The Bourne identity - Randolph Bourne & a transnational America

I'm currently reading Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen. In this work Deneen puts forward a different way of thinking about political distinctions:

a) the goal of classical liberals, progressive liberals and Marxists has been transformative progress

b) the two liberal groups saw the few, rather than the many, as the agents of this transformation 

c) for classical liberals the concern was defending property rights against the potentially revolutionary many; for progressive liberals the concern was defending an elite class of innovators against the conservatism of the working class

What jumped out at me when reading this was how well Deneen's description of progressive liberalism fits the writings of Randolph Bourne - as well as many left-wing politicians of our own times.  

Progress

When we use the word "progress" we usually mean something positive, such as an improvement in conditions. Its use can therefore sometimes pass by without scrutiny. 

Deneen's book has helped clarify for me the radical way that liberals understand the term, particularly their commitment to a politics of discontinuity.

Deneen argues that in the premodern tradition liberty was thought to involve the cultivation of virtue, so that we were able to govern ourselves, rather than being slaves to our own appetites and desires. The institutions of society helped to raise "guardrails" for those less able to achieve this condition. Modernity changed the concept of liberty to mean freedom from inherited limitations:

The realization of a new liberty required the dismantling of older institutions that had cultivated the classical ideal of liberty.

What had previously been considered as "guardrails" cam instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practises of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a bast and widening playground for the project of self-creation. (p.5)

This sets the backdrop to the politics of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century:

In his classic text, On Liberty, Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favour of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill's parlance, custom was a "despot" over the lives of those who wished to instead engage in "experiments in living". (p.6)

Deneen points out that many people do not benefit from this attack on formative institutions that,

protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people that are not well served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder. (p.6)

The point to be made here is that liberals, both left and right, see transformative change as representing long term progress, even if there are short term costs. The idea is not to improve what exists, but to churn over what is inherited from the past, no matter how fine it is, because the assumption is that this clears a path for the new order that will eventually bring its benefits. In this view, you deliberately move on from what exists, as what exists has no relevance to the present or the future, apart from the record of it you might keep, as in a museum, as it serves only to "cage" the shift to the future new order. Deneen uses the term "creative destruction" to describe what moderns want to achieve.

Therefore, when heritage suburbs are bulldozed to make way for high-rise apartments, someone with this modernist view of progress will more likely see this as a feature of modernity rather than a bug. The same when a suburb that was 50 years ago part of an Anglo-Celtic culture becomes Southern European, then Vietnamese and then Sudanese. The churn seems both pointless and destabilising to a more conservative mind, but it will be thought of as representing a progressive motion of society by a modern. The disruption to a settled way of life is thought of either as a good, as being "vibrant" rather than "stale", or else as something to be regretted only as a temporary loss on the way to something better.

Just to underline this point, consider the views of Herbert Marcuse, an influential philosopher of the 1960s who often cited the works of John Stuart Mill. He wrote of the student radicals of his time that,

In proclaiming the “permanent challenge”...they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture...they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation.

What he is saying is that even the most sublime aspects of tradition are oppressive and therefore individuals must be liberated from them. This concept of progress really means abandoning tradition and starting from Year 0 over and over again. And so there will be instability and discontinuity and, as a result, a difficulty for individuals to achieve a level of connectedness that is a core aspect of our flourishing.

None of this means that we should cede the aim of progress to liberal moderns. If you love the tradition you belong to, if you identify with it and belong to it, then as a matter of pride you will want to contribute to it, so that you leave it in the best condition possible for those who inherit it. 

This is why the men of Ancient Athens took the Ephebic Oath, in which they vowed that,

My native land I will not leave a diminished heritage but greater and better than when I received it.

In our own times, we must in particular think of progress in qualitative terms, in contrast to the quantitative progress (e.g. in GDP) that moderns often default to.

The nation

Mill himself did not entirely reject the idea of nations. He was a cosmopolitan at heart but believed, pragmatically, that political liberty was less likely to exist when there was a mixing together of different and incompatible nationalities.

However, there is a logic to his position on progress that would ultimately lead to something else. If you think that there is a liberal elite, the "few", who represent the progressive element of a society, in opposition to a backward and conservative "many", then nationality is undermined, because it is the "many" who form this national culture.

The national culture of the many will come to be seen by liberal moderns as parochial, stagnant, provincial, bland, conformist and uncreative. In contrast, the arrival of immigrant cultures, which disrupt and "churn" this national culture, will be thought of positively as adding vibrancy and diversity and colour and movement. 

Deneen begins his explanation of progressive liberalism by comparing it with the earlier classical liberalism. Both shared the same commitment to transformative progress, but the earlier liberals had, as their anthropology, a self-interested individualism. Progressive liberals sought an ever "widening solidarity":

Progressives - as their name suggests - believed that a truer and better liberalism could be advanced...Rather than locating the primary human motivation in self-interest and greed, progressives believed that a social spirit could introduce a national and ultimately global solidarity...In the United States, figures such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Frederick Jackson Turner believed that the early liberalism of the Founding Fathers had reached its limit, bequeathing upon the nation a widening web of interaction and relationality that now required moving beyond the selfish individualism of Lockean liberalism. They called for a national spirt and widening solidarity to replace the parochial identities that limited people's capacity to understand themselves as part of something larger...

The greatest obstacle to this advance was...the parochialism of ordinary people...they suspected that "the many" were a conservative damper who were likely to oppose the transformative ambitions of progress as moral transformation...they saw "the many" as traditionalists who constituted an obstacle to the realization of progress. (pp.77-78)

Fast forward to 1916. A young American intellectual named Randolph Bourne publishes an essay titled "Trans-National America". It represents the emergence of the modern progressive liberal mind. Bourne is part of the intellectual lineage described by Deneen. He was as a young man an admirer of Dewey. The link to Mill is suggested in the following description of his work:

Though he wrote on politics, young people, literature and other subjects, he came back time and again to a demand for personal liberty. What mattered to Bourne, as Christopher Lasch wrote in “The New Radicalism in America,” was that everyone “resist the impulses to acquiesce.”...Often Bourne sounds like the John Stuart Mill of “On Liberty,” who worried over the destruction of individual initiative and spontaneity.

What Bourne attacks in his essay is the idea that migrants should be assimilated into a dominant Anglo-American national culture. He does so, in part, by claiming that there is no such core Anglo national tradition:

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant...

With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture.

We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born

(I would point out here, as evidence of how enduring Bourne's way of thinking is, that just this year the premier of my state here in Australia, Jacinta Allan, declared that "Australia is nation of foreigners".)

Bourne looked down on Anglo-American culture because he thought it was too traditional - too much connected to its ancestral roots. He saw immigrant culture positively because through these cultures the American could be drawn out of his provincialism and into a cosmopolitan outlook.

And Bourne's hope was that America would become a kind of federation of nations, a "trans-nation" that might grow into a cosmopolitanism.

Randolph Bourne

The language Bourne uses in his essay matters, because it points clearly to the larger Millian framework. In the following quotes you will find him rejecting the existing American tradition because it is stagnant or provincial and praising the immigrant cultures because they are creative and transformative and help point to global solidarities.

For instance, in the following excerpt Bourne complains of the Anglo-Americans that,

They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country. So that, in spite of the ‘Revolution,’ our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging...

It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples—the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun—to save us from our own stagnation.

The assumption here is that what is needed is transformative progress in the sense that this was understood by men like Mill and Dewey. 

Similarly, Bourne adds,

The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency.

What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. 

Remember, Mill set a framework in which the continuity of established patterns of life within a community was a threat both to human liberty and to progress. And part of the movement of this progress was to be away from local identity and attachment toward more universal solidarities. And so you can understand why a settled, local way of life was associated negatively in Bourne's mind with a stale uniformity.

Perhaps the most telling excerpt is the following one:

Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind...

How do we respond?

Modern progressives have kept much of Bourne's politics. What I hope to have shown is that these ideas will not easily be countered unless their foundations in Mill's thought is challenged. We need to persuade people that there is a better way of defining both liberty and progress.

I think too that we need to defend the local. When I was younger, Australia had a more "parochial" culture, in the sense that you would identify not just as an Australian, but as a member of a state within Australia, and a city within that state, and a region with that city, and a suburb within that region. It might sound complicated, but it is the natural way of forming identities which "radiate outwards". The local identities do not prevent the larger ones from forming. 

Nor did the local identities make life more stale or colourless. On the contrary, they vivified life, through the sense of connectedness to particular places and people. The sense of community was stronger, the sense of a particular way of life was stronger, and the social commitments were also greater.

One interesting quality about these local identities is that they also vivified the places that you did not belong to. These appeared more exotic to the imagination, like worlds apart, which made them more exciting to visit and to experience. This was true, back then, even of parts of Australia itself.

Bourne wants us to believe that you can reject local attachments whilst also having a "widening solidarity" with all the people of the world. Personally, I would be more impressed if he had achieved the natural affinities that he should have had. Bourne did not get along well with his sister merely because she had conventional interests. He wrote of his home town and family that:

I am constantly confounded there by the immeasurable gulf between my outlook and theirs and I feel a constant criticism of my futile high-browism and Godless pursuit of strange philosophers. My young sister is almost a passionate vulgarian and takes with really virtuous indignation any deviation from the norm of popular music, the movies, Chamber's novels, Billy Sunday, musical comedy, tennis, anti-suffragism, and the rest of the combination that makes up the healthy, hearty, happy young normal person of the well-brought up family of the day of the middle-middle-class. I find her an index to current America, but we scarcely get along.

Many progressive liberals of today will most likely be unaware of their own intellectual lineage. It will have been received by them unexamined. But these ideas have something of a life of their own. They have skipped down through the generations because there has not been much to stop them. The challenge will be to influence younger generations with an entirely different framework.