Brandis 4

I've been looking at an attempt to justify right-liberalism by an Australian politician, George Brandis (1984).

In my very first post I criticised the way that Brandis described the individual:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations...

This might seem harmless, but there is a great danger in the belief that we have only unique identities and aspirations. As I wrote in the first post,

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

Brandis himself spells this out in the next part of his essay, when he discusses justice and freedom:

the highest value in a just society is the equal right of every individual to select and pursue his own ends, and to shape his life according to his own conception of what is the best life for him.

If a liberal society is based upon the self-determining individual, it is axiomatic that individuals must have the freedom both to determine their own ends and to pursue them...

It is crucial to appreciate that the liberal believes in freedom because he believes in individual rights, not vice versa. Freedom is one value among several which flow from the liberal's basic commitment to the equal right of all individuals to determine and pursue their ends in accordance with their own conception of the good. Freedom itself is not an absolute value, and the liberal is prepared to qualify it not only to the extent that this is necessary to ensure an equal measure of freedom for others, but also in cases where the limitation of freedom serves liberal values other than freedom, such as equality of opportunity.

You can see the way that assumptions flow into each other here. First, there is the claim that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations. If that is true, then there is nothing connecting individuals except a shared commitment to allow each other to pursue their own uniquely individual ends and to pursue their own concept of the good. This aim then comes to define what is meant by freedom, rights, equality and justice.

You end up with an ideal of an autonomous individual with various rights to self-determination, a commitment to the equal freedom of others, and to an equality of opportunity.

Note the relativism at the heart of the moral life here. For Brandis there is only a self-defined good, a subjective concept of the good that applies to me and my life alone.

Brandis gets things wrong at the very start of his argument. Our identities and aspirations cannot simply be described as unique. Nor are they based simply on subjective preference. For instance, our communal identity is often shared and is based on a real, inherited ethnic tradition. If we are bound together within this tradition, then we have a shared identity and common aims. Our freedom is not then just a freedom to self-define, but to express an identity that we have inherited and that we hold in common with others. What we require is not just an individual right, but a right to exist within a particular community.

The liberal philosophy, as set out by Brandis, is a notably pessimistic and demoralising one. It suggests that there are no goods that can be recognised as valuable within a community and which become a standard within the life of that community. There cannot be ideals of masculinity or femininity, or shared moral standards, or an ideal of family life, or notions of the good that are likely to be acknowledged by most individuals within a community, such as a connectedness to nature or to a family lineage, or to one's own heritage.

And there is no possibility of thinking, within the liberal philosophy, that there is an objective value to any of this, i.e. that the ideals that exist within a community have an inherent quality of goodness that our moral sense is able to discern. Instead, there is just a relative concept of the good, i.e. that I self-determine what is good for me, it is a good because I define it to be so, but it is a good for me alone. The concept of the good is radically squeezed down in the liberal philosophy as set out by Brandis.

Brandis 3

I've been looking at an essay on liberal values by the Australian right-liberal George Brandis. Here's the next section:

Secondly, conservatism and socialism share a theory of social change which owes much to the dogma of historical determinism. Both believe that the forces which shape a society's development - whether those forces are understood according to the conservative's metaphor of society as an organism with its own spontaneous causes of growth and change, or the socialist's more formal theory of dialectical materialism - are impersonal and irresistible. Neither gives any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force. For both, the past determines the present and therefore limits the future. The socialist feels that he is the prisoner of the past; the conservative would like to think that he still lives there.

Liberalism, by contrast, simply rejects historical determinism. It asserts that individuals, acting rationally and with co-operative goodwill can consciously shape the future of their societies so as to avoid the errors of the past and correct the injustices of the present. The reconstructive spirit of liberalism was captured well by Robert Kennedy when he proclaimed that it was 'the shaping impulse' of a liberal society that 'neither fate, nor nature, nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny'.

What does this tell us about Brandis? It suggests to me that Brandis does not feel a positive connection to the past. What matters for him is the idea of individuals rationally following a principle in order to create a just future. In this sense, the individual can only be acting against the past. The past is a kind of foil against which the rational individual sets himself.

I do think that Brandis has accurately described a liberal mindset in all this. Liberals have set themselves to create a new order based on the rational unfolding of a principle that aims at justice.

But there are major problems in taking this approach. First, a society is not built on the basis of a single, clearly enunciated principle. Any society faces the difficult task of coming to a sense of an "order of being" - an order which brings together the natural, the social and the spiritual aspects of life. There is no single principle which can express all of these things. What (ideally) happens instead is that a society gives rise over time to a culture which represents the best efforts of that society to reach a harmonious order of being.

Things are likely to go wrong if you seek to reorder society along the lines of a single principle aiming at justice. First, there is no such single "rational" principle. Second, the negative effect of adopting a false principle, as liberals have done, is radically heightened. Third, once you adopt such a principle there is no way to provide limits to its effects, as it becomes the sole organising principle of a society. The principle is likely to run to much more radical extremes over time than its originators ever intended.

Does this mean that Brandis is right when he claims that traditionalist conservatives do not give "any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force"? It's true that we reject the idea of radically breaking with the past in order to reconstitute society on the basis of an ideological principle. But it's not true that a culture, as an expression of an attempt to create an order of being, is frozen in time. Each generation tries to add to it, to improve and refine it, and this is partly an act of human reason (and conscience and creativity). Traditionalists do have a sense of justice and the good, and we do expect society to aim to measure up to this, but not as a singular, rationalistic principle that serves as its own starting point. We aim to carry forward a culture and a tradition and we look instinctively to the best of what our forefathers achieved to inspire us in reaching toward the good.

One final point. Brandis approvingly quotes Robert Kennedy speaking about "the shaping impulse" of liberalism, an impulse which overrides not only history but also nature. A traditionalist would never set reason against nature in a simplistic way. It's not that nature is sacrosanct. Anyone who has had children knows that they don't come ready civilised. Ruder aspects of their nature do have to be overcome. Even so, principle has to have regard for our created nature. You can't formulate principles about the way that human life is to proceed abstractly and without consideration for what humans are, for both better and worse, in their given natures.

Brandis 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a false and artificial starting point.

Brandis: unique identities, individual ends

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

So what did George Brandis set out as his beliefs?

a) The liberal theory of society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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