Self-awareness: an Achilles heel of liberalism?

The sociologist Robert Nisbet, writing in 1953, blamed much of the decline in the 1900s on the liberalism inherited from the 1800s. He characterised this liberalism as a belief that "natural" man, once shorn of conventional morality, had the "innate resources" as an atomised individual to pursue truth, happiness and justice.

Nisbet noted that this is in contrast to the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who famously wrote in criticising revolutionary France that:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

I agree with Burke but would like to sketch, rather tentatively, an argument that this Burkean position can be taken much further.  It is not just the private stock of reason that is too small in each man, but even more significantly the stock of self-awareness. Liberalism, in other words, assumes that each individual has sufficient self-awareness to successfully pursue an autonomous life course. I think this assumption needs to be, at the very least, questioned.

What is self-awareness? I consider it to be that quality of mind that allows us to step outside of and observe our own fleeting thoughts, feelings and impulses. 

Self-awareness is a significant attribute to possess because it allows us to have a stable sense of self. Imagine if all you are conscious of are your immediate feelings and thoughts. You could still respond to these, but they would continually change and you would not have a strong sense of an overriding stable centre of who you are.

Are there people who lack a sense of self? Yes. As strange as it may seem, I have known people who were curious that I had a sense of self, given that they lacked one. They wanted to know what it was like.

Self-awareness also seems to be part of what allows us to be aware of others as distinct entities with distinct perspectives. After all, if I myself lack a self-directing oversight of my own mental processes, then it will be difficult to see others as having this quality of personality. It is possible that I will become solipsistic in the sense of seeing the other person only in reference to the state of my own mind. 

Ashley Solomon is an American woman whose first marriage failed and in attempting to think through how to make her second marriage a success she identified solipsism as a problem she had to overcome:

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

What I suspect is that self-awareness is not given to everyone equally. There is an ascending order that perhaps goes something like this:

a. The lowest level are those who have no sense of self. Such people struggle to direct their thoughts and impulses and so can be either impulsive or subject to thinking errors. They will tend to have unstable relationships of all kinds.

b. The next level up are those who do have a sense of self but tend, to some degree, toward solipsism. They struggle to connect to an external reality outside of their own mind. They therefore lack an orientation toward objective truth, using language more to manipulate toward self-chosen ends. They tend to "externalise" in the sense of having an external locus of control - they will not think of themselves as being able to successfully self-direct, nor to be accountable for what happens to themselves or to the communities they belong to. One expression of this inability to self-direct will be a reliance on, say, therapists for external guidance, even when not in a crisis. 

c. At a higher level of self-awareness are those capable of rationally self-disciplining the processes of their own minds - their impulses, drives, thoughts, appetites and feelings. Here there is an internal locus of control, and some ability to direct the self toward higher ends. There is a beginning of self-knowledge at this level.

d. The highest level is a metaphysical awareness of the place of the self within a cosmic order. It requires a sincere effort to understand the truth of the reality we inhabit, & is helped by a careful reading of a wisdom literature inherited from past generations. 

Where do most people sit in this hierarchy? I am going to bring down fire upon myself for saying this, but a significant number of women seem to sit at Level B, whilst many men are attempting to make progress at Level C. However, this is very much a generalisation. There do exist women at Level C, but they fall into two groups. There are those who adopt a kind of masculine life path requiring self-mastery and self-discipline. This can have the negative consequence of a loss of feminine identity, which then undermines the self rather than raising it. There are other women, however, who seem able to hold the two things together: an orientation toward their own feminine self that includes prudential self-direction.

I would suggest as well that more is expected of men when it comes to self-awareness, as men are more specifically tasked with representing logos within human life (by logos I mean something like the principle of divine order that can be discerned within given reality). Men too are more expected to act for the larger good, i.e., to find a point at which things can be harmonised within a common good, which itself requires a higher level of accountability and self-awareness. It is also difficult to see any civilisation prospering without a certain number of men operating, at least partially, at Level D. 

So, to bring this back to my starting point, the issue then is whether those "optimistic" nineteenth century liberals were correct that natural man has the innate resources to successfully and rationally pursue truth, justice and happiness at a purely individual level.

I don't think so, in part, because the level of self-awareness is unevenly distributed and without it there is a difficulty in operating as a self-directing, autonomous agent. Furthermore there is an entropy written into reality that tends to draw things apart rather than organising them into integrated wholes. So even the best individuals will struggle at times to maintain an integrity of self.

What this means is that the natural man with his innate resources will most usually not be adequate to the task. Not only will he need grace, but some level of external discipline, guidance and exhortation, provided for instance through social norms, i.e., the "conventions" so looked down on by the nineteenth century liberals, as well as by the influence of culture, custom and education.

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.

Locke & the family

Dr Allan Carlson believes that the English philosopher John Locke set the template for the modern family back in the late 1600s. According to Carlson, Locke thought that the traditional role of fathers in the family was unnatural. All men wanted to do, by nature, was to survive as individuals and beget children (and then leave). Therefore, men were given power and authority over women and children as a way of luring them into family life.

And so, for Locke, the traditional paternal role was not only narrow in purpose, but politically damaging as it was used to justify the rule and authority of kings. Therefore, it had to be reformed:

"Since his overall project demanded an end to Patriarchy at the political level, so as to undermine the claims of kings, Locke deemed it necessary to bring an end to Patriarchy within the family as well. His alternative was the “liberal” marriage – of limited purpose and authority – where men might find compensatory satisfactions in friendships with a wife and children. Locke understood that, while it ran against his premise of gender equality, he still needed to cast the father as the presumed head of the family, which in industrial society evolved into the “breadwinner” role."

Being the "presumed head of the family" did not mean as much as it once did. As Dr Carlson points out, the paternal role was increasingly dominated by the demands of paid work. Even so, liberals eventually came to believe that even this "soft patriarchy" conflicted too much with liberal beliefs about gender equality. And so Locke's voluntary marital contract, in which women are tied to family by their natural connection to children, and men by their "artificial" role as head of the family, breaks down:

However, some in the liberal order eventually saw that as too great a price. To gain the promised equality, they said, women must instead overcome their maternal instincts and break their affective ties to children and to nature itself. At that point, the contract breaks down. As women renounce their innate purpose, men lose their artificially created one, and the liberal marriage system dissolves.

This overtly feminist step did not take place until the second half of the nineteenth century, but it had its origins in Locke:

While John Stuart Mill, writing in the mid-19th century, was among the first to describe this feminist imperative, its roots lay in Locke. Indeed, he readily acknowledged the validity, in certain societies, of the single-parent family, where “the children are left to the mother, follow her, and are wholly under her care and provision”.

So also with polygamy: systems of one man with multiple wives or one woman with multiple husbands. These too, Locke said, could serve as household forms adequate to the tasks of rearing children as “free and rational creatures”. Such matters were subject solely to cultural acceptance, what Locke called “fashion”. 

It would be interesting to follow this observation further. If Locke's end goal really was simply to raise children as "free and rational" creatures, then you could do this in a variety of settings, including state institutions. The traditional family is then put on shaky ground. An alternative approach would be to think of the offices of husband/father and wife/mother as being part of the social context within which we best fulfil our given purposes as men and women. It would also see the traditional family as an aspect of society itself, as its own little commonwealth, with a distinct culture, and with a set of economic, educational, religious and leisure functions that are foundational to the larger society.

Carlson does discuss the problem of the family losing its larger functions in society. According to Carlson, this was something deliberately aimed at by Locke:

Locke’s “Conjugal Society” rested on a “voluntary compact between men and women” that was limited to the “things of their common interest and [common] property”. Under Patriarchy, the economic lives of men and women had been merged, wholly and completely. As expressions of pre-industrial life, such households were also characterised by a great array of productive activities. The sexual and the economic merged fully here.

Locke aimed at families stripped of most functions, economic or otherwise. Property could be held separately, by husband and wife. Since the purposes of marriage were only procreation and the socialisation of small children as rational creatures, and since marriage was always provisional, a strong home economy was neither necessary nor desirable.

I've been thinking about exactly this issue lately. Modern society is rendering men and women increasingly less necessary to each other - at least in terms of social function. Not only is there gender role convergence, in which men and women end up doing much the same thing in society, but so many aspects of life are being outsourced, that it's much more possible for people to survive without the support of family.

To the extent that we can, we need to "un-Locke" the family. The family will not rest well on the basis provided for it by Locke and his successors (which is increasingly limited to a provisional friendship between "partners" of any sex). It needs to widen once again its functions within society and the paternal role needs to be grounded on fundamental aspects of masculine nature, identity, social roles and telos/purposes.

Nisbet: the problem of community

I have now finished reading the first part of Robert Nisbet's 1953 work The Quest for Community. If you recall, I found the opening sections of this book to be a powerful criticism of nineteenth century liberal individualism (see here and here).

I also wondered why Nisbet did not have more influence within the conservative movement of his time. I think the answer is to be found in the basic argument Nisbet goes on to make in the first part of his book. In its briefest form the argument is:

1. The reason why traditional forms of community are moribund is that they no longer have a significant economic or political function. Therefore they do not hold allegiance as they once did.

2. It does not matter if these traditional forms of community (such as family) do not survive. The form does not matter, what is needed is any form of local and personal community to meet individual needs.

3. The voluntary forms of association which were supposed to replace the traditional kinship based ones have not appeared, leading to social withdrawal and alienation.

The first step in the argument undoubtedly has some truth to it, but is overstated. The second I disagree with. The third has been confirmed by the research of later sociologists, such as Robert Putnam.

Here is Nisbet setting out his main argument:

The most fundamental problem has to do with the organized associations of men. It has to do with the role of the primary social group in an economy and political order whose principled ends have come to be structured in such a way that the primary social relationships are increasingly functionless, almost irrelevant, with respect to these ends.

...For more and more individuals the primary social relationships have lost much of their historic function of mediation between man and the larger ends of our civilization...

In any society the concrete loyalties and devotions of individuals tend to become directed toward the associations and patterns of leadership that in the long run have the greatest perceptible significance in the maintenance of life...

In earlier times...there was an intimate relation between the local, kinship, and religious groups within which individuals consciously lived and the major economic, charitable and protective functions which are indispensable to human existence.

Family, church, local community drew and held the allegiances of individuals in earlier times not because of any superior impulses to love and protect, or because of any greater natural harmony of intellectual and spiritual values, or even because of any superior internal organization, but because these groups possessed a virtually indispensable relation to the economic and political order.

Our present crisis lies in the fact that whereas the small traditional association, founded upon kinship, faith or locality, are still expected to communicate to individuals the principal moral ends and psychological gratifications of society, they have manifestly become detached from positions of functional relevance to the larger economic and political decisions of our society. Family, local community, church, and the whole network of informal interpersonal relationships have ceased to play a determining role in our institutional systems of mutual aid, welfare, education, recreation, and economic production and distribution. (pp.45-47)

There are two reasons for this being an overstatement. First, some of these traditional groups do still have a significant functional role in society. It is still the case, for instance, that family plays a significant role in mutual aid, welfare and recreation. If I think of my own life, it is my parents who have been the most reliable source of support, in terms of finances, advice and practical assistance. Similarly, the family is still important when it comes to an individual's economic interests in society. It is easier to advance economically if you have the support of a spouse and if your parents invested in your education.

Second, the viability of these traditional associations does not rest entirely on their economic or political function. Why, for instance, does it make sense for individuals to pair bond early in life within marriage? The answer is not just for economic or political advantage. It is, in part, because it is prudent to bond early, when in our prime, so that we have a strong basis for a partnership that will last us into the long decades of middle and old age. And we tend to discover that sex has such a strong unitive aspect that casual relationships are jading and damaging. For some people, too, the ideal of self-sacrificing love within a faithful relationship is an elevating spiritual good in life that is pursued for this reason, rather than for social function.

Nonetheless, Nisbet has a point. Traditionalists ought to be concerned that the institutions we support do not have their economic, welfare and political functions undermined, because this does contribute to the undermining of these institutions.

Decades ago, I was struck when reading nineteenth century diaries how much closer sibling relationships were compared to today. In particular, the relationships between brothers and sisters were noticeably stronger. Why would this be so? At the time, I suspected the reason was that brothers and sisters were more dependent on each other. If her parents died young, an unmarried woman might rely financially on the support of her brothers. A man who was injured might rely on his sister to nurse him back to health.

The point is not to deconstruct public hospitals so that this functional relationship is restored. It is, instead, to be sensitive to ways in which public policy might undermine the role of the family, or the local church, or the local town hall.

This is not just an economic issue. Take, for instance, the role of fathers. There is a trend in modern societies to reduce this role to that of "walking wallet". If allowed to continue, the role won't appear to young men to fulfil, in Nisbet's terms, a "principal moral end" or "psychological gratification" in life. So the challenge is to organise society in such a way that men play a more significant role as fathers. This might mean freeing up time for adult men to spend with their sons; it might mean organising worthwhile father son activities; it might mean providing resources for fathers to inculcate important values in their children; it might mean providing a more masculine role for fathers within a local church and so on. It would also be important to preserve, wherever possible, a degree of paternal authority and status in society.

To put this another way, if the first step is to abandon the liberal ideology that dissolves, as a matter of logic, the traditional institutions, there still remains a second step of organising society in a way that upholds the significance to the individual of these institutions. This means, in particular, setting limits to the organisation of society along mass, impersonal, standardised, bureaucratic lines, and instead allowing, wherever practicable, economic and political decisions to be made first at the level of family and second at a local, communal level.

(I had a debate recently with someone who told me that my children belonged to the state rather than to the family. This is exactly the outlook that then removes economic and political significance to the family, and therefore allegiance, commitment and viability.)

Nisbet's powerful chapter

A young Robert Nisbet

I've finished the first chapter of Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community, published in 1953.

It was extraordinary to read. I had imagined that this would be a dry work of sociology, but it is powerfully written and almost impossible to extract "the good bits" because it is all so memorably expressed.

Nisbet's argument

In my last post I described the first part of Nisbet's argument, namely that in the nineteenth century there was an optimistic account of the growing "individuation" of society. It was assumed that the individual was self-sufficient and had all that was needed to fulfil his potential innate to himself. He simply needed to be liberated from tradition, including traditional social relationships and forms of community. Particular relationships were sentimental and outmoded, henceforth society would be organised on more impersonal and "rational" lines (e.g. via the market or general legislation). History, too, had a power of impersonal social organisation that guaranteed social order and progress.

Nisbet then describes a reaction to this nineteenth century view. Intellectuals became increasingly pessimistic about social changes, using terms such as disorganisation, disintegration, decline, insecurity, breakdown and instability. Some excerpts:

At the present time there is in numerous areas of thought a profound reaction to the rationalist point of view...There is a decided weakening of faith in the inherent stability of the individual and in the psychological and moral benefits of social impersonality...A concern with cultural disorganization underlies almost every major philosophy of history in our time...Toynbee's volumes...are directed to the feelings of men who live beneath the pall of insecurity that overhangs the present age.

...Is it not extraordinary how many of the major novelists and poets and playwrights of the present age have given imaginative expression to themes of dissolution and decay - of class, family, community and morality?

...Where the nineteenth century rationalist saw progressively higher forms of order and freedom emerging from the destruction of the old, the contemporary sociologist is not so sanguine. He is likely to see not creative emancipation but sterile insecurity, not the framework of the new but the shell of the old

The writing becomes even more trenchant in the third section of the chapter:

A further manifestation of the collapse of the rationalist view of man...is the conception of man's moral estrangement and spiritual isolation that pervades our age. Despite the influence and power of the contemporary State there is a true sense in which the present age is more individualistic than any other in European history. To examine the whole literature of lament of our time...and to observe the frantic efforts of millions of individuals to find some kind of security of mind is to open our eyes to the perplexities and frustrations that have emerged from the widening gulf between the individual and those social relationships within which goals and purposes take on meaning.

Nisbet makes a similar point here to that of Patrick Deneen in his recent book Why Liberalism Failed, namely that individualism and statism in practice grow together. The more individualistic a society, the greater the role of the state. Nisbet also observes that individualism is counterproductive as it harms the individual by undermining the "social relationships within which goals and purposes take on meaning".

Nisbet continues:

Frustration, anxiety, insecurity, as descriptive words, have achieved a degree of importance in present-day thought and writing that is astonishing..."The natural state of twentieth-century man," the protagonist of a recent novel declares, "is anxiety."

...Where in an earlier literature the release of the hero from society's folkways and moral injunctions and corporate protections was the basis of joyous, confident, assertive individualism, the same release in contemporary literature is more commonly the occasion for morbidity and obsession. Not the free individual but the lost individual; not independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not to conquer but to be conquered: these are the major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.

Nisbet then discusses how religious thought had turned against the idea of the "self-sufficiency of man before God":

...this faith in the spiritual integrity of the lone individual is perceptibly declining in much Protestant thought of the present time..."It is this autonomous individual who really ushers in modern civilization and who is completely annihilated in the final stages of that civilization," declares Reinhold Niebuhr...Buber, Maritain, Brunner, Niebuhr, and Demant are but the major names in the group that has come to recognise the atomizing effects of the long tradition of Western individualism upon man's relation to both society and God.

Nisbet gives further evidence from the fields of sociology and psychology and ends the chapter with a quote from the historian Toynbee, who described the "proletarian" as having a consciousness "of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society and being unwanted in a community which is his rightful home."

What can we conclude from Nisbet's work? First, we have to acknowledge that the problems that we see around us today have roots that go back a long way. It is particularly interesting that Nisbet describes his own time as an age of anxiety, given the anxiety epidemic among young people today. It seems as if we have gone through a cycle and ended up back in 1953, but in an even more difficult situation.

And this raises an important question. If Nisbet was right, and the intellectual climate of his own time was highly sensitive to the level of anxiety, insecurity, guilt and alienation existing within the culture, then why have we cycled back to it once more? Why didn't this intellectual climate lead to a lasting change of course?

I can suggest several possible reasons but I'll leave this discussion to the next post.

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.

Nisbet: the quest for community

Robert Nisbet

I'm reading The Quest for Community by the American sociologist Robert Nisbet. The book was published in 1953 which serves as a reminder that the problems besetting the West go back further than some are willing to acknowledge.

The first chapter is titled "The Loss of Community". It begins,

Surely the outstanding characteristic of contemporary thought on man and society is the preoccupation with personal alienation and cultural disintegration. The fears of the nineteenth-century conservatives in Western Europe, expressed against a background of increasing individualism, secularism and social dislocation, have become, to an extraordinary degree, the insights and hypotheses of present-day students of man in society.

This is put very clearly. Nisbet believed that the thought of his age was focused on the problems of personal alienation and cultural disintegration.

What had brought society to such a point? Nisbet continues by noting that in the nineteenth century, the age of individualism and rationalism, words such as individual, change, progress, reason and freedom carried great symbolic value:

All of these words reflected a temper of mind that 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.

He is pointing here, in part, to the "anthropology" of liberal modernity, i.e. its framework for understanding man and society. Liberal moderns based their framework on the "discrete individual", i.e. man considered alone, separate and unrelated. It was then fitting, as a perfecting of society, that history would gradually liberate this self-sufficient and autonomous individual from a pre-modern past that emphasised instead a vision of man fulfilling his nature within a network of communal relationships.

Nisbet adds:

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.

Again, it was assumed that man was to be understood as a discrete individual, not as someone whose nature was expressed and fulfilled in relationship to others. And so these traditional relationships were thought of negatively as limitations holding back the potential of individuals, rather than as the social framework allowing the individual to reach toward his better and fuller nature. (Nisbet seems to have thinkers like J.S. Mill in mind when describing nineteenth century thought.)

Those who pointed to the costs of "individuation" were met with the response that progress required periods of disorder (an argument still heard today):

If there were some, like Taine, Ruskin, and William Morris, who called attention to the cultural and moral costs involved - the uprooting of family ties, the disintegration of villages, the displacement of craftsmen, and the atomization of ancient securities - the apostles of rationalism could reply that these were the inevitable costs of Progress. After all, it was argued - argued by liberals and radicals alike - in all great ages of achievement there is a degree of disorder, a snapping of the ties of tradition and security.

Nisbet's next point is interesting. He argues that the nineteenth century had faith "in the harmonies of nature", in the sense that the "natural man" - freed from "artificial" constraints of traditional social relationships and conventional morality - would then release his true natural potential and forge more authentic relationships. Therefore, the individual was right to follow his natural interest, guided by reason:

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.

Let's stop there for a moment. If Nisbet is correct, there already existed in the 1800s a framework of thought in which it was tremendously difficult to defend traditional society. What was inherited was thought to artificially restrict a self-sufficient, "natural" autonomous individual. Restraints on behaviour did not exist to secure a common good, but were irrational limitations on a pursuit of individual "natural interest". (I criticised this type of thinking in an earlier post Every Eve knows and follows the best path?)

And how was "reason" understood? Things get worse here: our particular loyalties and attachments were thought to be based not on reason but sentiment. Reason was connected instead to general principles which would govern abstract social groups, with these groups ever expanding in composition. Nisbet quotes the observations of the nineteenth century Russian sociologist Ostrogorski that,

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."

An Australian Prime Minister of the early 1900s, Alfred Deakin, was torn by this idea that the particular was to be rejected in favour of a constant expansion toward the universal (see Deakin's strange contradiction). On the one hand, he thought that the loss of the particular would lead to a flattening of identity; on the other hand, he associated the "expansion" to the universal with a vision of progress.

Nisbet explains the nineteenth century mindset further:

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.

It's important to grasp the importance of this view of history. If historical movement has a direction of its own, one with an organisational power that is a guarantor of social stability and progress, then it logically becomes wrong to uphold a traditional way of life - as this would then disrupt the proper organisational power of history.

So if Nisbet is right about all this, there were a number of features of nineteenth century thought which were dissolving of traditional society:

1. An anthropology based on the discrete individual, rather than man embedded in society.

2. A view that the individual was self-sufficient and that his potential was therefore restricted by traditional social relations and moral conventions.

3. The idea that relations flowing from the innate resources of the discrete individual were "natural" in opposition to the "artificial" relationships associated with traditional family and community life.

4. The notion that individuals should act according to "natural interest" rather than a common good.

5. The belief that particular loyalties and attachments were based on mere sentiment and that this was inferior to the "rational" formulation of general principles to regulate ever expanding abstract social groups.

6. The faith in the organisational power of history as a guarantor of progress.

If such ideas hold for too long they will inevitably have an effect - so we should not be surprised at the hollowing out of culture that afflicted most Western nations by the mid-twentieth century.

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.