Mamdani, Weaver & the warm collective

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

Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration

Bishop Robert Barron responded negatively, with the comment:

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

Fr Dave McNaughton disagreed, replying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How would you like your society?

Stefan Molyneux, who I generally respect as an independent minded thinker, posted the following comment on social media:

It's as radically individualistic as you can get. And it highlights why philosophy is so important when it comes to politics. 

One issue that comes to mind is that of universals. If you take a nominalist view, that general concepts have no existence outside the mind, you are more likely to believe that only individual instances of things have real existence. In this case, that there are individuals but "society does not exist".

The comments to Molyneux's post were overwhelmingly against his position. There were two main objections to his claim. First, that it makes sense to talk about emergent properties, i.e., that a complex system has properties that cannot be found in its individual parts alone. Second, many commenters pointed out that if you strip something down to its individual parts, that you could not then stop at "individuals exist" because those individuals are made up of cells, and those cells of molecules, and those molecules of atoms and so on in a descending series.

Personally, I would go much further and defend a notion of philosophical realism. My own view is that there are universals, such as the masculine and the feminine, that do exist as qualities or essences. We can, as individual men and women, seek to embody and express the higher aspects of the masculine or the feminine, thereby connecting our own being in the world to a transcendent good that is inherently meaningful. 

This was once more commonly accepted. Academics like Professor Judith Butler took aim at it, claiming that the masculine and the feminine had no real existence, but were merely socially constructed:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

Something similar is at play when it comes to communities, whether families or nations. Modern academics tend to emphasise the socially constructed and historically contingent nature of these communities. There is little recognition that these communities might have an 'essence' of their own, in the sense that they bear a distinct and uniquely meaningful character of their own, and carry this through time. People once discerned this as such a good, that they would make considerable sacrifices to defend it. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way:

Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.

Family and nation, in this sense, also connect us to transcendent goods, which is why most people do not feel them to diminish their individuality, but rather to add meaningfully to it.

There is perhaps another philosophical divide at play involving cosmology. I've lately been reading Regime Change by Patrick Deneen. Deneen laments that in modern times the "few" (the elite) and the "many" (the working class) are set against each other, trying to defeat the other. He argues that in times past there were virtues attributed to each class:

Those in the upper class were more likely to attain cultivation and refined tastes. They were more likely to be the beneficiaries of liberal education, and hence liberal by the classical definition: people free from daily cares, and able to develop certain virtues or excellences of character that required leisure and refinement. They could come to appreciate and cultivate fine and high culture, often patrons and preservers of many of the world's most treasured objects of transcendent beauty. At their finest, they governed well for the sake of the whole polity, inspired by lessons of noblesse oblige and chivalry, a disposition that arose in recognition of the gift and privilege of their distinct positions, and the corresponding responsibilities and duties that such station entailed. (p.23)

He then describes the virtues once ascribed to the working classes,

They were more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits and  natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tide, sun, and stars. If upper classes could set their sights on higher culture, the working classes often developed practices that reflected life's constant realities, its joys and pains, celebrations and suffering. They have been extolled as the political embodiment of "common sense," bearers of a deposit of practices and beliefs born of close experience with reality, largely untouched by distorted views of reality too often born of abstract theories made possible by a disconnection from limits. Because they lived in more straitened circumstances, they would develop certain virtues that came of necessity, such as frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and, often, stoic cheerfulness even in the face of penury and suffering. They were often the bearers of everyday culture that acted as a kind of bottom-up law and education, offering guidance to each successive generation on how best to make one's way in a challenging world. While lacking high culture, this "low culture" was often the very essence of culture in its widest and deepest sense: the social loam in which human life grew, persevered, and was memorialised and renewed. (pp. 23-24)

I would not usually quote at such length, but have done so because these descriptions reminded me that human societies were traditionally not conceived of as a collection of discrete individuals. Instead, individuals made up "estates" of the realm, which together formed the "body politic". Just as the different parts of a body need to function well for the good of the body as a whole, so it was with the estates. Perhaps to have a healthy society you need the social classes to develop toward the virtues they are most capable of, and to expect the other social classes to do the same. 

I don't believe that the current elite sees things this way. They don't see themselves as part of one body politic together with the working classes and that each contributes significantly, albeit differently, to the health of the body as a whole.

What I am describing would fall under the category of an organic view of society:

An organic society is a concept that views society as a living, interconnected organism where the various parts work together to sustain the whole. This idea contrasts with the view of society as a collection of autonomous individuals

Or as Dr Tyler Chamberlain explains "the organic theory of society":

Just like a physical body, the body politic requires many parts, each of which must perform its assigned function if the organism is to flourish.

This view seems to have been gradually replaced by something like a "mechanical atomistic" view of society. Social atomism has been defined as,

the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms

Social atomism tends to see communities as merely aggregates of individuals:

Individualist – atomist – theories emphasize the self-sufficiency and moral autonomy of persons. They speak of freedoms, rights and exceptions; rarely or never of reciprocities, duties and connections. Individualism dominates our self perception. It encourages us to deny the ligaments and nerves of our social lives. Perceiving every society as an aggregate, it assaults or diminishes the systems ... where personal identity, security and satisfaction are achieved. Every such system is, in atomist eyes, no less an aggregate than the passengers in a bus.

Despite the emphasis on the individual, it can nonetheless diminish individuality by treating individuals as fungible (replaceable) within a technocratically ordered system. The sociologist Elizabeth Wolgast argues that,

From the atomistic standpoint, the individuals who make up a society are interchangeable like molecules in a bucket of water – society a mere aggregate of individuals. This introduces a harsh and brutal equality into our theory of human life and it contradicts our experience of human beings as unique and irreplaceable, valuable in virtue of their variety – in what they don't share – not in virtue of their common ability to reason.

This does not mean that those holding to such an outlook are uninterested in achieving social harmony. One wave of modernists promoted the idea of individual rights as a way of achieving harmony. Some second wave liberals wanted to achieve harmony by erasing distinctions. They wanted to abolish classes and nations and even distinctions between the sexes. What would be left would be equal individuals within a universalist framework of individual rights. Some moderns have called for the will of an absolute ruler to be the foundation of harmony; others have advocated for the general will of the people to play this role. I believe it's the case that some leftists today think that harmony can be achieved if all people can be made to join in a group consensus politically, with those who disagree being ostracised for "hate speech" or some form of prejudice or supremacism. 

None of these strategies has functioned adequately. It is painfully obvious that the sexes have been set against each other in modern life, as have the classes. There is an evident absence of loyalty within modern societies, and an absence of a commitment to the common goods of social life. 

I am not suggesting that past forms be revived just as they were. We should, however, look to them to see what principles within them are worthy of being taken forward into newer social conditions.