Houellebecq & Liberal Modernity

Michel Houellebecq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In defence of identity

It's not easy to categorise Jordan Peterson. He calls himself a "classic British liberal" but he's not entirely like the "free market, individual liberty and limited government" right-liberals who have dominated the establishment centre-right parties.

For one thing, he is not a materialist in his philosophy and nor does he believe that self-interest or the pursuit of happiness are adequate ideals in life. He accepts the reality of differences between the sexes. He takes the idea of life as a moral project very seriously.

Even so, he has kept the strongly individualistic outlook that is typical of classical liberalism. He frequently criticises the idea that we might take pride in the achievements of the group we belong to; he believes that we may only have pride in individual accomplishments. As an example:

And he also approved of this graphic in which individualism is pitted against all forms of collectivism, including nationalism:

He even claims that the very "rightness" of the West is its commitment to individualism rather than to group identity:

Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that has ever figured out that the individual is sovereign. And that’s an impossible thing to figure out. It’s amazing that we managed it. And it’s the key to everything that we’ve ever done right.

This, I believe, is the tragic error made by Western thinkers. It is false to believe that you either support the individual or the group. The individual thrives within certain natural forms of community, such as family, ethny and nation. So if you support the individual, you should then also be committed to upholding the integrity of natural community as well.

In other words, we consummate our individual lives within natural forms of community. When we are forced to attempt a solo development, we truncate who we are as individuals.

Group identity

For Jordan Peterson, group identity stands in opposition to the individual. I'd like to respond with a brief defence of the importance of group identity to the individual and to society.

The question really is this: why should I not simply identify with myself and my own accomplishments? Why should I identify as well with my own particular tradition, whether of family, ethny, nation, race or civilisation, and take pride in its achievements?

The answer to this is interwoven, but we can draw out some of the threads as follows.

First, a group identity connects the individual deeply to a particular people, culture and place. Instead of existing in life as a kind of tourist, watching from the outside, uninvested in any particular tradition, my identity grants me a sense of connectedness, so that I feel rooted to where I live and to the community I live in.

As a by-product of this, I will feel a sense of belonging, a condition that we as humans naturally seek, to be part of something meaningful, that has a significant common purpose attached to it, and that helps to enrich, and give a particular flavour to, the sense of who we are.

My identity will then strengthen my commitment to the community I am part of. I will be more likely to commit to building a family and to raising children to successful adulthood. I will be concerned to uphold a healthy culture of relationships and family life. I will want to pass on my heritage to my children, and will therefore retell the folk culture and give patronage to the fine arts. I will have a stronger motivation to conserve the places of natural beauty, and the significant landscapes, that I am not merely visiting, but am a custodian of.

A group identity encourages me to build on the best of my own tradition, preserving it for future generations. It connects me across time, to generations past, present and future. It helps to hold a community to a moral standard, so that one generation is not thought to fail their forebears, or to lower the regard in which a community holds itself.

A group identity is the only way to guarantee, in the longer term, cultural diversity. There is not only a significant benefit in feeling connected to your own culture, but also in experiencing other living, breathing national or ethnic cultures. If we may only have an individual identity, and therefore if we logically become interchangeable within a global network, then over time there will emerge a single global, commercial culture, in which one modern city will closely resemble another, no matter where it is.

Nor is it realistic to imagine that our achievements are ours alone. Everyone is influenced either positively or negatively by the culture they inhabit, and this culture is the product of the choices of countless people over time. We rely on others to grow our food, or to police crime, or to sweep the streets. Even our mental capacities are the product of choices made by countless generations before us. As positive as it may be to take personal responsibility for our life outcomes, we have to integrate this with the truth that we stand on the shoulders of others, and that what a community achieves together, or fails to achieve, will have an impact on individuals into the future.

The idea that we may only take pride in individual achievement undermines a community by rendering as less purposeful the necessary, but unheralded, work that most people perform as part of their daily routine. Not everyone can be a professor, or a composer, or an actor and stand out for their individual achievements. This isn't laziness - it is simply inevitable that most people's labours will not attract public attention. It makes more sense to think that there is "a community at work, striving to do each role well" and then for that community to celebrate together, and have pride in, those individuals who emerge publicly for their achievements in pursuits such as sport, or science or the arts.

(This arguments goes a step further. When there is a close sense of community, there is a pride in communal achievements, such as the beauty of the towns, or the prosperity of industries, or the elegance of the women or the toughness of the men. There is a pride in what the community has achieved together.)

Group identity has another advantage in that it creates bonds of loyalty and support within a community, which then provides for individual security. If you know that you live among people with a shared identity, then you are more likely to have a freedom of movement, secure property rights, freedom of speech and access to employment. To take a clear example, white South Africans are currently facing land expropriation, are subject to high rates of crime, are discriminated against in employment, and cannot move freely at night but must barricade their homes. They are less well off as individuals than, say, Japanese who enjoy security among their own group within their own homeland.

Finally, group identity helps to hold together distinct communities, which then become unique expressions of the human spirit, to the point that there is an inherent good to their existence, a good that draws out a particular kind of love (love of country) that helps to complete and to nourish the human soul. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said something along these lines in his famous Harvard University address:

The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. 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.

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.

Setting out a vision of society

Liberal Party Senator George Brandis is Australia's Attorney-General. Some years ago he wrote this:

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 is the liberal view of society. The conceive it to be a conglomerate of individuals, each of whom has a unique identity and aspirations, and each of whom is in pursuit of individual ends. The only caveat on all of this is that there will be "agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence" - so social existence is not a driver of things at all.

And liberals have pushed Western societies a considerable way toward this ideal. Think of life now in one of the big multicultural cities. A lot of people end up living the liberal way whether they like it or not. Many single people, in particular, are now living the way that liberals want them to: without deeper connection to others, but in pursuit of purely individual ends, such as career and consumption.

It's important to grasp what the liberal ideal is in order to understand the importance of the traditionalist alternative. For traditionalists, some aspects of the identity and aspirations of individuals will be unique, but some will not. If a Japanese person identifies as ethnically Japanese, then he will share this part of his identity with millions of others. If he identifies as a man, then he shares this part of his identity with billions of others. Perhaps he might identify as a father, a son or a brother - again, this is a shared identity. He might identify as a Buddhist, sharing this identity with countless fellow Buddhists.

These aspects of his identity can only be expressed in community with others. To be a father requires a family. To be ethnically Japanese requires the existence of a Japanese ethny. To be a Buddhist will usually be expressed through connection to a particular church, culture and tradition.

And this is one way that individuals come to recognise the existence of a common good. If your sense of who you are is tied to an identity that you share with others, then you will be concerned to uphold the larger communal tradition in which you are able to express this identity.

You might, in fact, see a larger communal tradition as being important not only to the expression of your identity, but also to your social commitments, to your sense of belonging, to your connection to the past and future, and to your connectedness and attachment to a particular culture, land and landscape. You might also see this communal tradition as something that is inherently good, as a unique expression of human life with its own transcendent essence, that draws out your love and your desire to represent the best of this tradition, to protect and preserve it, and to make your own positive contribution to it.

And all of this will help add a richness and meaning to your own individual life, one that is torn away by the liberal vision of society, in which there is no shared identity and no common good, but only you alone as a "unique" individual with "unique" aspirations.

The liberal view of society makes us all interchangeable. Yes, that makes it radically "inclusive" but only by stripping us of the qualities that situate us deeply within a larger communal tradition of our own.

An even more revealing Swedish video

A few weeks ago I posted a video in which American uni students were asked if they would accept a man's claim to be a woman. Or Chinese. Or seven feet tall. The students mostly answered in the affirmative.

They did so because that is what the state ideology tells them they should do. According to liberalism, the highest good is to self-define who we are and to accept others doing the same. So if a man claims to be a woman? Or if a white person claims to be Chinese? A good liberal will respond "good for you".

A Swedish copycat video has now appeared. In some ways it is even better than the American one. The Swedish students are very clear that they will accept the claim from a very feminine Swedish woman that she is a man. But some of them hesitate to accept that she is Japanese or 7 feet tall or 7 years old. When asked to explain why they will accept that she is a man but not the other things they respond that she is not physiologically/biologically the other things. The Swedish woman then asks them the obvious follow up question: but isn't being female also something physiological/biological? The students struggle to cope when challenged this way.

To be consistent, and accept the claim that a biological woman is a man, you must then also accept that someone who is biologically Swedish is Japanese. Or seven feet tall. Or seven years old. The American students were consistent, the young Swedes haven't "got there yet".

What a strange world liberalism is leading us toward. There are basic aspects of reality being denied here. Imagine living within that mindset and how that would affect your sense of mental integrity.

A reader on the college kids

A reader and I had a brief discussion on whether the American college students really believed the things they were saying in the video on identity. I thought my reader's last comment to be a good summary of the likely situation:

I think some of them are True Believers. I think others manage to go along with it and believe it by being very careful never to examine their beliefs too closely because there's a part of them that suspects that asking themselves real questions might trigger major cognitive dissonance.

The essence of doublethink is never to take the risk of thinking things through. They know that men and women are absolutely identical and interchangeable and that gender is just a social construct. They know from their encounters with reality that the differences between men and women are profound and obvious. There's no way to reconcile these two ideas so they simply shut down their minds.

You can see the mental struggle going on in their minds in that video. Lots of nervous laughter.

If they ever find themselves in a situation where they encounter lots of people who don't believe this liberal nonsense their liberal beliefs will start to fade. Eventually reality will triumph. Of course our whole society is now structured in such as way as to make sure that young people never ever encounter lots of people who question these crazy liberal beliefs.

I don't have much to add to that, except to reinforce my reader's point that the system relies on maintaining liberalism as an intellectual orthodoxy. That's one reason why I think it's important to present to young people an intellectually serious criticism of liberalism.

There's one other issue I'd like to raise. I've noticed many of my female peers saying that "they don't take themselves seriously". This could just be their way of saying that they're not stuck up or pompous, or that they find it best to let go of egocentricity in order to live well. Perhaps it expresses something about womanhood. Even so, I'm not sure that people in traditional societies would have said such a thing. If you believe you are made in the image of God, and that your manhood and womanhood connects you to significant masculine and feminine virtues, and that you have important duties to self, family and community - then who you are, i.e. your "self", does matter.

What concerns me is that if liberalism teaches people that we can define our "self" however we choose, to the point that we can even choose to swap sexes, then the self will become thought of as just an arbitrary, self-chosen thing that we could just have easily made something else. Why then would the self be taken seriously? Perhaps that is where it all ends.

Cupitt vs Schall revisited

The video of the American college students now has over a million views on Youtube. If you remember, the video shows students from the University of Washington telling a white male interviewer that they would accept his claim to be seven years old, or Chinese, or female.

The video has been posted to a number of sites and has attracted many hundreds of negative comments, many mocking the students' views. But few of the comments have really identified the underlying problem, namely that the students are only expressing the logic of the liberal belief system they have been brought up with.

I wrote a post as far back as 2006, contrasting the views of two religious ministers, Don Cupitt and Father James Schall. Cupitt claims that we as humans are "outsideless" - that there is nothing of inherent value outside the individual. Cupitt's beliefs are described this way:

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.

The key thought here is this: "There is no longer any fixed truth by which one must align and judge oneself." Traditionalists like myself do believe that there are standards external to the individual (that transcend the individual) that the individual orients himself to and attempts to measure up to. We believe, for instance, that masculinity is not just socially constructed but has a real essence that a man can either more or less successfully attempt to embody and that connects an individual man to a higher, transcendent good. It is an objective measure of how we fulfil our given nature; of how we embody a significant and meaningful good; and of how we fulfil our higher purposes in life. It would make little sense for a traditionalist man to decide to take on a female identity - this would not be thought of as "liberation" but as a disordered orientation.

One of the problems with the liberal modernist view is that whilst it expands choice it does so at the cost of making what we choose purely subjective and therefore less meaningful. Here, for instance, is a statement from the website of Don Cupitt's church:

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 ...

Father James Schall has answered the Cupitt position eloquently:

The initial choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there...The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about lately. The issue under consideration is what brought the West to adopt liberal modernist beliefs. One angle I haven't considered much before is the way that God was conceived of in the Christian West. In pagan societies, the deities might act wilfully and arbitrarily - therefore, they might have to be propitiated with sacrifices. I have read as well that in Islam something is made good because it is the will of Allah that it be so - so again, what matters is the will of the deity. But in the medieval West there was not a deity ruling wilfully over a chaotic universe, but rather a divine order, i.e. reality was divinely ordered, even to the point that a hierarchy of beings might be identified.

The concept gives much spiritual depth to man's existence and it is also likely to stimulate man's efforts to use his reason to understand the reality he inhabits. But it has its weak points as well - it has to withstand evidence that the material world is not designed in as straightforward a way as might be imagined (e.g. consider the setbacks to Christian belief through the discovery of the fossil records).

Liberal modernity might be, in part, a reaction to a loss of belief in the existence of a divine order. Here, for instance, is how one Cupitt sympathiser describes his outlook:

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.

Instead of God the creator, it is now Man the creator. Instead of a universe in which moral values have a real existence, moral values instead are made up by humans.

I'm not sure that this is a key aspect of what has happened, but it's something worth considering.

The advanced liberal college mindset - astonishing!

I want to thank reader Clark Coleman for sending me a link to a video made by the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

The video shows young American college students being interviewed on the topic of identity. These students have been brought up on the liberal principle that the highest good is a freedom to self-define who we are and that what defines morality is therefore our willingness to accept others defining themselves as they wish.

This, taken logically, leads to some extraordinary moments in the video in which students refuse to challenge the most absurd claims about identity:



David French at National Review summed up the mentality reasonably well:

Essentially the new morality is “you do you — so long as it doesn’t hurt me or someone else in a way that I immediately recognize.” The new immorality is any act of “intolerance” that purports to interfere with this radical autonomy.

That's well put, except that this moral principle isn't really new - it is the same liberal principle that has been driving social developments in the West for generations now.

The principle is not really respectful of identity. If anyone can choose to be a woman, then how is being a woman meaningful? It is significant only as an expression of choice, and the choice is arbitrary as the same person could equally choose to be a man or something else altogether.

Nor can you really uphold communal identities according to this mindset. The attitude of "you do you - so long as it doesn't hurt me" is radically individualistic. It is about me the individual choice making individual, rather than the group I am connected to through a real, objective set of attributes.

You can also see why transsexualism is the soup de jour. There is no way that Westerners with this mindset are going to object to a man identifying as a woman. Such Westerners are going to agree to all the demands of the transsexual movement.

Finally, I'd like to reiterate the basic truth that ideas have consequences. It can be difficult for some people to grasp the hold that ideas have on intellectual types. The most important thing of all is not even the culture war, as important as that is. It is not even the use of emotion to sway political debates. It is rather the establishment of first principles. It is the answer to questions such as "What makes a man good?" Or "What are the aims of human life?" Or "What is the good that human societies should seek?"

Clarissa and the Hutterites

Clarissa, the liberal academic, has written a follow up post. She is perturbed that there are people who think than men and women are different by nature. All differences, according to her, are social constructs.

It's not surprising that Clarissa would think this way. She is committed to a liberal world view in which what distinguishes us is that we self-define who we are. In this view, our individuality is threatened by predetermined, collective identities such as that of being a man or woman or belonging to a particular ethnic group. Clarissa believes that we should work out a unique identity for ourselves, as this will give us individuality. She writes:

Sadly, many people are too stupid and lazy to work out their own individual identity, their own unique worldview. This would be a life-long project of self-improvement and learning, and many people choose not to think or make an effort. In the absence of an individual philosophy of life, they allow outside authorities to fill their inner void with content. The easiest way to organize your existence in the absence of a personality of your own is by adopting some collective identity. Gender roles work beautifully for this purpose because zero effort is required to practice them. Why figure out whether you like pink, blue or orange when you can always allow some manipulative salesperson make that decision for you and make you feel like you actually have a meaning as a result of adopting this “preference”?

If this were true then traditionalists would be lazy conformists, whereas liberals would be independent-minded individualists.

The first problem in accepting Clarissa's take on things is that she is the one following an intellectual orthodoxy. It takes a degree of non-conformism these days to be a traditionalist, whereas the liberal view is the standard ruling one. If Clarissa really spent a lifetime of study working out her own individual worldview, why did she arrive at the stock standard one? Why did she join the intellectual herd?

There's another problem with Clarissa's view that I'd like to raise and I'll illustrate my point with a photograph I posted recently of some Hutterite men:

These men belong to a small religious community sharing similar values and wearing the same clothes. If Clarissa were right, then these men ought to be low on both individuality and energy. But in the photo they don't appear that way. They don't come across as drones at all, but as healthy and spirited young men, of neither the wimpy nor the thuggish variety.

Where Clarissa and other liberals get it wrong is in thinking that we lose individuality when we are connected to deeper, inherited forms of identity. Such collective identities don't make us carbon copies of each other: if you put 100 men together you get plenty of individual particularity, just as you would if you put 100 English people together.

Where individuality is suppressed is when the individual is demoralised by experiencing life as an atomised individual. The Hutterites do not look demoralised.

And then there's the issue of identity. Clarissa uses the word but empties it of meaning. She talks about people working out "their own individual identity, their own unique worldview." As I've already noted, that would mean that Clarissa herself has no identity as she has failed to work out a unique worldview of her own, preferring instead to go with liberalism.

It means too that the word "identity" becomes curiously close in meaning to that of "worldview". That makes identity remarkably fluid and unstable - if I change my worldview then my identity changes along with it. Can there be a sense of continuity of self in such a view?

Connecting identity and worldview so closely means that identity becomes an intellectual, self-generated thing; if it has meaning, it has it as an intellectual conceit ("I'm not like the others, I think differently").

And, anyway, in Clarissa's view it is not so much identity itself that has meaning but the process of selecting identity. In other words, it is not the form of identity we end up with that carries weight or has meaning, but the intellectual effort to form one. So identity doesn't matter in itself.

In the traditional view, identity does matter. For instance, if I identify as a man, then that connects me to facets of my being (physical, emotional, spiritual); to the values associated with the masculine; to one aspect of my telos (i.e. to what I am rationally developing toward in fulfilment of my being); to other aspects of identity associated with manhood (e.g. fatherhood, being a husband); and to the roles associated with being a father or husband (amongst others).

Clarissa claims falsely that this is a passive account of identity; in fact, it is an active, complex and challenging one that no two men will complete in exactly the same way or with the same elements of success or failure.

It is also an account of identity that draws on the whole person, rather than the intellectual one alone. In this sense it encourages an "integrity" of self, i.e. a harmony of mind, body and soul, which again gives depth in comparison to a view of self based on "world view".

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.

Losing the particular

I've just read an essay titled "Living with the "Other"" by Miroslav Volf (in Muslim and Christian: Reflections on Peace, University Press of America, 2005).

Miroslav Volf is a professor of theology at Yale University Divinity School. He's a bit difficult to place politically. He seems to want to commit to both a liberal view of identity (one that is inclusive, porous, open and dynamic) whilst retaining the basic goods of a traditional view.

I don't think that's likely to work out well in practice, but it does at least mean that Professor Volf isn't entirely committed to a "dissolve at all costs" view of the world.

For instance, he writes:

...in order to have an identity, you must have boundaries. Imagine a world without boundaries. You cannot! For without boundaries you would not have "a world"; everything would be jumbled up together and nothing distinct would exist, which is to say that just about nothing would exist at all. To have anything except infinite chaos, you must have boundaries. Hence when God creates, God separates. If boundaries are good, then some kind of boundary maintenance must be good too. Hence when boundaries are threatened (as they often are in a variety of ways), they must be maintained. (pp. 9-10)

Similarly, although Professor Volf advocates embracing the other, he does recognise that conditions apply:

But should we not maintain our boundaries so as to protect our cultural identities? Yes, we should. If I am crushed in the process of embrace with the other, this is no longer an embrace but an act of covert aggression. Whereas the will to embrace the other is unconditional, the embrace itself is not. It is conditioned, first, on the preservation of the integrity of the self. Boundaries are good, I argued earlier, because discrete identities themselves are a good. And because both are good, they have to be protected.

Earlier I have argued for protection of identities - of oneself and of one's group - by appealing to creation. To have anything at all and therefore to have "a world," you must have and maintain boundaries. Hence when God creates, God separates (and binds together, of course). One can argue for protection of identities also on the basis of redemption. Since God showed redeeming love in Christ for all humanity, the self cannot be excluded as a legitimate object of love. I should love myself, provided my love of self is properly related to the love of God and of the neighbour. And since I can love myself, I can certainly love my group because such love includes both the love of the neighbour and the love of the self (since my own well-being is often connected with the well-being of my group). Hence one is entitled to ensure that the embrace of the other does not endanger the self. (p.18)

There are some good arguments in that passage. To summarise:

i) You are not "embracing" the other if you are crushed in the process; rather you are submitting to an act of aggression.

ii) It is important to preserve the integrity of self.

iii) Our distinct identities are a good, and we should seek to preserve the good.

iv) Creation necessarily involves acts of separation and the making of boundaries.

v) God's redeeming love is not directed at everyone except ourselves. We too have a self that is properly an object of love. We are therefore not empty vessels which take on content only in our regard for the other. We too have a self to be considered, and our well-being is connected to the well-being of the group we belong to.

Finally, Professor Volf argues that we should pay closer attention to those we are most closely related to:

But do not people to whom we are "thickly" related demand special attention? A spouse and children seem to do so. Why not fellow members of the same ethnic group? Insisting that "every human being is my neighbour," some Christians have advocated that we should be impartial in our love, extending it to those to whom we are "thinly" related no less than to those to whom we are "thickly" related. Yet even those Christian theologians who, like Augustine in Teaching Christianity claim that "all people should be loved equally," insist that "proximity makes a difference"...Other Christian theologians, like Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, have claimed that all neighbours should not be loved equally; we have special relations to some people and "the union arising from natural origin is prior to, and more stable than, all others." So to claim that love's scope is universal does not imply that we do not differentiate in how we ought to love those with whom we have special relations and those with whom we do not.

There is no good reason to wed the claim that love is universal in scope with what Gene Outka has called "simplified egalitarianism" which does not take into account that "our capacity for reciprocal help and harm is deeper and more varied with those closely related to us." The Christian claim that we should "love" all people, not just those with whom we have special relationships, does not imply undifferentiated cosmopolitanism, which would preclude giving special attention to our own family, ethnic group, nation, or broader culture. Not only is it right to maintain boundaries of discrete group identities, as I have argued earlier, it is also right to devote one's energies so that the group to which we belong will flourish. (pp.20-21)

 It seems to me that these kinds of theological arguments are important within Christianity; for Christianity to work there has to be an understanding of how a love that extends universally can be combined with the obvious goods of more particular relationships, such as those involving family, ethnic group, nation and broader culture.

As I mentioned at the start, I think that Professor Volf doesn't quite get it right, as his way of combining things wouldn't easily allow the particular relationships to survive. But at least he recognises the need to uphold both things: the universal and the particular.

If  you go to a Catholic church now, you are likely to hear only one side - the universal. A concern for the particular has been lost (unless it involves a group that has status within liberal politics, such as Aborigines - see here and here - but this then suggests that the Church isn't getting the universal right either - why should the Aborigines have a human status that others don't have?)

If anything, at a time when liberalism is dissolving particular relationships, the Church should be focused on the defence of the particular, rather than helping to drive liberalism forward by emphasising the universal.

If that's a problem...

I found this quite interesting. There's a young woman called Christine, whose family are Chinese from Malaysia. She moved to Singapore for a while and liked it:

Singapore was a unique place created by the Chinese diaspora, and continued to draw the Chinese diaspora to its shores — it was Chinese diaspora central! I also felt at home there because it was the one country in the world where I felt truly comfortable as an English and Manglish/Singlish speaking overseas Chinese. Finally, I was in a place where the majority population looked like me and spoke like me too.
 

That's understandable; she had found a place to live where she had a sense of living amongst her own ethny, namely the Chinese diaspora.

But what's really fascinating is that the Chinese diaspora population has such a sense of its own existence that it doesn't like the idea of large numbers of mainland Chinese migrating to Singapore.

Christine's story runs as follows. Whilst living in Singapore she became aware of increasing numbers of mainland Chinese living there:

But as time passed, I started feeling a disparity — it certainly seemed like there were more mainland Chinese than other Chinese foreigners in Singapore.

However, she then moved to mainland China herself:

I’ve been here two years, the typical overseas Chinese girl who has gone back to her ancestral land.

Living amongst the mainland Chinese put her mind at rest about what was happening in Singapore. That is, until she found out about the extent of mainland Chinese immigration into Singapore. It turns out that 1 million out of 5 million people in Singapore are from the People's Republic. This statistic startled her as it did Singaporeans:

According to a population census dated September 2010, Singapore’s population currently stands at about 5.07 million. That makes nearly one in five here a Chinese national.

Netizens largely react with shock and dismay to this news, calling it a “staggeringly huge number”
 

Christine wrote:

...this news comes as a shock to me as well. Knowing that there are “many mainland Chinese” in Singapore is one thing; being given a figure like 1 million — when your country’s population is only 5 million — is something else. I can understand why Singaporeans are upset. Take away the mainland Chinese aspect and replace it with “nearly 1 million eskimos are living in Singapore” and you would still get an uproar. Tell any country a fifth of its people are all from one other place, and you’d get a strong reaction. It’s not so much hating on PRCs and more about uncertainty over your own identity, isn’t it?
 

Christine, well put, but for some Westerners the situation of Singaporeans seems relatively luxurious - the immigrants to Singapore are, after all, a closely related population (the differences being mostly limited to those of language and manners). The stress on identity is much greater for, say, an Englishman in London or a white American in Los Angeles.

Does liberalism allow group survival?

The Democratic Alliance is the major opposition group in South Africa. It's a party that was historically made up of white liberals. In its 2009 election manifesto the party declared that it stood for a society in which:

...everybody has the opportunities and the space to shape their own lives, improve their skills and follow their dreams... People are not held back by arbitrary criteria such as gender, religion, or colour...

That's your standard liberalism. Liberalism claims that our human dignity depends on our ability to autonomously self-determine who we are and what we do. Therefore, predetermined qualities like our ethnicity or sex are thought of negatively as potential impediments to a self-defining life.

The problem is that this assumes that our "dreams" exist at a purely individual and self-determined level, i.e. that who we are as men or women, or as Afrikaners or Zulu, doesn't matter.

But not everyone in South Africa is a white liberal, so that assumption hasn't gone unchallenged. Former president Thabo Mbeki labelled it a "soulless secular theology" that was based on an atomised view of the individual.

Ryan Coetzee is the Democratic Alliance strategist. He has written a column in response to Mbeki's claims. It's an interesting piece as it shows a white liberal trying (unsuccessfully) to fit in a group identity within a liberal ideology. Coetzee tries his best to make concessions but he doesn't get very far.

Coetzee sets out the debate with this:

...during the 1980s and 1990s there was a detailed and sustained debate between liberals and communitarians concerning the liberal conception of the self, which does not need repeating here. Suffice it to say that it is perfectly possible and indeed desirable for liberals to hold a view of an autonomous self grounded in society without ceasing to be liberals.

The communitarians were a group of academics, some of whom made similar criticisms of liberalism to the ones I make. They did push liberals onto the back foot, but without changing any fundamentals.

Anyway, what Coetzee is saying is that he thinks it possible to retain the liberal view of an autonomous self whilst still, as the communitarians urged, having that individual grounded in a particular society. The liberals had not paid much attention for some generations to that communitarian concern.

Coetzee goes on to argue that liberals believe that despite the influence of predetermined qualities like our biology and our environment, individuals are unique and can choose "who and how to be".

Traditionalists would agree that individuals are unique and that individuals do choose aspects of how they live, but we would not make such a blanket assertion that it is an individual thing to choose who and how to be. Some of that is given to us. For example, if we are men, and attempt to realise that part of ourselves, then not every way of being is equally masculine. We will be naturally oriented to some ways of being rather than others. Similarly, if we have a moral conscience, and can recognise aspects of a pre-existing objective morality, then we will be oriented to some behaviours over others. And our ethnicity is not usually something that it is in our hands to choose. A Japanese man can choose to live in exile, or to make little effort to support his tradition, but he cannot suddenly make himself not Japanese in ethnicity.

Coetzee then makes a partial concession:

...individuals have a variety of identities, including group identities, and that these are perfectly legitimate. They are not atomized centres of consciousness with no connection to others: a person may be an Afrikaner, coloured, a woman, a socialist, a mother and a lover of classical music, and all these attachments (and many others besides) comprise her identity.

That's a lot better than the usual "ethnicity is a fetter" type of liberal argument. But note that some key aspects of identity (our sex and ethnicity) have been placed at the same level as an artistic taste (lover of classical music).

I'll take the concession, though, given that in many liberal societies a white identity is considered illegitimate. But as we'll see, the limited concession isn't enough by itself. Coetzee goes straight on to make this qualification:

....while individuals may be in part the product of biological and environmental forces, they are still able to exercise choice and thus can decide their identity and attachments for themselves, at least in so far as they feel alienated from the identities imposed on them by their history and environment. The woman described above can choose not to be Afrikaans, not to identify as coloured or as a socialist. She can even choose not to identity as a woman...

It's an insistence that identity has to be autonomously self-defined. And if you think that autonomously self-defining yourself is the key aspect of your human dignity, then your bias will be toward not accepting the predetermined aspects of your identity, i.e. you'll think yourself greater in dignity if you reject an identity as an Afrikaner or as a woman.

Second, it's odd to take the approach that we must decide for ourselves whether we are to identify as a man or as a Japanese. These things are so constitutive of who we are, that to deny them would mean failing to fulfil important aspects of self. Yes, a woman "can even choose not to identify as a woman" but that would be denying something that you already are.

Coetzee then makes this strange claim:

This is an optimistic and empathetic vision of what it means to be a human being. If we are mere representatives of larger entities (the middle class; Muslims; Africans; whatever) then there would be nothing about others to respect or with which to empathise. Indeed, there would be no other people (as we use and understand the term) at all – just ciphers representing abstractions.

This is an example of how liberal thought can be very alien to non-liberals. Surely I can identify ethnically as, say, a Frenchman and still respect a Bolivian for a whole range of qualities: being a good father, a good Christian, having masculine bearing, showing commitment to his own tradition, working productively etc.

Perhaps Coetzee really believes that if we identify with a communal tradition that we so merge into an abstracted mass that we lose all individual qualities. If that is what liberals think, then they need a good lie down on a sunny Queensland beach. If anything, individuals in traditional Western societies were more self-confident in asserting themselves rather than less so. Was Shakespeare just a cipher representing an abstraction?

Coetzee does give an example of what he fears. He criticises the "coconut" accusation levelled at some blacks by other blacks:

Blacks who think or behave or sound “like whites” are not real blacks, they are “coconuts”. The idea that one can be black, and think what one likes, and still be black, is anathema. In other words, the idea that you can self-identify as black and then define for yourself the meaning and significance of that identification is anathema.

Perhaps it's true that the "coconut" jibe is used to coerce some blacks into remaining within black norms. But there are norms generated in a variety of ways in every society, including liberal ones. There are norms of behaviour within social classes, for instance. In liberal societies, there are very strong norms about what makes you a good person or not, and what is correct or incorrect to say or believe. Norms can have a positive effect or a negative one, depending on what they are and what they push toward.

So we shouldn't be frightened of the existence of norms - they're always going to be with us. What matters is their quality. And nor can we do as Coetzee suggests, which is to define for ourselves the meaning and significance of an ethnic or sex identity. If that were possible, then such identities would have very little significance. If I could just make up what it means to be masculine, then that would be a merely invented, subjective identity which would not connect me to anyone else or to anything outside of myself.

That's not to say that the individual doesn't act upon such identities. Generally, we look to what's best within our tradition, or within masculine or feminine qualities, and try to draw on those things; and that means that there will be some individual variation and some changes in culture over time.

Here's something else from Coetzee:

We in the DA are a collection of complex individuals with many identities. We are not a collection of race or linguistic or religious or cultural groups that are immutable and that define the individuals in them, rather than being defined by the individuals in them.

It's the same problem. We are allowed to belong to a group as long as the group doesn't somehow define who we are; it is only allowed to work the other way  - we have to define for ourselves as individuals what identifying with the group means. But that makes belonging to the group less meaningful. Say I identify as a Catholic. If every Catholic self-defines what identifying as a Catholic entails, then you've reduced the sense that there is a real essence to being a Catholic.

The truth is that we are partly defined by being a man or a woman, by being an Afrikaner or a Zulu, by being a Muslim or a Catholic and so on. And although these identities are not strictly immutable, nor are they up for self-definition either.

Finally, Coetzee has an odd way of justifying social solidarity:

What makes solidarity possible for liberals is not the idea that other members of my group are facsimiles of me. In this conception of things, no solidarity (identification, care or compassion) is possible anyway, because there is no other with which to identify or empathise. In this (collectivist) conception of things, solidarity is really just self-interest masquerading as compassion for others who aren’t really other at all.

First, he assumes that solidarity means compassion and empathy rather than loyalty, a feeling of relatedness, or working toward common ends. Second, he seems to believe that you can't show compassion or empathy towards someone you are more closely related to because that would just be self-interest. That leads to his striking conclusion, that you can only experience solidarity with those who are most alien to you.

Coetzee supports this statement by Richard Rorty:

In my utopia, human solidarity ... is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increases in sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves ...

So solidarity with your own group is impossible because the very notion of solidarity has been redefined to mean compassion for people who are alien to you.

Now, having compassion for people who are other to you is a good thing. But it's no use for Coetzee to say that it's legitimate for people to have a group identity and then:

a) insist that there are no larger essences to these identities that help to define the individual, but that the individual himself defines what these identities are

and

b) redefine solidarity as something that only applies to those outside of the groups you belong to.

If liberals are going to declare group identity to be legitimate, then they have to commit to a philosophy which makes it possible for these groups to survive over time. Coetzee has not done this and so his concession to the communitarians isn't as significant as it might initially appear to be.

A feminist art of living

There's an American feminist academic called Jacqueline Scott (and, as it happens, an English one too, but more on her later) who has explained what she calls her "Art of Living":

Practicing the art [of living] means consciously trying to flourish by resisting offered definitions and actively seeking to define oneself. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to these offered (he might also use the verb "imposed") definitions as "nooks". They can sometimes be nooks of comfort and security, but they can also be nooks of imprisonment.

Regular readers will know that I see this kind of attitude as central to liberal ideology. The liberal idea is that the highest good is an autonomy in which we are supposed to be self-determining or self-defining individuals. Therefore, whatever is predetermined in our identity is thought to impede us - it is thought of in limiting terms as a strait-jacket or, in Jacqueline Scott's terminology, an imprisonment.

She continues on with this:

The art of living involves making conscious decisions as to how one conceives of oneself and practices a meaningful life. The assumption underlying this art is that one's identity and conception of a meaningful life are "up for grabs". With the art of living, then, one does not "discover" one's self, one creates it.

What she is saying is that if you think of yourself as a self-defining individual, then you are assuming that you don't have any essential identity or nature; you begin as a blank slate and you go on to create yourself from your own "conscious decisions".

That is a kind of existentialism: a belief that existence precedes essence (i.e. that first we exist and then we create what we are). Existentialists like to talk about people having authentic selves, which has always struck me as odd - how can your self be authentic if you have no essence and just make up who you are?

Jacqueline Scott briefly touches on this issue:

It was at Spelman that I established my first guidelines for my practice of the art of living...avoid sacrificing my authentic self (meaning my conception of it) in the name of pleasing or placating someone else.

At least that's clearly put. She believes that you are being authentic if you follow your own concept of self rather than changing it to please someone else. The problem, as she herself notes, is that the self you are staying true to is just a conception you have of yourself. You could just as easily have a different one. So why not change it to please others?

Here's another odd thing about existentialist authenticity. Jacqueline Scott is a black American woman but she is engaged to a Jewish man and has converted to Judaism. And yet she is, as she discusses in her writings, a Nietzschean nihilist. She writes:

There were many other aspects of Judaism that seemed less "natural". How in the world could I pray to a God in whom I could not wholeheartedly believe?

Indeed. But I suppose that in some ways it's easier if you are an existentialist to accept such a situation. If you are only dealing in self-generated concepts, then being Jewish isn't so much about accepting the truth claims of Jewish theology, but about finding a way to work Judaism into an image of self.

Finally, the other striking thing about Jacqueline Scott's beliefs is that it's difficult to see how she has come independently to her own identity as her liberal/existentialist philosophy demands.

As we've seen, she adopted Judaism to fit in with her boyfriend's background. She got her feminism from her parents:

I grew up in a household in which both of my parents considered themselves feminists, and in which...my mother was an active member of the Panel of American Women.

Her philosophy is also the standard one for Western intellectuals - she hasn't really avoided the spirit of the times in that regard. And, of course, her other sources of identity, of being black and a  woman are also things that she was born to.

So it's difficult to see her as a self-created entity. She has been influenced by the culture she grew up in, by her parents and her fiancee, and by inherited qualities of her sex and race. So her philosophy hasn't even worked out on its own terms.

What's wrong with liberal identity?

Living in a multiculture poses problems for identity:

A study of 339 young people aged 14 to 17 who live in Sydney's west and south-west suburbs found only one-third of them called themselves Australian even though two-thirds were born here.

Instead they identified themselves by their ethnic background as Tongan, Chinese, Lebanese, and so on, and 16 of the indigenous young people identified themselves as Koori or Aboriginal.

Less than half of them also felt ''Australian'' all the time and one-fifth did not feel ''Australian'' at all.

The liberal academic responsible for the research put a positive gloss on the findings:

Jock Collins, a professor of economics at the University of Technology, Sydney, who presented findings from the study at a conference in Europe, said the unwillingness of these "cosmopolitan" youth to identify as Australian should not be seen as a problem.

"A lot of these young people have links to their parents' nations of birth and they have diverse and multiple identities," he said. "They incorporate their migrant identities with elements of 'being Australian'."

Liberals like the idea of "diverse and multiple identities" because it suggests that identity is something that we can choose for ourselves from a menu of options. It fits in with the liberal belief that the key good in life is autonomy, so that the ideal man becomes someone who is self-defining or self-creating.

However, I very much doubt if Professor Collins has it right. I doubt that in the long-term these young people will sustain diverse ethnic identities.

What's more likely is that they are in the process of being deracinated - uprooted from their original culture and ethny. They might still identify as being a Turk or a Tongan, but it will be difficult to sustain this identity over time living in the suburbs of Sydney.

What happens when an ethnic identity is lost? Identity doesn't disappear. Individuals do need a sense of personal identity. So it takes on different forms.

You can see this with the Anglo liberals who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of them are the "true believer" types for whom liberalism is something of a religion. These true believers have a hostile view of whiteness and so have rejected identifying with their own ethny. They have also largely rejected identifying positively with their sex (masculinity or femininity) and with their family roles (husband, wife, mother, father).

So what do they build their identity on? Obviously, partly on their political beliefs. They have a sense that they hold a morally superior politics which makes them good and superior people. They also put a lot of emphasis on their work identity. Some of them, from what I've observed, also fill in the gap of their "tribal" identity through loyally supporting a sports team.

For reasons I will try to explain later, these alternative identities are a step down from the traditional ones. But they are nonetheless better than the ones that the young people living in Sydney's south-western suburbs are likely to adopt.

What happens to youth identity in a liberal culture? This is the issue discussed in a paper by Sarah Riley from the University of Bath in the UK ("Identity, community and selfhood: understanding the self in relation to contemporary youth cultures" 2008).

How would we expect identity to be treated in a liberal society? For liberals, what matters is that we are autonomous; we are supposed to be self-determining, self-sovereign creatures. The good, therefore, is not in anything we choose to do or be but that we get to self-define.

So liberals won't like forms of identity that we can't choose between or that we are "destined" to have as part of our tradition or biology. They will prefer instead forms of identity that are temporary, elective, multiple and fluid.

With that in mind, consider the following excerpts from Sarah Riley's paper. Here, for instance, she describes the dominant "neo-liberal" approach to identity:

The need to story oneself with multiple narratives, whether drawn from traditional - or consumption-based identity markers, is particularly relevant...

Neo-liberalism describes the idea that people are encouraged to see themselves as if they are autonomous, rational, risk-managing subjects, responsible for their own destinies and called “to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy"...

Neo-liberalism allows people to make sense of themselves in individualistic and psychological terms, understanding their consumption practices as freely chosen markers of their identity

Identity here is self-created and subjective. It is about "self-storying". The elements of identity being played with can be traditional ones (based on family or ethnicity) or they can be modern ones based on "consumption practices" (what we choose to buy, to wear, to own).

Sarah Riley uses the term "liquid" rather than "fluid" to describe the preferred liberal form of identity:

It is likely, however, that young people’s subjectivities are constructed through a variety of identities shaped by ‘traditional’ orientations to class, region, family and gender, and more ‘liquid’, flexible ones orienting around leisure-based activities, such as sports or shopping.

Identity, in the above excerpt, is described as a self-constructed "subjectivity". Although traditional elements of identity are still played with, the modern forms of identity, based on leisure activities such as sports or shopping, are considered more liquid and flexible and therefore superior in liberal terms.

More on the same theme:

This context has opened up the possibility for young people to engage in a playful pick-and-mix approach to identity as they move through a kaleidoscope of temporary, fluid and multiple subjectivities that often celebrate hedonism, sociality and sovereignty over one’s own existence.

Well, that's the liberal approach to identity in a nutshell. We playfully pick-and-mix our identity, and move through "temporary, fluid and multiple subjectivities".

And what about group identity? In her paper, Sarah Riley takes into account a theory of modern group identity called neo-tribalism:

Maffesoli’s theory of neo-tribalism ... characterises daily life as a continuous movement through a range of small and potentially temporary groups that are distinguished by shared lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour. These groups give a sense of belonging and identity, examples of which include gathering to watch football in a bar, participants on service user websites or regular commuters sharing public transport.

What distinguishes neo-tribal social formation from traditional social groupings is that people belong to a variety of groups, many of them by choice, so that neo-tribal memberships are plural, temporary, fluid and often elective

This too is a liberal approach to identity. Group identity is held to exist, but only in autonomous, self-defining forms, i.e. in forms which are plural, temporary, fluid and elective.

What is the point of this kind of group identity? It is to express "self-sovereignty:

when groups create opportunities to practice sovereignty over their existence they are creating spaces in which to engage in values that orient around sociality, emotionality and hedonism. In relating neo-tribalism to young people, it may be useful to recognise the similarities between Maffesoli’s concept of sovereignty and Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ), a term he uses to describe transitory unsanctioned self-governing sites

Note the language used to describe these group identities: they are based on "transitory" affiliations, which once again emphasises the idea of identity being temporary.

Which brings us to the key question. What is wrong with these modern, liberal forms of identity? One part of the answer is that they are merely subjective:

Thus, the proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication make available a dynamically-shifting range of stories and forms of knowledge that can inform young people’s identity management. Subjectivity, then, is not considered to be constructed from pre-formed essences which exist independently outside of time, talk or other social activity, but are constantly (re)produced in interaction, constructed from the range of subject positions available to the individual...

Our identity is held to be subjective, self-constructed and "managed". It is not thought to be based on "pre-formed essences which exist independently" of our own self.

But if identity is not related to anything that has an independent, objective value, if it has value only because we choose it, then it isn't very significant.

I'll put this another way. For liberals, the forms of identity are not very important or meaningful in themselves. What matters is the feeling of "self-sovereignty" that we get in the moment that we exercise our choice to self-define. Liberals focus on the individual saying "I exercised my choice to opt for this" rather than "this category of being has a meaningful essence I share in or participate in or embody".

The results can be shallow. Identity can be reduced to consumer, lifestyle or leisure choices. Traditional identity, in comparison, dealt more with the "transcendent," by which I mean sources of meaning existing independently of our own individual will, but to which we could feel connected.

There's another problem. Identity based on subjective, transitory connections is likely to be disintegrative. Sarah Riley herself puts this even more strongly than I would:

It may be that young people will experience fractured and multiple subjectivity in the same way that they are encouraged to consider high street clothing – as tools of identity to be temporarily appropriated, experienced and then cast off in favour of some new look or experience. Future subjectivity may therefore be conceptualised as a collection of multiple, diffuse selves existing across time and space, that have differing degrees of relationships with each other and perhaps no longer needing to be held together by the concept of a ‘core self’.

It is likely, therefore, that in the future young people will need to find ways to exist in the plural.

I'm not sure it will get to that stage, but I do think it's true that an identity that aims to be shifting, temporary and liquid will become increasingly fractured.

History in the remaking

Royal Auto has the largest circulation of any monthly magazine in Australia. It's read by half the adult population here in Victoria. So it's significant that the feature article in this month's edition (August 2009) is on the topic of history, ancestry and identity.

The article looks at a historical re-enactment society in the Victorian city of Ballarat. The young members of this society are quite articulate when it comes to explaining why they devote so much time to their hobby. For instance, David Waldron believes that it connects him to his heritage:

His participation ... is a way of "bridging the disjuncture from my heritage - my own history. I am recreating that sense of connection."

Another member of the society, Fred Cheney, an English and history teacher, has a theory about the loss of Western identity:

Fred ... has tried to connect with Asian spirituality but found immersing himself in the essentials of northern European culture is the better fit pyschologically. He says the transported gene pool of white Australia set his social lineage adrift.

"And in the absence of knowledge about our own ancestral roots, we tend to project our internal indigenous sense onto the exotic other - the Aborigines or the Asian races," he says. "Through these processes we are reclaiming our own roots. For me, enacting the Viking period is a way of engaging with my racial heritage. We get the sense it is still there. The costumes are profoundly respectful of our ancestors, but by wearing them you get that instant consciousness of The Great Then."

There are women involved too. Anna says of history that,

"reading about it just isn't enough." And best of all is the payoff in a real sense of connection. "This sense of tribal community is vital to sustain us now because it has a real integrity. We do operate as a tribe or an extended family."

If this sounds a little politically incorrect, it's because it runs against the grain of orthodox liberalism. According to liberal orthodoxy there is no collective good, only an immense set of self-chosen individual life paths. The overall aim is to achieve an autonomy in which we self-determine every aspect of who we are. We don't choose our ethnicity or our ancestry, so these are thought of negatively as impediments to the self-creating, blank slate individual. Furthermore, because liberals associate the West with power and dominance, they see Western forms of ethnic identity as being constructed for the oppression of others. So Western identity gets tagged as supremacist or discriminatory, whereas non-Western identity is tied much more positively to resistance to Western cultural and political dominance.

So there is a profound rejection of modern liberal orthodoxy when the Ballarat history players declare that their own Western ancestry is authentic and indispensable to who they are.

I personally have no desire to dress up like a Viking. Nor do I think that re-enactment is the most effective way of challenging the liberal status quo. But I do agree with the Ballarat history players that a sense of our ancestry and roots is important in forming our self-identity. It deepens and enriches our sense of who we are. It places us within a distinct tradition, so that we identify with a set of cultural ideals and achievements, rather than always being outsiders who are not actively involved in reproducing a culture of our own.

If liberal theory treats such an identity, at least for Westerners, as wholly negative, then this only shows that liberal theory is inadequate - that it limits too severely what can be expressed within our self-identity.

Nothing there but what we put there?

James Schall once wisely observed that,

The initial choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there.

The orthodoxy these days is that there is nothing there but what we put there. Take, as an example, the views of Professor Judith Butler of the University of California. She believes that there is no natural basis to masculinity and femininity, that gender is merely a performance:

... 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 ...

This puts the issue neatly enough. Judith Butler is taking the view that there is nothing there to define us as men and women, only what we ourselves put there as a performance or act. She correctly identifies the opposing view, but rejects it.

The opposing view is that there is an objective good embedded within masculinity and femininity to which we aspire as individuals. It is understood, in this view, that masculinity and femininity have an "essence" - that there is a real, underlying, permanent quality of masculinity and femininity that we can recognise and which is then expressed in various ways by individuals and within cultures.

So we have two diametrically opposed positions. The first position, that gender is a mere construct, is usually justified in terms of human freedom and choice. It is argued that we should be free to choose our own identities and that we cannot do this if we are limited to an unchosen masculine or feminine identity. The aim then becomes to overthrow the traditional distinction between masculinity and femininity in order to make human identity fluid and multiple.

There are some powerful arguments against this liberal view. One of them is put by James Schall, who writes:

we are seemingly freer if there is nothing there in the first place, if we are solely responsible for our world and our own being. The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves ... on this premise, no reason can be found not to be something else tomorrow.

This suggests two things. First, if there is no objective good to which my identity is connected - if my identity is something I just put there myself according to my own will - then there is a loss of meaning and significance to who I am. Second, if I can change my identity at will, then my very sense of self - of who I am - will begin to dissolve. I will not have a stable identity.

It's not difficult to apply this criticism to the works of Judith Butler. According to Judith Butler, the freedom to self-define requires more than a denial of gender. She wants both gender and sexual orientation to be self-defined; to achieve this, she wants to deny even the distinction between male and female:

Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler's approach - inspired in part by Foucault - is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors.

In a Butlerian universe, we would be made free by denying the existence of men and women; of masculine and feminine; and of heterosexuality. But there's more:

Butler says: "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender..." In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.

... This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner "core" self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances.

David Halperin has said, 'Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.'

It's not (necessarily) just a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner...

So there is no authentic inner core identity to who we are in a Butlerian universe. There is nothing, no essence, to which such an authentic self could refer.

Is there not a tremendous cost to such a freedom to self-define? Aren't we giving up a real, meaningful substance to our own being in order to gain such a freedom? What kind of a self are we left with to exercise our freedom to self-author?

(In my next post, I'll continue this theme by looking at the thoughts of a devotee of Judith Butler, Professor David Gauntlett.)

Can you put trust in diversity?

Dr Andrew Leigh is an economist at the Australian National University. In a recent article he explains the importance of interpersonal trust to the healthy functioning of a society:

Trust is important because it acts as a kind of social glue that enables business and communities to operate more effectively. In regions where people trust one another, institutions, markets and societies seem to work better. Trusting societies have more effective bureaucracies, schools that function more efficiently, less corruption and faster growth.

Trust, though, is undermined by ethno-linguistic diversity. This, at least, is what Dr Leigh found when he researched data from the Australian Community Survey. Dr Leigh found that:

Neighbourhood-level analysis also throws up a startling finding: trust is lower in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods ... The effect of diversity operates on immigrants and locals alike. In more linguistically diverse suburbs, both foreign-born and Australian-born residents are less inclined to trust those around them.

Dr Leigh believes that this pattern, in which diversity is associated with low levels of trust, holds true elsewhere:

The negative relationship between trust and ethnic diversity is not unique to Australia. Separate studies looking at the US, Britain, India, Kenya and Pakistan have shown that diversity is associated with lower levels of trust and less investment in shared resources. In the US, work by Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara has produced very similar results to my own: holding constant a raft of other factors, US cities that are more diverse tend to be less trusting. Other research has reached similar conclusions.

Dr Leigh's research corresponds closely to the well-publicised findings of Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University. Professor Putnam's research shows that:

the more diverse a community is, the less likely its neighbours are to trust anyone ... "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down ... We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined."

So what does Dr Leigh conclude from all this? He makes it very clear throughout his article that he supports continuing large-scale immigration, despite the negative effect that diversity has on trust.

Significantly, he concludes his article with this quote from Professor Putnam:

Growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1950s, I knew the religion of just about every kid in my 600 person high school ... when my children attended high school in the 1980s, they didn't know the religion of practically anyone, it simply didn't matter ..."

In my lifetime, Americans have deconstructed religion as a basis for making decisions. Why can't we do the same thing with other types of diversity?

So here we get back to a basic problem liberal modernists like Professor Putnam and Dr Leigh face, namely of having to make things which matter, not matter. The "hope" of these men is that ethnicity might be somehow deconstructed and made unimportant to people, so that high levels of immigration, and therefore high levels of ethnic diversity, might be able to coexist with high levels of neighbourhood trust.

Ethnicity, though, is what places people within a larger tradition, and connects them closely to a particular culture and community. It's not really the kind of thing which is secondary and which can reasonably be sacrificed to the goals, or the decision making processes, favoured by economists.

What happens when diversity does become the reality? As might be expected, it can be experienced negatively, as something alienating. As an example of this, consider the recently reported reaction of Oliver James, a prominent British author and psychologist, to modern Sydney. He thought the city itself was "beautiful and spacious" but he nonetheless became "unsettled" as he was driven into town:

Oxford Street was like the "Tower of Babel, a confusing polyglot in its diversity". There were people from "all the ends of the Earth", creating a feeling of "identitylessness, so you feel like you could be from anywhere.

English journalist, Peter Whittle, wrote along similar lines about the transformation by immigration of the London suburb he had grown up in:

Sometimes now, in streets I've used since Sixties boyhood, I'm struck by the sense that I should no longer think of this place as providing my identifiable roots, and that I am simply one of many who happen to be living here, with no greater claim to it sentimentally or historically. Such anonymity might be what people are looking for when they choose to live in the teeming metropolitan centre, but in a suburb which has shaped much of your life it's a much harder feeling to negotiate.

This part of south-east London has never been affluent ... But it had something which amounted to a collective identity. Now, it appears to me fragmented, with different ethnic communities existing side-by-side, sometimes uneasily, and always with a sense of nothingness in the air.

What kind of social policy can adequately replace this kind of loss? I don't believe there is one which can even begin to compensate. A better aim would be to support the continued existence of traditional community life, rather than insisting on ever increasing levels of diversity.

Fatherhood, lineage, identity

Katrina Clark's mother was a feminist who, at age 32, wasn't sure she would ever marry and have children. So she had herself artificially inseminated instead.

The feminist mother was considered "a pioneer, a trailblazer for a new offshoot of the women's movement" for making this decision. Her act of deliberately creating a fatherless family, though, had serious repercussions.

First, it left the daughter with a "lonely, tired mother" who struggled to make ends meet living on food stamps.

Worse, it left the daughter confused and angry. The problems weren't so great when Katrina was small, though sometimes she would:

daydream about a tall, lean man picking me up and swinging me around in the front yard, a manly man melting at the touch from his little girl. I wouldn't have minded if he weren't around all the time, as long as I could have the sweet moments of reuniting with his strong arms and hearty laugh. My daydreams always ended abruptly; I knew I would never have a dad.

Note just how gendered her daughterly instinct is. She didn't just long for a parent who happened to be male, but for a manly father who would respond emotionally to her as a girl.

This girlhood dream could not be fulfilled by a female parent; it required not only a man to fill the role, but a strongly natured man who, for his part, felt a reciprocal fatherly instinct to be charmed by his daughter.

Things got worse for Katrina. Her mother moved into a kind of group household, made up of a number of unrelated adults and their children. This didn't give Katrina a sense of living in a complete family:

I would stay in my room, listening to Avril Lavigne and to Eminem's lyrics of broken homes and broken people. I felt broken too.

There was also the problem which arose when Katrina reached the natural stage of developing her sense of identity. Having no father, and no knowledge of a father, she was left with "the puzzle of who I am".

She writes of her need to know where she came from and what her history was, and of the confusion of not knowing her biological roots.

She wanted "a sense of roots" so badly that she decided to track down her biological father, even if this required 10 years of intensive work. As it happens, she succeeded in her search after just weeks.

Having finally established a relationship with her biological father she felt at last a "relief about my own situation". She writes of him that,

I'm certain he has no idea how big a role he has played in my life despite his absence -- or because of his absence ... I feel more whole now than I ever have.

We live in times when fathers are seen to be optional within a family. Children, it is claimed, only need a loving home, which might be just as easily provided by women alone.

Katrina's story, though, suggests that this view is false. Katrina is telling us that fathers are missed within families: that they are missed by lonely mothers who struggle financially; that they are missed by children who long for a paternal and not just a parental relationship; and that they are missed by children who don't have knowledge of a paternal lineage, and whose identity is therefore left confused and incomplete.

So men are never truly going to be made redundant by new reproductive technologies. The social ideal ought to remain, as per tradition, to maximise the number of children who grow up with the benefit of living with a father.

Our attention ought to be directed more to encouraging a good practice of fatherhood within Western culture, rather than denying men a necessary place within the family.