller dowry, which meant that they would marry downwards into a lower social caste. Or the family wealth could be concentrated into one or two larger dowries, allowing some daughters to marry upward and gain prestige and powerful social connections for the family.

In general, a higher percentage of daughters than sons were able to marry. What I believe this demonstrates is that marriage was not so much organised around "women as chattel" but around maintaining the lineage and noble prestige of the family. Both sexes were expected to play their role in achieving this aim.

Harmony & affection

Among the nobility marriages were arranged, often through an intermediary, who might be an older relative (of either sex) or a powerful connection. Older bachelors with no living parents might sometimes take on the role of arranging a marriage themselves.

The fact that marriages were arranged does not mean that they were always without affection or even that the parties concerned did not have some influence in the process. The  Christian ideal of marriage as a loving, personal, faithful spousal union gained increasing acceptance in society, albeit more gradually in the noble class:

Medieval German marriage sermons had long emphasized that the goal of marriage was "loyalty, peace and harmony," which could be achieved only through the efforts of both spouses. For example, a sermon of 1449 describes emotional harmony (concordia animorum) as a major goal of marrige and gives a list of commandments on how to achieve love in marriage. (p.149)

Some noble marriages most certainly achieved a genuine marital love:

The Danish princess Dorothea wrote in 1535 to her husband Duke Albrecht of Brandenburg, "I cannot conceal from you how every night, and especially when I have just received your letters, all I dream is that I am lying with my husband, dearest to my heart, and share all joy and pastime with you." The funeral sermon preached for Dorothea in 1547 said, "There was such mutual love between the spouses that one can truly use the old saying, "Though their bodies are two, their hearts are one". (p.151)

There were also unhappy marriages. One historian has estimated that about 10 percent of noble marriages broke down. Interestingly, 69 percent of legal applications made for judicial separation in the ecclesiastical court at Constance were initiated by women (p.166), a number that has changed little from today.

Noblemen of that era had the option of taking a concubine. They could install a woman from a lower social class in a house outside the castle and visit her and his illegitimate children. It was considered socially acceptable among the nobility as long as protocol was not violated: it was improper for the concubine to be treated better than the wife. Interestingly, it was thought a deep violation of the social code if the concubine exercised the type of sway over the nobleman that was thought to be the proper preserve of his wife. Over time, and under the influence of Christian morality, laws were passed against concubinage, but the nobility were powerful enough to resist these measures.

What caused marriages to break down? Interestingly, there are historians who believe that the shift toward companionate ideals of marriage might have played some role:

Stone regards the increase in marital breakdown in the course of the sixteenth century as the product of middle-class and Puritan values - rising expectations of affection and companionship in marriage, coupled with increasing public disapproval of the mistresses and illegitimate children who had previously provided a relief, at least for men, in arranged marriages.

Finally, there is the issue of choice of marriage partners. The extent to which young people had a say in marriage partner seems to have varied. Judith Hurwich cites examples where young nobles had no choice at all, but were expected to follow the wishes of the family. However, increasingly young people were able to exercise at least some choice. By the late 1400s, the children of the urban elite were actively participating in their own marriage negotiations. According to Judith Hurwich, they wanted the potential for affection to exist and could veto parental choices when this was absent (pp. 105-106).

Judith Hurwich summarises recent research on the customs of the English aristocracy as follows:

even before 1550, there was some room for personal affection and free choice of partners, and daughters as well as sons had the power to veto partners they disliked. Many sixteenth-century English peers in their testaments cautioned executors against forcing their daughters into marriages to which the women objected. (pp. 106-107).

Conclusion 

You could not read Judith Hurwich's history and come away thinking that noble marriage was organised around the concept of women as chattel. Rather, both sexes shared the aim of maintaining a noble lineage, and it is clear that marital practices were organised to a considerable degree to achieve this outcome. Nor was the ideal of concord and affection in marriage absent. Much of Judith Hurwich's history is focused on how these two distinct aims were managed and reconciled.

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.