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.