Poster boy of the Australian left

Peter Drew is a left-wing Australian artist. He is best known for his posters which show people from different ethnic backgrounds being described as "Aussie".

Peter Drew with his posters

In an interview with a local Indian media outlet, Drew explained his views on identity as follows:

All identity should be fluid in some sense, whether that’s the make up of our blood, that being our race or nationality, or our job, or the behaviour we exhibit, or the clothes we wear. It’s all superficial in some sense, it’s not entirely real, there is some substance to it, but none of it can say who we really are, and so it is fluid in some sense and so it says Aussie on all my posters, it’s a provocation….it’s really to open up the discussion and then allow us to talk about identity in a fluid way, because I think that’s what ultimately is empowering to individuals and gives us the most freedom. [1]

This is not an original thought. It is an orthodox expression of the liberalism which has dominated the Western political class for many decades. 

The basic idea of this liberalism is that the overriding good in life is a freedom to be an autonomous individual, i.e., an individual who is self-determining or self-authoring. This principle has momentous consequences. It means that anything that is not self-determined, but rather predetermined, is thought of negatively as a restriction on individual freedom. And traditional national identities, based as they are on our unchosen ethny, fall into this category. Someone who is ethnically Japanese did not choose to be so, they were simply born into this identity. This type of identity is relatively fixed - this Japanese person cannot suddenly decide that they are ethnically Nigerian.

Which is why Peter Drew is so concerned that identity be fluid, because this is what then opens up the possibility of moving between identities. 

One cost of having easily discarded, or traded in, identities is that they then become merely external to the self-authoring individual. The "I" that chooses must be separate to whatever identities are either selected or abandoned. So therefore it would not be accurate for a person to say "I am Japanese" as the two things would be distinct. As Drew puts it, in this liberal view our identities are "all superficial in some sense" and "not entirely real". Our identities are also flattened - they are all equally choices, so our choice of national identity is spoken of by Drew in the same terms as our choice of the clothes that we wear. It is possible that Drew's use of clothes to illustrate identity is revealing, as a kind of metaphor for identity as he understands it, as he sees identity as something that we can put on or take off, as something that is more of an external cover or adornment, rather than being part of who we truly are.

So how do we challenge this liberal logic by which a commitment to individual autonomy leads to a rejection of deeper forms of unchosen communal identity?

One possibility would be to assert a different understanding of freedom. We could think of freedom not as a radical act of self-authorship, but as the liberty to pursue our given ends, the "telos" which is given to us as part of our nature. 

Why don't we have this understanding of freedom? It would be possible to do so had we kept to an older Western philosophy:

...things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature?

In this philosophy, it makes sense to think of freedom as a freedom for excellence - to pursue that which makes us flourish and become more human; to orient ourselves toward the good; to become what we ought to be.

But there is a more modern strand of philosophy which blocks this path because it rejects the idea of essences. This philosophy took a nominalist and voluntarist stance:

Philosophical voluntarism is the doctrine that assigns a primary role to the will (Latin: voluntas) over intellect or reason in human action, metaphysics, and theology. It posits that free choice and desire are the fundamental drivers of reality and moral obligation, often arguing that truth and morality are created by divine or human will rather than discovered through rational contemplation.

If you hold to this kind of voluntarism you are more likely, I think, to support Peter Drew's claim that there is nothing all that real to be discovered within our given natures, but that what matters is the freedom to assert our own will, even if the identities that we self-create are necessarily superficial.

Nominalism denies the real existence of universals. This means that there are only individual instances of things, with universals being names we give to things:

Nominalists offer a radical definition of reality: there are no universals, only particulars. The basic idea is that the world is made exclusively from particulars and the universals are of our own making. They stem from our representational system (the way we think about the world) or from our language (the way we speak of the world). 

If there are only particulars, then there is no "virtue," "apples," or "genders." There are, instead, human conventions that tend to group objects or ideas into categories. Virtue exists only because we say it does: not because there is a universal abstraction of virtue. Apples only exist as a particular type of fruit because we as humans have categorized a group of particular fruits in a particular way. Maleness and femaleness, as well, exist only in human thought and language.

Take, as an example, masculinity. For a nominalist this is not a real quality or essence that inheres to being a man:

For a nominalist, there is no "essence" of masculinity that exists independently; rather, there are only particular men and specific actions that society conventionally labels as "masculine".

Masculinity is viewed as a social construct or a useful fiction rather than a natural, fixed, or metaphysical reality. It is a label applied to behaviors (e.g., strength, emotional restraint) that may vary across cultures and time periods.

Instead of saying, "These men are masculine because they share the quality of masculinity," a nominalist would say these individual men simply resemble each other in certain ways, and we use the term "masculine" to describe that resemblance.

The characteristics defining masculinity are not fixed by nature but are arbitrarily selected and grouped together by human beings. Because masculinity is a label rather than an inherent property, nominalists recognize that its definition is subjective to cultural contexts, and it can change based on social conventions.

Again, if this is your understanding, then it becomes difficult to see freedom as a movement toward our natural ends, in which we cultivate virtue or identify objective goods to embody or to serve. The nominalist position suggests, first, that such things are merely conventions or constructs, and, second, that lacking an essential nature that might be held in common, that we cannot know what the good for others might be, that there is only what we know of our own selves. But this then pushes in the direction of the liberal definition of freedom, in which individuals are not part of a natural order of existence, but can autonomously make whatever they choose of their own individual being.

[1] The Indian Sun TV. “In conversation with Peter Drew Artist/Activist" (Video).” YouTube, 20 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1TJBnBiz9g

Postscript: When reading Peter Drew's account of national identity I was reminded of the writing of Judith Butler on gender identity. The quote by Butler below illustrates the nominalist position very clearly:

... 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...

You can perhaps see a connection here to Drew's claim that our identities are superficial and "not entirely real". 

Senator Hawley's Great Speech

Hawley with his wife and two sons being sworn in

Josh Hawley is currently the youngest American senator, aged only 39. He was invited to give the commencement address for King's College in New York City.

Early in his address, Senator Hawley spoke of a failure in America's public philosophy which he urged the graduates to rectify:

"Your work is only just beginning. For the wider world now beckons you and it is a world in need. And so this morning I remind you of the words of the Apostle Paul, "Fan into a flame the gift that God has given you. For God has not given us a spirit of fear but a spirit of power, and of love and of discipline" - and you will need all three to meet the challenges of our present age.

For we stand at one of the great turning points of our national history. When the failure of our public philosophy and the crisis of our public life can no longer be ignored, and what we do about these needs will define the era that is to come.

For decades now our politics and our culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition. Of escape from God and community. A philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice. It is a philosophy that has defined our age."

This is the philosophy of individual autonomy that is most commonly associated with political liberalism. But Senator Hawley does not name liberalism as the problem. Instead, he believes that we are living in an age of Pelagius, a British theologian who was condemned as a heretic in 418 AD.

Which raises the question of why Senator Hawley connects political liberalism with the theology of a heretical British monk. At first glance, the connection seems tenuous. Pelagius would not have endorsed a modern liberal morality. He belonged to the ascetic wing of the early church. He believed that through our free will we could achieve moral perfection and therefore salvation. His theology was morally demanding. He would have been aghast at the liberal idea that the highest good is a freedom to choose in any direction.

Nonetheless, Pelagius is looked on warmly by some liberals. Why? It seems that when it comes to the critical debate in the early church between Pelagius and Augustine some liberals instinctively prefer the Pelagian view.

The Pelagian view of salvation gives a greater role to individual self-determination. The stress is more on what we achieve through our own will, rather than through unmerited grace or through the sacraments of the church. It is claimed that Pelagius regarded Augustine's theology as giving man too supine a role in relation to God (which made me think of the liberal humanist intellectuals of the late 1800s and early 1900s who wanted man to be co-active with God in steering humanity to its ultimate destination).

The Pelagian view also gives greater emphasis to human perfectibility. The Augustine view was that man inherited sin via the fall and therefore all men, even the saints, were blemished and in need of grace. The Pelagians are said to have rejected this doctrine of original sin. This view would certainly have appealed to some of the early utopian liberals, such as the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He and his circle bristled at the idea that man's nature was tainted. They believed that we could live in this world as in the Garden of Eden, in an idyllic and perfect state of freedom and equality, doing whatever we had a mind to do, and that this was only prevented by the existence of power structures in society.

Charlotte Allen, writing in First Things, explains the appeal of Pelagius to liberal progressives as follows:

Augustine is at odds with our prevailing climate of opinion, which regards obedience to the will of God as servility, the idea of eternal damnation as unspeakably cruel, and mankind as essentially a race of good people held back only by reactionary political attitudes and unjust social structures. Such views have turned Pelagius into a modern hero, a progressive before his time. As Michael Axworthy wrote in the New Statesman last December, those living in the “liberal, humanist culture of western Europe today . . . believe in free will, in the perfectibility of mankind, in the ability of people to make the right choices, do good, and to make things better.” We are, in a word, Pelagians.

Regardless of how much blame we apportion to Pelagian theology, Senator Hawley does a great job in identifying troubling aspects of "our public philosophy". For instance, in commenting on a significant Supreme Court decision, Hawley observes:

It is the Pelagian vision. Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self. Indeed this notion of freedom says you can emancipate yourself not just from God but also from society: from family, from tradition. The Pelagian view says the individual is most free when he or she is most alone, able to choose his or her own way without interference. Family and tradition, neighbourhood and church, these things get in the way of uninhibited free choice.

Senator Hawley makes a further important point. This view of freedom most suits the elite, who are in a better position to imagine themselves having significant choices in life:

The truth is the people at the top of our society have built a culture and an economy that work mainly for themselves. Our cultural elites look down on the plain virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice, things like humility and faithfulness. They celebrate self-promotion, self-discovery, self-aggrandisement...The elites assume that their interests are vital, while everyone else's can be done without, they assume that their value preferences should prevail, while denigrating the loves and loyalties of the great middle of America...Our Pelagian public philosophy says liberty is all about choosing your own ends - that turns out to be a philosophy for the privileged and for the few. For everybody else, for those who cannot build an identity based around what they buy, for those whose life is anchored in family and home and nation...today's Pelagianism robs them of the liberty that is rightfully theirs.

I'd like to draw this point out further. It is concerning to see the anxiety epidemic that is growing among young people. I think the following explanation for this epidemic is perceptive:

I’ve observed in myself and others a deep seated anxiety (which can manifest itself in depression, arrogance, self-loathing, or an affect of neurotic superiority, among other things) which seems to follow from the idea that our worth is ours to either prove or create. Under this idea, even if our worth is unconditional we must live a certain way to make sure that others know this — and if the value of our existence is in our own hands, then we need to make sure we live a certain way in order to justify our existence in this world.

There has been a significant change in how individuals derive self-worth even during the course of my own lifetime. Of course individual ambition and a desire for personal achievement existed when I was younger. But this was not the only source of people's sense of worth. There used to be a much stronger connection to larger social entities that individuals identified with, took pride in and derived a sense of meaning from.

Individual achievement was supplemented by membership of communities with a common fund of achievement that everyone could draw on. These communities were richly overlaid. I remember the civic pride in local suburbs, parochial attachments to city and to state, a sense of national family, as well as participation in a larger Anglo and then Western culture and civilisation. Most of all, there was a positive sense of belonging to a tradition of Australian manhood.

Senator Hawley is right to express concern at the logic of the reigning public philosophy. If it is all about my own self-determined achievement, measured in terms of status, money and social power, then there will be a severe hierarchy of winners and losers (and many of those who "win" will work themselves to the bone to do so).

I believe one of the reasons the philosophy will ultimately fail is because it does denigrate and undermine the loves and loyalties of the common man, expecting him instead to join a contest for elite status, with all the demands and sacrifices of this aim, but with little prospect of success.

Houellebecq & Liberal Modernity

Michel Houellebecq

There's an interesting review at American Affairs of Sérotonine, the latest novel by French author Michel Houellebecq.

The reviewer is none other than Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch party Forum for Democracy, which made significant gains in the elections in The Netherlands earlier this year.

Baudet notes that the characters in Houellebecq's novels are portrayed as grappling with the alienating effects of liberal modernity - of a society which is focused on maximising individual autonomy to a degree that dissolves traditional forms of identity and belonging and which also makes stable, enduring relationships difficult to maintain:

At some point in the course of their lives, all of Houellebecq’s characters are forced to acknowledge that their romantic ideals have be­come untenable in the modern age, since individualism has made profound, long-term relationships impossible. This simple idea forms the fundamental conviction of Houellebecq’s work. It echoes, in certain ways, Marxist Verelendungstheorie: as technological inno­vations have made jobs boring and interchangeable, and as free trade has destroyed traditional farm life and honest labor, we now pass through life as atomized wage slaves in the service of incomprehensible, unfathomable government organizations and overwhelmingly powerful multinational corporations. Erratic consumer preferences, capricious fashions, and an unpredictable herd instinct dictate the opinions (or the whims and fancies) of most of us who no longer have a family, a home, a church, and a nation to reinforce our sense of identity. Unable to chart a course for ourselves, we are floating around in an empty sea. Rudderless. All control of life—andof who we are—is lost.

The fault lies on both sides of the mainstream political spectrum. As a European, Baudet labels these the social democrats on the left and the liberals (classical liberals) on the right:

Now this fundamental point which Houellebecq makes time and again deserves further reflection, because it challenges the very fun­damentals of both the contemporary “Left” and the “Right.” It challenges modern anthropology as such. Both the social-dem­ocratic and the liberal wing of the modern political spectrum (re­spectively advocating the welfare state and the free market) wish to maximize individual autonomy. Liberalism and socialism differ when it comes to the most effective way to achieve that objective, but they do not differ in the objective itself. They are both liberation movements; they both want the complete emancipation of the indi­vidual.

And both base their vision of society on the (unfounded but supposedly “self-evident”) principle that every individual enjoys certain “inalienable rights,” which by definition eclipse all other claims, and to which all other ties, loyalties, and connections must ultimately be subordinated. Over time, all such institutions that the individual requires to fully actualize a meaningful existence—such as a family and a connection to generations past and future, a nation, a tradition, perhaps a church—will weaken and eventually disappear. Today, even new life (in the womb) may be extinguished to avoid disturbing the individual’s freedom. In the Netherlands (where I live), suicide is facilitated to ensure that here, too, no constraints—such as the duty to care for your parents—are placed on the indi­vidual.

It is this fundamental assumption of the modern age—that individual autonomy (be it through free markets or welfarism) leads to happiness—which Michel Houellebecq challenges.

The weakness that Baudet identifies in Houellebecq's writing is defeatism. Houellebecq captures the descent skillfully but cannot see a way out.

There is much more in the review - I recommend clicking on the link and reading it in full.

Hell's Prentice or Heaven's Free-woman?

In 1620, transvestism became an issue in England. There were complaints about women who had taken to wearing masculine clothes. One of the pamphlets written at this time, Haec-Vir, is particularly interesting, because it considers arguments both for and against the practice. It gives us some insight into the proto-liberal thought of the time.

The pamphlet sets out a debate between two characters. Hic Mulier is the mannish woman and Haec-Vir is the womanish man (but I will just refer to them as the man and the woman).

The man begins by criticising the woman for behaving in a base, unnatural, shameful and foolish manner. I won't focus on this part of the debate, except to note how important acting nobly was to moral thought of this time.

The woman then has a right of reply:

First, you say I am Base, in being a Slave to Novelty. What slavery can there be in
freedom of election, or what baseness to crown my delights with those pleasures which are most suitable to mine affections? Bondage or Slavery is a restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire, to perform the intents and purposes of another’s disposition, and that not by mansuetude [gentleness] or sweetness of entreaty, but by the force of authority and strength of compulsion. Now for me to follow change according to the limitation of mine own will and pleasure, there cannot be a greater freedom.

She is arguing that liberty exists when there is no "restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire". Freedom, in other words, is being able to choose to do whatever I autonomously have a mind or a will to do. Freedom is the pursuit of desires, as long as they are my desires ("which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire"). It is not that far removed from the modern liberal understanding of freedom.

She goes on to deny that she is behaving unnaturally. She argues that she was born free and she suggests that men and women are constituted in a similar way ("we are compounded of like parts"), and should operate in much the same way, namely along male lines. Sex distinctions, she argues, are often based on mere custom and that,

Custom is an Idiot, and whosoever dependeth wholly upon him without the discourse of Reason will take from him his pied coat and become a slave indeed

The woman has put her case forcibly and at length, but the man is having none of it. He does not submit to proto-liberal ideas about freedom but replies:

You have wrested out some wit, to wrangle forth no reason; since everything you would make for excuse, approves your guilt still more ugly: what basest bondage, or what more servile baseness, than for the flattering and soothing of an un-bridled appetite, or delight, to take a wilfull liberty to do evil, and to give evil example? This is to be Hells Prentice, not Heaven’s Free-woman.

He is pointing out that to seek no restraint in doing what "the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire" or to be limited only by "mine own will and pleasure" is to justify "unbridled appetite" and a "wilfull liberty to do evil". This, he says tellingly, will not lead her to be "Heaven's Free-woman", i.e. it is not a virtuous understanding of freedom.

His argument draws on an older pre-liberal understanding of freedom in which we are at liberty when we are not slaves to our animal passions or to our sins, but are directed instead by our reason. (This understanding of freedom has potential problems of its own which I'll discuss in a future post; it's enough for now to acknowledge that the older understanding was set against "unbridled appetite", i.e. it was set against the idea that "my desires are justified as long as they are authentically my desires".)

The man wins the argument in the end by appealing to the teaching of the church. There is a passage in Deuteronomy which clearly forbids transvestism and so the woman agrees to give it up, albeit on one condition - that the man himself gives up dressing in an effeminate, foppish way.

The woman then claims that she only did what she did as a strategy to force men to give up their effeminacy:

Now since according to your own Inference, even by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman, both in their habit and behaviors, what could we poor weak women do less ... than to gather up those garments you have proudly cast away and therewith to clothe both our bodies and our minds?

She quotes a section of the poem Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Ruggiero has been beguiled by the sorceress Alcina and made effeminate:

His Locks bedewed with waters of sweet savour;
Stood curled round in order on his head;
He had such wanton womanish behaviour,
As though in Valor he had ne’re been bred:
So chang’d in speech, in manners and in favour,
So from himselfe beyond all reason led,
By these inchantments of this amorous Dame;
He was himselfe in nothing but in name.

Again, this is very different to the proto-liberal view expressed earlier in the pamphlet. The proto-liberal view is that it is our inborn nature to be free, which means being subject only to our own reason, which means choosing whatever we authentically desire. The poem, however, suggests that we have fit ends or purposes, that reason holds us to, and that therefore in the loss of reason, we fail to hold to these purposes, and are no longer ourselves.

The woman ends her part by promising that all will be set right if men return to their masculine role:

Cast then from you our ornaments and put on your own armor; be men in shape, men in show, men in words, men in actions, men in counsel, men in example. Then will we love and serve you; then will we hear and obey you; then will we like rich Jewels hang at your ears to take our Instructions, like true friends follow you through all dangers, and like careful leeches [physicians] pour oil into your wounds. Then shall you find delight in our words, pleasure in our faces, faith in our hearts, chastity in our thoughts, and sweetness both in our inward and outward inclinations. Comeliness shall be then our study, fear our Armor, and modesty our practice.

The man decides to return to more masculine wear:

Away then from me these light vanities, the only Ensigns of a weak and soft nature, and come you grave and solid pieces which arm a man with Fortitude and Resolution...From henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell, and if at any time he hide himself upon the earth, yet it shall be with contempt and disgrace...Henceforth we will live nobly like ourselves, ever sober, ever discreet, ever worthy: true men and true women. We will be henceforth like well-coupled Doves, full of industry, full of love. I mean not of sensual and carnal love, but heavenly and divine love, which proceeds from God...

Thoughts on freedom

If you were to ask a liberal what freedom is the simplest answer you might get is that it means doing what you want to do. And, it's true, there is a sense in which this is a particular type of freedom.

But taking this as a first principle of society leads to some unusual outcomes. The highest circulation newspaper in the UK ran a story recently with the headline "Trans woman, 41, pretended to be a boy to groom a girl." Accompanying the story was a photo of the "trans woman":

If freedom means doing what you want, then logically this would include a man identifying as a woman, if this is what he wanted to do.

But there is another, and I believe more significant, way to define freedom. In one of Chesterton's books, a character is asked to define freedom and he answers "First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself".

If this is true, then freedom cannot mean being able to choose anything. To be free, we must necessarily limit the choices we make, so that they fit with, and help to develop, our personhood. The better we "self-limit" in this sense, the more freedom we have to be powerfully and admirably what we were created to be.

And this is what most people instinctively aim at. We ask what it means to live excellently, in a fully natured way, to best fulfil our created natures.

And this necessarily means that we are oriented to ordering our lives. We think of ourselves as living within a moral universe and we try to adhere to the natural law that we discover through reason, conscience and experience, so that we maintain the moral integrity that is important to our sense of ourselves, and so that we perfect, as best we can as fallible creatures, our moral nature.

We seek as men to fully develop our masculine qualities. We wish for ourselves a muscular frame and physical strength and athleticism; we attempt to fulfil, to a high degree, the roles and duties associated with being a husband and father; we cultivate the harder virtues of courage, endurance, self-discipline and resilience; and we seek to work effectively with other men to uphold the existence of our communities and traditions.

We wish also to live through our spiritual natures. We value experiences of transcendence or communion. We seek to remain open to deeper experiences of love and connectedness. We appreciate the higher experiences available to us through the arts, through an appreciation of female beauty and through a love of nature.

A mind that can govern itself to be oriented to this line of development is a mind that experiences itself as free. It is a mind that is able to self-consciously guide the person along the path that best fulfils our created nature. But our right minds are not always in charge. Sometimes fierce passions (e.g. anger) clouds our reason, or sometimes bad habits (sloth) prove too strong. Perhaps there is an addiction or a temptation that proves stronger than our right minds.

And so part of life is the effort to cultivate habits of virtue, so that we maintain the freedom to self-consciously and successfully pursue our better purposes - so that we, rather than bad habits or addictions or temptations - are in charge and we can develop freely toward our ultimate ends .

There is a lifelong effort to order ourselves; it stands alongside the effort to accumulate wisdom and self-knowledge.

What are the first principles of modern society?

Rulings by supreme courts are useful things. Not because they demonstrate great wisdom or knowledge, but because they require the first principles on which a society is based to be openly stated.

Such was the case when the Iowa Supreme Court made its ruling on a proposed law which would require women to wait 72 hours before having an abortion. The court blocked the proposal on the following basis:

"Autonomy and dominion over one's body go to the very heart of what it means to be free," the justices wrote. "At stake in this case is the right to shape, for oneself, without unwarranted governmental intrusion, one's own identity, destiny, and place in the world. Nothing could be more fundamental to the notion of liberty."

There you have it. The first principle of a liberal state is "liberty" but understood in a very particular way, namely as an individual autonomy by which we can "shape, for oneself...one's own identify, destiny and place in the world."

I have explained many times before why this is such a negative and "dissolving" concept of liberty. It means, logically, that only the things that we self-determine are legitimate. The predetermined aspects of life, which we do not shape for ourselves, come to be thought of as "prisons" from which the individual has to be liberated.

But there is much that we do not determine for ourselves. We do not determine, for instance, our race and ethnicity or our sex. And yet these are significant aspects of identity and community. In a liberal society, though, they must be made not to matter, because they conflict with the liberal definition of liberty as a state of individual autonomy, in which what matters is a freedom to self-define and self-create.

It's interesting, too, that the supreme court justices use the phrase "dominion over one's body". Patrick Deneen, in his excellent book Why Liberalism Failed, writes about the shift in the early modern period in the understanding of man's relation to nature. Instead of being embedded in nature, the point instead was to stand outside and against nature, seeking dominion over it. Classical liberals, according to Deneen, applied this to the natural world around us but still accepted an embedded human nature that we might live by (albeit a cut down and distorted one by which human nature was understood to be a self-seeking one aiming at individual profit); modern leftist progressive liberals extended it to having dominion over human nature itself (i.e. we might choose our own nature) with a logical end point in transhumanism.

Hat tip: The Four Marks

Song of Sebastien Jallamion

Tiberge at Gallia Watch has posted an item which shows how crazy things are getting in France. A policeman named Sebastien Jallamion has been punished by a court for political commentary he made on an anonymous Facebook page. He has also been suspended from his job. During his police disciplinary hearing he was rebuked for having criticised the leader of ISIS following the beheading of a Frenchman. A member of the committee said to him "Are you not ashamed of stigmatizing an imam in this way?"

It led me to compose this little response written from the viewpoint of that committee member:

Song of Sebastien

Are you not ashamed Sebastien?
You have spoken against evil
You have defended your countrymen
You have acted with courage as a free man.

And here I sit in a committee room
risen within a servile state
where truth and character is as small
as the statutes I bring to condemn you.

Are you not ashamed Sebastien?
If you were not here but had stayed unseen
I would not be discomfited by thoughts
of the greater man I should have been.


PS I notice there is a petition in support of Sebastien Jallamion here.

Choosing our own path?

In my last post I wrote: "I've never understood the appeal of the right-liberal idea about freedom in the market."

I got a few responses, which seemed to boil down to the idea that we are better off today, thanks to the free market, because we get to choose what we do more than previous generations did:

You and I have far, far more liberty than any previous generation in human history. That means we have vastly more power to choose our path than they did.

I want to thank those who did write in; however, I mostly can't accept the argument, for the following reasons.

First, I don't think that freedom should be defined as the ability to choose our own path. If that becomes the accepted definition then much else follows.

First, it means that our sex, our race and our sexuality will be thought of as having no proper bearing on our life path. If I am free because I can choose my own life path, then why should my sex stop me from choosing to do something? Why shouldn't a woman be able to choose to be a combat soldier? And if I choose to follow my rational self-interest and migrate to a country with a higher standard of living, then why should I be prevented from doing so on the basis of my nationality, ethny or race? And what if I am homosexual? Why should I not be able to choose to marry, if freedom means choosing my own life path? In fact, if freedom is choosing my life path, then why should I not be free to choose whether to be a man or a woman (this once would have been considered an absurd argument, but we are now seeing the whole transsexual issue become prominent in society).

Second, if freedom means being able to choose our own life path, then the proper focus of life will be thought to be those things that we can choose as individuals. That, perhaps, partly explains the big focus on market freedoms. We do get to choose as individuals what career we have, what we buy and sell and what investments we make. It fits within what is permissible within the liberal concept of freedom. What doesn't fit so well are those aspects of life with a communal dimension or that involve stable relationships with others. For instance, my inherited national identity might be important to me, but there is no defence for it when freedom is defined as a self-chosen life path.

Third, the focus of modern society in expanding the freedom to choose our own path hasn't created a higher level of this freedom. What, for instance, if the path you want to choose is to marry in your early 20s and to enjoy a stable, lifelong marriage? The fact is that you had a better chance of being able to choose this 60 years ago compared to today. What if you would like to support a family on your own wage, to save money and to quickly pay off a house and to put your children through private schooling? Again, you had a much better chance of choosing this 40 years ago compared to today (when housing is so expensive and the male wage is stagnant). What if the life you want is one in which men are respected, in which moral standards are encouraged, in which a European civilisation is highly regarded and admired, and in which the fine arts are flourishing? Again, we were born too late for this. Yes, we can go to a food court and choose 20 varieties of food. You couldn't do this a generation ago. But is it really a good trade off? I don't think so.

The freedom debate

Back in 2006 there was a debate on freedom between some British left and right liberals. Much of it is predictable and unenlightening, but there were a few points of interest.

The left liberal was Neal Lawson. He began with this observation:

Politics is about competing conceptions of liberty or freedom. What is it to live freely?

In a sense he is right. The banner of liberal politics has for a long time been the word freedom. Our current PM, Tony Abbott has said:

The dream of greater personal freedom is probably the Liberal Party’s nearest equivalent to a “light on the hill”

And:

The Liberal Party’s animating principle is freedom

There are two responses to be made to this. First, it is limiting and distorting to see politics as being only about freedom. People do want to be free, but they also want other things as well: happy marriages, the opportunity to raise children, a work and life balance, membership of a community they are proud to belong to, achievements in culture and the arts, a productive economy, an attractive environment, some level of cultural continuity, the upholding of a national identity and so on.

The proper role of a government is to hold in balance a range of goods that sometimes compete with each other, to the point that there is a framework of society that fits together. Part of this framework will be an understanding of what the proper limits of a government are.

Second, if politics is about freedom alone, then what freedom is understood to be matters a great deal. According to Neal Lawson, it is the right-liberals who have managed to define freedom in market terms (he calls right-liberals "conservatives"):

Conservatives have taken ownership of the word and therefore its meaning. Freedom from the state, from trade unions, freedom of exchange, free markets and free enterprise – the lexicon of freedom is the language of the right.

Again, he's correct that right-liberals do see a freedom to be self-made in the market as a key aspect of freedom. He contrasts this with the left-wing view of freedom here:

Neo-liberalism equates individual liberty solely with free markets. In contrast, 'social liberalism' suggests individual liberty requires some kind of collective welfare provision. Both of these visions are part of the liberal tradition but come to very different conclusions about what it means to be free.

There are a few points to be made here. First, he overstates the difference between left and right. Both have the autonomous, abstracted individual as a starting point. But when it comes to the issue of how a society of such individuals is to be regulated, right-liberals look to the market whereas left-liberals tend to look to the state.

Second, the left-liberal view of solidarity is not persuasive. The left-liberal idea is that we express our social natures by accepting a "collective welfare provision," i.e. by agreeing to pay taxes to fund the welfare state. If that's supposed to be the alternative to right-liberalism, then excuse me for not getting excited. The sense of connectedness between people should run deeper than this: there are supposed to be loyalties to family and ethny; an impulse running between men and women; a bond existing between groups of men (comradeship, brotherhood); a connection felt by those belonging to cherished institutions (e.g. school, university alumni) and so on. In the left-liberal conception, my social nature is complete after I hand in my tax return.

However, I have to say that reading the Neal Lawson piece did get me thinking about what freedom in the market might mean to people. I've never understood the appeal of the right-liberal idea about freedom in the market.

But think of it this way. If you live in a society in which the "sideways" connections between people (family, ethny, sex etc.) have been considerably dissolved, so that the individual is treated only as an individual, then the sense of agency that we have in life is considerably reduced. What can you do as a private individual? What effect can you have on anything? For most people the answer will be: very little. It will be just you as an individual, with no role except to steer your own individual course (which most people find difficult to do, as the surrounding culture exerts such an influence over us.)

So what is left to the average person to salvage some sense of agency? Well, if you get money then you have buying power - you have a freedom to distribute your financial resources as you see fit. You have freedom in the market in the sense that decisions to purchase are in your domain.

You might have to work all week to get the money, but come the weekend you have agency to please yourself or your family with purchasing decisions.

To me it's not central to what freedom should mean, but in the absence of anything else, perhaps it has its appeal to people.

Cog status

Naomi Wolf, the American feminist, has noticed that quite a few of the leaders of the more patriotic parties in Europe are women (e.g. Marine Le Pen in France, Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark and Siv Jensen in Norway).

She's not happy about it. She's written an article in which she crudely attacks these parties; however, she does a good job in explaining why ordinary women might find these patriotic parties appealing:

right-wing movements benefit from the limitations of a postfeminist, post-sexual-revolution society, and the spiritual and emotional void produced by secular materialism.

Many lower-income women in Western Europe today – often single parents working pink-collar ghetto jobs that leave them exhausted and without realistic hope of advancement – can reasonably enough feel a sense of nostalgia for past values and certainties. For them, the idealized vision of an earlier age, one in which social roles were intact and women’s traditional contribution supposedly valued, can be highly compelling.

And, of course, parties that promote such a vision promise women – including those habituated to second-class status at work and the bulk of the labor at home – that they are not just faceless atoms in the postmodern mass. Rather, you, the lowly clerical worker, are a “true” Danish, Norwegian, or French woman. You are an heiress to a noble heritage, and...also part of something larger and more compelling than is implied by the cog status that a multiracial, secular society offers you.

The attraction of right-wing parties to women should be examined, not merely condemned. If a society does not offer individuals a community life that takes them beyond themselves, values only production and the bottom line, and opens itself to immigrants without asserting and cherishing what is special and valuable about Danish, Norwegian, or French culture, it is asking for trouble.

There's a bit of snark in this, but she does recognise that things have gone seriously wrong within liberal modernity (see, it's not just us).

The new girl guide promise & the origins of liberalism

The Girl Guides in the UK have changed their promise. No longer will the girl guides pledge to "love my God" but instead they will promise "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs."

This got me to thinking about the way one branch of liberalism may have developed over time. There is a certain logic to the change to the Girl Guide promise. There are now more people without religious belief in the UK. Therefore, the promise to "love my God" might have seemed to exclude these people. The new pledge "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs" would still allow Christians to follow Christianity but it would include atheists as well.

At the surface level, therefore, the pledge seems to be neutral and to allow for a variety of beliefs. It doesn't immediately seem to do harm.

But it does do harm. If we try to incorporate every possible belief or lifestyle by retreating to a position of being "true to myself and developing my beliefs" then we are establishing as the default public position a relativism and an individualism.

We are establishing relativism because the pledge to be "true to myself and develop my beliefs" sends the message that something is true only relative to myself and my own subjective beliefs. And we are retreating to an individualism in the sense that we are no longer recognising a shared belief within a community, but only an individual one.

But it is difficult for a community to operate without some sort of shared value system and so what is then left to liberalism is to make the commitment to being inclusive the focus of a communal, and publicly enforced, morality.

Furthermore, what is clearly lost within this kind of liberal value system is a commitment to shared objective goods and truths within a community. How might people feel compensated for this loss? By focusing on the freedom to make up our own individual goods. So a certain concept of freedom will then be emphasised.

It is said by some that liberalism developed from the attempt to deal with religious diversity in the wake of the Reformation and the various wars of religion. It is possible that the starting point was the well-intentioned one that I have described, but that the logic of the falsely "neutral" position it involved then went on to do great damage to Western societies.

So how then should a diversity of opinion or belief be dealt with in society? If we learn our lesson we would have to say that the relativism and individualism of the "neutrality" position should be the least favoured option. Other options:

i) The atheists are allowed to simply opt out of reciting that part of the pledge.
ii) That part of the promise is dropped and the focus is on other goods that are shared by theists and atheists alike.
iii) A separate group of guides is set up for those parents who wish to avoid the promise to God.

These are only suggestions, but I make them to show that it's not necessary to deal with a diversity of belief by turning to a principle that is perhaps intended to be neutral, but which in reality is anything but neutral and which instead strongly preferences a view of the world which is relativistic and individualistic and which leads ultimately to the intolerant enforcement of tolerance and to a dissolving view of freedom based on the idea of the self-defining individual.

A terrific quote

The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre very elegantly and concisely describes what is wrong with liberalism in this brief passage:

Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied.

James Kalb: Out of the Antiworld

James Kalb has written an excellent article titled Out of the Antiworld. It's best to read it in its entirety, but I'd like to focus in this post on just one aspect of it.

James Kalb describes the liberal moral system in his article and it reinforces some of the points I have been trying to make in recent posts. According to Kalb, the liberal understanding of what makes something rational includes a scepticism about what can be known and this rules out the idea of an objective moral order, so that the focus is put instead on what is subjective:

The result is that nothing can be held to have a natural goal or reason for being, and the only meaning something can have for us is the meaning we give it. In such a setting, wanting to do something is what makes it worth doing, and the good can only be the satisfaction of preferences simply as such. Morality becomes an abstract system that has nothing substantive to say about how to live but only tells us to cooperate so we can all attain whatever our goals happen to be.

Given such a view, the uniquely rational approach to social order is to treat it as a soulless, technically rational arrangement for maximizing equal satisfaction of equally valid preferences. That principle claims to maximize effective freedom, but it narrowly limits what is permissible lest we interfere with the equal freedom of others or the efficient operation of the system. Private hobbies and indulgences are acceptable, since they leave other people alone. So are career, consumption, and expressions of support for the liberal order. What is not acceptable is any ideal of how people should understand their lives together that is at odds with the liberal one. Such ideals affect other people, if only by affecting the environment in which they live, and that makes them oppressive. If you praise the traditional family, you are creating an environment that disfavors some people and their goals, so you are acting as an oppressor.

The result is that the contemporary liberal state cannot allow people to take seriously the things they have always taken most seriously.

Liberals claim to stand for individual freedom, but if you have a system in which everyone must be equally free to do as they will, then you cannot assert as a good anything which might limit what other people do, or which might even create an environment which defines things according to one view rather than another.

When you look at what then individuals are really left free to do you find that they are mostly left with the more trivial of choices rather than the more significant ones. Career is perhaps one of the more important choices left to people, which might partly explain why most liberals are so focused on the good of career. Then there are consumer choices, entertainments and travel. These can all be chosen in a way that doesn't necessarily interfere with the choices of others (though even with careers there are issues about who should be favoured or not in employment).

And what is lost? In general the things that matter most to people, as these require a community to defend them as public goods. For instance, most people want to live within a traditional community of their own, one in which they have a sense of continuity over time, a link between generations and the transmission of a particular culture and heritage. But to realistically offer this choice to people means that you must have some sort of borders between different communities - otherwise distinctions are lost. And the liberal system of equal freedom doesn't allow for such borders, because it would mean asserting as a public good a measure that would limit the freedom of some people (those not within the community) to exercise a choice (to join the community). It would mean, in other words, discriminating between people in order to uphold an important public good, thereby violating the non-discrimination rule.

But going to the shops and choosing how to spend your money is OK. Or deciding to go to Bali rather than the Gold Coast is also OK. That becomes what defines us as liberal subjects, it even defines our dignity as human individuals in the liberal understanding of things. But to most people it seems a trivial base on which to try to build a sense of human dignity and flourishing. It is "equally free" but at a depressingly low level. Aspects of life that are meant to be secondary are what are left to us; we lose the traditional anchors of identity and meaning and motivation; and we find that public life is dominated by people from everywhere shopping together.

There is one other aspect of James Kalb's article I'd like to discuss, but I'll leave that for a future post.

Another significant Benedict quote

In 1997 the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict, gave a long interview to a German journalist, Peter Seewald.

In this interview, Pope Benedict rejected the idea that men and women are interchangeable in their roles in society. He explained the belief in interchangeable roles in a similar way that I do. According to Pope Benedict, moderns think of freedom as being a liberty to self-author or self-create. But to be free to self-author means rejecting the given parts of our nature.

Pope Benedict described the modernist mentality this way:

The idea that 'nature' has something to say is no longer admissible; man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really 'free and liberated'. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man's part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator - a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.

Moderns believe that in taking this approach they are maximising individual freedom. That's supposed to be the selling point.

But what kind of freedom is it really? In the traditional view, my identity as a man connects me to a masculine essence, which exists independently of me as an objective value. But in the modern view, there is only an arbitrary, invented identity that doesn't connect me to anything outside myself. It seems that in adopting the modern view I am losing something rather than liberating myself.

It's about primacy

You may recall the recent stoush on the English left between feminists and transsexuals. In short, a white feminist called Suzanne Moore wrote an ode to female anger which included the line:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.
 

That set off the transsexuals who accused white feminists like Suzanne Moore of being privileged. Which then led another white feminist, Julie Burchill, to write angrily that everything she had she got for herself and that:

we are damned if we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs.

Well, Julie Burchill's column was removed from the newspaper site; a female minister called for her to be sacked; and she is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission.

And that has led her friend Suzanne Moore to question the direction of the left:

The wrath of the transgender community has been insane. They say I haven't apologised enough and I probably haven't...The sexual and political confusion is nasty and, while I accept some of it is my fault, is it all my responsibility?

...I feel increasingly freakish because I believe in freedom, which is easier to say than to achieve and makes me wonder if I am even of "the left" any more...

And I am serious about freedom of speech. If Lynne Featherstone can call for a journalist and an editor to be sacked, this does not bode well for having politicians and lawyers running the press, does it? Do you actually want to be governed by humourless, authoritarian morons?

How has the left ceded the word "freedom" to the right? It maddens me.

No party represents freedom now...People died for my right to offend you... you may continue to hate me, put me on lists, cast me out of the left. Free-thinking is always problematic...
 

She has a point. The enforcement of "tolerance" has become increasingly intolerant and coercive, to the point where freedom of speech, of association and of conscience is being eroded.

But what's more interesting to me is that a white feminist should be starting to feel this way. Liberalism hasn't targeted everyone equally. There has been a hierarchy of sorts, in which those groups tagged as privileged lose moral status and can be discriminated against, whilst those tagged as oppressed are told that they will get special treatment to aid their advancement.

Obviously, if you're stuck in the first group liberalism won't be experienced as positively as those in the second group.

Women have been told for a long time that they're in the "special treatment" category - but what happens as other groups press their claims and being female is no longer such a trump card?

The other interesting development in this affair is the column by Dan Hodges, a leftist who has worked for the British Labour Party. He wrote that the dispute was:

...illustrative of some of the problems affecting the radical Left at the moment: not least the fact that a significant fraction of the radical Left is utterly bonkers.

....But the fight for equality has always been a bare-knuckle one. That’s because – in truth – it’s not based on equality at all. It’s about primacy...

Though those fighting the good fight would never be caught dead admitting it, they’ve spent decades constructing, and scrapping over, a tightly defined hierarchy of oppression. And that hierarchy is invariably a self-serving reflection of prevailing internal power cliques.
 

In other words, the group which proves to have the most power gets, as its prize, to claim to be the most powerless and therefore to deserve primacy.

Australia to have the most onerous discrimination law?

The Federal Labor Government is proposing a new Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination law which redefines discrimination as "conduct that offends or insults".

You just have to shake your head at that definition. It doesn't take much to offend some people, so the limits this law would put on free speech are potentially very onerous. The Victorian Attorney-General got it right when he observed that:

Many people may be subjectively offended or insulted by the simple expression or manifestation of views different to their own.

To make such expressions of views in workplaces, schools, clubs and sports prima facie unfavourable treatment and hence discrimination ... appears to substantially erode freedom of expression.

Even the Human Rights Commission is critical of the proposed law:

Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs thinks the broad definition will spark too many lawsuits.

She said the words offend and insult "have to go".

"There is no need to set the threshold so low," she said. "I would suggest the government consider taking the words 'offensive' and 'insulting' out (of the legislation).

"It does raise a risk of increased litigation".
 

And what does this say about liberal society? Liberals go on and on about individual freedom, and yet here we are facing a law which makes it an offence to say something that someone else, subjectively, thinks is offensive.

How do we explain this? I think part of the explanation is this: liberals pursue a freedom which is understood to mean an absence of impediments to self-determined choice. Because this is the liberal "good" it means that liberals focus on a "negative" morality, i.e. a morality of non-interference. The idea is that we all get to pursue our self-determined goals, only if we agree to leave each other to pursue these goals: therefore the good person is the one who shows respect for others and their choices, who is non-discriminatory, who believes in equality, who is tolerant, who is non-judgemental, who isn't prejudiced and so on.

The problem is that there is nothing to stop a negative morality of non-interference being pursued to the point that it itself becomes coercive or even tyrannical. And that is what we are seeing in the proposed Australian anti-discrimination laws.

I'll finish by congratulating the Law Society of South Australia for its submission to the inquiry on the proposed law:

The Law Society of South Australia told the Senate inquiry it "condemned" the new definition.

"The robust expression of opinions, short of incitement to hatred, is a strength of our social and legal system," its submission states.

"It should not be curtailed to protect subjective offence that individuals may feel when their beliefs or attitudes are criticised."

Memo to Jeremy Clarkson: Britain abolished international slavery

Popular Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson isn't afraid of speaking his mind. That's increasingly rare and I commend him for it.

But his most recent comments are disappointing. Clarkson's dog had to be put down and some of this twitter followers responded with cruel comments. Which then led Clarkson to write the following in Top Gear magazine:

Britain is a nation of 62million complete and utter bastards. We are the country that invented the concentration camp, and international slavery.

Maybe he's being deliberately provocative. Perhaps he wrote it whilst still in a fit of anger and upset. Even so, it's a hopelessly negative attitude to take toward your own national tradition.

The jibe about inventing international slavery isn't even remotely true. Slaves have been traded across national boundaries for thousands of years. If Britain had a distinct role it was more for using its power to abolish the international slave trade rather than inventing it.

Which leads me to a theory about why so many Westerners have a self-contempt. One of my readers recently defended liberalism as follows:

Shame on both the conservatives and modern liberals and any “ism” for using the government to force people to act in ways they think they should act. The only thing that should be worth dying for is freedom from men using the government to force people to act out their ideals. Governments should only exist to protect peoples life, liberty and personal selfishness as long as their selfishness does not lead to stealing, cheating, lying or causing harm to another’s private property or themselves.

There is an assumption underlying such an attitude which is that there are no positive goods that can be known to us; instead, we are to think in terms of there being personal, subjective ideals. But this runs very close to a pessimistic nihilism, as it locks in the suggestion that real, objective goods either don't exist or can't be known.

The only thing that lessens the nihilistic blow is this: if you think that there are only personal, subjective ideals then you might be able to conclude that a freedom to pursue your own subjective ideal unhindered becomes the one significant good that can be recognised to exist.

Which perhaps helps to explain the tremendous emphasis placed on such a freedom by liberal moderns. It is something that is clung to in order to avoid an immediate descent into a nihilistic scepticism.

But it's not much to cling to. And hence the vulnerability to self-contempt and a desire for self-abolition.

The solution is to have the courage to discuss a mix of positive goods (which can include freedom and autonomy) and to develop these within the political, cultural and social framework of society. Obviously,  a society which does a better job of this will have a stronger foundation than one which doesn't, but ruling out the notion of positive goods ensures that you will fail.

Is it really just a case of being you?

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part.

Lawrence Auster

I've been reading the Times of India a bit lately, in fascination and dismay at how quickly India is picking up the modernist disease.

The paper even has a "new age" section which recently featured a short article titled "Be what you want to be". I found it interesting as it was a summary of ideas that are commonly held in the West.

According to the article, what matters in life is a freedom and power to be ourselves:

True freedom means the power to be really you. Every one of us is unique, with our own basic personality, wants, desires, likes and dislikes. The sum total of all these makes us what we are. However, few of us are lucky enough to be in control of internal and external circumstances to be able to express our true selves. So we could end up being what we’re not.

The core idea here is that we are the sum of our preferences. We are a bundle of wants and likes, so that what matters is the freedom to "express our true self" by following our desires.

The worst thing then is to be impeded by some external force in following our uniquely desiring "true" self:

Family and society, friends and colleagues create circumstances – albeit perhaps with good intentions -- that condition us, often forcing us to do or become what we are not. Invariably, it suits many of us too, to be what others want us to be, rather than to be ourselves.

Sounds nice, but remember what "being ourselves" is thought to mean. Our self is understood to be the "sum total" of our preferences, so being our authentic self means nothing more than following through with our self-generated desires rather than external ones that "force" us to be something else. Humans are being defined here by wants, likes and desires.

Once you accept this definition, other consequences follow. For instance, who knows better what we want than ourselves? It therefore will seem logical that the individual should be made as autonomous as possible, as there is no point for the individual to accept direction from any other source. What other source can tell me what my unique wants or desires are?

Note as well that if we follow this idea that our "self" is a unique combination of likes and desires that if we do something we dislike we are thought to lose our very self. There's not a very strong basis for the concept of duty here, of acting for the right or the common good rather than acting to fulfil a personal desire.

What happens if we are blocked in following our own wants? According to the article we become stressed and this leads to disease. The suggested cure is this:

So let’s give ourselves absolute or total freedom, to think, to speak and to do what we really want to.

Total freedom to do what we really want to? What if we want to spend our children's inheritance in a bar? The article cautions us as follows:

This does not mean becoming selfish or license to cause injury to others. On the contrary, a person who values his freedom will immediately realise the value of others’ freedom. Absolute freedom means freedom for all. It means giving up controlling ourselves and controlling others.

That sounds like Millsian liberalism. I don't see that it's necessarily true. If my purpose in life is to make sure that my desires are unimpeded, then what is to stop me taking the attitude that the fulfilment of my own desires should come before those of others? And even if I do choose to value the freedom of others to pursue their own desires that does not make me unselfish. I'm still just doing my own thing for myself, I'm not acting for others.

Nor is it the case that this formula, in which we are each supposed to act for ourselves but respect the rights of others to do the same, leads in practice to a happy mindset of mutual freedom. In the West, what it has led to is the breaking apart of the natural solidarity of a traditional society. If what matters is the power to define and follow our desires, then there will be a sharp focus on which group is thought to hold a controlling influence, thereby holding back all the rest from a genuinely human status. Western society has been riven by a focus on hierarchies of dominance, privilege and oppression.

And what about the idea, expressed in the quote above, that we should give up controlling ourselves? That makes sense if life is simply a matter of following our individual desires. If that is true, then we can simply move from one desire to another - control will be thought of as a block. The problem, though, is that we all learn soon enough that if we pursue our wants in an uncontrolled way that we end up harming ourselves. And we are more likely to live a lesser, rather than a greater, life.

As I suggested earlier, it seems to me that this "free to be me" view of life is a common assumption of modernist liberalism. It has the advantage of being a clear and simple way to view things; all we have to accept is that we are unique in our desires and preferences and that life therefore becomes a matter of individual preference satisfaction and "tolerance," "respect" and "non-discrimination" when it comes to the preference satisfaction of others.

(Here's something else about this system of thought. If you were not to respect a preference or want of someone else it would mean that you were not just rejecting the preference or want but their very personhood, as they are defined as a person by their wants.)

Why should we reject the "free to be me" ideas as set out in the Times of India article? First, it doesn't even work on its own terms. Many of our deepest wants require a social setting. If, for instance, I deeply want to marry a feminine and family-oriented woman, then I need a society in which such women exist in numbers. If I want to live in a community which respects moral virtue, then I need a society in which individuals maintain such standards. If I like my own ethnic tradition and want to see it continue, then I need for that aim to exist at something larger than an individual level.

How can I maintain such conditions of society if the understanding of what it means to be human is so radically individualistic? The "free to be me" philosophy emphasises that my wants are unique and that I fulfil them simply by not controlling myself or others. So how then am I supposed to uphold the social conditions that are necessary for the fulfilment of my deepest wants and preferences? What is likely over time is that my wants will become increasingly trivial; they will be limited to what is possible within the system.

The second reason for rejecting the "free to be me" philosophy is that it is a false statement of what it means to be human. We are not just a bundle of random preferences. We are creatures with a definite nature to be fulfilled and able to recognise a common good and a moral right existing over and above our fleeting desires.

Rick Santorum: a principled critic of liberalism?

How's this? A leading Republican politician once made a principled criticism of liberalism. Back in 2005, Jonathan Rauch wrote a review of Rick Santorum's book It takes a family: conservatism and the common good. Rauch described Santorum's argument as follows:

In Santorum's view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is "no-fault freedom," individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: "freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice." This, he says, is "the liberal definition of freedom," and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is "the conservative view of freedom," "the liberty our Founders understood." This is "freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self." True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue --not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be" or "the freedom to be left alone" but "the freedom to attend to one's duties--duties to God, to family, and to neighbors."

That's pretty good for a mainstream politician. Lawrence Auster once observed that,

liberalism consists in the belief that there is no good or truth higher than the self

Santorum explicitly rejects this liberal denial of a good or truth higher than the self; he believes that the self is rightly oriented to objective virtues.

Similarly, Santorum is not radically individualistic. He recognises that there is a common good and that families are a natural unit of society.

I don't write this as an endorsement of Santorum. I don't have a good understanding of his wider policy positions. Rejecting some of the philosophical foundations of liberalism doesn't necessarily turn you into a worthy traditionalist.

But it does demonstrate that it's possible to bring traditionalist criticisms of liberalism into political debate.

Liberal radicalism in France: fidelity a pathology, yelling a crime

Maryse Vaillant is a prominent French psychologist who has written a book, Men, love, fidelity. She says that the aim of the book is to "rehabilitate infidelity".

Her argument (according to newspaper reports) is that infidelity is essential to the psychic functioning of some men, making infidelity "almost unavoidable". If this were accepted it could be "very liberating" for women.

But her argument goes much further than this, it becomes much more radical. She claims that those men who are faithful might have something wrong with them - that they might be suffering from a pathology, a too rigid concept of duty:

However, in Miss Vaillant's book she insists that fidelity is not, by definition proof of love. In fact, "pathological monogamists" in many cases lack the strength of mind to take a mistress, she claims.

"They are often men whose father was physically or morally absent ... during their childhood. These men have a completely idealised view of their father and the paternal function," she said.

"They lack suppleness and are prisoners to an idealised image of a man of duty."

She has inverted the normal view of fidelity. Now it is the faithful men who are weak for not taking a mistress and immoral for following a principle of duty.

What's going on here? I don't have a chance to read the book, but it does seem as if Madame Vaillant is taking a liberal argument to a more radical conclusion. In the liberal view, the moral thing is to be self-sovereign and to do what we will. Therefore, the aim of reform is to remove impediments to our individual choice.

The older morality becomes one of these impediments. It's too rigid - it states clearly that the aim is to be faithful. This restricts what we can choose for ourselves. It makes us a "prisoner" to our sense of moral duty.

The hero is then the one who breaks through moral taboos (impediments). So it is the adulterer, in Madame Vaillant's eyes, who is the healthy one with the strength of mind to act for his own purposes.

It's true that liberalism also states that our actions must not limit the similar freedom of others. But, according to Madame Vaillant, women can find it liberating to accept that their husbands need to have a mistress. So adultery passes that little qualification.

I won't embark here on a defence of fidelity as an ideal in marriage. My intention has simply been to point out how radical liberalism is when applied consistently to such issues. However, there is one curious flaw in Madame Vaillant's argument that's worth pointing out.

According to her, faithful men suffer a pathology because their fathers were absent during their childhood. So father absence is recognised as a bad thing - a source of pathology. But wouldn't men taking mistresses create more father absence in society? Most men find it hard enough to combine a career and family. What if they have to combine career, family and mistress? Won't they be spending less time with their kids? So wouldn't then adultery (the supposedly good thing) create more father absence (the bad thing, the source of pathology)?

All of which raises another question. Does liberalism at least leave people alone to do their own thing, even if it does so by rejecting or inverting normal moral standards? The answer clearly is no. It does not even achieve this. Far from leaving people alone in their relationships, it is extraordinarily intrusive.

For example, the French government has announced it will introduce a new law which bans 'psychological violence' in relationships. A man might end up with a criminal record if he insults his wife during an argument:

Married couples in France could end up with criminal records for insulting each other during arguments.

Under a new law, France is to become the first country in the world to ban 'psychological violence' within marriage. The law would apply to cohabiting couples and to both men and women.

It would cover men who shout at their wives and women who hurl abuse at their husbands - although it was not clear last night if nagging would be viewed as breaking the law.

The law is expected to cover every kind of insult including repeated rude remarks about a partner's appearance, false allegations of infidelity and threats of physical violence.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said electronic tagging would be used on repeat offenders.

The law makes every adult person in France a criminal. Who hasn't at some time shouted at or insulted a spouse during an argument?

It's possible that the law might catch out some of those men who do systematically bully their wives. But it does so in an incredibly intrusive way, by criminalising behaviours that occur in nearly all relationships, thereby making men in particular dependent on the good will of their wives (and of the magistrates who will judge the cases).

So in liberal France men do not end up getting left alone. There is a sword hanging over their heads in their relationships, courtesy of a state which thinks it best to manage relationships through crime laws.