The Bourne identity - Randolph Bourne & a transnational America

I'm currently reading Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen. In this work Deneen puts forward a different way of thinking about political distinctions:

a) the goal of classical liberals, progressive liberals and Marxists has been transformative progress

b) the two liberal groups saw the few, rather than the many, as the agents of this transformation 

c) for classical liberals the concern was defending property rights against the potentially revolutionary many; for progressive liberals the concern was defending an elite class of innovators against the conservatism of the working class

What jumped out at me when reading this was how well Deneen's description of progressive liberalism fits the writings of Randolph Bourne - as well as many left-wing politicians of our own times.  

Progress

When we use the word "progress" we usually mean something positive, such as an improvement in conditions. Its use can therefore sometimes pass by without scrutiny. 

Deneen's book has helped clarify for me the radical way that liberals understand the term, particularly their commitment to a politics of discontinuity.

Deneen argues that in the premodern tradition liberty was thought to involve the cultivation of virtue, so that we were able to govern ourselves, rather than being slaves to our own appetites and desires. The institutions of society helped to raise "guardrails" for those less able to achieve this condition. Modernity changed the concept of liberty to mean freedom from inherited limitations:

The realization of a new liberty required the dismantling of older institutions that had cultivated the classical ideal of liberty.

What had previously been considered as "guardrails" came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation. (p.5)

This sets the backdrop to the politics of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century:

In his classic text On Liberty, Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favour of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill's parlance, custom was a "despot" over the lives of those who wished to instead engage in "experiments in living". (p.6)

Deneen points out that many people do not benefit from this attack on formative institutions that,

protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people that are not well served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder. (p.6)

The point to be made here is that liberals, both left and right, see transformative change as representing long term progress, even if there are short term costs. The idea is not to improve what exists, but to churn over what is inherited from the past, no matter how fine it is, because the assumption is that this clears a path for the new order that will eventually bring its benefits. In this view, you deliberately move on from what exists, as what exists has no relevance to the present or the future, apart from the record of it you might keep, as in a museum, as it serves only to "cage" the shift to the future new order. Deneen uses the term "creative destruction" to describe what moderns want to achieve.

Therefore, when heritage suburbs are bulldozed to make way for high-rise apartments, someone with this modernist view of progress will more likely see this as a feature of modernity rather than a bug. The same when a suburb that was 50 years ago part of an Anglo-Celtic culture becomes Southern European, then Vietnamese and then Sudanese. The churn seems both pointless and destabilising to a more conservative mind, but it will be thought of as representing a progressive motion of society by a modern. The disruption to a settled way of life is thought of either as a good, as being "vibrant" rather than "stale", or else as something to be regretted only as a temporary loss on the way to something better.

Just to underline this point, consider the views of Herbert Marcuse, an influential philosopher of the 1960s who often cited the works of John Stuart Mill. He wrote of the student radicals of his time that,

In proclaiming the “permanent challenge”...they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture...they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation.

What he is saying is that even the most sublime aspects of tradition are oppressive and therefore individuals must be liberated from them. This concept of progress really means abandoning tradition and starting from Year 0 over and over again. And so there will be instability and discontinuity and, as a result, a difficulty for individuals to achieve a level of connectedness that is a core aspect of our flourishing.

None of this means that we should cede the aim of progress to liberal moderns. If you love the tradition you belong to, if you identify with it and belong to it, then as a matter of pride you will want to contribute to it, so that you leave it in the best condition possible for those who inherit it. 

This is why the men of Ancient Athens took the Ephebic Oath, in which they vowed that,

My native land I will not leave a diminished heritage but greater and better than when I received it.

In our own times, we must in particular think of progress in qualitative terms, in contrast to the quantitative progress (e.g. in GDP) that moderns often default to.

The nation

Mill himself did not entirely reject the idea of nations. He was a cosmopolitan at heart but believed, pragmatically, that political liberty was less likely to exist when there was a mixing together of different and incompatible nationalities.

However, there is a logic to his position on progress that would ultimately lead to something else. If you think that there is a liberal elite, the "few", who represent the progressive element of a society, in opposition to a backward and conservative "many", then nationality is undermined, because it is the "many" who form this national culture.

The national culture of the many will come to be seen by liberal moderns as parochial, stagnant, provincial, bland, conformist and uncreative. In contrast, the arrival of immigrant cultures, which disrupt and "churn" this national culture, will be thought of positively as adding vibrancy and diversity and colour and movement. 

Deneen begins his explanation of progressive liberalism by comparing it with the earlier classical liberalism. Both shared the same commitment to transformative progress, but the earlier liberals had, as their anthropology, a self-interested individualism. Progressive liberals sought an ever "widening solidarity":

Progressives - as their name suggests - believed that a truer and better liberalism could be advanced...Rather than locating the primary human motivation in self-interest and greed, progressives believed that a social spirit could introduce a national and ultimately global solidarity...In the United States, figures such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Frederick Jackson Turner believed that the early liberalism of the Founding Fathers had reached its limit, bequeathing upon the nation a widening web of interaction and relationality that now required moving beyond the selfish individualism of Lockean liberalism. They called for a national spirt and widening solidarity to replace the parochial identities that limited people's capacity to understand themselves as part of something larger...

The greatest obstacle to this advance was...the parochialism of ordinary people...they suspected that "the many" were a conservative damper who were likely to oppose the transformative ambitions of progress as moral transformation...they saw "the many" as traditionalists who constituted an obstacle to the realization of progress. (pp.77-78)

Fast forward to 1916. A young American intellectual named Randolph Bourne publishes an essay titled "Trans-National America". It represents the emergence of the modern progressive liberal mind. Bourne is part of the intellectual lineage described by Deneen. He was as a young man an admirer of Dewey. The link to Mill is suggested in the following description of his work:

Though he wrote on politics, young people, literature and other subjects, he came back time and again to a demand for personal liberty. What mattered to Bourne, as Christopher Lasch wrote in “The New Radicalism in America,” was that everyone “resist the impulses to acquiesce.”...Often Bourne sounds like the John Stuart Mill of “On Liberty,” who worried over the destruction of individual initiative and spontaneity.

What Bourne attacks in his essay is the idea that migrants should be assimilated into a dominant Anglo-American national culture. He does so, in part, by claiming that there is no such core Anglo national tradition:

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant...

With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture.

We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born

(I would point out here, as evidence of how enduring Bourne's way of thinking is, that just this year the premier of my state here in Australia, Jacinta Allan, declared that "Australia is nation of foreigners".)

Bourne looked down on Anglo-American culture because he thought it was too traditional - too much connected to its ancestral roots. He saw immigrant culture positively because through these cultures the American could be drawn out of his provincialism and into a cosmopolitan outlook.

And Bourne's hope was that America would become a kind of federation of nations, a "trans-nation" that might grow into a cosmopolitanism.

Randolph Bourne

The language Bourne uses in his essay matters, because it points clearly to the larger Millian framework. In the following quotes you will find him rejecting the existing American tradition because it is stagnant or provincial and praising the immigrant cultures because they are creative and transformative and help point to global solidarities.

For instance, in the following excerpt Bourne complains of the Anglo-Americans that,

They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country. So that, in spite of the ‘Revolution,’ our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging...

It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples—the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun—to save us from our own stagnation.

The assumption here is that what is needed is transformative progress in the sense that this was understood by men like Mill and Dewey. 

Similarly, Bourne adds,

The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency.

What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. 

Remember, Mill set a framework in which the continuity of established patterns of life within a community was a threat both to human liberty and to progress. And part of the movement of this progress was to be away from local identity and attachment toward more universal solidarities. And so you can understand why a settled, local way of life was associated negatively in Bourne's mind with a stale uniformity.

Perhaps the most telling excerpt is the following one:

Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind...

How do we respond?

Modern progressives have kept much of Bourne's politics. What I hope to have shown is that these ideas will not easily be countered unless their foundation in Mill's thought is challenged. We need to persuade people that there is a better way of defining both liberty and progress.

I think too that we need to defend the local. When I was younger, Australia had a more "parochial" culture, in the sense that you would identify not just as an Australian, but as a member of a state within Australia, and a city within that state, and a region with that city, and a suburb within that region. It might sound complicated, but it is the natural way of forming identities which "radiate outwards". The local identities do not prevent the larger ones from forming. 

Nor did the local identities make life more stale or colourless. On the contrary, they vivified life, through the sense of connectedness to particular places and people. The sense of community was stronger, the sense of a particular way of life was stronger, and the social commitments were also greater.

One interesting quality about these local identities is that they also vivified the places that you did not belong to. These appeared more exotic to the imagination, like worlds apart, which made them more exciting to visit and to experience. This was true, back then, even of parts of Australia itself.

Bourne wants us to believe that you can reject local attachments whilst also having a "widening solidarity" with all the people of the world. Personally, I would be more impressed if he had achieved the natural affinities that he should have had. Bourne did not get along well with his sister merely because she had conventional interests. He wrote of his home town and family that:

I am constantly confounded there by the immeasurable gulf between my outlook and theirs and I feel a constant criticism of my futile high-browism and Godless pursuit of strange philosophers. My young sister is almost a passionate vulgarian and takes with really virtuous indignation any deviation from the norm of popular music, the movies, Chamber's novels, Billy Sunday, musical comedy, tennis, anti-suffragism, and the rest of the combination that makes up the healthy, hearty, happy young normal person of the well-brought up family of the day of the middle-middle-class. I find her an index to current America, but we scarcely get along.

Many progressive liberals of today will most likely be unaware of their own intellectual lineage. It will have been received by them unexamined. But these ideas have something of a life of their own. They have skipped down through the generations because there has not been much to stop them. The challenge will be to influence younger generations with an entirely different framework.

How would you like your society?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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