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. 

Formless modernity

Patrick Deneen, in a conversation with Albert Mohler, made the following observation that has, I believe, a great deal to it:

I often think of a line in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in which he says Americans, that is liberal democrats, will find forms to be abhorrent, they will always be opposed to forms. And what did he mean by that? 

Forms are that which create a shape or are a shape. Forms are all of the ways that, especially in nature but also not in nature, we draw distinctions. So you're [speaking to Mohler] dressed in a nice jacket and tie, I'm business casual, we would say you're more formal and I'm more informal and if I were my students I'd be wearing a hoodie and the tendency is to move toward the more informal in liberal democracy. 

And so the same mechanism that leads us to have informal Fridays or informality in address or not to be addressed as professor or doctor but as Patrick or hey you or dude, all of these are manifestations of the same phenomenon that leads to the decrial of borders, that's a form, the nation is a form; that leads to the decrial of religion as opposed to spirituality; liturgy as opposed to just simply feeling and emotion that I have, or connection or spirituality that I have; and of course it leads to the denunciation of the idea that there is somehow in nature a man and a woman. 

So it seems an odd thing to claim but the move toward informality is not disconnected in its deepest philosophical form.

[From a YouTube video, "Regime Change? A Future Beyond Classical Liberalism and Its Legacy? - With Patrick J Deneen", from 50:28, see here]

In short, a denial of form in philosophy leads, logically, both to informality but also to "formlessness", i.e., to a rejection of distinction. And so we see things "ratchet" within liberal modernity toward both of these things.

Just to underline this connection, consider the etymology of the word "formal". It first made its appearance in the late 14th century:

"pertaining to form or arrangement;" also, in philosophy and theology, "pertaining to the form or essence of a thing," from Old French formal, formel "formal, constituent" (13c.) and directly from Latin formalis, from forma "a form, figure, shape"

So the word "formal" originally had a sense of the form or essence of things, i.e., of the quality that constituted a particular thing. So what then happens when you get an early modern philosophy that stridently denies the existence of forms or essences? You will get a gradual shift to the "informal" and from there an effort to overthrow distinctions that once constituted "form".

Professor Patrick Deneen

This happened very gradually in Western culture but was already being noticed in the early 1800s. Professor Deneen cited Tocqueville describing the US in the 1830s. It was exactly in this decade that the American feminist Sarah Grimke decried the existence of distinctions between the sexes:

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

Similarly, in 1811 the English poet Shelley wrote a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener in which he prophesied of differences between the sexes that,

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

In 1792 the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that,

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

In 1820, the Austrian statesman Metternich observed of the liberals of his era that,

...one of the sentiments most natural to man, that of nationality, is erased from the Liberal catechism, and that where the word is still employed, it is used by the heads of the party as a pretext to enchain Governments, or as a lever to bring about destruction. The real aim of the idealists of the party is religious and political fusion.

The drive toward "fusion", i.e., toward a kind of oneness, is perhaps also a manifestation of the ratcheting of liberal modernity toward "informality" in the sense of indistinction. 

In recent times, the drift toward informality is clear enough. I can see it in my own profession of teaching. Students now mostly call teachers by their first name; the wearing of uniforms is becoming less common; teachers themselves often dress casually; and some schools have even stopped using the word "teacher" preferring terms like "facilitator". 

You can see the informality too in the way that girls often dress. Fashion is still a major interest to girls, but the way it is expressed is often casual and at least semi-androgynous. Teenage girls might typically dress in hoodies and tracksuit pants. These are clothes that do not express "form" in the sense of highlighting anything distinctly feminine. The lack of feminine form goes hand in hand with a casual sensibility ("relaxing into formlessness").

It's interesting to compare this with the traditional clothes worn in rural Europe ("Tracht" in the German speaking countries). These were very formal in the sense of making distinctions. The particular "Tracht" that was worn might show a person's occupation, marital status, social class, religion and home town, as well as being very distinct in terms of one's sex.

This topic also reminds me of a video I saw a few years ago in which a glamorously dressed woman (showing "form") walked through a shopping mall in a European city filled with very indistinctly dressed people, who looked at her with a degree of perplexity. 

The many and the few

Professor Deneen sometimes talks about a tradition in classical thought (going back to Aristotle) which focuses on the problem any society faces of balancing the influence of the elite and the majority. Aristotle termed a society ruled by the few, but for the common good, an aristocracy, and a society ruled by the few for their own self-interest, an oligarchy. 

Clearly we have drifted in the modern West more toward an oligarchy. Our elites have chosen to define themselves against their own working classes. The elite only allows itself to be distinct, as a class, in terms of having values that the working-class does not. If the working classes are patriotic, they are globalist and so on. 

In the past, the elite were more aristocratic, in the sense that they held to an ethos of noblesse oblige, in which their privilege obligated them to certain responsibilities toward the larger society. And, in a society in which form was still possible, the elite could aim to be distinct through what was called "good form". Good form referred to the polite customs of dress, of speech, of manners and such like that a gentleman was thought to adhere to. This good form could be intricate, and might be thought burdensome by modern standards (an American was able to write an entire book about it in 1888), but it is a better way for an elite to identify itself than to set itself against its own majority, and it reflects something positive, namely that the culture still recognised form, rather than being committed to dissolving things into a formless mass.

Traditional Australia

It is possible that traditional Australian culture was more informal than elsewhere, at least in certain respects. There is a good side to this: it can make for friendly, sincere and relaxed social relationships. The traditionally warm and laid back Australian culture has its appeal.

Perhaps, though, we need to find a balance in this. A healthy society will inevitably have form, and therefore generate some level of formality. This is particularly true in certain social settings, for instance, in the interaction of men and women; in religious observance; in public office; in public ceremonies; in the arts; and in professional settings. 

Individuality

If you lived in nineteenth century England, when formality was still more present in society, it might have seemed that the rules of society were stifling to your individuality. To rebel against form, and to live like a Bohemian or a non-conformist, might have been thought to promote a freely expressed individuality.

But time has proven this false. We now live in a more formless age. And it has not led to a flowering of individuality. Rather, we have become uniformly formless. We have been made fungible: we live as interchangeable units of a mass society. Our sex no longer stands for much, nor does any part of our identity. 

In rejecting form we have jettisoned the aspects of self that connect us to the transcendent and that make us meaningfully distinct in our personhood. 

John Lennon wanted all the world to live as one; Shelley wanted to abolish distinctions; Metternich warned that liberal moderns wanted to abolish nationhood in favour of religious and political fusion. This is not the pathway to genuine individuality. We have travelled far enough down this road to know this. 

Forms represent essence and carry purpose and meaning. There must therefore be degrees of formality and distinctions in a healthy, well-functioning society. To become indistinct is not a welcome fate, but something to be firmly resisted.

Kristol wants to replace the white American working class

Here is a good traditionalist quote from Abbé Grégoire Celier, who I believe is a French cleric affiliated with the Society of St Pius X (via Wrath of Gnon):

Note the insistence that a nation is not an aggregate of standardized and interchangeable individuals. I was reminded of the relevance of this when reading about comments made recently by Bill Kristol, a leading American neoconservative. During a debate on the difficulties being experienced by the white American working-class, Kristol took the view that rather than trying to help them by limiting low skilled immigration, they should instead be replaced via open borders:

Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? Seriously, you can make the case—this is going on too long and this is too crazy, probably, and I hope this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse.

You can make a case that America has been great because every—I think John Adams said this—basically if you’re a free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled—whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century.

This is a rampantly ideological position to take. Although it is no doubt true that some migrants do work hard to establish themselves, the statistics clearly show that many immigrant groups are far more likely to be welfare dependent than the natives. Consider this:

In 2012, an average of 41.6% of African Americans received means-tested benefits each month. About 18% of Asians or Pacific Islanders and 13% of whites received benefits each month. Thirty-six percent of Hispanics of any race received government assistance.

Bill Kristol has things exactly the wrong way around. White Americans are far less likely to be "clipping coupons" than the wave of immigrants from Mexico. And yet Kristol calls white Americans "decadent, lazy, spoiled" and believes that they need to be race replaced by "waves of people" from Mexico.

Kristol's attitude is also rampantly ideological in the sense that he sees people as interchangeable units, with those best fitted to the needs of the market being the ones who can justify their place in society. In theory, the liberal take on society is supposed to uphold the rights of the individual and to promote "individuality". But look at what happens in practice. Individuals are stripped of those qualities that tie them to a particular place, people and tradition, and are instead standardised as part of an anonymous mass serving the market, and can therefore be readily replaced.

If you can be so readily replaced on the grounds of lacking dedication to the market then you cannot claim to have much standing as an individual in society. You have value not on the grounds of your individuality but rather on your utility.

South African liberal wants to close down boys schools

Thorne Godinho is a white South African who describes himself as "a committed social liberal". He wants to shut down boys-only schools:

The behaviour of the men who attend boys-only schools, and the cultural practices that are an indelible part of the boys-school experience, clearly highlight the problems of masculinity and male-centric and dominated spaces...

...the broader culture and traditions associated with boys-only schools, provide the greatest evidence of why we need to re-consider masculinity and how we see, educate and love men.

In such male-centric and dominated spaces boys are taught about what it means to be a man and how to behave and live as a man. Beyond promoting a culture of violence and abuse, the effect of institutional culture is to promote discipline, outdated standards of masculinity and heteronormativity, and subservience to the institutional culture.

He is right about some of the effects of attending a boys-only school (I went to one myself). It's true that there tends to be a bit more violence; at the same time, though, they are masculinising environments which do promote loyalty to the school as an institution.

But why would Thorne Godinho oppose discipline, institutional loyalty and masculinity? His argument is based on liberal understandings of individuality and freedom.

There are liberals who believe that identity is always uniquely individual. If this is true, then a collective identity is something that is falsely imposed on the individual, restricting our ability to be who we truly are. Freedom, therefore, means liberation from any collective identity, so that we can be free to be who we truly are.

Godinho is consistent in treating collective identities as restrictions on the self: not only does he want men to challenge their own masculinity, he has also written a post titled "How to challenge your whiteness".

Here is Godinho putting the liberal view:

Instead of allowing young men to discover who they are on their own, a collective culture is forced upon them – one which suits their fathers, teachers and people who cling to gender essentialism.

There is no space, no freedom to live as one truly is. In these schools, individuality dies at the hands of an institutional culture which values collectivism, muscle and toeing the line.

The ethical feminist Drucilla Cornell has developed the concept of the “imaginary domain” – the space in which one can claim one’s sexual and gender identity. In the “imaginary domain” exists the freedom of every person to choose how to live, love and be – away from the stifling gender constructs shoved onto us by society. This freedom is categorically important if we truly believe that people are equal and are ethically and morally allowed to determine the outcome of their own lives.

Unfortunately, this freedom cannot co-exist with the institutional culture prevalent in boys-only schools. And the freedom to be as one chooses certainly cannot exist in a space where violence and abuse is utilised as a weapon to enforce power relations and collective subservience to the institutional culture present.

It all hinges on whether masculinity is simply a social construct or whether it expresses something real ("essentialism"). Godinho is homosexual and therefore not likely to experience masculinity as an essence. But what if developing a masculine identity is natural and healthy for boys? Then the whole liberal edifice falls down: a boy's identity and development of self will be helped, not harmed, by exposure to a masculine environment.

Furthermore, there is an inconsistency in Godinho's account of individuality. He talks at times of young men "discovering who they are on their own" which suggests that there is some unique, given identity there to be uncovered. But he then talks about the importance of a freedom of every person to choose what to be - which suggests that identity is something that has to be self-created rather than something given to us.

So are we self-creating blank slates? Or do we have a uniquely given identity?

There are problems with both views. If we are blank slates who are free to choose whatever identity we like, then identity doesn't mean much. It is a random thing that doesn't connect us to anything. But if there is a given identity, then Godinho has to drop some of the liberal pretence that we are free to choose whatever we want to be.

Finally, it should also be noted that liberals don't really give up on collective identity. They just replace natural forms of human community with political ones. Liberals are adept at forming communities based on the political principles of liberalism (i.e. where you claim membership by various kinds of political markers, e.g. using certain academic terminology, following PC codes etc.)

Godinho finishes by suggesting that girls should be used as a battering ram against boys:

Maybe the best way to ensure difference is to flood the halls of boys-only schools with young women. Maybe we need to start exposing pupils to ideas and ways of thinking which do not restrict them. We can begin to challenge the ideology of masculinity and what it’s doing to South Africa’s men.

Clarissa and the Hutterites

Clarissa, the liberal academic, has written a follow up post. She is perturbed that there are people who think than men and women are different by nature. All differences, according to her, are social constructs.

It's not surprising that Clarissa would think this way. She is committed to a liberal world view in which what distinguishes us is that we self-define who we are. In this view, our individuality is threatened by predetermined, collective identities such as that of being a man or woman or belonging to a particular ethnic group. Clarissa believes that we should work out a unique identity for ourselves, as this will give us individuality. She writes:

Sadly, many people are too stupid and lazy to work out their own individual identity, their own unique worldview. This would be a life-long project of self-improvement and learning, and many people choose not to think or make an effort. In the absence of an individual philosophy of life, they allow outside authorities to fill their inner void with content. The easiest way to organize your existence in the absence of a personality of your own is by adopting some collective identity. Gender roles work beautifully for this purpose because zero effort is required to practice them. Why figure out whether you like pink, blue or orange when you can always allow some manipulative salesperson make that decision for you and make you feel like you actually have a meaning as a result of adopting this “preference”?

If this were true then traditionalists would be lazy conformists, whereas liberals would be independent-minded individualists.

The first problem in accepting Clarissa's take on things is that she is the one following an intellectual orthodoxy. It takes a degree of non-conformism these days to be a traditionalist, whereas the liberal view is the standard ruling one. If Clarissa really spent a lifetime of study working out her own individual worldview, why did she arrive at the stock standard one? Why did she join the intellectual herd?

There's another problem with Clarissa's view that I'd like to raise and I'll illustrate my point with a photograph I posted recently of some Hutterite men:

These men belong to a small religious community sharing similar values and wearing the same clothes. If Clarissa were right, then these men ought to be low on both individuality and energy. But in the photo they don't appear that way. They don't come across as drones at all, but as healthy and spirited young men, of neither the wimpy nor the thuggish variety.

Where Clarissa and other liberals get it wrong is in thinking that we lose individuality when we are connected to deeper, inherited forms of identity. Such collective identities don't make us carbon copies of each other: if you put 100 men together you get plenty of individual particularity, just as you would if you put 100 English people together.

Where individuality is suppressed is when the individual is demoralised by experiencing life as an atomised individual. The Hutterites do not look demoralised.

And then there's the issue of identity. Clarissa uses the word but empties it of meaning. She talks about people working out "their own individual identity, their own unique worldview." As I've already noted, that would mean that Clarissa herself has no identity as she has failed to work out a unique worldview of her own, preferring instead to go with liberalism.

It means too that the word "identity" becomes curiously close in meaning to that of "worldview". That makes identity remarkably fluid and unstable - if I change my worldview then my identity changes along with it. Can there be a sense of continuity of self in such a view?

Connecting identity and worldview so closely means that identity becomes an intellectual, self-generated thing; if it has meaning, it has it as an intellectual conceit ("I'm not like the others, I think differently").

And, anyway, in Clarissa's view it is not so much identity itself that has meaning but the process of selecting identity. In other words, it is not the form of identity we end up with that carries weight or has meaning, but the intellectual effort to form one. So identity doesn't matter in itself.

In the traditional view, identity does matter. For instance, if I identify as a man, then that connects me to facets of my being (physical, emotional, spiritual); to the values associated with the masculine; to one aspect of my telos (i.e. to what I am rationally developing toward in fulfilment of my being); to other aspects of identity associated with manhood (e.g. fatherhood, being a husband); and to the roles associated with being a father or husband (amongst others).

Clarissa claims falsely that this is a passive account of identity; in fact, it is an active, complex and challenging one that no two men will complete in exactly the same way or with the same elements of success or failure.

It is also an account of identity that draws on the whole person, rather than the intellectual one alone. In this sense it encourages an "integrity" of self, i.e. a harmony of mind, body and soul, which again gives depth in comparison to a view of self based on "world view".

A return to Clarissa

I was interested to see Laura Wood run a post about Clarissa's blog. I wrote a few things about Clarissa's blog a few years ago.

Clarissa is a liberal academic. In what way is she a liberal? Well, liberals believe that the highest good is the freedom to be a self-determining individual; therefore, individuals need to be liberated from predetermined aspects of the self. What is predetermined? Our sex and our ethny both fall into this category. Therefore, Clarissa writes:

...There are many people out there who feel confused, lonely and lost in a world where modernity is destroying old certitudes, identities and ways of being. Modernity is liberating in the sense that we are a lot less tied to collective identities ascribed to us at birth. Gender identities, normative sexualities, class origins, religious backgrounds still exist, of course. Nevertheless, they are nowhere as binding as they used to be before the advent of modernity. It isn't easy to challenge the identitarian status quo, but it still can be done...

 ...At birth, you are handed a set of norms that you are supposed to observe as a representative of your gender, social class, religious denomination, etc. You accumulate enough of these collective allegiances and you can guarantee that pretty much every aspect of your life will be defined for you...Modernity is terrifying because it erodes the stability of collective identities.

Clarissa admits that liberal modernity uproots people and their identities, but she nonetheless supports this because she believes that it is the path to true individuality and to independent thinking. Traditionalists like myself would argue against this that our individuality gains in depth when we are connected to the deeper forms of individual identity, such as our identity as men or women or as members of longstanding ethnic traditions.

And in practice liberal moderns who have abandoned traditional identities rely to a considerable degree on careers for a substitute source of meaning and identity. Clarissa is no exception: she places great weight on self-actualisation through a career, to the point that she claims that women who stay home to look after their children are suffering from "self-infantilisation" and are being "castrated".

Which is why it's so interesting that Clarissa has chosen to run a post by a guest writer complaining that her female employees are too emotional and high maintenance and that she will only be hiring male employees from now on. Here is how the guest writer starts her post:

I am a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a passionate entrepreneur. I don’t just stand for equality – I have crashed the glass ceiling in every aspect of my life. I get extremely angry when I come across articles that insist there are gender differences that extend beyond physiology. I am fortunate to have had female role models who taught me through their own examples that I can accomplish absolutely anything I desire.

She is setting herself up for a big fall here. No differences between men and women apart from different body bits? Well, experience proved otherwise:

I have had women cry in team meetings, come to my office to ask me if I still like them and create melodrama over the side of the office their desk was being placed. I am simply incapable of verbalizing enough appreciation to female employees to satiate their need for it for at least a week’s worth of work...

I have developed a different approach for offering constructive criticism to male and female employees. When I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff. I plan, I prepare, I think, I run it through my business partner and then I think again. I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough. We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future. And I also have to confirm that I still like them – again and again, and again.

I am also yet to have a single male employee come to my office to give me dirt on a co-worker or share an awkward gossip-like story. My female employees though? Every. single. one.

Most of my work colleagues are women and I've haven't experienced such behaviours at this level. Even so, I smiled when she wrote "I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough" because I have the same problem with my wife. I've never really figured out a way to cushion a negative comment with her - it never works (reader advice?).

Now, you would think the obvious conclusion to draw would be "well, there are differences between men and women". But Clarissa herself has added to the bottom of the post this comment:

People: in the past 2 hours I have had to Spam 63 comments from losers who tried to inform me that “men and women are psychologically/emotionally, etc. different.” Once again, anybody who embarrasses him or herself by chirping idiotically “yes, men and women are different” will be banned outright. This will be my small investment into sparing these losers further public embarrassment. Stop wasting your time, such comments are not going through on my blog.

Interesting. Clarissa has:

a) hosted a post which complains that female employees show different behaviours to male employees

b) then claimed it is idiotic to believe that males and females are psychologically and emotionally different

Personally, I find it amazing that anyone could go through life without realising that men and women are psychologically and emotionally different. How can you be in a relationship and not have a sense of this?

Clarissa did let through one comment (from a woman) attempting to explain the different work styles of men and women. Such observations are never strictly scientific and are always highly generalised, but I found some of it interesting nonetheless (e.g. the chain of command idea).

A painting best left hidden?

Several paintings lost in the aftermath of WWII have been found hidden in an apartment in Munich. One of them is interesting for the wrong reasons. Painted by the German Otto Dix it is a reminder of how corrupt European high art was in the early 1900s. It is meant to be a portrait of a woman:



Portrait of a woman by Otto Dix


Otto Dix is one of the better known painters of the era, and the painting above is estimated to be worth about ten million dollars.

Dix was part of an art movement called the "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "New Objectivity." He belonged to the "verists" subgroup of this movement:

The verists' vehement form of realism emphasized the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered the most important of the verists.

The problem is that the other competing art movements, at least in Central Europe, were equally unappealing. You had the Dada movement, which took the nihilist line of destroying everything in the belief that something better would appear afterwards:

This dissolution was the ultimate in everything that Dada represented, philosophically and morally; everything must be pulled apart, not a screw left in it customary place, the screw-holes wrenched out of shape, the screw, like man himself, set on its way towards new functions which could only be known after the total negation of everything that had existed before. Until then: riot destruction, defiance, confusion. The role of chance, not as an extension of the scope of art, but as a principle of dissolution and anarchy. In art, anti-art.

Note the aim of "the total negation of everything that had existed before" - this I take to be an expression of nihilism.

And then you had futurism, which was also committed to destroying traditional Europe, particularly "closed and predetermined forms" (which suggests a belief in the autonomous, self-determining individual "liberated" from whatever is predetermined):

The Futurist programme was based on the refusal of all closed and predetermined forms, on the exigency of a constant renewal of the arts, and the affirmation of the individual’s creative mind above all social hierarchy.

In their manifestos of 1909 to 1913 the Futurists celebrated the dynamism of great cities, the energy and destructive force of modern inventions. The hectic, deafening chaos of a mechanized world would destroy the old morality, the old society, the outmoded human product. They saw the cycle of death and rebirth repeated in men's entanglement with the machine, with electric power and kinetic force.

I've written recently about how liberal modernity bases itself, in part, on a certain understanding of human individuality, namely a belief that the creative unfolding of self is best achieved when the individual is detached from natural forms of human community such as the family, ethny and nation. It is possible that this was part of the futurists' "affirmation of individual's creative mind above all social hierarchy."

There were Australian artists who looked on in dismay at what was happening in the Old World. Australian art was still in a golden age, particularly when it came to landscapes:

Hans Heysen, Droving into the light

Finally, back to Otto Dix. It is sometimes said that the paintings of Otto Dix were the product of his traumatic experiences in the First World War. But there is evidence that Dix was a certain kind of nihilist prior to this. His thought shows the influence of both realist and vitalist forms of nihilism. Eugene Rose described realist nihilism this way:

He is the believer, in a word, in the "nothing-but," in the reduction of everything men have considered "higher," the things of the mind and spirit, to the lower or "basic": matter, sensation, the physical...the Realist world-view seems perfectly clear...in place of vague "higher values" naked materialism and self-interest.

Dix claimed later in life that he volunteered for service in WWI because he wanted to experience violence and death close at hand, because "I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself." We learn that:

Dix himself took a perverse pleasure in the events unfolding around him. Olaf Peter relates how Dix would often appal his friends by providing a “detailed description of the pleasurable sensation to be had when bayoneting an enemy to death.”

For a time, too, it seems that Dix was influenced by a vitalist nihilism:

Dix's worldview was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and the vitalism in life's 'will to power'. He, like the majority of his contemporaries, saw World War I as an opportunity to achieve both personal and national greatness through struggle and battle. In this spirit Dix intentionally signed-up with the German Army to fight, to experience life and action as it happened.

But the war was not transforming in the way that "struggle and battle" was supposed to achieve:

He was embittered and disappointed that the war, in which he and many others of his generation had placed such great hopes of vital change, had altered neither men nor their environment.

I've set all this out because when you look at the timing of European decline it becomes clear that a certain nihilism amongst the intelligentsia was prominent even before WWI (it may even have been part of the push toward war).

Have a look at the Otto Dix painting again. That is the disfigured soul of Otto Dix looking at you, a man charged with the cultural leadership of Europe in the early decades of the 1900s.

The Pope Francis interview

Pope Francis gave a lengthy interview a few weeks ago which provoked much discussion. I've only just gotten around to reading it. I don't claim to have fully understood every nuance of it, but I thought I'd share what I found interesting.

First, I thought this was of interest:

Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.

It's worth thinking about what Pope Francis means by this. Obviously, a traditionalist would agree that "There is no full identity without belonging to a people" - so it's a nice quote to have to hand. I'm not sure though that Francis means it in the same way we would. I suspect he means that we can't show our complete moral nature unless we are in a relationship with others. For us, though, it is more literally a matter of identity: we are so constituted that our sense of ourselves, of who we are, derives in part from the ethnic or national tradition (the people) we belong to.

Second, Pope Francis does seem to reveal himself to be a "progressive" in the interview. I have to be careful to explain what I mean here. I think there is a progressive attitude to life, one which emphasises the "creative spirit," not just in terms of art, but more generally of the way in which individuals and societies "creatively unfold" themselves over time.

Those who hold to this mindset tend to see change as a good thing, as a moving forward of the individual or society. They tend to emphasise open-ended and fluid movement in society, rather than hierarchy, order or convention. They are committed to the process of self-making and the re-making of society.

There is a positive side to this, as a progressive politics will often attract those who are committed to social change rather than passively observing from the sidelines. But the great weakness is that progressives, so committed to what is creatively open-ended, don't have as strong a sense of how we (and the reality we inhabit) are constituted in ways that provide us with our purposes - our intended paths of development that best fulfil who we are. Progressives, therefore, can seem more interested in the process of change rather than having an adequate measure of what the quality of that change really is.

Pope Francis is not radically a progressive, but he does err on the side of progressivism. For instance, he emphasises the idea of history as a movement of progress:

human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth

Here is another example of Pope Francis rejecting the "static":

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things.

I do have to say that we traditionalists could learn something from Pope Francis when he is in this "progressive" mode. He stresses the need to be dynamic, to be fruitful, to be searching, to be creative, to have audacity and courage. Here is an example of Pope Francis showing a commitment to shaping society:

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics.

Somehow we have to take the best of the progressive mindset and meld it with the best of the traditionalist one. We have to take the strength of traditionalism, which is to have a close sense of what is good within created reality, and of an order within which these goods can be harmonised, which then gives direction and meaning (a telos) to human actions, and combine it with the strength of progressivism, which harnesses the creative spirit within human nature to shape individual life and to motivate a strong commitment to the shaping of society.

An Oberlin strong point?

My last post mentioned Oberlin College in the U.S. It's well known for its liberal politics. On its homepage it markets itself as follows:

Oberlin is a place of intense energy and creativity, built on a foundation of academic, artistic, musical excellence. With its longstanding commitments to access, diversity, inclusion, Oberlin is the ideal laboratory in which to study and design the world we want.

Last month I tried to develop some ideas about the way that liberals understand individuality (e.g. here). One part of my argument concerns human nature. We traditionalists accept aspects of human nature that are rejected by liberals, such as masculinity and femininity. We tend to think of ourselves as having a more comprehensive and realistic account of human nature than liberals.

And this belief is justified. However, there does exist one aspect of human nature that liberals do accept and focus on, namely the "creative spirit" aspect of our nature. Liberals express this creative spirit when they emphasise individuality as a creative unfolding of self; when they value the achievement of being self-made; when they reject (formally at least) convention; when they set out to shape the world after their own design; and when they look toward human progress.

That particular focus does bring some advantages to liberalism. It will tend to attract those who have an energy and commitment to making real world changes; who have a degree of idealism about social activism; and who will express themselves in idealistic language as being socially committed.

We need to take some of this ground for ourselves. That's one reason I'm not keen on labels such as "reactionary" or "curmudgeon" (there are even problems with "traditionalist" and "conservative"). We need to incorporate the creative spirit into our own politics, by bringing out the way that our politics serves individuality (as the creative unfolding of self) and contributes to the progress of human societies.

Look at the way that Oberlin markets itself. It is appealing to the creative spirit that I have tried to describe: "a place of intense energy and creativity" and "the ideal laboratory in which to study and design the world we want."

We should try to combine our own political advantages (a less abstract, detached and individualistic understanding of the human personality) with those of liberalism (a focus on creative energy, social activism and taking things forward).

John Paul II on heritage

In my post on "The Elite Consensus" I argued that a core problem with liberalism is not so much materialism or even selfishness but a faulty concept of individuality:

From the liberal perspective, what we do in the family or as members of a tribe is simply conventional and doesn't therefore express individuality. They prefer the idea of an existence in which there is no entity larger than ourselves, in which there is a purely personal identity (i.e. I identify with myself) and in which relationships are incidental to our true purposes. In other words, they identify individuality (the creative unfolding of ourselves as persons) with a kind of detached self-making.

So the problem isn't at its heart one of materialism or selfishness. Instead, it's a concept of individuality which detaches the individual from particular forms of identity, belonging and connectedness, and also from those goods embedded within our own nature and reality which guide our development in a particular direction.

If the key problem is not selfishness then the churches are not going to change the course of liberal modernity by emphasising selflessness. If, instead, the key problem is a faulty concept of individuality, one which emphasises a detached self-making, then the churches need to put forward an alternative concept of individuality, one which emphasises the way that we fulfil our individuality as created beings.

The churches are mostly failing to do this, but there are exceptions. The example I'm going to post today is a long one, but well worth reading. It's from an apostolic letter, Dilecti Amici, written by Pope John Paul II in 1985. The letter was addressed to the youth of the world; the following section is on inheritance:

11. In the vast sphere in which the plan of life, drawn up in youth, comes into contact with "other people", we have touched upon the most sensitive point. Let us go on to consider that this central point, at which our personal "I" opens up to life "with others" and "for others" in the marriage covenant, finds in Sacred Scripture a very important passage: "Man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife".

This word "leaves" deserves special attention. From its very beginning the history of humanity passes-and will do so until the end- through the family. A man enters the family through the birth which he owes to his parents, his father and mother, and at the right moment he leaves this first environment of life and love in order to pass to a new one. By "leaving father and mother", each one of you at the same time, in a certain sense, bears them within you; you assume the manifold inheritance that has its direct beginning and source in them and in their family. In this way too, when you leave, each one of you remains: the inheritance that you receive links you permanently with those who passed it on to you and to whom you owe so much. And the individual-he and she-will continue to pass on the same inheritance. Thus also the fourth commandment of the Decalogue is of such great importance: "Honour your father and your mother".

It is a question here first of all of the heritage of being a human person, and then of being one in a more precisely defined personal and social situation. Here even the physical similarity to one's parents plays its part. Still more important is the whole heritage of culture, at the almost daily centre of which is language. Your parents have taught each one of you to speak the language which constitutes the essential expression of the social bond with other people. This bond is established by limits which are wider than the family itself or a given environment. These are the limits of at least a tribe and most often those of a people or a nation into which you were born.

In this way the family inheritance grows wider. Through your upbringing in your family you share in a specific culture; you also share in the history of your people or nation. The family bond means at the same time membership of a community wider than the family and a still further basis of personal identity. If the family is the first teacher of each one of you, at the same time-through the family-you are also taught by the tribe, people or nation with which you are linked through the unity of culture, language and history.

This inheritance likewise constitutes a call in the ethical sense. By receiving and inheriting faith and the values and elements that make up the culture of your society and the history of your nation, each one of you is spiritually endowed in your individual humanity. Here we come back to the parable of the talents, the talents which we receive from the Creator through our parents and families, and also through the national community to which we belong. In regard to this inheritance we cannot maintain a passive attitude, still less a defeatist one, as did the last of the servants described in the parable of the talents. We must do everything we can to accept this spiritual inheritance, to confirm it, maintain it and increase it. This is an important task for all societies, especially perhaps for those that find themselves at the beginning of their independent existence, or for those that must defend from the danger of destruction from outside or of decay from within the very existence and essential identity of the particular nation.

Writing to you young people, I try to have before my mind's eye the complex and separate situations of the tribes, peoples and nations of our world. Your youth, and the plan of life which during your young years each one of you works out, are from the very beginning part of the history of these different societies, and this happens not "from without" but pre-eminently "from within". It becomes for you a question of family awareness and consequently of national awareness: a question of the heart, a question of conscience. The concept of "homeland" develops immediately after the concept of "family", and in a certain sense one within the other. And as you gradually experience this social bond which is wider than that of the family, you also begin to share in responsibility for the common good of that larger family which is the earthly "homeland" of each one of you. The prominent figures of a nation's history, ancient or modern, also guide your youth and foster the development of that social love which is more often called "love of country".

We are not abstracted, detached beings. Our individuality unfolds within the social bonds of family and our larger family - our tribe or nation. We are spiritually endowed in our individual humanity through the social love that is more often called "love of country".

The elite consensus

What matters in life? There seems to be a consensus amongst the social elite, whether on the right or left, when it comes to this question. It is assumed that the real aim of life is to make yourself in the market. What is considered important morally is that nobody be disadvantaged by factors outside their control, such as their class, race or sex, when it comes to workforce participation.

It's understandable that the elite would share this assumption about life. The kind of people who rise to positions of prominence are often ambitious people who are highly committed to their career and who move within circles in which career is associated with power, wealth, fame and achievement.

But the elite consensus is a problem. First, it is highly reductive and leaves out much of what traditionally anchored human life. Second, it is dissolving of important forms of human identity and connectedness.

Let's take family as an example. The elite consensus assumes that career is what matters most and that the key thing is that family roles and responsibilities don't impede job opportunities, or earnings or status. And so the emphasis is on career being the organising centre of life, including family life, rather than family being an independent institution with its own principles of organisation.

That's why there is hardly anybody in mainstream politics who can really be counted as pro-family, regardless of what political party they are in. The effort to keep the family distinct from the market has failed.

It's a similar story when it comes to a larger communal identity (whether of ethny or nation). If what matters is the individual making himself in the market, then the most heroic person is the one who is an economic migrant, i.e. the person who pitches himself from one country to another to improve their job opportunities or their material conditions of life. But the mass immigration this justifies undermines the historic communities linked by a common ethnicity, i.e. by ties of ancestry, history, culture, religion and language.

In theory, the counterweight to the elite consensus is supposed to come from the churches. But in general the churches have done a poor job in providing an alternative account of what a human life is for.

At times, the churches emphasise the idea that human life is about selfless service to others. This does seem to be set against the elite consensus as it is a non-market and non-materialistic ideal of life. But in some ways it misses the target. Yes, it's true that the elite consensus can lead some people toward material ambition (some feminists for example are very focused on the holding of power in society). But what seems to be really at stake here is not so much materialism, but ideas about human individuality (the unfolding of the human personality).

From the liberal perspective, what we do in the family or as members of a tribe is simply conventional and doesn't therefore express individuality. They prefer the idea of an existence in which there is no entity larger than ourselves, in which there is a purely personal identity (i.e. I identify with myself) and in which relationships are incidental to our true purposes. In other words, they identify individuality (the creative unfolding of ourselves as persons) with a kind of detached self-making.

So the problem isn't at its heart one of materialism or selfishness. Instead, it's a concept of individuality which detaches the individual from particular forms of identity, belonging and connectedness, and also from those goods embedded within our own nature and reality which guide our development in a particular direction.

If the churches are to challenge the elite consensus, then it doesn't help much to emphasise an abstract selflessness, or for that matter abstract moral concepts such as justice or equality. These, if anything, only further encourage the abstracted, detached concept of individuality that the liberal elite operates with.

To be an effective counterweight, the churches would have to emphasise the way that we fulfil our individuality as created beings, made for particular relationships within particular social entities. To be fair, it's possible to find instances of church leaders doing just this (I've got a fine example lined up for a future post), but the general trend runs the other way.

Brandis 2

I've been looking at a statement on liberal belief by George Brandis (1984). Here is the next part of his essay:

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism. Firstly, conservatism and socialism have in common the belief that the basic units, the 'building blocks', of human society are structures much vaster than the individual.

The conservative sees society as a naturally ordered, harmonious hierarchy; while in the eyes of the socialist, the basic structures of society are irreconcilably hostile classes...Both agree that individual persons are but incidents of larger entities. Although liberal social theory does not deny the existence or significance of such larger categories, it insists upon the priority of the individual. It is the distinctive claim of liberalism that the individual person is the central unit of society and is therefore prior to and of greater significance than the social structures through which he pursues his ends.

Brandis doesn't frame things the right way. If you want to defend the individual then you have to defend the social entities which he belongs to, which express his social nature, which make his social commitments possible, which help to define him and which bring significance and meaning to his life.

So it's not helpful to think of the individual as being either prior to the social entities or subordinate to them.

If your starting point is the autonomous individual as the central unit of society, then you are not doing the individual any favours as you are taking him as an abstract entity and stripping him of important aspects of who he is and of how he fulfils himself in life.

It is a false and artificial starting point.

It's a new dating world for women too

Laura Wood has had several very interesting posts up lately. One of them is titled Going Mad. A young woman who was brought up to be a feminist wrote a letter to Laura Wood expressing her frustration at not being able to find a man who wants to form a family with her:

I am a young woman in my twenties. I have a Ph.D. and was raised to be extremely feminist. To make a long story very short, I am very lonely. I am attractive and pleasant enough and have never had trouble attracting men, but they (or at least the ones I meet) tend to want only one thing. Over time, I have discovered that I have very conservative …"tendencies" and have been lurking at your site and others like it for years, rather wistfully I must say. I long to be a wife and mother and to have a lifelong companion. I love art, music, and literature, and that is why I continued my studies, but while they have been rewarding, they have only made me lonelier in the end, because the students are all very liberal and even the ones who are married are not in it for the long haul. Divorce is always considered an option and many of them engage in behaviors I wouldn’t consider at all appropriate in a marriage, like flirting or even adultery.

In response I feel I have gone somewhat mad. My parents and friends have told me that I should focus only on my career and have treated my desire for marriage as a sickness, as if it should be a cherry on the top of my life instead of my life itself. So I feel that there is something wrong with me. On top of that, I have no idea where to find a community or a dependable, hard-working, masculine man who is looking for the same things I am and wants a marriage for the long haul, a true lifelong commitment.

The letter highlights a problem with the liberal concept of society. I quoted George Brandis's concept of society in a recent post of my own:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

If it's true that all of our needs and aspirations are unique, then society is going to be thought of as a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing their own ends. That works if all you want in life is casual hook-ups with the opposite sex. Atomised individuals can interact with each other on this basis. But what if you want something more than this? What if you want to form a family?

Then things become more difficult. As Laura's reader points out, matters of culture then become important. It starts to matter if there is a culture of stable commitments within a community. It matters too if men are dependable and hard-working or not. And there needs as well to be a place, a community, where those who want to form families can meet together.

So a culture and a community, formed on the basis of shared or common aspirations rather than uniquely individual ones, become important in an area of life that is highly significant to us, namely our opportunity to marry and have children.

In a strongly liberal environment, like that on a campus, the effects of atomisation and the disruption to culture and community are likely to be stronger. So my advice to Laura's PhD reader would be to make a determined effort to meet men outside of the campus scene (even if this is counterintuitive, given the usual human drive toward assortative mating).

It's a pity that the traditionalist movement isn't developed enough yet to offer the kind of community she is looking for. I would point out to readers who are feeling a bit dispirited that if we did grow a bit more, so that we were even a small community, we would become a beacon for those people, like Laura's reader, who are searching for an alternative.

Brandis: unique identities, individual ends

It's uncommon for members of the right-liberal parties to set out their beliefs in a systematic way. Back in 1984, George Brandis did just this (I am assuming he is now Senator George Brandis of the Australian Liberal Party).

So what did George Brandis set out as his beliefs?

a) The liberal theory of society

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism.     

Traditionalists strongly disagree with this view of human society. We would not use the word "unique" when describing identities and aspirations. The reality is more complex than this: some aspects of our identity and aspirations are uniquely individual, but others are shared and communal.

Is it really unique for instance that I have a male identity? Is it unique that I identify with my ethnic tradition? Is it unique that I aspired as a young man to find an attractive woman to love and with whom I could form a family?

Some aspects of our identity and aspirations, far from being uniquely individual, are part of an eternal human condition. Does that mean that it is all dull conformity? No, because these identities and aspirations are refracted differently within each human personality.

It is important to get this right, because if you take the liberal view that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations, then you end up with the liberal idea of society as being a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing ends that can only possibly be known to them.

What you lose is a sense of the larger social entities which help form individual identity, to which individuals feel a sense of belonging and attachment, and which provide the social context (the framework) for the lives of individuals (i.e. for expressing our nature as men and women).

It is terribly mistaken, in the traditionalist view, to base a theory of society on "the pursuit of individual ends." Let's say that we have a masculine identity and it is a part of this identity to play an effective role as a husband and father and also to uphold the larger communal tradition we belong to. Our "individual ends" cannot then be separated from a number of "social ends" relating to family and community. Our social ends and our individual ends blend together.

That possibly helps to explain why it doesn't feel free to be limited to individual ends. If we are limited in this way, we can't fully pursue some of the more significant ends in life, so part of our personality feels bottled up or stifled.

There's much more to comment on in George Brandis's essay, but I don't like to make these more theoretical posts too long, so I'll resume discussion in a future post.

So what did Georgiou the compassionate moderate think about Anglos?

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about the so-called "moderates" within the Liberal Party (in Australia, the Liberal Party is the major right-wing party).

My argument was that the moderates should really be termed the "radicals" or the "purists" because they want a pure form of liberalism rather than one fused with anything conservative.

They reject pluralism. They do not want to balance a range of goods together within a coherent framework. Instead, they insist that there is one overriding good, that of individual autonomy.

This makes them the more ideological wing of the Liberal Party and it means that their social policy will have more radical effects on society, as it means that society has to be reshaped to fit just one primary good.

I quoted one of the leading "moderates" (i.e. purists) Senator George Brandis, in support of my argument. Brandis identifies the one goal as "individual freedom" but he makes it clear that he means "freedom as individual autonomy":

the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives.

in qualifying the Liberal Party's commitment to the freedom of the individual as its core value, and weighing it against what he often called social cohesion, Howard made a profound departure from the tradition of Deakin and Menzies.

Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life [i.e. to be a self-determining, self-creating autonomous individual]

Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...

Brandis does not allow for competing values. He is not a fusionist but a liberal purist. As such he is not a moderate liberal but a radical one.

But they like to think of themselves as moderates, and as the "compassionate" liberals, and are treated as such in the media. For instance, when one of the leading "moderates" in the Liberal Party, Petro Georgiou, retired last year, we had letters of praise in the papers such as this:

Farewell Petro, your honesty and compassion to all humans will surely be missed. Here passes the last great 'liberal' leaving the party...

Compassion to all humans? Well, he didn't extend much compassion to the majority of the population when he wrote back in the 1970s:

We as Liberals are committed to encouraging and supporting diversity in our multicultural society. We reject the sterile Anglo-conformity of past days.

Sterile Anglo-conformity of past days? So we are to treat the culture that came before 1970s style multiculturalism as sterile?

That is not a moderate or a compassionate view. It is a radical recasting of society and one which is cold to the consequences for those belonging to the Anglo tradition.

The quote comes from an Andrew Bolt column in today's Herald Sun. Bolt does a good job attacking the claims that Australia was always multicultural, but he himself only puts forward assimilation as an alternative.

Neither option is appealing or coherent. The multiculturalists believe you can have open borders and that the immigrants can all live harmoniously in their own cultural groups. It doesn't work out well. If you put 140 ethnic groups into Melbourne and Sydney, it becomes difficult for a traditional culture to maintain itself. People tend to become deracinated and end up adopting a pop culture lifestyle based on entertainment and consumerism. 140 cultures stuck together effectively means no culture, just shopping malls. You need a bit of distance and continuity to maintain a real cultural tradition.

In Europe the outcome has been even more problematic. There you have Muslim immigrants in large numbers, some of whom express non-liberal values. So the liberals in power decide the solution is to pull the plug on multiculturalism in favour of assimilation.

But can assimilation work? Maybe if numbers were small. But the liberal commitment to open borders means that numbers are constantly growing. So how then is it assumed that there will always be a confident Anglo majority culture for the immigrants to assimilate into? The Anglo population will necessarily lose its confidence as its numbers and its sense of place recedes. As it declines, the newer immigrant groups will lose their desire to assimilate into a culture which is in retreat.

It hasn't been thought through. It's not enough for Bolt to call for assimilation. He needs to rethink the whole liberal framework which has brought about such unworkable options. In particular, he needs to consider why liberals are so ideologically committed to open borders.