What went missing?

Earlier this year I wrote a piece on the three great "conversations" in the Western tradition:

There have been three important "conversations" in European culture. One is the materialistic, naturalistic, scientific one. Another is the formal religious one, marked by a Christian concern for individual salvation through the avoidance of sin. The third conversation is also spiritual, but not tied formally to religion or theology or to salvation or sin; it is a conversation on what impressed the European mind as being of spiritual meaning or worth in life.

We are used now to the materialistic conversation dominating what we discuss and in what terms. The Christian conversation is still there, but cordoned off to a minority of the population. The third conversation is now almost entirely lost to us, even though it was once as prominent as the other two.

What is also striking is that there is so little crossover now between the conversations. It was once not unusual for an individual to hold all three realities together: a man could be a believing Christian, conversant in theology; he could at the same time recognise the reality of the material world, and be educated in the scientific processes describing this world; and still again take part in a conversation about the role of character or moral virtue in the spiritual life of man.

And here's the thing. When I read books about the radicals of the early twentieth century, I recognise immediately what I dislike about their politics. At the same time, though, it's hard not to notice that even the radicals of the time were usually more embedded in all three of the European conversations than an ordinary, conventional man of today. In this sense, they were still more cultured, in spite of their political radicalism.

I was interested to learn, in researching my recent posts on Simone de Beauvoir, that she too seems to fall into this category of relatively cultured mid-twentieth century Western radicals.

No doubt she was mostly committed to a secular materialism. Consider, though, her views on love between men and women:

Love has been assigned to woman as her supreme vocation, and when she directs it towards a man, she is seeking God in him ... Human love and love of the divine commingle ... because human love is a reaching out towards a transcendent, an absolute.

This is taken from her book The Second Sex. I only have a partial quote and so I'm not sure of the exact context of what she is saying. Still, she seems at least to be "conversant" in an aspect of the human experience not usually dealt with so openly today.

A commenter at this site, Franklin, did recently write something similar to de Beauvoir. In a discussion on relationships he stated that,

Man, both male and female, has an innate desire for transcendent love, for something out of this world in this world.

This places a considerable degree of meaning in human relationships. If a man experiences the transcendent in his love of women, then he will appreciate all the more (and be particularly attuned to) those women who bring out their finer, more womanly qualities.

There will be a deeper reason to appreciate what is admirably feminine in women and to feel alienated by moves toward an androgynous, grungy culture in which gender difference is repressed.

De Beauvoir's quote reminds us, too, of one reason why many women are discontent with metrosexuality in men. There are women who want to admire us for our stronger, more masculine qualities - the ones that we ourselves instinctively feel carry the most significance.

De Beauvoir may have been relatively cultured in her ability to participate in the different Western conversations; she did women a disservice, though, in making her final political stance so one-sided.

She chose in her politics to tell women that femininity was an oppressive construct created by men in a process of "othering". This entirely fails to reconcile what de Beauvoir had written of in the quote above: that individuals experience the finer qualities of the opposite sex to have a significant meaning and to inspire love.

De Beauvoir knew the conversations but she failed to hold them together.

The end of man

Here is the personal profile of an Australian blogger:

About me

Merely one of the billions of crudely assembled piles of meat that inhabit this rock, the only thing setting me apart from the masses is my ability to think.

There are others who also see things this way. For instance, there is the feminist writer who believes that men and women are not so different as:

We are all human beings. We are all similar lumps of fleshy matter that moves and grunts and goes around its daily business.

It is, I suppose, a strictly materialist approach to describing existence (although I wonder if nominalism also doesn't play a role - if there are only particulars then perhaps you end up with the kind of reductionism quoted above.)

It's not a view, though, which fits how we experience life. Just this afternoon I went for a walk after work in one of the more rustic parts of the outer suburb of Melbourne I live in.

In late winter there's a bit of moisture in the soil and the wattles are in bloom - so the air is heavily scented. I walked through the country-style lanes to the river and felt richly, luxuriantly connected to nature. You would have to strip off whole layers of the mind, at such a time, to reduce the earth to a mere "rock" and myself to "a crudely assembled pile of meat".

(I just read out the blogger's view of himself to my wife. Her laughing reply: "So poetic, isn't it!")

Can we make it up?

The late Pamela Bone wrote an article some years ago summing up her life beliefs. In the final paragraph she tells us:

I don't know the meaning of life. I believe it has the meaning we give to it.

Pamela Bone was an independent-minded feminist who didn't always endorse the latest left-wing position. The above quote, though, shows her to be an orthodox liberal modern in terms of her basic life philosophy.

She is assuming that there is nothing to reality (or nothing that can be known) which represents a significant good in life which might anchor our life's meaning. In the absence of a meaning grounded in reality, it is left up to us as individuals to create a meaning.

Little wonder that those who hold this view believe that autonomy is such a key principle: if it's true that we each create our own meaning then we must be left to do this unimpeded and we must give equal respect to what each creates as their meaning as none can be more objectively true than others.

Isn't there, though, a basic problem with all this? If my life can only have the meaning I make up for it then it is meaningless. The whole project is therefore misconceived. Either there is a meaning to life which transcends individual will or we must set aside the whole question of meaning. One or the other.

Which leads me to happiness studies. A researcher in this field, Arthur Brooks, has recently found that conservatives are happier, by a large margin, than liberals:

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%).

Why might this be? It's not because conservatives are wealthier (they're not) and not because there was a Republican President in 2004 (conservatives were also happier than liberals when Bill Clinton was President).

Statistically three factors appear to be important, namely marriage, children and church:

Mr Brooks thinks three factors are important. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married and twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Mr Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.

When religious and political differences are combined, the results are striking. Secular liberals are as likely to say they are “not too happy” as to say they are very happy (22% to 22%). Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being very happy than not too happy (50% to 5%). Religious liberals are about as happy as secular conservatives.

So conservatives are more likely to find an externally grounded life meaning outside of autonomous will: in a commitment to marriage, to parenthood and to church.

Brooks makes clear in explaining his findings that marriage and parenthood aren't of benefit because they bring comfort or pleasure, but because they contribute in the long term to a sense of life meaning. I was reminded when reading this of the complaint of Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger that feminism had left her with "a nice caffe-latte kind of life" but that "the lifestyle trappings are joyless ... and the point of it all seems, well, pointless ... I am childless and I am angry."

I was reminded too of what D.H. Lawrence wrote on this issue; he believed that the autonomy of unimpeded will undercut a purpose in life and therefore was not experienced as a true freedom:

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief ... Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose ...

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

Hat tip: reader George for the happiness studies article.

The springs of human action

I had intended to finish up with Jean Devanny, but I found a story of hers on my bookshelf which I can't resist writing about.

It's called "The springs of human action". Devanny uses the story to identify a flaw in her own communist politics. It's the same flaw that struck me on reading Devanny's biography: the failure to hold to the theory consistently.

The theme of the story is sexual liberty. A New Zealand communist, Jimmy, is working as a miner, perhaps in the early 1920s. He exhorts his fellow workers to apply the logic of communist theory to their own homes and marriages:

'Isn't it possible for you to follow a thing out to its logical conclusion?' he demanded hectoringly. 'You can't limit science! You can't annihilate a fact by denying it or refusing to recognise it!'

When he is quizzed about what he means he replies that the miners have two options:

'You can arrogate to yourself every freedom your economic position allows and restrict your wife in the same proportion ... Or you can do as I do - apply the morals of the future regime to your own individual case today. Refuse to make a woman your chattel by tying her to you legally; regard her as a human being like yourself with all the rights and privileges of a human ... she might be the sort of woman that wants a lot, needs a lot from life. She might need other men, for instance ...'

We are told later that:

He and his kind believed in the absolute sex equality of man and woman, believed in freedom of action for the individual.

You can recognise the basic ideas of modernism in such thoughts. According to modernism we are not secure in our status as humans. We only achieve a human status if we are autonomous in the sense of being self-determining individuals. Therefore, it's important to modernist theories, Marxism included, that we not be restricted in what we choose for ourselves.

That's why Jimmy the communist believes that women are being treated as less than human if they are tied to one man and lack the "freedom of action" to take other men as lovers when they desire to do so.

After berating his fellow workers, one of the miners makes a remark suggesting that Jimmy's own woman might be putting his theory to the test. Jimmy picks up on the hint and reacts angrily. He is later forced to admit to himself that he acted from jealousy.

He walks home intending to confess to his de facto, Margie, his own infidelities and to give her the option of leaving him if she wishes. But, arriving home early, he disturbs her with another man.

At this point, Devanny makes some telling points. It's not just that Jimmy struggles with "the fire of his jealousy". Devanny suggests that Jimmy has a transcendent sense of what Margie is as a woman - of her loveliness and goodness - and that he feels deceived to think of her now in lesser terms as just another player. It makes her less special in his eyes, more mundane:

'... you should have told me before you did it ... we always agreed that you would tell me if you liked another man better than me. I'd have let you go.' She dropped her eyes from his.

'I don't like him better than you. I don't like him at all really.'

This turned him cold. He looked away from her and tried to get what that admission meant. It was not hard to get. It means that she was just another - Mrs Phillips ... The Socialist's soul filled with an anguish unspeakable, the anguish of broken trust in something he had reverenced ... His Margie, so good, so kind, so sweet and loving! He knew so much about women. Too much not to recognise now that Margie was an 'old hand' at this game.

(Note how Devanny, supposedly a scientific materialist, once again reaches for words like soul and reverenced to impart meaning to a situation.)

Jimmy tries to apply reason and principles to the situation. He cannot do as other men might and punish her by calling her a bad woman - after all, he believes in sexual liberty as a defining point of a person's humanity. So he has nowhere to go: he cannot bear her betrayal but cannot condemn it either. His principle of liberty hasn't brought him freedom; Devanny writes simply that "He was caged."

Margie then suggests a way out. The answer is to make sex not matter. If it's treated as a meaningless physical act, not expressing anything beyond itself, then the infidelity won't count for much. A relationship between a man and a woman could instead be founded on comradeship or friendship:

... she was right; her attitude was the only one if they were to continue living together. He must conquer himself. What was she saying? - "Make too much of this silly sex act. It doesn't mean anything, really. It is the smallest thing in life. It takes up only a moment or two out of millions of moments. The things that matter are comradeship, congeniality, friendship and kindness ...

(I was reminded when reading this of the modern day feminist who, when it comes to sex, "puts the act itself on a par with sneezing").

Devanny has spelled out the logic of sexual liberty for us. For sexual liberty to be made practicable, sex itself must be made not to matter. It can be made free by being made unimportant. Relationships are to be reconceived in more platonic and mundane terms as expressions of friendship and not of romantic or sexual love.

Jimmy tries to accept the new dispensation:

'She must be right. I must apply reason. If reason can't triumph over emotion, mind over matter, there is no hope for the world. No hope!'

He continues, though, to feel caged and tormented. He comes to think of his situation as hopeless and in a mad despair kills Margie.

So the politics of sexual liberty fails spectacularly in Devanny's story. Why then did she continue to promote this politics? Why stay with a system of thought which you know can't work as it's supposed to in practice?

Jean Devanny: liberty, science and more

This is the last in a series on Jean Devanny, a communist writer and activist of the 1930 to 60s. Having read her biography, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary, I was struck by the number of unresolved inconsistencies in her beliefs. In this post I'll list several more.

Pacifism

The communists of the era were big on pacifism. Devanny, for instance, had helped to establish a Peace League in Cairns in 1935 (p.130); in 1934 she had undertaken a propaganda tour for a movement against war (p.129).

Yet in her May Day speech in 1935 she "launched into a paean of praise for the Red Army". Reminiscing about a military parade she had witnessed in Russia she said:

I never before thought the bayonet a beautiful weapon. Depends on whose body it is intended to be used, doesn't it ... Then the loveliest sight of all. The tractors drawing big guns ... (pp.127-128)

Free speech

The communists peppered their speeches with references to free speech. We learn in the biography of Devanny that:

During 1934, the Workers' Weekly and the Party organisers widened the scope of their agitation on a range of issues, particularly freedom of speech. (p.118)

In that year, Devanny spoke to a large demonstration in the Sydney Domain on the issue of free speech, an event commemorated in verse:

The workers in great numbers gather'd on that afternoon
To pledge their right for freedom and for liberty of speech (p.118)

However, the party didn't defend free speech for its own members. At a meeting in 1942, Jim Comerford asked the party leader "to stop interjecting and to give him a fair go". Shortly after "a few of J.B.'s "loyal" followers threw Jim into the street." (p.197)

Another member, Joyce Batterham, recalled of this time that "When you were directed to do things, you just did it! ... There was ... not much freedom of choice." (p.197)

Devanny herself was not tolerant of opposing views; Hilda Essen wrote of her that "There's no argument, she's simply right." (p.161) According to the historian Stuart Macintyre, Devanny was the first in Australia to use the term "politically incorrect" in rejecting someone's views (p.161).

The climate within the Communist Party is suggested too by Devanny's fear of repercussions in publishing her autobiography. She wrote to Miles Franklin:

Sometimes I feel so sick about the whole thing, the shock to my family, the fear of what they might do to me (the P[arty] I mean) that I wish I had never started on it. (p.269)

Science & materialism

Marxists pride themselves on being scientific materialists and Devanny was no exception. A journalist, Nelle Scanlan, interviewed her in 1926 and was struck by Devanny's "preoccupation with 'scientific socialism'". Devanny told Scanlan that her most recent novel was based upon "the materialistic conception of history." Scanlan recorded that "Greater faith in the infallibility of science could not be found". (pp.38-39)

Yet throughout the biography we find evidence that Devanny perceived the world in other terms; she didn't write as a strict materialist examining "matter in motion", but instead chose to describe things using a "spiritual" vocabulary, and when praising individuals she took the inherent value of character as a real given.

For instance, she describes a visit to a tropical island as a day of "rapture" (p.259); she later declares that she is "a primitive soul" (p.275); she praises a friend as being "Utterly trustworthy, concentrated on things of the mind and spirit, the Doc's sagacity and sincerity could not but be an uplifting influence" (p.205); and she complains that after WWI people were "soul-emasculated" (p.44).

She doesn't seem to have been far from experiencing the transcendent through nature. For instance, in the following passage she writes of an ecstatic feeling aroused by the "unearthly" magnificence of a tropical sunset:

The sunset of this last day was of a nature to make one quake half in ecstasy, half in pain. So clear was the atmosphere that separate trees on the forward part of the mainland ranges stood out plainly ...

An incredible quiet and stillness fell: a glowing stillness, in which the world changed to the colour of old-gold.

Then, in one last ecstatic burst, Woody was let to even greater splendour ... A soft diaphanous veil of rose touched the waters of the main lagoon, the outer sea turned to forget-me-not blue and then dusk, moonless dusk, fell down as though some lordly hand, unable to bear longer the unearthly magnificence of it all, had clapped down a colossal lid. (pp.220-221)

Liberty & fraternity

Communism was supposed to be a movement for liberty and fraternity. However, once again communist theory didn't turn out well in reality. For much of the biography Devanny seems to have been most oppressed and tormented by her callous treatment by the party, rather than by the larger society.

Devanny wrote in 1953, having spent a few years away from the party that, "I am regaining the good humour which horrors and terrors deprived me of for about twelve years." (p.275)

She did have reason to complain. In 1941 Devanny was living in a small settlement at Emuford in Queensland with a group of communist workers. Some of the workers' wives began to spread rumours about Devanny; when she threatened to complain to HQ she was punched in the face by a male comrade. She then travelled to HQ to lodge a protest, but on her return to Emuford a group of comrades assaulted her so badly that she was taken by ambulance to hospital. There's some evidence that she was sexually assaulted.

Devanny was then ostracised by the party; when she had recovered she wanted to return to Sydney but the party wouldn't send the fare. It was finally a businessman who felt sympathy and gave her the money to return home. (p.190)

Not surprisingly, the idealism of the party workers tended to fail over time. The novelist Dorothy Hewett lamented of herself and her partner that "our original political idealism and belief in ourselves [had been] corroded by time, and bitter experience". (p.297) Devanny for her part confessed to Miles Franklin in 1953:

No good assuming that I have any ideals left, Miles. They are as dead as a doornail. (p.268)

My own surprise is not so much that Devanny lost her ideals, but that she lived for so long with such inconsistencies of theory and practice.

What holds the wings of modernism together?

Why should it be that modernism has held together? After all, the two wings of modernism seem to be directly opposed to each other.

One wing of modernism is political liberalism. Liberalism is based on the idea of the self-creating, autonomous individual who is free to choose in any direction.

The other wing is a scientific materialism. The materialists believe that everything is a product of material causes, so that every action we take is ultimately predetermined (and could, in theory, be predicted).

You would think that the liberals and the materialists would wage intellectual war on each other. The two seem difficult to reconcile: a strict materialism is deterministic and so denies the very possibility of free will or the reality of individual choice.

Some moderns are aware of this problem. There was a debate at the Catallaxy website some time ago in which Jason Soon admitted that he and other moderns were haunted by the difficulty of reconciling what he refers to as philosophical naturalism with their political beliefs:

Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world and derived from conditions that precede us and surround us. Each of us is an unfolding natural process, and every aspect of that process is caused, and is a cause of itself. So we are fully caused creatures.

Of course this is just another way of saying naturalism implies determinism at some fundamental level even if we know that in practice we cannot (at least for now) have the ability to pull certain strings to make humans function like clockwork. I do consider myself a naturalist but a question that haunts (in my view unjustly) those of us who are simultaneously philosophical naturalists and politically libertarians is whether the two are reconcilable.

There follows a debate in which one of the contributors, Daniel Barnes, actually does step back from a full acceptance of the materialistic view. He writes that he doesn't want to dodge:

another basic difficulty, which is how you can say ‘choice’ is both vitally important (ie: be a libertarian) and an illusion at the same time. Call me old-fashioned - I probably am - but despite the compelling nature of deterministic arguments, and the semi-occult feeling of denying them, I still can’t...quite...go...there.

A commenter calling himself c8to then tries to reconcile free will with determinism as follows:

what we always meant by free will was the ability to look at a list of possibilities, run some algorithm and deterministically decide the goal maximising actions

Daniel Barnes shot back with this:

“Deterministically decide” is an oxymoron. Because if determinism is true, you ‘decide’ nothing. A scientist with sufficient data should be able to exactly predict what your “algorithm” will do - and, like every other event, it will have been exactly predictable since the dawn of time. If you call that a decision you might as well say a planet ‘decides’ to circle the sun.

If, though, it is difficult to reconcile political liberalism with a deterministic materialism, why have they successfully coexisted? One possible answer is to be found in a recent study on liberal and conservative patterns of belief. This study found that conservatives placed a far greater weight on "purity" than did liberals. A libertarian called Razib did the questionnaire on which the study was based and reported the results as follows:

when it comes to "Purity" I go farther than even the typical liberal. Here this might be my hard-core reductionist materialism coming through, I don't really believe that anything has an essence, everything is simply a collection of atoms, so talk of an act or object being pure or impure seems totally incoherent to me most of the time.

You can see in this quote how a "hard-core reductionist materialism" might work well together with political liberalism. The materialism undercuts the idea of essences, which then means that there is no given quality toward which things ideally develop. This removes a basic obstacle to individuals developing, as liberals wish them to do, in any direction.

So liberalism and materialism are in alliance when it comes to attacking a traditionally "essentialist" view of things and perhaps this helped them to combine to form the modernist mindset.

It's hardly an ideal combination though. Materialism might help liberals to strike down essentialism, but it does so at the expense of choice and free will. The liberal individual might be able to choose in any direction, but his choice is illusory as it is predetermined. He becomes a fully caused, rather than a self-created, creature.

We're not allowed to have the important things?

Here is liberal writer David Fiore:

Any time a human being chooses to describe themselves as anything but a "human being", liberalism has been thwarted.

... The liberal subject is always merely that - he or she can have no group affiliation, no "sexual orientation", no gender in fact! As far as the state is concerned, each person is a "unit" and that is absolutely all.

This strikes me immediately as being oppressively inhuman. It takes away important aspects of the human experience, such as our existence as men and women and as members of particular ethnocultural traditions. It treats us merely as abstracted units, without a given nature and without the connection to history, people and place which we derive from "group affiliation".

So the question is why liberals like Fiore adopt this position. I've put a part of the answer often enough: that liberals have turned to individual autonomy as their prime good, and that this makes unchosen identities and inherited affiliations morally illegitimate.

Still, we then have to ask why autonomy should be adopted as the overriding goal. I've suggested that the liberal theory of being is faulty: liberals assume our distinction as human beings is that we can self-create who we are. This then means that to be fully human we must be, above all, autonomous, self-determining agents.

There's undoubtedly more to it, though. For instance, there's a variety of ways to arrive at the belief that transcendent goods either don't exist or can't be known. Once you arrive at this belief, then meaning has to be individually constructed or asserted. What then matters is our autonomy to individually construct our life's purpose.

Here is how one modernist thinker puts it (with admirable brevity):

We all find ourselves existing. Now we must all decide our own meaning or purpose.

A traditionalist wouldn't accept this. If you believe, as a traditionalist, that transcendent goods exist, and can be known (at least imperfectly), then it's not a case of constructing our own individual meaning (out of nothing), but of relating our own lives to these larger, objective goods.

As for David Fiore, he makes these claims:

Ideally, society is a pact between people that makes the existential struggle for meaning as pure as possible.

... If, as I (and all non-pantheists) believe, we have no access to the noumenal, then two thousand years of tradition are as useless to us in ascertaining what is "right" as the word of any living, breathing person.

The message here seems to be that we can't know, and that therefore longstanding cultures embodying the ideals of generations past cannot point to important truths.

Why should Western intellectuals come to deny transcendent goods? It's possible that it has to do with a modernist project to make knowledge certain - to the same degree that knowledge in the natural sciences is made certain. As Jim Kalb recently put it, there is a modernist preference for directing reason to things that are "clear, distinct and verifiable".

It's a project which not only leaves out those areas of knowledge which can't be made distinct along scientific lines, but which also often ends in a profound scepticism about our ability to know the external world at all.

Finally, I'd like to quote a small part of Jim Kalb's reply to David Fiore. It focuses on a particular issue - the likelihood of liberalism achieving social cohesion - but also sets out in condensed form a general outline of liberalism:

As you seem to say, liberalism understands man as essentially an ego with thoughts and desires but no particular qualities that are relevant to what he is. He has no binding connection to anyone in particular. His connection to his next door neighbor shouldn't weigh more for him than his connection to someone in Borneo. He can't assume that he shares any common goods with others. He does have the abstract realization that everyone else is in the same position, and he'd agree that it would be better for all men to get what they want than otherwise.

So I suppose the question is how much social cohesion can arise out of such abstract realizations. Not a lot, it seems to me ...

Grayling's progress is Lagonda's loss

Lagonda is a young Dutchwoman who loved the community she grew up in. She remembers tranquil Sunday mornings, marked by familiar sights and sounds:

That is how I remember the Sunday mornings of my childhood. Calm and beautiful, saturated in a slow light.

She remembers a well-knit community, decent and caring, in which people looked out for each other and respected basic social norms.

Sadly, she is now grieving for a lost community:

That was less than 20 years ago. But who still knows what is normal? When I walk into my town now, the inevitable conclusion forces itself on me: The Netherlands is gone and will never come back.

In the last 20 years cheap apartment blocks were built, a diverse population moved in, ethnic violence broke out, parts of the town became off limits to locals, drugs and crime increased, and the new suburbs became run down and poorly maintained.

As a result,

the town closed up definitively: the last remains of the old spirit have disappeared. People have become closed, cautious, frightened.

Lagonda directs her ire at a section of the Dutch political class:

There is a force active in the Netherlands, that lives on this fear, a force that savours tearing apart the textures of traditional society. It is the force of the progressives: it hates contentment, it hates the citizen that dares to be satisfied with his life, it hates the soap bubble of safety that the common man wishes for himself ...

I think Lagonda is right to blame the political progressives. Perhaps she's right too that some of these progressives are motivated by sheer animosity toward the comfortable middle-classes, by a desire to shock, upset and outrank the average citizen.

I doubt, though, that progressives are motivated chiefly by malice. It's best to look at the political beliefs of progressives to understand why they act as they do.

We have a prominent progressive visiting Melbourne this month, namely Professor A.C.Grayling. He's here to discuss his most recent book Toward the Light, in which he argues that Western history since the 1500s has been a progress toward ever greater amounts of liberty.

Grayling claims that as a progressive he is following a great ideal and bringing a blessing of "liberty" to ordinary citizens. But what does he mean by liberty?

As you might expect, he means individual autonomy. For Grayling, the measure of human progress is the advance toward ever greater levels of individual autonomy:

The most congenial moment in the moral progress of humanity for Grayling seems to be the Enlightenment. This is the age whose best minds affirm the fundamental good of personal and political autonomy.

But what does it mean to have more autonomy? First, the existence of social norms, which Lagonda valued as giving shape and purpose to community life, will be looked on negatively as restrictions. Grayling writes:

A living community has to tread this line, always; once a static moral orthodoxy is enforced, the effect on the community is a stifling one. Take the examples of divorce and homosexuality, both of which in living memory were regarded with distaste and opprobrium, and both of which have become acceptable and part of the mainstream, thereby liberating people to more generous possibilities for living flourishing lives.

Grayling has to take this view. If you believe that the fundamental good is individual autonomy, then the existence of a community standard will be thought of negatively as a "stifling" limitation on the self-determining individual.

Similarly, the mainstreaming of divorce will be described as part of the progress of society, as a step toward "liberating people" from a settled pattern of family life.

Grayling is enough of an intellectual to also take this logical step:

One measure of a good society is whether its individual members have the autonomy to do as they choose in respects that principally concern only them. The debate about heroin, cocaine and marijuana touches precisely on this. In my submission, a society in which such substances are legal and available is a good society not because drugs are in themselves good, but because the autonomy of those who wish to use them is respected ...

If a good society is one in which individual autonomy is paramount, then Grayling has a case. Restricting drugs like heroin and cocaine is "stifling" to some other individual's liberty to self-determine his own life and therefore impedes his opportunities to "flourish".

The problem, of course, is the gap between theory and reality. Lagonda didn't experience the trafficking of drugs and the breakdown of social norms in her town as a liberating progress, but rather as a demoralising erosion of community life.

In Professor Grayling's homeland, a wave of murders by teenage gangs has led even some of those on the left to decry the extent of family breakdown in England. People see the fatherless boys, the street gangs and the crime and they don't easily interpret it all as a further step toward liberation and human flourishing.

Then there's the issue of religion. If your aim is to be autonomous, you won't easily accept a higher authority. Consider the following online discussion between Grayling and some admirers:

tarav: Grayling discusses how the Christian story of Satan was based on a pagan myth. Grayling tells of "the fall of Satan, once an archangel high in the ranks of heaven, but whose pride - he desired autonomy, independence, self-determination - was the cause of his being cast from heaven"

tarav: if this is evil, then I am evil too!

MadArchitect: if God is merely a personality of authority, and heaven is merely a territory of the good, then there's much reason to sympathise with the fall of Satan

acgrayling: Tarav and Milton would agree "me too!" ...

Which brings us to a further question. Why should individual autonomy be cast by progressives as the overriding good?

In part, it's because of a tradition within Western thought which answers the question of what makes us human with the idea that it is our ability to determine for ourselves who we are that sets us apart from other (lesser) creatures. Therefore, to hold on to our human status we must assert our autonomy; if some are denied autonomy they are being treated as less human and the principle of human equality is being denied.

Perhaps another reason for the emphasis on autonomy is that modernists tend not to recognise goods existing objectively outside of our own selves. Therefore, the "good" for modernists often consists in the satisfaction of our own preferences or the achievement of our own goals.

Grayling has at least partly confirmed that this is his understanding by writing that:

"the good" is not exclusively a matter of human satisfactions and achievements, because there is the non-human world to be taken into account too.

So, with the proviso that we need to consider the welfare of animals and nature, Grayling seems to connect the "good" with what he terms "human satisfactions and achievements".

If preference satisfaction is the goal, then autonomy will be valued because what matters is that I am unimpeded in pursuing what I want.

If achievement is the aim, then the argument is usually that it is the individual who can best determine what life projects interest him and suit him and that autonomy will therefore best serve the pursuit of the good.

So liberal modernists have a theory of being (regarding what makes us human) and a theory of value (of what constitutes the good). These theories are supposed to lead to human flourishing: to a society in which we flourish as autonomous individuals, each of us pursuing our own career or lifestyle goals, within materially prosperous, differentiated, neutral/respectful, open societies.

That the theories are inadequate is suggested by the fact that the societies don't flourish as they are supposed to. This is not because the whole project is held back by an "irrational" opposition to extending full human equality (i.e. equal autonomy) to all people. Lagonda herself points out that the Dutch, more than any other nation, have tried to adapt to the demands of modernity and to accommodate to newcomers. Yet, the effect isn't a sense of flourishing, but rather a loss of moorings, confusion and a sense of powerlessness:

Nothing is natural or obvious anymore, everything has become guilt-ridden and corroded. Who knows what is normal anymore? Who knows anymore what behaviour may be expected, or even demanded, from fellow citizens? The average citizen, who time after time tried his or her hardest to adapt, is completely lost. All that he knew has been taken away, all the ways he could arm himself have become powerless. We are made to walk as if on eggs through our own society, yelled at by the propagandists of the progressive congregation, who tell us it is our own fault.

Even those presenting Grayling's views to us no longer truly believe that theory matches reality. One columnist declares himself to be sceptical about Grayling's account of progress because:

it seems to me that another delusion the success of science has fostered is that there might be no limits to human capabilities or knowledge. It is not just that technology has downsides as well as upsides ... It is that a scientific account of the world is not enough to live by, though meliorism would have us act as if it is.

When interviewed in the Melbourne Age, Grayling pressed the idea that religion is to blame for society's problems. The interviewer, James Button, wasn't persuaded:

Yet given the world's problems, I ask him, is this a top-order issue in countries like Britain and Australia? Surely a larger concern is the pervasive feeling that the consumer society is empty, devoid of value?

Many of the responses to Grayling run along such sceptical lines. The progressive theory is more difficult to accept now as it is difficult to read modern societies in terms of "onwards and upwards".

It is time to rethink modernist theory. We need a theory of being which is willing to consider as key human qualities our defining forms of identity and attachments, and our place as social beings within communities. This would allow us to recognise that there is a good in how we have been made and not just in the process of self-making.

We need too to rethink the theory of value, so that we recognise "transcendent" goods: higher goods embedded in institutions and traditions, in which individuals partake, but which are grasped as larger, encompassing entities. In doing so, we would open our eyes to the reasonable desire of most people who, just like Lagonda, wish to conserve what is good within the traditional texture of society.

Why artists should be conservative

Since the end of WWII artists have been overwhelmingly liberal modernists. Where has this got them?

They have become irrelevant. As a reward for their role in transgressing the traditional order, artists have been given a few state grants and then ignored.

A liberal modernist society doesn't need artists. It's run by a managerial class on a technocratic basis. There simply isn't an important social function in such a system for art.

Serious artists, therefore, have been shunted out of the public square. How many people today know or care about an important contemporary poet or painter or playwright or composer?

It wasn't always so. Traditional societies ultimately found a basis for order on the transcendent (on the recognition of a "good" existing beyond our own immediate individual preferences or desires). It wasn't functionaries who were best able to express and communicate the transcendent to the public. This was a role for high art, a role which gave artists an important place within society and culture.

Consider the case of poetry. Wordsworth had a tremendous influence in the early 1800s. If you read his most famous poems, they express the transcendent in Wordsworth's response to nature. By the 1920s and 30s, you get poets like E.E. Cummings, who is a modernist in some regards, but who still expresses the transcendent in his love poetry.

And today? In Australia the only really well-known poet (known to the general public) is Les Murray, and it's probably no coincidence that he is unusually anti-modernist in his world view.

People once cared about art because they cared about the "transcendent moment" that artists might communicate in their work. They also cared about art because art had a role in sustaining a civilisation: in giving finer expression to what was both good and necessary to the existence of a people and culture.

Artists might, for instance, represent to the public a higher ideal of fatherhood, or of national feeling, or of the masculine virtues, or of romantic love.

What is there for artists to do in alliance with liberal modernism? For a while, they could assist modernists in trashing the remnants of a traditional culture. There was a moment, too, when they tried to align art with the goals of technocratic efficiency (think of the principle of the architect Le Corbusier that a house is a "machine for living in").

But none of this has a future. Eventually there is no more tradition to set yourself against, and there is no reason for an art based on efficient, abstract function to resonate with the public (most people do their best to ignore it).

It's difficult to see how the situation for artists can improve; the further we descend into liberal modernism the more irrelevant that artists become to the processes of society.

So let me repeat: it makes sense for artists to decouple themselves from the forces of liberal modernism, as it is through these very forces that they are being relegated to insignificance. The hope for artists is that liberal modernity will falter and that this will allow a reassertion of the traditional within Western culture.

Why the left is bleeding men

It's been my impression for a while now that the left is becoming the female side of politics. Where have the younger, straight men gone? Increasingly, it seems, to some kind of right-liberal politics.

Why? Perhaps because there is just too much pain and suffering for a heterosexual man in having to share a political milieu with feminists.

To give you a flavour of what left-liberal men have to put up with, consider this Open Letter to All the Liberal Straight Men by a feminist calling herself Earlbecke.

Remember, Earlbecke is writing to the men on her own side. She is not writing to criticise and annoy conservatives like myself, but to address the average left-liberal, politically correct male.

Her first six words begin in a friendly tone: "Dear Straight Guys, I respectfully submit...". However, that's it for friendliness or respect.

She proceeds to tell male leftists that they are actually not understanding or sensitive individuals just because they show concern or admiration for women. They remain sexists if they show a "specialized sort of attention to women", namely a heterosexual appreciation for women. Instead, they have to change the very way they think so that they see women as people rather than as women.

She then begins her official first point, which is that this is all about her and not about men, so that when she is attacking leftist men their role is to passively listen and accept:

Resist the urge to assert yourself in defense of the male voice. We've already heard it, and doubtless we will hear it again. Save it until we're finished. Do it somewhere else.

Her second point is the same as her first point: that this all revolves around her and not about men, and that what men like isn't relevant and women shouldn't care what men like.

Her third official point is the killer:

3. We are all human beings. We are all similar lumps of fleshy matter that moves and grunts and goes around its daily business. Until you can look at any random woman on the street and see the human being before you start placing significance on the gender presentation, until being human, of any variety, any color, any sexual orientation, any genitalia, any anything, is the nebulous vague default in your mind, you still need to try harder. If you automatically assume a person of unspecified gender or sex is “he”, or white, able-bodied, and heterosexual, that is your problem. And this is why so many of us have no time or patience to try to explain things to you.

She's not exactly a romantic soul is she? She can only conceive of men and women being "similar lumps of fleshy matter that move and grunt". And she demands that we all think the same way. As an instinctive mental default she wants all men to see women not as women but as "its", and to only consider the "gender presentation" as some kind of afterthought.

Point number four is that men have no right to question her on this and that she is "not required to explain myself". Men, she admits, might be made confused, upset or defensive by what she says, but they are not entitled to have "everything placed in a pretty little box" for them. Continued listening, though, is OK.

Number five is predictable: all men are guilty. The only kind of male not guilty is one who "reads the whole list and nods along and then genuinely apologizes for your gender (while not feeling the need to defend yourself by insisting that you do not represent these men)."

So leftist men are innocent if they silently agree to everything, apologise sincerely on behalf of all men, but don't attempt to separate themselves from male guilt.

Now surely, the response of most self-respecting men to all this will be to find a political home elsewhere. Why belong to the left if it means being berated by haughty, condescending feminists for the "sin" of being male and heterosexual?

Earlbecke seems to recognise the burden being placed on straight left-wing men: that of being made confused, defensive and guilty. She seems to think that this is a deserved condition for men.

It is a burden, though, which can disappear in a moment of true liberation when a man decisively rejects the politics of the left, and this is what political men in general appear to be doing.

(There is more on the same theme in an interesting post by Julian David.)

Is there really no outside?

After I finished writing my last post about the Anglican/Hindu priest, the thought occurred to me that there might be more such multi-faithists. A google search came up with the unfamiliar name of Don Cupitt, a Buddhist/Atheist/Anglican priest.

Cupitt is an interesting thinker: he takes some of the trends existing within liberal modernism to their logical conclusion. For instance, he is a non-realist: he believes that ideas are created by language systems rather than representing anything really existing.

Therefore, for Cupitt, there is no really existing truth but only socially constructed "truths".

On the website of Sea of Faith, an organisation based on Cupitt's philosophy, we find some of the implications of this non-realism clearly laid out:

Truths are made within human culture and language. Ideas, beliefs, faiths: we made them up ... So SoF proclaims its mission: "To explore and promote religious faith as a human creation." In this sense, Sea of Faith is humanist."

Its members ... know their religious practices and "truths," like everyone else's, are socially constructed, made by human communities ... So, since faith systems were man-made ... we know we can remake them for our needs, our times, our place. We can ordain gays, or abolish the priesthood ... make God female - or re-fashion him/her as the symbol or imagined incarnation of wholly human values ...

One sympathiser distills the Cupitt lesson this way:

Religion ... becomes like art. Christians are artists, creators of truths. We give up the notion of a divinely ordained hierarchical universe that we just slot into. We have always created ethics.

So there is nothing out there, no "outside" (Cupitt actually uses the term "outsideless" to describe the human condition). This, for Cupitt, is nothing to regret, as it fits in well with another trend within liberal modernism: the belief in autonomy as the highest of human values.

Cupitt values the idea of autonomy, and the freedom he associates it with, so highly, that he thinks that it, rather than the real existence of God, is the true basis of religion.

And since the real existence of God would impede such autonomy, he thinks it anti-religious to suppose the real existence of God. This at least is how the following reviewer summarises his views:

He believes that for genuine moral choices to be made by humans God cannot be understood as one who 'stands over' humanity imposing moral choices onto us..

How can such a hetronomous faith ever be the means whereby I become autonomous and fully-liberated spirit? It is impossible. This appears to be a conclusive religious argument against the objective existence of God. An objective God cannot save ... The more God is absolutised, the more we are presented with the possibility of living under the dominion of a cosmic tyrant....

The absence of objective truth, or even access to an objective reality, is taken to be the ultimate in a liberation from any constraints. We can do and be anything according to our own will because there is no truth for us to live by. As it's explained in one article on Cupitt:

as our language is not a corrupted version of a 'pure' form residing beyond language, we cannot say that words have any meaning beyond their cultural and social 'norms'. The meaning of word is only agreed by the human community and does not reside 'outside' a text. Because of this, 'nothing is entrenched or necessarily absolute' ...

Realism is now understood by Cupitt as, 'spiritual slavery', nothing more than an imposition and restriction onto the world of free-choice and free-values. Morality is synonymous with freedom; the freedom to grow into an autonomous person. There is no longer any fixed truth by which one must align and judge oneself. We are free (and must be freed) to be who we want to be.

I won't attempt a rebuttal of the non-realist view right now, but in my next post I'll quote some interesting views of James Schall on the issue.

Transcendence

Lawrence Auster has written several posts lately on the theme of transcendence. Although this is not the easiest subject matter, it's an important argument and well worth the effort to read.

What is transcendence and why does it matter?