"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."
De Tocqueville
We are talking virtue, of course.
“Virtue is the result of having emotions that have been trained by habits.”
C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man
“Virtues are not mere thoughts but habits we develop by performing virtuous actions.”
Aristotle
It is worth taking time to reflect on this quote from Tocqueville. Individual freedom has become a fetish in modern society, but it masks a profound conformity, rationalizes a selfish anarchy and serves only to produce a vast indifference. It generates not freedom at all but a universal antagonism, anarchy, indifference and constraint.
A man whose work I much admire is Robert Bellah. He introduced me to Tocqueville's emphasis on the mores, on the need to foster what Tocqueville called "the habits of the heart" if we are to have strong and flourishing communities. At the same time I was reading Marx in depth in the period of 1985 to 2000, I was reading Tocqueville, in less depth, certainly, but with an eye on certain pertinent themes with respect to modern individualism. Tocqueville, I recall reading somewhere, claimed to have Rousseau every day. He didn’t necessarily agree with Rousseau, opposed him in many respects. But Tocqueville appreciated that Rousseau takes us to the key themes of life. And, as I shall argue in my forthcoming book on Rousseau, Rousseau was not a theorist and apologist of the modern centralised state – he favoured a humanly scaled city-republic constituted by the habits, customs and mores fostered by an organic culture. Rousseau is not the abstract rationalist portrayed by his critics. Burke would be surprised to find so many points of agreement with the man he considered the epitome of an abstract rationalism in politics.
So it should be no surprise that I came to see socialist and conservative arguments against what Marx called the "abstraction of the political state" as actually convergent. It's there in Hegel doctrine of Sittlichkeit, the ethical life embracing the family, civic associations, the system of needs and the state as ethical agency embodying and expressing the universal good. It’s there in Hegel’s critique of a modern diremption in which the social atomism of a fractured, individualist society below generates the political centralisation of the state abstraction above. The commonality that is thwarted in social relationships comes to be projected upwards and outwards to the state as ‘illusory community’ (Marx’s term in The German Ideology).
This is an interesting collection of essays on that theme. It was published in 1985, the year that I started at university as a young radical but ever prepared to learn from good arguments from wherever they came. I absorbed the themes of this book, and they stayed with me.
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Stephen M. Tipton
"The fundamental question we posed," the collective authors say, "was how to preserve or create a morally coherent life." They speak of "the moral ecology," of "the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community" and of the urgent need for a transformation of the society. The article reviewing the book calls these ‘strong words’ which are maddeningly vague and unspecific as a call to action.
"The globe," the authors say, "is divided between a liberal world so incoherent that it seems to be losing the significance of its own ideals, an oppressive and archaic communist statism, and a poor, and often tyrannical, Third World reaching for the first rungs of modernity. In the liberal world, the state, which was supposed to be a neutral night watchman that would preserve order while individuals pursued their various interests, has become so overgrown and militaristic that it threatens to become a universal policeman."
Yet the transformation has to come, the authors say, not from a changed consciousness in certain individuals (they would be powerless) nor from the state (which would be tyrannical), but from collective action that might begin by restoring "the dignity and legitimacy of democratic politics."
The authors argue that the political clash between Reagan's Neo-capitalism and Welfare Liberalism should be viewed not so much as an either-or choice but as vectoring forces that must produce a third way in which gain and social responsibility both figure. The choice between market and state/government is false, a choice between abstractions and fictions. I agree very much. But the nature of the ‘third way’ suggested is unclear:
‘An obvious question is whether the transformation that the authors envisage would link the citizenry in an idealistic new concern for the commonwealth or simply create or energize special interest groups (regional, economic, religious, occupational) and conflicting, divisive coalitions. The ideal is easy to embrace; the practical consequences, hard to foresee.’
I’m inclined to agree, and would hope that my own work on ‘the moral ecology’ is strengthened by the critique of political economy and an emphasis on structural and institutional capacity.
The title, as I have said, is from Alexis de Tocqueville who, in writing on, and examining the nature of, Democracy in America from 1835 to 1839, discovered the habits of the heart that were key to a healthy social order. They remain key. He identified these habits as family life, religious convictions and participation in local politics. These habits form the right character for a viable democratic way of life. The habits of the heart serve to sustain free institutions, De Tocqueville argued. Tocqueville identified individualism - a word which he was one of the first to use - as the force which threatens to corrode that democratic way of life from within, separating citizens apart from each other and setting them against one another, rendering positive collective action difficult, if not impossible, coming in time to undermine those same free institutions.
‘We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous--that it may be destroying those social integuments that De Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.’
'All human beings have a deep psychological need for a sense of security which comes from knowing where you are. But "knowing where you are" is a matter of recognizing social as well as territorial position.'
- Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (1976)
On a similar theme … I’m pondering the arguments of this book, Why Liberalism Failed, in light of my recent argument that MacIntyre’s local communities of virtues need to be embedded on a larger scale in political society (asking the question as to whether that is either possible or desirable? ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’, I argue, with all-important clauses, conditions and qualifications).
Why liberalism failed
"Political Scientist and author Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame talks about his book Why Liberalism Failed with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. By liberalism, Deneen means the modern enterprise--the push for self-actualization free of the constraints of tradition, family, and religion that typifies modern culture. He argues that both the left and the right have empowered the state and reduced liberty. He argues for a smaller, more local, more artisanal economy and a return to the virtues of self-control and self-mastery."
Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
Political Scientist and author Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame talks about his book Why Liberalism Failed with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. By liberalism, Deneen means the modern enterprise--the push for self-actualization free of the constraints of tradition, family, and religion that typifies modern culture. He argues that both the left and the right have empowered the state and reduced liberty. He argues for a smaller, more local, more artisanal economy and a return to the virtues of self-control and self-mastery.
Before anyone dismisses this position on account of its being conservative, I should draw attention to long-standing criticisms of the liberal order from thinkers and writers considered to have had affinities with and sympathies for leftist views. I am currently reading Lewis Mumford in depth. Now, whilst Mumford is impossible to label - and was carefully to distance himself from the socialist left - his affirmation of the ‘Yankee Communism’ of New England’s Golden Day, his calls to socialize production, and his support for what he calls ‘basic communism’ make him an interesting figure indeed. And he very much called for a recovery of the virtues, emphasizing the character forming discipline gained in family, work and small-scale community. Mumford's criticism of the modern Megamachine is based upon the application of his organic principles - and it is very radical indeed:
In our own time, the mechanical world picture at last reached the state of complete embodiment in a multitude of machines, laboratories, factories, office buildings, rocket-platforms, underground shelters, control centers. But now that the idea has been completely embodied, we can recognize that it had left no place for man. He is reduced to a standardized servo-mechanism: a left-over part from a more organic world.
The only possibility for human salvation, Mumford argued, was to replace the mechanistic worldview as the ideological support and sanction of the power system with a renewed organic philosophy. Our best, indeed Mumford considered it to be in all probability our only, hope is to renounce the myth of the machine and withdraw compliance with the militarized superpowers and create in their stead a global network of relatively small-scale, decentralized, varied, regionally integrated communities based on face-to-face interaction and personal contact and co-responsibility, an organic order based upon "neighborhood or kindred purposes and affections." Loving one's neighbour remains key, and requires that we become neighbours to one another the world over, from immediate units in close social proximity. and this is organic, working with nature and its innate creative purpose. It's a principle that has been out of fashion in an age of mechanistic reductionism and atomism - basic principles of liberal metaphysics and ontology - but this age has also been the age of abstract power and war, monetarism and militarism, what Mumford calls a "purposeless materialism." Against this, he seeks the societal embodiment of the organic principle, a planning and design that is concerned "to follow nature's contours," not because of some preconceived abstract plan that proceeds in accordance with principles of a priori rationality, but as the inescapable consequence of "organic planning," a process Mumford defines as moving "... from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that . . , become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex, final design, hardly less unified than a preformed geometric pattern."
That's not atomist or mechanicist or reductionist, it sees patterns, purposes and necessary connections and lines of development where the dominant modern/liberal metaphysics sees only discrete events and happenings. But it's my view. It's a view that goes back to Aristotle. Dismiss it for being conservative all you like, but Mumford had good judgement, and he emphasized the connection between this organicist or essentialist metaphysics underpin the points of support and stability in community that are key to preserving order and sanity in the world.
It’s not every day that a book garners glowing blurbs from both Rod Dreher of The American Conservative (“clarifying”) and the socialist scholar Cornel West (“courageous”), but then these aren’t ordinary times. Patrick J. Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” speaks to a profound discontent with the political establishment.
For my part, I have a long standing admiration for Cornel West’s work, and cited his comments on an ethical Marxism in my thesis. And Dreher, too, I admire for his book on Dante. I’ve never been keen on Dreher’s call to us to take ‘the Benedict Option,’ but I can certainly see its appeal. But liberals, I’d guess, would be unsurprised and unmoved by the apparent convergence of conservatives and Marxist socialists in agreeing on the failure and collapse of liberalism. I set out my own objections to the liberal ontology and philosophy at length in my recent work.
‘Liberalism, as he defines it, encompasses the orthodoxy of political elites, whether they lean to the left or the right.’
Alasdair MacIntyre says the same thing – the conventional public sphere, the world of politics, culture and media is liberal, whether people designate themselves as conservative or socialist or radical.
‘It prescribes autonomy for individuals to “fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” It advises government to get out of the way in the realm of markets (a Republican priority) and personal morality (a Democratic one). It has been an unmitigated disaster.’
Hallelujah and praise be!! I’ve been hammering this theme for aeons – much to the consternation of my liberal/radical friends, no doubt (my conservative friends are even more perplexed by my interest in Marx). I can only say that my views are internally consistent, and solidly grounded.
Deneen is conservative, many would say reactionary – but he ‘gets it.’ In a way, I’ve been trying to get the Left in politics to ‘get it’ in the same way.
‘“Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” Deneen writes. His critique in this slender volume is impressively capacious. Ruthless economic liberalization has left many people materially insecure; relentless cultural liberalization has left them unmoored. Communal ties are discouraged in order to encourage a mobile force of workers. Freedom becomes something for an increasingly powerful government to grant or withhold.
Mere tinkering won’t alleviate the deep rot in the liberal project, Deneen insists. He says we need to envision a future after liberalism, where local, preferably religious communities tend to the land and look after their own. These groups would cultivate “cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice and small-scale democracy.”’
Deneen even attempts to recover environmentalism for conservatism – not before time (it’s possible, Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy is a fine book, emphasising small-scale practical reasoning and love of home and place as a condition of the success of all ambitious environmental projects (which are also needed, I would add)). “Short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty,” Deneen writes, “forces our children to deal with shortages of such resources as topsoil and potable water”
I have to make it clear at this point that there is too much by way of moral panic and moral generalisation that is comfortable for me. The reason people of liberal/leftist persuasion have been sceptical at my attempts at moral recovery lies precisely in the dangers of moralism, and an overextended concept of community and common good that all too easily becomes oppressive of difference and individuality.
‘In an otherwise illuminating section on the development of capitalism, Deneen refers to the great economic historian Karl Polanyi, who showed how the state had to take a strong hand in the creation of ostensibly free markets: “As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, ‘Laissez-faire was planned.’” But Polanyi drew different conclusions from his own observations. An ardent social democrat who fled his beloved Red Vienna when the fascists took over, Polanyi went into exile four times, eventually landing in Canada. This cosmopolitan intellectual, born into a Hungarian-Jewish family, would most likely have been highly suspicious of Deneen’s extreme disdain for what he calls “lives of deracinated vagabondage” and his sentimentalization of communal norms enforced by “people of good will.”’
I affirm communal norms enforced by people of good will. The challenge is to constitute the right ties and conditions of that commonality, rather than sentimentalize them. There’s good criticism here:
‘Deneen says that the only proper response to liberalism is “to transform the household into a small economy.” Home may be where the heart is, but it can also be the site for homegrown prejudice, petty grievances and a vicious cruelty. Deneen is so determined to depict liberalism as a wholly bankrupt ideology that he gives exceedingly short shrift to what might have made it appealing — and therefore powerful — in the first place. With all its abiding flaws, liberalism offered a way out for those who didn’t conform to the demands of the clan.
Besides, nobody is truly stopping Deneen from doing what he prescribes: finding a community of like-minded folk, taking to the land, growing his own food, pulling his children out of public school. His problem is that he apparently wants everyone to do these things — which suggests he may have more in common with his caricature of a bullying liberal than he cares to admit.’
As I write on Lewis Mumford, who was big on personal renewal and the recovery of virtue, and who was keenly aware of the failures of liberalism from long ago, there is a need to keep eyes open and be aware of blind spots. Everyone has their blind spots — ‘even erudite political philosophers keen to denounce the blind spots of others.’
‘Deneen and his fellow localists are cast as virtuous souls who would necessarily make discerning, merciful and respectful yeoman farmers once the revolution comes. Yet this generous forbearance doesn’t seem to extend to liberals — or to use his awkward slur, “liberalocrats” — who get tarred in this book as a bunch of condescending, self-satisfied chumps. Hypocrites, every one: They’re all the same.’
We’re all liberals now – or liberalocrats; embrace personal choice and morality as no more than subjective value judgement below, and you necessarily become in the state project above.
The Guardian doesn’t like it much.
Hugo Drochon
Instead of individualism, Deneen says the future lies with radically decentralised, local communities where the true meaning of culture might be found again. By culture, he means “a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings”.
I agree with much of what Deneen argues, but am cautious of those who identify culture and community with their own notions of culture and community. In the end, it all depends on how we balance and integrate unity and diversity, avoiding their separation and consequent reduction of either term to abstraction. A properly constituted pluralism, in other words.
"It is [the] pluralist project – building bridges between different communities – that is in most urgent need of rediscovery. What we need now is not a retreat to our own communities, which can only aggravate the polarisation of society, not to say give free rein to those already in power. What we need now is more politics."
You can only build bridges if there is a wider community, a supreme community embracing all other communities.
Read widely, take what you can, whether as warning or as promise.
In their protests and demonstrations, people are crying out for a genuine public community. The problem is that no matter how assertive they are in terms of their rights and liberties, people have lost the ability and know-how required to build and sustain such a community. Building public community is about acquiring, learning and developing the aptitudes and habits required to be an integral part of the whole, whole and wholesome, one of the many … it’s about tapping into that circularity of true order.
“Habitual social, economic, and political practices and customs that flowed, often unconsciously, from hidden beliefs, assumptions, and commitments.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
1 Corinthians 9:19-27 New International Version (NIV)
Paul’s Use of His Freedom
Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
The Need for Self-Discipline
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
1 Corinthians 9:19-27