Marcuse's Utopia

In 1971 John Lennon released his famous song Imagine. It is a song that calls on us to imagine a certain kind of utopia, one in which there are no nations and no religions but only a global solidarity, a brotherhood of man. 

From what intellectual milieu did this song spring from? It's hard to ignore the influence of a leading intellectual of this period, Herbert Marcuse. 

Marcuse was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, studied Marxism as a young man, came under the influence of Heidegger, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. He ended up emigrating to the United States in 1934. He was a leading theorist for the New Left in the 1960s, but his influence subsequently waned. 

Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse was a self-proclaimed leftist utopian. As such, he stands in a tradition that goes back to at least the later 1700s. Marcuse absorbed a great deal of thought from the past. Evident in his writing is the influence not just of Marx, but of Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Hegel, amongst others.

Leftist utopianism has certain common characteristics. It often involves a belief that you can achieve an absolute form of autonomous individual freedom, of perfect equality and lasting peace; that you can and should have solidarity between people, but only at a universal, global level; that human nature can be remade to make possible these achievements, so that you bring into being a New Man; and that human nature is currently corrupted by the institutions of civilisation, so that change requires an attack on these institutions and a subverting of culture and religion.

It is interesting to me just how similar the basic underpinnings of Marcuse's worldview of the 1960s are with that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1810s. Marcuse's ideas considerably overlap with Shelley's, albeit expressed in the language of Marx and Freud. Leftist utopianism has been remarkably stable over a long period of time.

The aims

What was Marcuse aiming for? He did not present this in an entirely systematic way, but it's possible to identify certain themes. 

First, he believed in "liberation", by which he meant, in part, absolute individual autonomy. He wrote:

Liberty is self-determination, autonomy...It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do

This is a standard aim across most modernist political currents. It's noteworthy that Marcuse, who identified as a socialist, should share this belief with liberals of all stripes. 

If you want to be completely free as an autonomous individual, then there will be nothing that might limit what you determine for yourself. Nor will you be defined by anything outside of your own individual choice. You will not be defined by nation or class, nor by family or sex. You will not be limited in your choices by religious belief. There will be nothing above you and nothing below you. There will just be you, a discrete individual, existing on the same plane as everyone else and everything else.

Here is how Shelley puts his vision of the new autonomous man:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

However, Marcuse did not entirely reject the idea of solidarity. But the only kind of solidarity that was permissible was a global, universalist one, that of humanity. He wrote of how the revolution had the aim of "creating solidarity for the human species" and said of happiness that "its validity depends on the real solidarity of the species “man,” which a society divided into antagonistic classes and nations cannot achieve".

He used Freudian concepts to try to make this scientific. Freud had claimed that Eros represented a life force that aimed at higher unities of life. Marcuse used this theory to argue that prior to all social forms of morality, there was a biological, instinctual one that aimed to create unities at the highest level possible (i.e., ultimately at the universal level, that of humanity):

Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a “disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unities” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.

But solidarity was not, in Marcuse's view, to impinge on our individual autonomy. He praised the student rebellion of the 1960s for not creating any hierarchy of leadership or any stable forms of organisation:

Socialist solidarity is autonomy: self-determination begins at home…. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.

Another angle to liberation for Marcuse was that surrounding the Marxist concept of alienation. Marcuse followed the idea that man is formed through his productive labour, but that he is alienated from this self-formation under the conditions of capitalism. His labour is treated as a kind of commodity, and he does not control the conditions of his labour, nor does he receive all of his productive output. He is forced to spend his life toiling for others. 

Marcuse thought there was a way out of this. Modern capitalism had raised industrial output to such a level that if this output was distributed more equally, there could be a great reduction in the need to work for necessity. 

The general aim here of reducing working hours is easy to support. The issue is whether Marcuse's political orientation was likely to help achieve this aim or not. My own belief is that he unintentionally made things worse (I will explain this further on). I would just note, for now, that one component of Marcuse's ideal of liberation, and the achievement of individual autonomy, was overcoming alienation from our labour.

A third aspect of Marcuse's utopia is more difficult to explain. Marcuse had a lifelong interest in aesthetics. It led him to the idea that in a utopia reality would be remade along artistic lines. He believed that if a repressive form of reason could be overturned that, "The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man." Art would no longer be a separate sphere of life, the whole of life and reality would be art. In Marcuse's utopia, the distinctions between science and art, logic and imagination would no longer exist:

Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.

For Marcuse, the imagination was a liberating force. Reason by itself would not liberate people, because it was too bound to current conditions of life. Marcuse therefore strongly supported the surrealists, and thought that dreams and the poetic imagination could envisage a different and better way of life. He quoted a leading French surrealist, Benjamin Péret, who held that a poet "can no longer be recognized as such if he does not oppose himself by a total non-conformism to the world in which he lives." Marcuse felt that the libertarian possibilities of the revolution,

are “sur-realistic”: they belong to the poetic imagination

The ideal for Marcuse was a world in which "mediations" would,

...reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism. Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream.

Note the similarity to the beliefs of Percy Bysshe Shelley back in the 1810s:

Shelley’s poetry often expresses a utopian vision of a better society...Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world. Through his writings, Shelley encourages readers to tap into their creative faculties, to dream, and to envision a more just and compassionate society. His emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination resonates with readers, reminding them of their capacity to bring about positive change.

And think too of John Lennon's song, with its title "Imagine" and the line "You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one".

A fourth aspect of Marcuse's utopia was the idea that we could not really know what the utopia might be like. He ends his "Essay on Liberation" on this note:

And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.

Marcuse was aware of the problem of describing his alternative vision. He refused to set out a blueprint for his utopia:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.

He recognised, though, that it was reasonable for people to ask for some vision of the new before committing to destroying the old:

However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action.

Marcuse did sketch out a vague and abstractly intellectual picture of what the organising principles of his utopia would be. But it is still striking how willing he was to subvert the traditions of his society, even what he terms the "most sublime manifestations of traditional culture", in favour of a roughly drawn, unlikely utopia.

How would Marcuse's utopia come about? Like other leftist utopians he thought that human nature was malleable. What was corrupting this nature was the influence of oppressive and exploitative institutions, and so there is much mention in his writings of the need to subvert these institutions.

He thought, as well, that it was both possible and necessary to create a type of new man and that this would not happen automatically as a result of institutional change. Marcuse suggested that if there were revolutionary changes to morality, that this might reach into the "biological" nature of man (by which he meant that the organism of man would be reconditioned so that it could only function along the lines of the new morality):

To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological" dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.

Marcuse did not believe that the working-class was likely to initiate revolutionary changes. He looked instead to social movements of his time, such as those of Black Americans and feminists. He placed particular hope in the feminist movement, because one other aspect of his utopia was the ideal of peace (Lennon: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace"). 

It makes sense for someone on the left side of modernity to emphasise peace. The original wave of liberalism had based its politics on an anthropology of conflict, making the starting point the claim that man in a state of nature would engage in a war of all against all. Marcuse makes reference to this in his Essay on Liberation, in which he notes the existence of classes and nations, and the absence of universal solidarity, and claims that,

As long as this is the history of mankind, the “state of nature,” no matter how refined, prevails: a civilized bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], in which the happiness of the ones must coexist with the suffering of the others.

And this is where his excitement about the radical feminist movement comes in. Marcuse believed in the Freudian idea that Eros, or libidinal energy, was the Life Instinct, that was locked in battle with aggressive energy, the Death Instinct. Marcuse identified feminine qualities (receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness) with the Life Instinct and masculine ones (aggression, dominance, performance, assertiveness, competitiveness) with the Death Instinct. He hoped that the feminist revolution would ultimately make traditionally feminine qualities universal, thereby ushering in an androgyny, in which men and women were equally feminine:

No other rational meaning can possibly be attributed to the idea of androgynism than the fusion, in the individual, of the mental and somatic characteristics, which in patriarchal civilization were unequally developed in men and women, a fusion in which feminine characteristics, in cancellation of male dominance, would prevail over their repression.

Marcuse was aware of the disorder and pain that such a transition would involve: "This will be struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment and suffering (mental and physical)". But it was his answer to the issue of creating an anthropology of peace - human nature would be remade to be universally feminine. 

A brief reply

Marcuse's utopia can be criticised from many different angles. I want to focus on just one, his concept of solidarity.

Marcuse thought that you could position solidarity at the universal level of humanity, rather than, say, at the level of family or nation. I would argue that this is not realistic and is ultimately detrimental to the good of individuals.

Marcuse believed in the concept of reification, i.e., that under capitalism people are treated more as objects or things, and that relationships between people are treated as relationships between things. Marcuse was also critical of the "performance principle" in which the norms and values of a society are geared toward economic competition and acquisition.

I would argue that the family used to put certain limits on these things. Yes, the family has had a certain economic function in history, either as a household economic unit or, at the aristocratic level, via the arranging of marriages for economic and social advancement. 

The family, however, has also been held up as a haven from the competitive pressures of the outside world, particularly following on from the industrial age. A well-functioning family was envisaged as being, ideally, a place where a certain kind of peace might be sought. 

Rather than being "reified", relationships between family members were to be highly personalised, and based on mutual loyalty and natural affection. There was to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the common good of family life, rather than a competitive and self-seeking dynamic between family members.

The solidarity of family life, based on mutual support, was intended to help buffer individuals against the indifference of the outside world, and to make them less vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.

The feminism of the 1970s, which Marcuse championed as "liberation", pushed things in the wrong direction. It emphasised the idea of men and women as contending political classes, which not only undermined solidarity between the sexes, it represented a shift toward aggression and competitiveness in human relationships rather than away from it. It destabilised family life, with the rise in unmarried adults rising from 28% in 1970 to 47% by 2019. These adults do not have the same level of economic or emotional support (for instance, a married couple will accrue three times more household wealth than an unmarried adult, similarly 80% of married women express confidence in being able to retire comfortably compared to only 50% of unmarried and divorced women). 

Nor did 1970s feminism push back against reification. If anything, this has intensified. Consider the feminists who complain about having to "perform" what they call "emotional labour" in marriages. 

It seems likely, as well, that relationships between the sexes have become more, rather than less, transactional since the 1970s. It is not uncommon now to hear women argue that, as they don't really need a man (economically), that they will only consider a man who is able to "add value" to their lives. It has become less common to hear either sex talk about a loving spousal union as a primary aim of life. 

It is a similar story when it comes to nation as a source of solidarity. National solidarity places limits on certain types of exploitation. For instance, open borders mean that the workers of one nation must compete for jobs with other workers around the world. If employers have no solidarity with the workers of their own country, they are free to employ whoever will work the longest for the least money. It is noteworthy that wages have stagnated since 1980 whilst GDP growth has continued to rise:

In other words, the share of national wealth going to the working classes has fallen over time as national solidarity has waned. This, in Marcusian terms, means that the alienation of labour has increased - it has gone in the wrong direction - as national solidarity has been undermined. 

Again, when a country has a stable sense of national identity, then relationships between individuals involve a sense of a shared history and culture, with a deeply held connection to place and to a particular tradition. Relationships between people are not mediated as strongly by economics, by a sense of living in a society marked by labour and consumption on a mass scale, of existing within a kind of global entrepôt. In this way, too, national solidarity places limits on the reification that Marcuse so opposed.

The position I am arguing here is that Marcuse's utopia was self-defeating. By making solidarity universal, he increased the degree of alienation and reification, rather than overcoming them.

Which leads me to one final criticism of Marcuse. Marcuse thought that he could abolish the "performance principle", by which reality was shaped by norms of competition and acquisition, by making men and women equally feminine, and therefore androgynous.

Marcuse seems not to have adequately considered the way that women contribute to the drive to acquire material things. One of the reasons that men "perform" is to attract a wife. There are plenty of men who are kept hard at work to afford the renovations or the holidays or the house that their wife desires. Left to themselves, some of these men would most likely choose to live more simply. It is therefore unlikely that abolishing the masculine, if this were possible, would overcome the drive within human nature to be materially acquisitive.

And, to the extent that men do have a provider instinct, this is mostly a beneficial aspect of the masculine. A man might leverage some of his "aggression" to succeed in this role, but it is motivated by his love for, and commitment to, his family and it helps to create material comfort and security for his wife and children. To abolish the masculine would mean a loss of this provider instinct and the benefits to family life that go with it.

But, most importantly, the masculine cannot be reduced to these material functions. At its best, the masculine is able to discern the higher ordering within reality and then frame society in a way that is most conducive to human flourishing. 

It is true that this creates a kind of hierarchy, as it involves a serious engagement with the vertical dimension of reality, where not all things are equal, but where we can aspire to higher things within our nature and within the nature of the reality we inhabit. It also requires a serious engagement with forms, with the essences of things, and therefore with their distinct natures and ends. 

It is true, I think, that men need a certain type of receptivity, a quality identified as feminine by Marcuse, to best perform this highest of masculine tasks. In other words, if a man were entirely unreceptive he would find it difficult to discern "logos" - the ordering principles within reality. However, this is a refining of the masculine, rather than a turn to androgyny. 

Men have largely been lacking in recent times in contributing this sort of masculine leadership. Perhaps part of the reason is that the New Left and second wave feminism, both influenced by Marcuse, managed to successfully malign the masculine, and to stamp it with negative associations, as being merely a social construct that unleashes aggression into society and that represses the life instinct.

It is time to move beyond Marcuse and the intellectual frame he helped to create.

Russia, nihilism, utopia

I am currently reading Nihilism Before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie. The first section is not an easy read, and not a good entry point into philosophy, as it deals with the difficult ideas of German idealist philosophers like Fichte and Hegel. The book, however, is an important one as it ties the ideas of these philosophers to the political nihilism that came later in the nineteenth century.

We often think of nihilism in terms of a depressed person who doesn't find meaning in life. But German idealist philosophy, particularly that of Fichte, had a complex reading of human consciousness in which an "absolute I" attempted to negate the phenomenal or empirical aspects of self and the world around it. So the act of negation becomes central to the activity of self.

Gillespie links this philosophy to the adoption by leading intellectuals of figures like Faust, Prometheus or even Satan as models who were at least partly admired. It's interesting to note that the young Marx fits into this mould. He liked to quote Faust that "Everything in existence is worth being destroyed" and he wrote a drama called Oulanem in which the title character declaims "If there is a something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins–the world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses."

This emphasis on negation, i.e., on the belief that what exists, whether good or bad, needs to be destroyed, so that a higher aspect of self can be realised, effectively set the self against the existing nature of things. This formula played out in a variety of ways, but I want to focus on one particular instance that Gillespie describes in his book, namely that of the Russian nihilist Chernyshevsky. 

This story begins with a novel written by the famous Russian author Turgenev. Turgenev was influenced by the philosophy of his times, admitting once that "I prefer Prometheus, I prefer Satan, the type who revolts, who is an individual". In Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons the lead character Bazarov is a nihilist:

Bazarov is one of the great Promethean revolutionaries in modern literature...The negative character of Bazarov's greatness, however, is part and parcel of his nihilism. As he himself admits, he does not stand for anything. He wants merely to clear the ground...He is a monster of negation and of freedom...As a nihilist, he stakes out a position against not merely autocracy but nature itself, including his own human nature.

Turgenev portrays Bazarov as a flawed character, who is, as one contemporary critic put it, "destroyed in his destroying":

Bazarov is in rebellion against the world and indeed against life itself. Like Fichte's I, he is a monster of will but his will has no object other than freedom. He is thus a creature of pure negation, a destroyer and revolutionary...As sheer negativity, this will cannot construct a positive new reality...

Bazarov believes he is an autonomous, self-creating being, a Prometheus who has freed himself from the rock of political and theological despotism...Turgenev, however, tries to show us that this heroic Prometheanism is essentially tragic, because it rests upon a faulty understanding of man and nature...Bazarov's belief in his own autonomy leads him to violate "natural laws" and he must pay the price that nature extracts...he discovers he is not thoroughly autonomous but bound by nature in ways he cannot overcome.

Some nihilists admired the character of Bazarov, but others saw in him an attack on the nihilist movement. One of those in the latter group was Nicolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote his own highly influential novel What is to be done?, which was an attempt to show that it was indeed possible to organise love, family and social life so that the individual remained absolutely independent.

In the novel, Vera Pavlovna marries Lopukov, but she then falls in love with Kirsanov. Lopukov fakes his death and leaves Russia so that his wife is free to marry Kirsanov. Vera Pavlovna "is driven by a desire for autonomy, to live as she pleases".

This all sounds tawdry, but according to Chernyshevsky it represents the height of human nobility:

These people, according to Chernyshevsky...are only what all men would be if they were not deformed by corrupt social institutions. Jealousy and all the other emotions that degrade human nature are the result of the corrupt "order of things," that is, the existence of private property. He suggests that in a properly ordered society the ill-tempered will all become kind because it will not be contrary to their interests to be kind."

Chernyshevsky sees human nature as being regenerated to an extraordinary degree, as is described in a dream had by the character Vera Pavlovna:

There is nothing loftier than man; there is nothing loftier than woman...It was her own face, kindled with the brightness of love; more beautiful than all ideals left to us by sculptors of ancient time and by the great artists of the great age of art...I have the reverence for purity which "chastity" possessed. But in me it is not as it was in them, but fuller, loftier, keener...till I appeared, people had no idea of perfect enjoyment of freedom.

Gillespie goes on to describe Chernyshevksy's newly configured world as follows:

It is a world of aluminium and glass, a communal world in which almost all work is done by machines and in which there are few old men and women since they remain healthy and youthful until shortly before they die. There is only freedom, satisfaction, and enjoyment, "an everlasting spring and summer, an everlasting joy".

This reminds me of the vision of a new society by the poet Shelley. He too thought that by overthrowing power structures in society that you would radically regenerate human nature. Shelley wanted an Edenic condition of life and bitterly opposed Christianity for suggesting that man's nature was too fallen to realise such an ideal in this world. 

There is a difficult mishmash of incompatible visions in Chernyshevsky's novel. He wants absolute autonomy for the individual, so that we can do whatever we please. He also wants to maintain traditional European moral ideals, such as nobility of character, purity and faithfulness. But how can you have people acting egoistically and still maintain moral character? 

Chernyshevsky believes that the solution is partly technology (machines will do all the work) and partly social organisation (removal of private property will harmonise my own rational self-interest with a beneficence toward other people).

Even on his own terms, though, the results are hardly persuasive. We are supposed to believe that a young woman who is liberated to act however she pleases, and who therefore leaves her husband for her husband's best friend, is acting according to an unparalleled level of chastity and fidelity. 

And, in practice, we know how the attempt to maximise individual autonomy works out. It means, as a matter of logic, accepting that everyone's choices in life are equally valid. This means that the traditional moral structure collapses. There is no longer noble and base, pure or impure, loyal or disloyal. There is only a technocratic organisation of society for enabling the maximum satisfaction of individual desire. The moral ideals change substantially, to focus on non-discrimination, inclusion, openness and tolerance of whatever people choose to do or to be, rather than on the quality of the choices themselves.

And we have had the liberation of sexual choices for women. It does not bring about the highest possible level of purity, chastity and nobility in either men or women. It does not even lead to people making judicious rational choices for their own longer-term interests. It is gradually having a disordering and dissolving effect, and not just because of the existence of jealousy. 

The main point I would emphasise here is the reliance of the nihilists and other revolutionaries of the time on the idea of a radical regeneration of human nature. They wanted radical autonomy and a pursuit of self-interest, alongside a higher realisation of traditional moral ideals. They pinned their hopes on the idea that something would change human nature so significantly that such an unlikely and seemingly contradictory utopia might be possible. Many hoped that the regeneration would take place once power structures were overthrown, whether these involved kings and priests, or capitalists (or, in today's language, whiteness and patriarchy).

Again, we had the overthrow of private property in Chernyshevsky's own nation of Russia in 1917 (and Lenin was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky). You would struggle, I think, to view the results as being "an everlasting joy" and a "perfect enjoyment of freedom" brought about by the creation of a loftier and nobler human nature.

Is Tucker a trad?

I admire Tucker Carlson. He is one journalist who is prepared to take a stand on principle, even if that means going against the narrative and drawing fire on himself. He has stood firm even when activists have, literally, arrived on his doorstep.

I think it is unlikely, though, that he could be termed a traditionalist. He recently gave an online interview in which he was asked what a 22-year-old Carlson would do in 2021. Carlson gave a typically trenchant answer, explaining that he would do his own thing in some rural part of the US rather than enter a big corporation, because "the system is collapsing" and "It certainly doesn't want people like me".

So far there's no problem. But then Carlson muses that the current American regime is based on lies and that if he were 22 he might even look further afield, to another country. He states, "but if I were 22, I might look to see if there's another place that's going to treat me as an individual and not as a member of a tribe. A system that actually cares about people, not identity".

This is a very modern, rather than a traditional, way of seeing the world. Remember it was the liberal radical Shelley who, back in 1820, wanted people to be without tribe and identity. Shelley looked forward to the emergence of a new leftist kind of man, whom he described as follows:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

There is a considerable irony at play here. Shelley helped set in motion a politics which was based on the idea that we would be free when there were no more distinctions between people that might lead to inequality. Once this state of affairs was reached, then human nature would be regenerated and we could do whatever we wanted as individuals, living a kind of Edenic existence on earth.

Shelley targeted the aristocracy and the church as institutions blocking the path to equality. Later on, Marx targeted the bourgeoisie. More recently, we have feminists and critical race theorists targeting white men like Tucker Carlson.

Tucker, quite reasonably, does not want to be targeted. The answer, though, is not to abandon the most recent phase of leftist thought, merely to return to its Shelleyan origins. It's better to dig deeper and uproot the tree that bears such poisonous fruit.

In this spirit, I'd like to go back even further than Shelley. I find it interesting that Tucker believes that unless you treat each person solely as an individual that you are denying their nature. He says, "And never deny who you are. I thought this was all sort of common knowledge, that we all agreed on this some time ago that we shouldn't have to deny our nature in order to succeed. We should celebrate each person as an individual, but we've given that up completely."

This too is a modernist idea. Tucker is suggesting that it is our nature to be wholly individual. That we are just one instance of a thing, rather than being a member of a class of things. If true, those asserting that there are hundreds of different "genders" would be on the right track. 

Where does the idea come from? I'm currently reading The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. His argument is that toward the end of the medieval era there was a philosophical turn to nominalism which overturned the long established Western belief in philosophical realism. Nominalists reject the real existence of universals, so that there are no really existing "essences" by which things might be grouped together, or share a common nature (for example, no masculine or feminine essence that individual men or women might represent or express).

If you were to remove the nominalism, it is unlikely that you would set apart human nature and identity. Instead, you would see the two as being closely connected. If there is a masculine essence, and I am born a man, then there is a "given line" along which I can develop and fulfil my nature and define my telos (my purposes). Of course, each man is likely to do this a little differently (so there is still individuality), but I belong to a particular class of being (men), and this is deeply infused in my sense of self (being an "essential" part of who I am). Being a man or a woman is not, as Shelley put it, a "detestable distinction" but a core reality that inevitably helps to define us.

Leftists take a radically nominalist approach, usually claiming that "masculine" and "feminine" are merely oppressive social constructs. However, because they also see "patriarchy" as the oppressive social structure that they wish to destroy in order to liberate humanity, they retain male and female as legitimate terms if they are understood as classes within a political system. 

Nominalism has, perhaps, unhelpfully trained the modern Western mind to think only in terms of the discrete individual. This carries over into issues of national or ethnic identity. We do not, as we should, see our membership of a nation or ethny as helping to fulfil aspects of our nature by deepening our connection to a people and place, which then strengthens our commitments to preserve our heritage, to maintain the health of family life, to uphold unity and solidarity (including between the sexes), to love the natural environment of our homeland, and to uphold what we owe to past and future generations. 

To say, "Why can't we just be individuals?" not only strips us of all this, it leaves us vulnerable to those with a stronger sense of who they are as a people. 

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.

A line of descent

Man was made to be embedded in certain kinds of relationships. The obvious one is the family, in which we can fulfil aspects of our mission as men and as women; our drive to reproduce ourselves and the tradition we belong to; to pair bond with someone of the opposite sex; to uphold our lineage and the tradition of achievement it represents; and to be anchored by the stable loves and attachments which are possible within kin relationships. 

Much the same goes for the larger familial type community which we belong to, namely our membership of an "ethny". This gives us a connection to generations past, present and future; it connects us deeply to people and place; it makes us custodians of a particular cultural inheritance; it deepens our social commitments; and, again, it draws us into a set of relationships based on natural forms of loyalty and common identity. 

Little wonder that for our ancestors piety, understood to mean honouring those who sacrificed to create who we are, namely God, our parents and our nation, was such an important virtue. And little wonder too that fidelity, a proven loyalty to family and nation, was so important and that acts of infidelity or treachery were so fiercely condemned (traitors occupied the innermost circle of hell in Dante's Inferno.)

These relationships are foundational to human life. Without them the individual loses his footing, loses the stability necessary to hold together his psyche/soul, and will spend a life not aiming for the highest things, or oriented to what is good, or true or beautiful within existence, but trying to assuage his anxiety and to keep at bay, however he can, his unease.

What is so unusual about modern Western society is that an influential part of our intellectual class not only fails to defend these relationships, but with unerring instinct and with tremendous moral passion seeks to undermine them. In other words, they are actively oriented to an ethos of infidelity.

You can see this in the feminist women who claim that "men have been the greatest enemy of women" or who relentlessly promote the idea that the biggest threat to women is their own husbands, who are portrayed as tyrants and abusers. This represents an effort to break the ties between men and women, to adopt a mindset in which men and women are fundamentally set apart.

You can see it too in those white liberals who so readily accept atrocity stories designed to dehumanise their own ancestors and to encourage young people to turn against their own history and heritage.

How did it come to this? There is no single source for the descent of the West. Our inability to defend our communal foundations has multiple sources that span both the left and the mainstream right of politics. What I want to do is to attempt to describe just one of these strands, namely that of secular humanist leftism. This appeared amongst an avant-garde by the early 1800s, though humanism itself goes back well before this. Today it is the predominant worldview amongst the Anglo urban middle-class. It is the orthodox view of most teachers and academics, the ones responsible for instructing our children.

You can see the politics of infidelity very clearly in the works of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Unlike most of his fellow Englishmen of the early 1800s, he stood fiercely opposed to God (and not on scientific grounds - he was happy to believe in ghosts). He identified with Satan not because he saw Satan as evil, but because he saw Satan as asserting a freedom against God (unsurprisingly, this identification with Satan persisted amongst avant-garde intellectuals for much of the nineteenth century). 

Shelley adopted the attitude of non-serviam: I will not serve. He did so perhaps for the usual reason of pride, but more so it seems because of his notion of human freedom. I am speculating here, but I suspect that Shelley had the attitude that our authority lies in our own reason and will; that therefore we should be subject only to our own reason and will; and that therefore a God who establishes an external law for us to follow, whether this be a natural law or revelation, is a tyrant exercising power over us.

(A brief detour: the notion that the existence of an external law, including God's law, makes us unfree is easy to challenge. If the laws were merely arbitrary, then, yes, they would represent subjection. But if they represent truths about how our lives are rightly ordered, then the more that we obey them, the closer we get to the truth of our being, and the less that they become external impositions.)

Much follows from this rejection of external authority. It means that we can no longer recognise the vertical structure of reality; if everyone is their own authority, then how can I recognise the authority of a bishop or a king or even a father? Relationships can only be horizontal - they can only exist "sideways", hence the emphasis on equality.

Similarly, if there is no natural order of being, and only individuals following the authority of their own will and reason, then many traditional distinctions become obsolete, such as those between men and women, or those of nation (Shelley termed such things "detestable distinctions"). In particular, the duties that flow from them will be rejected as external impositions on the sovereign self. 

Here is Shelley imagining the new man:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

It's very clearly expressed. You can see the absolute rejection of the vertical structure: no king, no social classes, no God, no awe. You can see the rejection of "distinctions", meaning the qualities that give people a supra-individual identity and belonging: no tribes or nations. There is only the free and uncircumscribed individual.

But that is only part of the story. Shelley was not committed to the classical liberal view that man has a low nature (selfish, acquisitive, greedy) that can be harnessed within society. One reason he hated Christianity is that he disliked the idea that man's nature was fallen. He chose to believe that you could have a society of self-sovereign individuals, not subject to external law or custom, who would choose, like himself, to live according to noble principles and, above all, according to selfless love. 

This was an expression of the "all you need is love" ethos that has been around in more recent times (Shelley and John Lennon would have got on like a house on fire - Lennon's "Imagine" is very much in the Shelleyan spirit). Given his belief that love, without moral law, was sufficient, Shelley logically adopted the free love idea: that men and women should remain in a relationship for as long as the love was there, but then move on without jealousy once it finished. It led to a trail of destruction in Shelley's life, including the suicide of his first wife whom he abandoned to run off with the teenage Mary Shelley. 

Many middle-class liberals have continued along much the same lines as Shelley. They see themselves as representing the forces of love and peace, despite acting with immense hostility against those they see as upholding traditional loyalties. We should not be surprised by this. If they reject law and custom as sources of authority, then like Shelley they are likely to see themselves as acting from some sort of inwardly generated universal benevolence or disinterested love instead. The intense virtue signalling perhaps reflects this anxiety to prove that they still have a moral foundation. 

Similarly we should not be surprised at the vehemence, the rage and despair, that they feel toward those who are not "enlightened" and who still have fidelity when it comes to supporting traditional family roles or national identities. For Shelleyan leftists, these are not part of the necessary foundations that support individual life, but aspects of tyranny and oppression over the self-sovereign individual, particularly if these foundations have some standing and authority within the mainstream of society (e.g. "whiteness" in Western countries or masculine leadership in the family or society). They are seen to be assertions of power by some over others, existing for the purposes of exploitation and hindering the progress toward the new free and equal individual.

The utopias imagined by Shelleyan type leftists have often involved a picture of individuals living free from necessity, without a government (why would you need one once human nature is redeemed and there is no need for law). The individual in these communities is free to wander around by themselves, with no personal property, forming voluntary friendships, sharing everything including the women.

In reality, the drift has been toward a mass floating particle society with an ever more centralised state, leading ultimately toward global governance. There are some traditionalists who have picked up on this aspect of leftism and who wish to combat it by emphasising instead smaller scale, localised community life with a return to more personalised relationships. I do think this is one legitimate response to liberal modernity, but with one caveat. 

Such communities won't survive the larger trends within society without clarity of principle, i.e. without firmly establishing an alternative ethos or "metanarrative" that can be embedded within its culture. Similarly, they won't survive without vigilance when it comes to guarding the institutions (the schools, the churches, the local media). There clearly exists a temptation for intellectual types to drift toward a Shelleyan worldview, and it is these types who are often the most motivated to work their way into positions of influence. The left understands how "formation" works - the deliberate approach to instilling a certain worldview, or set of presuppositions, in the young. We should not leave formation to chance, but must have a deliberate approach to it. Finally, we should keep challenging at the political level: the stronger a position that we build for a traditionalist politics within the mainstream of society, the more likely it is that local communities will be sustained into the future.

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.

Shelley & the descent of the left

An American teacher gave her students a test and asked them to identify "obstacles that keep people from moving ahead". One student gave the simple answer "white people".

Now, you might ask what this has to do with the English poet Shelley. As it happens, Shelley is part of a chain of thought on the left side of politics that ultimately leads to this answer.

In my last post I tried to explain why Shelley's concept of freedom was inseparable from a concept of equality. Shelley's political philosophy went something like this:

1. Human nature is not "tainted" in the sense of being fallen or having a fixed potential to do evil.
2. The reason why people do the wrong thing is because of existing political institutions which are based on some people having power over others (i.e. power structures).
3. Man can be regenerated if these power structures are abolished.
4. Power structures were those of the ancien régime, i.e. kings, aristocrats and priests.
5. This power structure should be replaced by democratic rule.
6. If power structures were replaced, then people would live an "Edenic" existence, i.e. a return to an idyllic, untainted existence as before the Fall.
7. Shelley, as a poet, unsurprisingly conceived this to be a kind of poetic existence within nature, with people living in complete freedom and equality, doing as they wanted, motivated by pure, selfless love, without jealousy or acquisitiveness etc.

This was how Shelley saw things in 1820. A generation later Karl Marx came along and made a key observation. Marx realised that you could get rid of the ancien régime, but in its place you would still have a power structure. The bourgeoisie would still hold power over the proletariat within a democratic system. Marx, cleverly in a way, revised the Shelleyan system, by noting that if the working class were to take power, there would be no other class below them to exploit. In other words, there would no longer be a class based power structure.

In that case, thought Marx, the power structure of society would be abolished, and you would have the kind of Edenic existence that Marx briefly sketched in his writings. His Eden was less poetic than Shelley's, but was similarly based on the idea of abolishing nations and families, and having people wander round as "unencumbered" individuals, doing whatever productive work they felt like doing (fishing, writing etc.).

Marxism is clearly a tweaking of Shelleyism, or at least of political ideas that were already in vogue.

And what of the modern left? Well, there has been a further tweak to the system. Even though Shelley did want to abolish sex distinctions, nations and marriage, he believed the key power structure to be overthrown was the class one (aristocracy). The same for Marx (the bourgeoisie). The modern left, though, focuses more on race and biological sex as power structures to be deconstructed (whiteness and the patriarchy). Only then will humanity reach its final destination of true freedom and equality.

So you can see why that school student dutifully answered that it was "white people" who were an obstacle to people moving ahead. That student is the end product of a current of thought that has existed within the left since at least the 1820s (probably earlier).

There are a few other things I should point out. First, there are other currents of thought which have also shaped the modern left. For instance, there is still the influence of the Fabians, who believed that progress would be led by a class of neutral experts employed by the state, i.e. by a technocracy ruling along scientific lines.

Second, it's interesting that the modern left no longer envisages the end point of history as a return to Eden. Perhaps that's a result of Christianity no longer shaping the mental landscape, even of those rejecting it, as much as it used to. What we are left with is a belief that white men are the privileged class upholding a power structure and that freedom and equality will finally be achieved when this power structure is defeated.

Third, it is noticeable that some of those pushing the modern version of Shelleyism are doing so to gain power for themselves, rather than to achieve a vision of utopian freedom. Middle-class feminists are often most interested in using "gender politics" to gain a competitive advantage in high status professions. They want status, money and power for themselves, rather than a system in which such things no longer exist. Similarly, it is clear that if whites become a minority in Western countries, that power will simply be passed to a new non-white majority rather than there being no power structure.

The main conclusion to draw from all this, though, is that it is the initial assumptions of Shelley that have to be challenged. Where did these beliefs of Shelley come from? I can't be exactly sure, but it's possible they go back all the way to thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Shelley himself traced the intellectual journey of his ideas about human nature as follows (from his 1820 political manifesto):

the new epoch was marked by the commencement of deeper enquiries into the point of human nature than are compatible with an unreserved belief in any of those popular mistakes upon which popular systems of faith with respect to the cause and agencies of the universe, with all their superstructure of political and religious tyranny, are built. Lord Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, Boyle, Montaigne, regulated the reasoning powers, criticized the history, exposed the past errors by illustrating their causes and their connexion, and anatomized the inmost nature of social man. Then, with a less interval of time than of genius, followed Locke and the philosophers of his exact and intelligible but superficial school. Their illustrations of some of the minor consequences of the doctrines established by the sublime genius of their predecessors were correct, popular, simple and energetic. Above all, they indicated inferences the most incompatible with the popular religions and the established governments of Europe.

Shelley here praises Hobbes (and others) for having "anatomized the inmost nature of social man" and then praises Locke for having popularised the genius of thinkers like Hobbes.

So what was Hobbes' view of the nature of man? Hobbes began by imagining a state of nature in which men were free to do as they wanted. Hobbes then argued that in such a state of nature life would be short and brutish as individuals would attack each other and there would be no security of life or property. Therefore, argued Hobbes, individuals rationally made a social contract to give up part of their rights to government in return for such security. Hobbes used this argument in favour of the authority of kings.

The problem with this Hobbesian view is that it it undermines natural, uncontracted, prepolitical forms of human community, such as family and nation. The reality is that we don't begin as disconnected individuals, reluctantly combining via a social contract. We are by nature social creatures, and we express important aspects of our created natures within a social context.

It is possible that Shelley ran with the Hobbesian view, as it undermined the idea of a natural and/or divine order, but that he refigured it by challenging the idea that human nature was selfish and violent. In other words, Shelley built on some of the framework established by Hobbes (autonomous individuals in a state of nature) but made these individuals naturally good and therefore able to live a peaceful, free and equal coexistence, once the tainting influence of power structures was removed.

If we want to reject modern leftism in a principled way, it is possible that we have to go back all the way to the seventeenth century and reject the Hobbesian way of framing politics.

Shelley the Utopian

In my series of posts on the English poet Shelley (here, here and here), I've looked at his very liberal attitude to freedom, and how this made him want to abolish marriage, sex distinctions and nationality.

I'd like to end the series by considering why this liberal concept of freedom also committed Shelley to such an emphasis on equality.

I think the answer goes something like this:

1. Shelley rejected the idea that human nature was tainted, i.e. that man was a fallen creature.
2. He believed instead that man had power over his own nature. It was human institutions that had corrupted this nature, and these could be reformed.
3. Once man was perfected he would return to his intended, natural condition of being good, free and equal.
4. In this condition, a utopia would emerge, a heaven on earth, in which human existence would be regenerated, with everything being made beautiful, in body and mind, and subject only to a pure universal love, unmotivated by any base concerns.

Man was corrupted, in Shelley's view, and denied this wonderful utopian existence, by acts of tyranny - the exercise of power over others. It was this that threw a "mask" over the world, hiding man's true nature from himself. In Shelley's own words:

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches

And this is where freedom and equality become such great and noble (and inseparable) objectives for Shelley. The aim was to reach a condition in which there was no exercise of power over others. Shelley was so serious about this that he even portrayed God as a tyrant and a modified version of Satan as the hero who rebelled against the authority of God.

So try then to imagine how Shelley saw things. For him, what mattered was a fight for liberty against "tyranny" (defined as any exercise of power of one person over another) which therefore was also a fight for equality (for abolishing "distinctions" that gave one person some sort of standing vis-a-vis another person). Hence the twinning of freedom and equality.

Freedom and equality were the keys to establishing humanity's true condition of heaven on earth and so were supercharged in their significance.

It would be easy to criticise Shelley's world view as being unworkable or impractical. But more than this it deserves to be condemned for being, mostly, undesirable - a dystopia rather than a utopia.

If we return once more to Shelley's vision of what man would be like once the "mask" had been removed, and true freedom and equality revealed, we see the problem:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

What does it mean to be free in a Shelleyan sense? It means that nobody has power over me and that I am king over myself - an autonomous individual. My will is uncircumscribed. But to be free and equal in this sense also means that I am tribeless, nationless, Godless and churchless. Also abolished, as Shelley explains elsewhere, are biological sex and marriage.

Do I really want Shelleyan freedom? What about the meaning, identity and belonging that I derive from manhood, from membership of a communal tradition, and from stable family commitments?

Shelley wants us to move away from particular loves and loyalties, and the obligations and commitments that go with this, toward disinterested universal ones, which do not "encumber" us, but which also abstract, atomise and deracinate our own personhood, and which make human relationships shifting, uncertain and volatile.

The last point is evidenced in Shelley's own life. He wanted "pure" relationships, based not on exclusivity or jealousy, but this ended in the suicides of two women, including his first wife. Throughout his life, he "abandoned" quickly and frequently.

It is not that Shelley was wrong in just one respect, or that his system could be tweaked a little to make it viable and desirable. It is the larger approach that fails, the overall framework.

Shelley & the machine

I'd like to take you back to 1820 again, this time to a manifesto written by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley titled A Philosophical View of Reform.

In this manifesto, Shelley praises Sir Francis Bacon for increasing "the powers of man" by initiating the perfection of "the mechanical sciences" but complains that the existing "forms of society" prevent these newly acquired powers from being applied in a utilitarian way to increase the overall happiness of society.

Fortunately, continues Shelley, the "political philosophers" have laboured to overcome the problem by thinking up new forms of society based on liberty and equality. Shelley puts his liberal/technocratic vision as follows:

"Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed. The result of the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment of the principle of Utility as the substance, and liberty and equality as the forms according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered." 

I think we need to pause and carefully consider what Shelley is arguing for. Shelley believes that human society is to be thought of like a machine, one made powerful by man's increase in power over nature, and that this machine is to be geared to whatever is thought to increase utility, which can only, in Shelley's mind, mean that human life is to be administered according to the forms of liberty and equality.

Note how society itself is assumed to exist to fulfil a kind of Baconian mission of increasing power via technological organisation. Shelley might have been a poet of the romantic era, but this is already that rationalist, technocratic view of society that James Kalb writes about ("Liberal modernity tries to turn the world into a machine for manufacturing satisfactions")

The traditionalist mind doesn't conceive society this way, as a technology to procure an end according to a formula. A human society is, for us, a body of people to which we belong, one that carries with it a tradition, a culture, and a history. It has a value in what it is and as the larger body within which we express our social being.

The forms exist, in part, to maintain the society, but they also express aspects of our social natures. The family, for instance, exists not only to produce the next generation, and to enculturate this generation to successfully carry on a tradition, but it also allows men to fulfil that part of their masculine nature which is expressed in being a husband and father, and a woman likewise to experience being a wife and a mother. Each family also has the potential to embody a good within its own existence: it has a value in being a unique expression of human community.

Therefore, if a Shelleyan liberal were to say "the family fails as a form of society because it does not administer human life according to the principles of liberty and equality" a traditionalist would not see this as failure, as family is supposed to allow us to express aspects of our natures as men and women; to secure a future for a lineage, a nation and a tradition; and to be a unique and meaningful community in itself, one that helps to form identity, attachments, loyalties, commitments and a connection to past and future generations.

Society is not a machine to administer human life according to a single level formula. It is not a technocratic system to give power to such a formula. The pity, again, is that Shelley's view was to become the modern one; to give Shelley credit, he picked up very early on where liberalism would, if followed in a principled way, take a society.

(I had intended this post to be focused on Shelley's understanding of equality but got sidetracked. Will return to this topic soon.)

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.