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.