Partial interest & the common good

I listened recently to a very interesting lecture by Professor Patrick Deneen on the topic of "Aristopopulism". In this lecture, Deneen mentions that a basic problem in politics going back all the way to the ancients was how to overcome the conflict between the few at the top and the many below. The solution was to look for a common good, particularly one that might restrain the behaviour of those with power.

It is clear that the commitment to a common good is weakening in Western societies. The elites no longer see their own fate bound together with that of their co-nationals. At the same time, there is an emerging unease within the majority about their appointed role in society. Below, for instance, is an image from a yellow vest demonstration in France. The placard reads "Work, consume and shut your mouth" - a complaint about what is expected of ordinary French people.

We seem to be replacing the traditional commitment to a common good, that all were duty bound to uphold, with an understanding of society as being made up of a whole series of partial interests, each set against each other, but each needing to be balanced to achieve a state of social justice.

Liberals often just assume this model of society, whilst traditionalists are more likely to still have in mind the notion of a common good. For instance, a liberal woman will assume that men have always acted out of a partial interest to press their own power in society against that of women. Therefore, if men express unease or discomfort about some feminist initiative, a liberal woman will understand it to represent a psychological difficulty of those men in giving up power for the sake of equality.

Similarly, imagine a situation in which a husband has worked for decades for the good of his family and ends up with a larger amount of superannuation than his wife, who perhaps stopped work for a period of time to be with her children. If you think in terms of people acting dutifully to uphold the common good of their family, then you will think of the husband and wife sharing a joint interest and benefiting together from their combined superannuation. A liberal woman, though, might be so used to thinking in terms of men and women having separate and distinct partial interests, and the notion of a common good might be so absent, that she will see the husband and wife as having separate financial interests, and therefore she will see the difference in superannuation as harming rather than benefiting the wife.

You can see all this playing out as well when it comes to race relations. In a traditional society, there was a common good represented by the continuing existence of a people, its culture and tradition. It would have been thought not only normal but also highly desirable for this culture and people to dominate within its own country.

But if there is no common good, but only competing partial interests needing to be balanced out, then the existence of a dominant majority people and culture becomes highly problematic. White nationalists sometimes claim a place within the field of modern politics by asserting the right to promote the partial interests of whites. As understandable as this is, it doesn't work well when the notion of a common good has been rejected in favour of partial interests. If the majority people and culture assert their rights, then this will be seen to be favouring an "unequal" situation, of the majority wanting to continue as a dominant majority and therefore favouring "supremacy" rather than being balanced out by everyone else.

Can a society that lacks the notion of a common good prosper? I don't think so. First, there will be a widening sense of incompatibility between those at the top and the rest of the population. The discontents that gave birth to the yellow vest movement in France are likely to build up in force elsewhere. Second, the absence of a common good will, over time, erode the conscientiousness and sense of duty that once helped motivate people to make and to keep their commitments to others. Third, it will be more difficult to persuade people to make lifelong commitments without the sense of meaning and purpose provided by a common good.

Finally, when people stop thinking about how interests can be harmonised within a common good, then even our own partial interests are likely to suffer. For instance, feminists often make the mistake of thinking that they can push the partial interests of women without thinking of the larger harmony of interests necessary for things to work out well. As an example, feminists have been very successful in enrolling women into higher education, sometimes with the help of quotas and the like. There is now something like a million more women than men in higher education in the U.S. But where then do these women find husbands with a similar or higher standard of education? Feminist successes in education lead to failures in family formation. So are women really any better off even looked at from the point of view of their own partial interests?

Ginsburg on feminism

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, once defined feminism as follows:

"Feminism … I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, 'Free to be You and Me.' Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers—manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent."

This definition conjures up a feeling that feminism is an expansive movement, one that is opening up new vistas of human experience to people, more opportunities, new fields of endeavour.

Maybe this is what some feminists intended or hoped for. I would argue, though, that in practice things have moved the opposite way - that there has been a narrowing of life for most people, a "thinning" of human experience, especially of those aspects of life that once provided a sense of meaning, identity and emotional support to individuals.

Why have things moved the wrong way? It is important to understand that the principle set out by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a matter of logic, disallows as much as it permits. And what it disallows is, arguably, much more significant that what it grants.

What Ginsburg is arguing for is the autonomy principle, namely that what matters is a freedom to self-determine. Whatever is a barrier to us self-determining is thought of as a limitation, a cage, from which we have to be liberated.

We do not get to determine our sex. Therefore, according to the autonomy principle our sex should not influence what we might do or be in life. Ginsburg herself wrote:

The gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage

And the Marlo Thomas song that she believes defines feminism has the stanzas:

They're closing down 'Girl Land'
Some say it's a shame
It used to be busy
Then nobody came

... And soon in the park
That was 'Girl Land' before
You'll do as you like
And be who you are.

There is an unfortunate logic at play here in which a girl can only "do as you like / And be who you are" by denying her own girlhood, something that you would think would be at the core of who she is and how she identifies.

It is the same when it comes to family life. To be autonomous means being independent. But a stable, successful marriage requires that men and women cultivate those aspects of their given nature, and those social roles, that make them truly interdependent.

Similarly, successful relationships require that individuals discipline themselves to a higher concept of behaviour, one that promotes high trust and one that places relationships within a larger concept of the good (of service to family, community, nation, God). But autonomy emphasises that we be free to act as we please, to act, as the song puts it, "as you like" without limitations. And so there is a shift to a low trust society with an unstable culture of family life.

There is also an assumption made by those who push autonomy that what matters most as a measure of life is our career. Career success is thought to override other aspects of life that were once thought significant, such as family. We are supposed to live primarily for one thing alone, for our job and for the values associated with it - for work values.

This is more than acceptable to those who have the most power in society. First, because it represents their own value set, but also because it focuses human life on patterns of work and consumption that benefits the plutocracy at the top of society.

If you think back just a few generations, an individual might have felt deeply connected in terms of purpose, social role, belonging, pride, self-worth, commitment, love and identity to the communities they were a part of (town, city, state, nation etc.); to family life and the goods associated with this; to their manhood or womanhood and the identity/values/roles attached to this; to long established ideals of moral behaviour (including to honour); and to the experience of what was "transcendent" in life (not self-determined, but a given part of existence) that connected us to the good, the beautiful and the true (in nature, in art, in religion, in love).

Can we trade all of this for a working life within a corporation or institution and claim that our lives have been expanded? That we have a wider circle of life? Or even that we are freer to be ourselves?

In my own experience, the answer is no. It feels instead as if life is being directed, over time, into a singular and narrower channel. This channel begins with the idea that what matters most is that we are self-determined, moves on to the related idea that our lives are then measured by self-achievement within the market place, which then means that we ideally cultivate "executive focus" skills as a means to this success, which then means that our lives are increasingly regulated by the needs and demands of the corporations or institutions we work for.

I am not entirely against this aspect of life. The pressures of work can help us, for instance, to achieve a higher level of self-governance and therefore build character. My concern is that there is little to delimit it, to provide boundaries to prevent it entirely dominating the culture we inhabit.

Which brings me to a further problem with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's approach to expanding life. According to her, the aim is to remove limits or barriers, as this will then give greater opportunity. But limits or barriers are not always a bad thing. They can protect. They can provide a delineated space within which certain aspects of life can be safely cultivated. They can demarcate, i.e. mark out spaces within which the variety of life can be maintained.

If we really wanted to maximise "self-determination" the smart thing would be to establish, as a community, an understanding of a common good, i.e. of what matters most in our individual lives within a community and then to act to secure this common good. This would give us a much greater control over the course of our lives.

As things stand now, our lives are being radically shaped by forces that we feel are alien to us: by powerful interests in society, by distant government, by a media we have no control over, and by a political philosophy which promises freedom from limitation, but which fails to delimit or protect or uphold, and which therefore places no barriers to the ever expanding dominance of work and consumption as the major source of values in modern life.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Memo to Jeremy Clarkson: Britain abolished international slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philippe Legrain: let's replace nations with ...

Philippe Legrain describes himself as follows:

My outlook is broadly liberal, socially and economically. I am passionate about individual freedom, think markets generally work well and believe that competition is usually a powerful force for good. But I am also convinced that governments need to intervene vigorously to make a reality of equality of opportunity and help the less fortunate.

This is a centrist (perhaps a centre-right) take on liberalism. Like other right liberals, he associates individual freedom with the market; like left-liberals, he looks to the state to intervene in society to create "equal freedom".

If you think this makes him a soft and cuddly kind of liberal, think again. He is enough of an intellectual to draw out the radical logic of liberalism.

I wrote recently that,

Liberalism recognises only the individual parts of society: millions of autonomous, choice making individuals ...

How does Philippe Legrain define society? He describes it as,

a framework of the aggregated individual choices made by others - "society"

He puts the word society in scare quotes to suggest its lack of real existence; all that really exists for him is the sum total of choices made by individuals.

The full quote is this:

Everyone is torn between the urge to do their own thing and the need to live with others: individual choice therefore exists largely within a framework of the individual choices made by others - "society".

If "society" is just the sum total of choices made by individuals, then society can be anything and everything:

In this context, ‘society’ can mean everything from a family to a group of friends, a workplace, a village, an urban neighbourhood, a national society that sets its own laws, or a global sense of humanity that aspires to common norms such as human rights.

Oh, but it can't be a traditional community, based on a particular people or place. Legrain follows liberal orthodoxy here too. The orthodox position is that individual autonomy is the supreme good; whatever we don't determine for ourselves is therefore a restriction from which the individual is to be liberated. We don't choose to be members of traditional communities but are (mostly) born into such traditions; therefore, thinks Legrain, they represent a coercive tyranny and should be replaced by new chosen communities:

Misplaced nostalgia for the erosion of the coerced local communities of old – the flipside of which is liberation from the tyranny of geography, social immobility and the straitjacket of imposed national uniformity – should not blind us to the richness and vibrancy of the new chosen communities, be they groups of friends from different backgrounds, multinational workplaces, environmental campaigns that span the globe, or online networks of people with a common interest. Solidarity is alive and well when British volunteer doctors treat AIDS sufferers in Africa, when friends take over many of the roles that family members once performed (or failed to perform), and when the membership of pressure groups never ceases to rise.

What Legrain is really arguing here is that the older national communities, such as the French, the English, the Dutch and so on, are coercive tyrannies from which people should be liberated and replaced by newer, superior, voluntary communities such as "groups of friends from different backgrounds", multinational workplaces, pressure groups or environmental campaigns.

We are to be "liberated" from our nationality, and perhaps even from our biological family (which is also unchosen after all), and instead experience the richness and vibrancy of belonging to "groups of friends from different backgrounds" or "online networks of people with a common interest".

Can you really be liberated to something more trivial?

Nick Clegg: there is no common good

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, has published an essay titled "The Liberal Moment". He believes the time is ripe for the Liberal Democrats to take over leadership of the left from the Labour Party.

According to Clegg, both the Conservatives and the Labour Party are living in the past. They are both too wedded to the nation and the nation state. Clegg believes that people have become liberated from membership of nations, through such things as technology and immigration. Therefore, what matters is a flow of power upward to global governance and downward to individuals. The new ideal is the empowered, transnational individual and the global state:

We live in a more atomised society where people are no longer rigidly defined by class or place. Our society is no longer trapped by a culture of diffidence and hierarchy.

The capacity of the nation state to act for its citizens has been dramatically diluted as globalisation has undermined its powers. The increasing accessibility of international air travel and new technologies like the internet have radically stretched people’s physical and conceptual horizons. New forms of religious and ethnic identity have dissolved the traditional glue that held the identity of nations together. In short, we live in a more fluid, less deferential world ...

This is Clegg's criticism of the Labour Party:

Labour has lost its ideological way ... They are unsure how to deal with a globalised world in which the nation state is no longer the correct locus of power. They are unsure how to react to the way people have been empowered by technology, travel and prosperity and are no longer willing to subordinate themselves to a collective whole in the name of a supposed ‘common good’ ...

"We live in a more atomised society" begins Clegg. You might think that he would take this as a negative feature of modernity and suggest a remedy. Instead, he thinks of it positively as a form of individual emancipation.

There's a logic to this. If you are a liberal like Clegg you'll believe that self-determination is the highest, overriding good. This means that we cannot be defined by anything that we can't immediately choose for ourselves. We can't be defined by anything that is traditional or biological or even, as it seems, social. If we are defined in some way by the particular society we live in, then we have been "trapped" or "rigidly defined" by the place we inhabit.

An atomised individual is not defined by his relationship to others in a society, nor by an attachment to a particular community. He is a kind of blank slate, an empty canvas ready to be self-authored. He fits in better with the liberal ideal than someone who takes part of his identity from the particular society he lives in.

So for Clegg, the modern atomised individual is escaping "subordination" to a collective whole.

Is such an individual free? What is there left for him to choose to be? He has to keep himself radically unsituated in any place or society, otherwise he is being other defined rather than self-determined. He is free to be not much at all.

It's better to take what is best and deepest in our constituted selves with us, so that we get to be free as men and women, as Swedes or Japanese, as Richardsons or McGregors.

Then there is Clegg's attitude to the common good. For Clegg, there is only a 'supposed "common good"'. He is clearly sceptical that it's possible to speak of a common good at all.

But again he is following a tradition within classical liberalism here. John Stuart Mill, for instance, once wrote that:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.

There is no recognition here that at least some of our purposes in life are rightly directed toward a common good, such as the improvement and perpetuation of our own particular community, society, civilisation or tradition.

Steven Kautz is an American academic who writes in defence of classical liberalism. Here is how he describes the rejection by classical liberals of a common good:

It should not be surprising, even to partisans of liberalism, that a world dominated by liberal individualism has given rise to longings for lost community. Classical liberalism is a doctrine of acquisitive individualism, and teaches that man is by nature solitary and selfish, not political or even social: the most powerful natural passions and needs of human beings are private. Human beings are not friends by nature.

This harsh moral psychology is, at any rate, the fundamental teaching of classical liberalism. As a result, the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals. Liberals are inclined to view partisans of community as either romantic utopians or dangerous authoritarians.

If there is no natural common good, beyond peace and security, then invocations of the spirit of community are either foolish or fraudulent, impossible dreams ...

But without recognising a common good, how can we set out to maintain the communities and traditions we identify with? It can't be done in principle (as I explain further here).