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" came 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 practices 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 vast 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 foundation 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.

Can feminism be reformed?

PragerU, a classical liberal website, has published a video on feminism. The argument made in the video is that feminism has done great harm to society but only because it has veered away from its founding, liberal principles. Therefore, a new feminism is needed which returns to these principles.

Although I find it encouraging that a right-liberal organisation is so clearly acknowledging the damage done by feminism, it's not difficult to show that the larger argument is wrong and that modern day feminism is a logical development of those foundational liberal principles. Returning to them is just starting over and repeating the process. What's needed instead is a rethink of those early liberal principles.

Here is the video itself:

Tammy Bruce, herself once a leading feminist activist, sets out the first principles when she says:

Dignity is at the core of what feminism should always be about. Dignity means that a woman should always be able to freely choose her own path in life.

Liberalism was an attempt to create a post-Christian philosophy for the West. It argued that human dignity rested on man's ability to live according to self-determining choice, i.e. on his autonomy. Feminism applied the same principle to the lives of women.

Tammy Bruce believes that modern feminism has betrayed this principle. Her complaint is that:

Feminism has downplayed the desire for women to have a family and hyped the rewards of career and casual sex.

She goes on to complain about modern sexual mores as witnessed in music videos and the hookup culture.

However, if the aim is dignity, and dignity means always being able to choose freely what we do, then it is logical that women will reject traditional family roles of being a wife and mother and focus instead on careers. It is also logical that sexual mores will become increasingly libertine.

Let's start with sexuality. I wrote a post some months ago on the popular singer Cardi B. She made a music video showing a dozen or so women twerking - the kind of thing Tammy Bruce is complaining about. One woman on social media did criticise Cardi B for doing this. Cardi B defended her video on the grounds that,

It says to women that I can wear and not wear whatever I want. Do whatever I want and that NO still means NO.

She is defending her twerking video based on the very liberal principle that Tammy Bruce wants to base a "reformed" feminism on, namely that it displays women choosing for themselves as an act of empowerment.

A legion of other women chimed in as well to defend the video for much the same reason. A selection:

Leah: It's because we're free to do what we want with our bodies.

Fatimata: It shows that women can do whatever they want with their bodies...Encouraging women to be themselves and act as they please...

The Hoarse Whisperer: You seem troubled by women having autonomy over what they choose to do with their bodies...

Ahkweah: It shows that as women we can do whatever we want.

The mistake is to see dignity not as a quality in itself to be upheld as a matter of character but as something we gain as through the act of choosing or through self-defining our own good.

This is a debate that goes back quite some way within Western culture. I wrote another post earlier this year about a pamphlet published in 1620 on the topic of transvestism. In the pamphlet there is a woman who chooses to dress like a man and she initially defends this choice on the basis that it represents a genuine freedom. In her mind we are not free if we are subject to any "restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire".

Yes, it's old-fashioned language but it's the same argument being put forward by the followers of Cardi B.

Her opponent in the debate rejects the notion that freedom is a liberty to choose as we please, as this encourages "unbridled appetite" and a "wilfull liberty to do evil":

...what basest bondage, or what more servile baseness, than for the flattering and soothing of an un-bridled appetite, or delight, to take a wilfull liberty to do evil, and to give evil example? This is to be Hells Prentice, not Heaven’s Free-woman.

There was a pre-liberal understanding in the West that we achieved dignity not by asserting our power to choose as we pleased, but by rejecting the baser aspects of our nature in favour of the nobler ones. The debate ends with the male character declaring:

From henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell...we will live nobly like ourselves...ever worthy: true men and true women.

Let me reiterate the basic point I am making here. If what matters is dignity, and dignity is based on a freedom to choose as we will, then you are going to end up in the long run with Cardi B, because that is what the "I will not be restrained or limited in what I choose to do" looks like. If you prefer a culture that has some level of modesty attached to it, then you need something besides the liberal definition of dignity to support it.

And what about women being wives and mothers? At one level, this sounds like it fits the liberal principle logically. If it's about dignity to choose, then why shouldn't some women choose to prioritise family over career?

But there's a catch. If what matters is my own autonomous choice, then I should, as a matter of principle, choose to do things that maximise this choice. And being a wife and mother fails this test. First, it is based on a predetermined gender role, i.e. on an aspect of self that is not self-determined. Second, it is not uniquely chosen but is based on a biological aspect of human nature that is shared by all women. Third, it is based on a notion of interdependent, complementary roles within the family, rather than on independent and individual self-achievement. Fourth, because stable, lifelong commitments place restrictions on who we might choose to live with.

For all these reasons, feminist theorists have often looked down on women choosing to prioritise family. Many have gone so far as to denounce the family as a patriarchal construct that oppresses women. And those who have accepted the family often want to reconstruct it so that it allows for female autonomy, for instance, by delaying family formation; or by having gender neutral roles within the family; or by outsourcing the traditional maternal role to the state; or by having easy divorce laws that favour women.

So you cannot uphold the family on the principle that human dignity rests upon a freedom of autonomous choice. Instead, you have to reassert the idea that we bring our own natures as men and women to fulfilment, in part, through participating in the offices of being a husband/father or a wife/mother, or that we express the principle of sacrificial love through what we give of ourselves to our families as husbands/fathers and wives/ mothers, or that we uphold the common good for ourselves and our progeny through the transmission of our own distinct culture, tradition and lineage through our willingness to uphold a culture of family life.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that some of the failings of modern feminism that Tammy Bruce criticises were in evidence from the very start of first wave feminism. It was not unusual for the leading figures of first wave feminism to believe that free love should replace marriage, or that the distinctions between men and women should be dissolved, or that women should prioritise independence via career rather than marriage and motherhood. First wave feminists were also criticised for hating men whilst nonetheless copying them, just as modern feminists are.

I can't give a complete account of this in a single post, but one general point I'll make is that once intellectuals accepted the liberal principle that they should not be subject to the will of another, only their own, they rapidly drew the conclusion that there should be a levelling of society, in which distinctions between people were abolished, so that there was something like an equality of sameness. It was thought to be "bigotry" for distinctions to matter.

Here, for instance, is a founding theorist of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, wanting women to become more man-like:

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society ... For this distinction ... accounts for their [women] preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

Wollstonecraft was a believer in free love, travelled to Paris during the French Revolution in the 1790s and had a love child there with an American businessman (though when he abandoned her she tried to drown herself in a river).

Wollstonecraft later had another child, Mary, with William Godwin - himself a believer in free love. This child ran away at age 16 to live with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley too wanted to abolish sex distinctions in society. He wrote in 1811:

...these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

Shelley was also a free love enthusiast who abandoned his first wife Harriet when she was pregnant with their second child. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine River. Shelley's reasons for opposing marriage are exactly the liberal ones you would expect:

That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

If we jump forward to 1837 we have the early American feminist Sarah Grimke also complaining about the existence of sex distinctions:

We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes...the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female...Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society...

John Stuart Mill was an influential first-wave feminist. In 1833 he theorised that higher character was androgynous rather than distinctly masculine and feminine:

...is there really any distinction between the highest masculine and the highest feminine character?

In the 1860s, Eliza Linton addressed the feminists of her era as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate" and as the "bad copies of men who have thrown off all womanly charm".

In 1889 a student of Girton College, a feminist college at Cambridge established in 1869, summed up the spirit of her education as follows:

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family ... One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

Here you have the idea that what matters is developing as an independent individual rather than as an interdependent member of a family. Note the negative terminology applied to family roles: "mere parts - excrescences".

By the early twentieth century the radical wing of first wave feminism was just as extreme as that of today. Alexandra Kollontai, for instance, grew up understanding feminism to mean:

That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model ... I could help my sisters shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice ... I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

Therefore, as you might predict, she disliked the idea of sex distinctions, wanting them to be levelled away. She gave public lectures in which she prophesied that even the physical differences between men and women would, as a matter of progress, dissolve. A record of one lecture recounts how she,

...longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible...

She even thought that love itself should be subordinated to the objective of individual autonomy:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life...

We are stuck in a loop. We adopt an inadequate principle for our society, it does damage, we retreat a little but still keep to the principle and then we suffer another wave of harm. At some point in time we need to reconsider the underlying principle itself, the one that keeps setting us down the wrong path.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.