Mamdani, Weaver & the warm collective

The newly elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, said in his inaugural speech that he wanted to replace "the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism".

Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration

Bishop Robert Barron responded negatively, with the comment:

Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people in the last century. Socialist and Communist forms of government around the world today - Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea etc - are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy , which people like Mayor Mamdani caricatures as "rugged individualism."

Fr Dave McNaughton disagreed, replying:

Bishop Barron is gaslighting...Reading the full text suggests that Mamdani was advocating for a very Catholic idea, the practice of solidarity. Shame on Bishop Barron.

So, do we follow the priest or the bishop on this issue? Even though I'm not as straightforwardly in favour of the market economy as Bishop Barron (as the market needs to be regulated carefully or else it too can be dissolving of society), nonetheless I was more disappointed with Fr McNaughton's position. 

It is a rookie error to think that the meaning of words used by progressive moderns is the same as how those words were once understood in pre-modern times or in church theology. Moderns did not abandon traditional concepts like freedom, equality or justice, but instead colonised them so that they could be used within a modernist framework. It is therefore a mistake to assume that when figures like Mamdani use words like "collective" that this is an endorsement of traditional notions of solidarity. 

Even though I am a long-time critic of the hyper-individualism of our culture, I understand why many people blanch when hearing the word "collective". It has become associated with ideological, centralised, statist, redistributist, technocratic, impersonal, distant and authoritarian forms of social organisation. This is not a type of solidarity that most people find appealing.

Some of these features come out in the politics of Cea Weaver, a young woman whom Mamdani has appointed to oversee rent control in New York. She wants to impoverish the white middle class; block the employment of white men; and discourage the procreation of white boys:

So the concept of solidarity as espoused by Cea Weaver does not extend to whites in general and white men in particular. Why? Because it has an ideological basis, as do most forms of modern "collectivism". She believes that the power structures that prevent humans from being truly free and equal are "whiteness" and "patriarchy" and therefore she sees things through a lens of white, male systemic privilege which makes her want to abolish white men rather than extend a hand of solidarity to them. 

This is surely a long way from a genuinely Catholic understanding of solidarity.

Her viewpoint is also, predictably, redistributist (wanting to make the white middle class poor) and statist. 

Ironically, the modernist view of solidarity is also, in its own way, individualistic. It seeks to "liberate" the individual from traditional forms of community, such as families, and instead provide a "socialised" care that is provided in an impersonal and detached way by a centralised, bureaucratically run welfare state. 

We have travelled a considerable distance already toward this aim. Consider that in 1932, Leon Trotsky praised the efforts of the Bolsheviks to abolish the family in these terms:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note that Trotsky describes the family as a "shut-in petty enterprise". It was too local for him, too enclosed within itself, it was too much its own little world. 

So what then of a more traditional understanding of solidarity? This was built around an organic concept of society, in which we belonged to social bodies such families and nations, drawn together through natural loves and loyalties.

I won't attempt a complete defence of this traditional understanding. I do, however, want to respond to Trotsky. Trotsky denigrated the family as a shut-in petty enterprise. At the surface level, this might seem to be true. The family embraces only a relatively small number of people. And it can become its own little world.

But it is not petty, not when it works the way that it should. It gives us the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of who we are as men and women. For men, to be masculine providers and protectors. To build and to leave a legacy. For women, to express maternal instincts and drives and to create a loving home. Families come with a sense of lineage, and so can connect us to generations past, present and future. They can provide some of our sense of identity and belonging. They can provide us with a sense of pride in familial achievements, and gratitude for the sacrifices of our forebears. 

And the jibe about being "shut in" might also be challenged. First, because family at its best can lead to a sense of belonging to a unique little community, one with its own quirks and its own unwritten understandings, its own little culture and its own characters. If done well, family can become more than an aggregate of its parts, so that it takes on a unique quality of its own, a distinct way of being human in the world, and therefore a good in itself.

Second, if we are formed well by our upbringing within a loving family, then this is a foundation for us to reach out toward larger communities. We are capable then of the kind of loves that make us value our neighbourhoods, our towns, our regions, our nations. The smaller, local forms of community form us, and preserve us, and support us in ways that make us capable of radiating outwards, even to universals like a concern for humanity. And if we are truly connected to the particular, local social bodies we belong to, we are more likely to see the transcendent goods reflected in these, and this too gives us a higher and more expansive experience of life.

One final point. It is also somewhat artificial to set the notion of a rugged individualism against that of a warmth of collectivism. In the older concept of an organic society, the idea was that each person had a role to play as a distinct member of a social body. It was therefore important that individuals were able to carry out these social roles, or else the social body itself would suffer harm. To give one example, it was important for men to have the strength of character - the masculine toughness - to do the hard things required of them. This was not done in opposition to the collective good but in support of it, not so that a man could live alone outside of a community, but so he could effectively contribute to it.