The levelling down of Western culture

I attended a seminar recently and listened to the keynote speaker for just a few minutes before predicting that he would be left-wing. Sure enough, later in the presentation he spoke about how important anti-sexism and anti-racism were to him and how sincerely he supported Aboriginal issues.

Why was I confident in predicting this? It was because of the way his mind operated. I wrote recently about how men's minds tend to run along a vertical axis, so that they are able to orient upwards toward things that are above one's own thoughts and feelings. Women's minds, in contrast, often run sideways along a horizontal axis and so can be attuned in a close in way to what others are thinking and feeling.

This man was intelligent, had masculine interests, and had a masculine systematising mind. But he was painfully sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of those in the audience. He worried that we might be upset about some of the things he would speak about, and he assured us we could take leave and go outside if we ever felt uncomfortable. At one point in the presentation he talked about the importance of safe spaces and the need to practise self-care. 

His mind was so attuned to that more feminine horizontal axis that I knew the vertical axis would be undeveloped. And without a vertical axis, I don't think it's very likely that a person will be genuinely traditionalist. It's not that everyone with that more upwardly oriented mind will be traditionalist, but it does have considerable predictive power.

And here's the issue. Most of the Anglo intellectual men I know are lacking in this power of the mind. They are masculine in certain respects; they are intelligent; and they are intellectually curious. But they have been deprived of any growth along the vertical axis. And this is at least a part explanation of why they are so hard to draw into a traditionalist politics.

So how might a society be organised so that this masculine power of the mind were better developed? The most direct path would be to explicitly teach a more traditional metaphysics. But this is not what I want to focus on. I want to consider what a culture that draws out this aspect of the mind might look like.

The basic principle here is that anything that draws our mind upwards to something higher than us, or larger than our own individual self, to which we are indebted, or which creates a sense of reverence or awe or love or respect, is helping to cultivate a power of the mind along that vertical axis.

I'm not going to attempt a complete list of what fits this criteria or put them in any kind of rank. But I would include a sense of pride in our own origins. If we feel connected to our own tradition, to our culture and to the achievements of our own people, then we have a love for something that extends across time through many generations; we respect the achievements of our forebears; and we feel a sense of duty to uphold standards that have been set for us. This is something that lifts us spiritually up along that vertical axis, to a good that exists independently of us but that draws out our commitments.

It is no accident that those who wish to embed a modernist "leveller" metaphysics so ruthlessly attack this sense of pride in origins. It is one of the key battles in any culture war. Here in Australia we lost that battle some decades ago and were made to feel ashamed. When I talk to young left-wing men it is obvious that this has had a considerable impact.

I would also point out that this type of patriotic feeling helps to develop masculine spirituality. For this reason, it is unwise for the churches to regard it negatively or to undermine it. As a positive example of how the churches have supported this higher aspect of the mind consider the Catholic catechism which teaches that the fourth commandment "requires honour, affection, and gratitude toward elders and ancestors".

A culture that develops the upward motion of the mind will also be oriented toward the heroic. Why? Because the heroic involves a selfless commitment to a larger good that we are willing to courageously defend. Or it denotes a kind of inspired action, sometimes via a test of skill or strength, that distinguishes character and leadership and which draws admiration. 

To illustrate how flattened our sense of the heroic has become consider these statues located very close to each other in the Melbourne CBD. The first is of the explorer Matthew Flinders. Erected in 1925, it shows a dignified and determined man with the sailors on either side pushing the boat forward representing strength and endurance. 

The second group of statues was commissioned in 1994 to honour three of Melbourne's founding fathers, namely Batman, Swanston and Hoddle. It is, at best, whimsical.

The point of embedding the heroic within a culture is not to encourage self-aggrandizement, or to focus on the achievement of fame as a life goal. It is to encourage that sense men have of wanting to push into the higher reaches of their own nature and to achieve some higher good in doing so. It is an encouragement toward a nobility of character and purpose. And, in setting high standards, it pushes men to consider higher goods embedded within the reality of existence that a man might embody. 

Architecture can reflect the kind of axis that a community is most oriented toward. It is notable that traditional church architecture here in Melbourne emphasised spires, presumably reflecting an upward orientation, as with St Patrick's Cathedral:

Whereas the modern parish churches look more like halls, which perhaps might encourage a sideways orientation on fellowship, but not reverence or awe:

While on the topic of churches, worship itself can potentially develop that upward orientation of the mind. Worship helps develop the vertical power of the mind when it is reverent, when it encourages a sense of the sacred, and when it expresses gratitude and indebtedness to God. There is room too for cultivating fellowship in worship, which represents the more horizontal axis of the mind, but if this is made dominant, then there is a loss of balance, i.e., the modernist "levelling" influence has made itself felt.

The attitude a society has to male authority figures will also reveal how much it has succumbed to a leveller ethos. The father is the most common male authority figure, and he represents the larger ordering principles within society and within reality. As Lawrence Auster put it:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father.

This explains why children who rebel against their own father will often similarly rebel against the larger society. It is notable, for instance, how many leaders of second wave feminism did not have a good relationship with their fathers, often because those fathers were absent: 

Germaine Greer: wrote a book titled Daddy We Hardly Knew You.

Kate Millett: her father abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old.

Eva Cox: her father left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".

Jill Johnston: her father left when she was a baby. She wrote a book titled: Mother Bound: Autobiography in Search of a Father.

Gloria Steinem: she said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year".

Rebecca West: her father left when she was three, both she and her two sisters became radical feminists.

Mary Eberstadt explained much of the fury of the BLM riots in the USA in 2020 along these lines:

Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.

That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period...It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.

She connects the leaders of the BLM movement to a history of fatherlessness:

The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age two. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact, also when she was two. The author of another bestseller, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action, was raised by his grandmother. Colin Kaepernick’s biological father left his mother before he was born, but he was then adopted and raised by a white family. James Baldwin, a major inspiration for today’s new racialist writers, grew up with an abusive stepfather; his mother left his biological father before he was born. The list could go on.

So the father is a symbol for a larger order that includes family, faith and patria ("fatherland"). Our word "piety" is derived from the Latin word "pietas" which included honouring not only your own father but all those responsible for your existence, including God and your own people. So Mary Eberstadt is expressing a long tradition in Western thought when she connects filial piety not only to a respect for our own father but also a loyalty toward God and country as well.

Our society clearly has issues with male authority figures. Since about the 1980s, fathers have been portrayed in popular culture as, at best, loveable but harmless figures of fun. Worse has been the attitude of certain feminists, who have portrayed fathers as figures of violence and oppression, as did Kate Gilmore when appointed to lead the Keating Government's gender campaign in 1994:

You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.

When we level down society, by casting down male authority figures, we lose access to the vertical structure of reality, in particular through the undermining of filial piety. It is important to note, however, that there is a balance here too between the vertical and the horizontal. Fathers, for instance, will not be held in esteem if they only claim a place in their children's lives through being in a position of authority. Fathers need to build warm human relationships with their children as well. Similarly, those men who occupy positions of authority in society need to be careful not to abuse their power or else trust will be catastrophically lost.

What else indicates the distinction between vertically oriented traditional societies and horizontally oriented modernist ones? Well, certain types of standards. For instance, most traditional cultures recognise different degrees of formality. This makes sense if you have a hierarchical understanding of reality, i.e., one that points upwards. It also makes sense in a society which believes in honour, i.e., in showing respect and in keeping faith. 

And so a traditional society will maintain distinctions of sorts. There might be certain courtesies. There might be titles of address. There might be ceremonies and rituals. Different levels of politeness, including of speech. 

There is a balance to be held here as well. Too much of this can be stifling and create too much social distance (and provoke a backlash). But the general trend in modern societies is, again, to level things down. We have lost the courtesies between men and women. School students increasingly address teachers by their first name. Formal dress standards are not what they once were. This might not seem much in itself, but the issue is what it points to. By continuing to collapse "degrees and distinctions" we are losing access to one dimension of reality.

Standards of conduct are also relevant here, or at least when they uphold a genuine moral good or virtue. When we abide by these we are acknowledging a higher good that has a claim on us - we are lifting the horizons of the reality we inhabit. And so in traditional societies there will be social norms and taboos that will be generally respected as meaningful. 

Again, the general trend in modern levelling societies is toward a loss of standards. If anyone doubts this I suggest they listen to the lyrics of many of the popular songs of today. What is expressed is undeniably crude, as if there were no meaningful standards, which, if true, would mean no higher moral dimension standing above us. There would be a flattening of the reality we inhabit.

I don't believe traditionalists need to go to any extremes in countering all this. What I'm suggesting is that the metaphysics that young intellectual men are brought up with leads them to an understanding of the world that lacks a vertical dimension, and that this is then reflected in the culture and in their politics (with the cultural changes then reinforcing the difficulties they have in relating to traditional ways of being). It is one reason why they come across at times as "mentally blind", in the sense of not being able to comprehend what it might be like to have a sense of loyalty or of patriotic feeling, or, for that matter, to genuinely register the transcendent experiences of life.

Left behind

I ventured into left-wing Twitter recently. A poster had asked how his fellow left-wingers would describe those on the right in a single word. The most interesting answer was this:

I don't think this is right at all and said so:

It led to an exchange which made it clear that what traditionalists believe to be the common good differs greatly from the leftist understanding. The leftists pointed me to an article on Sweden the gist of which was the idea that Sweden was oriented to the common good up to the 1980s when the Social Democrats began to privatise the economy; it then led to a period of growing inequality which all sides of politics are now attempting to overcome.

Here is the leftist ideal:

The centre-left has governed the country for 81 of the past 100 years, striving to be “the people’s home” – or folkhemmet – in which the social democratic state was like a family, caring for all and with no one left behind. Sweden became one of the most socially equal countries in the world.

So the "common good" means that the state ensures social equality, which apparently means a levelling out of all kinds of distinctions - of class, of ethnicity, of sex:

Karl Möller seems an unlikely poster child for a war on inequality. He is the lone male among a dozen women, each with a baby in her arms.

Möller, 45, is part of a city-wide programme in Gothenburg to mix social classes, genders and ethnicities to make Sweden’s second city a more equal place to live.

New integrated “family centres” such as this one, which opened in March, aim to target support at the families who need it most. “It is important for us to be in mixed areas to create more equality,” says manager Helen Antonson.

This concept of a common good hasn't worked on its own terms - Sweden has seen a growing inequality in income and health for some time. Worse, though, is that the concept itself is misconceived: it dissolves many of the connections between people through which stable forms of community are formed. It therefore tends to create anomie and social withdrawal - an excessive individualism rather than community and a common good.

Consider the following graph comparing the percentage of lone person households in Europe in 2016: 

In Sweden the percentage is double some other European countries. In other parts of the world the corresponding figure is often under 10%:

Why do so many Swedes live alone? One Swedish historian put it this way:

Why, then, does Sweden stand out when it comes to the high number of single households? Trägårdh says that Sweden is a "radically individualistic" country with a social structure that enables people to live independently - that is, to avoid having to rely on one another.

"It has something to do both with values and with the types of institutions we have created in Sweden in more recent decades," explains Trägårdh.

"Individual autonomy has been important for a long time here."

To try to make what is happening here clearer, think of it this way. The Swedes are starting out with an individualistic view of man, i.e. that we create meaning for ourselves as autonomous, self-defining individuals. The "common good" part only comes later and consists of a commitment to a state sponsored egalitarianism, in which distinctions between people are levelled.

A traditionalist common good looks very different because it begins with our view of man, namely that our own good is inextricably intertwined with the good of the larger natural forms of community we belong to, and through which we obtain aspects of our identity, our social commitments, our roles and purposes, our loves and attachments, our connection to a particular culture and tradition, and our connection to generations past, present and future.

The leftist "common good" emphasises independence over interdependence and it wants to level away the distinctions on which a traditional common good is formed. As an example of this mindset, consider the way that Monica Silvell, a Swedish bureaucrat, explains the change of ideas about men and women in Sweden:

The old view of men and women complementing one another was replaced by the notion that the sexes were basically similar.

There is a levelling of distinctions ("the sexes were basically similar) and a loss of interdependence ("the older view of men and women complementing one another"). There is no "common good" here anymore, in the sense of the sexes needing each other to fulfil aspects of their own selves. The "common good" becomes, instead, something very different: a commitment to the egalitarian liberal state. As we have seen, this leftist "common good" tends to create "aloneness" rather than stable forms of community.

Why are we denatured?

At the very beginning, when I first became involved in traditionalist politics, I wrote about the need to uphold the fully natured person. This was a person who, for example, was still deeply connected to people and place, who felt a love for these things and a corresponding duty to defend them, who sensed the inherent good and meaning within them, who felt enriched by them. I was aware, even back then, of a denaturing process within political modernity through which these parts of our own selves were being lost.

I have come to see three reasons why we are being denatured. I'll briefly mention the first two, as it's the third one that needs drawing out.

1. Liberal autonomy theory

I've written about this at length previously. Liberals define freedom as maximising individual autonomy. This is understood to mean the ability of an individual to self-determine who he is and what he does. The terrible problem with this formula is that it consigns everything predetermined in life to a negative role as a fetter on our personal freedom that we need to be liberated from. This includes our sex and our ethny, which are not self-determined and which liberals therefore believe ought not to matter.

In other words, there are significant aspects of our nature that are rejected because they are predetermined and don't fit in with the liberal way of defining human freedom. They are not allowed to matter, and people who think they do are reviled with words like "sexist" or "bigoted". There is a suppression of what we are allowed to express about our own natures.

2. The levelling instinct

There are people who reject the vertical axis of reality. They do not see the benefit in an ordered hierarchy, nor do they wish to serve the higher, transcendent goods that exist outside and above them. They see distinctions negatively as an affront to a levelled, individual existence.

There are many reasons why people might go down this path. A more natural one is that civilisation often does involve artifices, such as people having to work hard to maintain status. There is a very longstanding counter impulse to wish for a more simple, pre-civilised life - an Arcadian life.

This evolved, however, into a more damaging ideological view within Western thought. The idea was that men were not to be redeemed in religious terms, but through a radical restructuring of society. Men, it was argued, were naturally good but corrupted by the power structures within civilisation. If you could abolish these power structures, man's nature would be redeemed and you could have an Edenic life of freedom and equality.

Originally, the power structure targeted was the Ancien Regime of kings, priests and aristocrats. Then later the power structure was capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In more recent times patriarchy (men) and whiteness.

Those who hold to this ideological view place their faith in a future utopia that will arise via the effort to level down human existence. John Lennon's song "Imagine" is a kind of anthem for those who follow this mindset: the ultimate aim is to have no nations, nothing above us, no distinctions but only a "oneness". But this is a denial of the fully natured person who is alive to transcendent goods, to partial loyalties and to natural distinctions.

People become levellers for other reasons too. Those who are in a state of father rebellion will often reject all that the father represents symbolically, including the vertical axis of reality. And throughout history there have been those who pridefully reject the authority of anything outside themselves, who declare "non serviam".

3. The technocratic mindset

On the right people often declare the levellers to be communists. It is true that Marxism is an example of a leveller movement, but levelling is something that predates Marxism. In the early 1800s, for instance, the first English group to call themselves liberals (a radical group which included the poet Shelley) held leveller views, as do many ordinary middle-class white leftists today.

The problem with the next reason for the denaturing of Western man is that it is not confined to the left. Whilst it is a feature of leftist thought (including communist thought) it is just as common on the right, even amongst those who consider themselves "Tory". It has so deeply infiltrated the Western mind that it covers the political spectrum.

Here is the problem. In the early modern era, Western man decided to place himself outside of nature. For this reason alone it was inevitable that Western man would become denatured.

Professor Patrick Deneen describes the premodern view of man's relationship to nature as follows:

Premodern political thought....understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order. Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was required to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. [Why Liberalism Failed, p. 35]

In this premodern view, we are necessarily embedded within nature - within our own nature and that of the reality we inhabit - with our purposes being found within the nature given to us. It was commonplace within Western thought for people to seek to live within the nobler aspects of their nature, particularly those that linked the individual to sources of meaning within the natural order.

This began to change in the early modern period. The new scientific outlook saw man as standing outside of nature, commanding it for his own purposes. In the longer run this led to a technocratic mindset in which the natural world was viewed as an inert resource to be organised efficiently for the purposes of quantitative growth.

This mindset spills over into attitudes toward people, who come to be seen in technocratic terms as resources or as forms of capital to be employed in the most effective way for growth or for strategic advantage. People are no longer seen as fully natured creatures embedded within distinct traditions, connected deeply to people and place, with particular ("partial") loyalties and with different roles in society.

This has been a significant problem since at least the 1940s. It was in that decade that academics and bureaucrats within the public service decided that Anglo-Australia was to be phased out, because statistical growth targets required human capital from other sources. One Australian MP even suggested, in the aftermath of WWII, that German children be removed from their parents en masse and brought to far off Australia because it would have strategic benefits.

The Australian right today is divided between those with this technocratic mindset and those with a more genuinely traditional outlook. It was announced yesterday, for instance, that the British PM, Boris Johnson, had decided to offer residence in the UK to 3 million Chinese living in Hong Kong. If you think of people as having a nature which includes a connection to ancestry, to history, to culture and tradition, as well as a love for and identity with a settled sense of peoplehood, you are unlikely to approve of the decision. It will seem to be a policy at odds with deeply rooted aspects of human nature.

But some people don't see things this way. They no longer recognise such aspects of human nature. They are more inclined to take a technocratic view that there is a utility in moving people around like this, perhaps for geopolitical advantage, perhaps for GDP growth. Such people have adopted the "modern" view of nature, that we stand outside of it, directing it for our own utilitarian purposes, which usually means advancing state power or seeking quantitative economic growth.

On my Australian social media feed about half applauded the move by Boris Johnson and suggested the same offer should be made by our own PM.

The problem is not with particular technological advances, such as a medical scientist developing a cure for a disease. The problem is with how we see the relationship between man and nature. We have to acknowledge that Western man has fallen into a mindset in which nature exists to serve the purposes we assign it but has no significance in itself. This then has consequences for the value we place on our own nature and of how we relate to the natural order we inhabit. The technocratic mindset denatures us and makes us fungible, i.e. it turns us into interchangeable resources to be deployed within an economic system of production and consumption. We are stripped down to those attributes that make sense within a technocratic understanding of life.

We have to recognise that this is a problem on the right, not just on the left. It is not even just a problem with right-liberals - it goes beyond this, because it is such an unchallenged aspect of modern thought.