Oz Conservative

Not all nationalisms are equal: what the radical side got wrong

2026-06-29T20:24:57.378+10:00

When you look at Australian politics before WWII, you get a divide between two groups. One group is described as being establishment, suburban, Anglophile supporters of the British Empire. The other group are the radical nationalists, members of the labour movement, supporters of a more rural, larrikin type of Australian identity.

There were issues with both groups. I want to focus here on two problems with the radical nationalist side, because it helps to understand how politics developed in Australia after WWII.

You have to imagine here that you are someone who does not want Australian identity to be tied so closely to Britain or the British Empire, but instead to a native, more purely Australian derived culture. Taken too far, this had some negative consequences.

One consequence was a type of Anglophobia. This was not true of all the radical nationalists, but it did happen. Arthur Calwell, for instance, justified the pivot toward a culturally heterogeneous society after WWII on the basis that Australia was "a dull inbred country of predominantly British stock". The ongoing influence of this stream of thought was still evident in the early 1980s, in films like Breaker Morant and Gallipoli.

Arthur Calwell

And then there was the issue of indigeneity. Some of the radical nationalists did not want a culture derived from Britain, so they looked in unusual ways to Aborigines as a source of indigeneity.

In 1936 Percy Stephensen wrote a book called The Foundations of Culture in Australia. To be fair, he does state in the book that Australian culture would begin "not from the Aborigines...but from British culture". Even so, he did want to co-opt indigeneity, writing that a form of Initiation Corroboree should be adopted as a means of instantiating Australian "national lore" without which there could be "no national centre, no nation". He also believed in a theory that Aborigines were the original human ancestors, writing to a friend that Aborigines were ‘[o]ur spiritual (perhaps our physical) ancestors, (for the Aborigines are the oldest Aryans on earth)'.

The novelist Xavier Herbert went further. He thought that the children of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers were the true Australians. You can see in his letter to Stephensen the influence here of the Anglophobia and the desire for "indigeneity" - how it alienated him from his own identity and made him want to merge into an Aboriginal one:

My Dear Inky,

A moment ago I concluded your book Foundations of Culture. What can I say about it? …. How your inspired message made me feel! … I dream of being made a patrol officer, so that I may go right home to the old people and become one of them. But I’ve not forgotten ‘the True Commonwealth’. I still tear up such Sydney Morning Heralds as I find, and bare my teeth at Pommies.

Yes—and I’m working to found a gigantic organisation called the Euraustralian League, comprised of so-called half-castes and quarter-castes, and of any whitefellas … [who believe] that the culture of the land will grow like gum trees from the soil. These Euraustralians—or yeller-fellers as the transplanted Pommies call them—are a great race. There are something like 20,000 already …

We are not Australians, Inky. Only those lucky people are. They are I should say the most vigorous race of people on the earth. I love them, and envy them their nationality. Curse the fates that arranged that I should be born a colonial Pommy! Will you work with me to organise this Euraustralian race so it will rise up and up and increase and multiply and eventually sweep the Pommies back into the sea?

PS. Some day I shall write ‘True Commonwealth’, a vast tale of the rise of the Euraustralians and the birth of the happiest nation on the earth and some day I shall father a Euraustralian so as to truly root myself in this dear earth and so as to legitimise my bastard whitefella genius.

Then there were the Jindyworobaks, a cultural movement of the 1930s and 40s founded by the poet Rex Ingamells in 1937. They believed that Australian culture could only thrive by co-opting Aboriginal culture. They were rightly criticised for doing this in a clunky way, by throwing in Aboriginal words like "wurlies" into their poetry.

Rex Ingamells

This too survived into the post-War period. Germaine Greer is the classic example. As a young woman she imagined herself for a time to be Jewish. Later she had herself adopted into an Aboriginal tribe and wrote an essay in 2003 titled "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way To Nationhood". The message of this essay was that white Australians were experiencing a spiritual malaise because they clung to an Anglo identity and that they should instead declare themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".

This adoption of Aborigines as the centrepiece of the national identity at the expense of the Anglo-Celtic founders has been pushed some way forward in recent years by the leftist, cultural elite, most likely because it permits the erasure of the older identity in favour of a newer, open-bordered, multicultural one (the PM Anthony Albanese said in response to Pauline Hanson defending the traditional monoculture, that "it's really a nonsense argument to go back to something that was never there" whilst the Labor Premier of Victoria, Jacinta Allen, declared last year that Australia is "a nation of foreigners".)

What I've hoped to show in this post is that some left-wing intellectuals of the twentieth century, despite being nationalists, did not help defend the existing culture, because they wanted a different originating source of Australian culture, one that was not derived from the British Isles. So they ended up, in some cases, fostering an Anglophobia, and in others trying to co-opt indigeneity from the Aborigines - sometimes leaving themselves alienated from their own identity and wishing to be something else.

It was all unnecessary. When I was a boy in the 1970s there was still a warmth of affection for the UK. You could have a primary love for Australia, but a secondary one for Britain, because of ancestral and cultural ties. The two did not conflict. If anything, the UK connection just added in a richness to that identity.

Must we choose the least worst option?

2026-05-24T20:43:32.294+10:00

The Tickle v Giggle case has finally been decided in the Federal Court of Australia. The gist of the case is that a TERF feminist, Sall Grover, founded a women's only networking app called Giggle. Transsexuals were excluded from the app via facial recognition. One of these transsexuals, Roxanne Tickle, challenged the ban in the courts and won.

One interesting feature of all this is that because TERF feminists are no longer very welcome on the left, they are increasingly orienting to the right. People on the right are generally supportive of the idea that biological sex is real and that women should be allowed to have their own spaces.

The Giggle app

But there's a catch. TERF feminists are the modern version of the most radical feminists of the 1970s. Is it really the case that social conservatives should embrace the politics of these women?

Some undoubtedly will. They will look at aspects of what these women are saying and find reason to agree. This, for instance, is how Sall Grover began her presentation of her TERF feminist beliefs after losing her court case:

Most people on the right will be sympathetic to this. If this were it, then it would be very easy to form an alliance with TERF feminists. But consider what Sall Grover listed straight after this:

This is a very radical doctrine, with radical implications. The first thing I'd note is this. The TERF feminists often claim that to call a biological man a woman is a suppression of truth and reality. But is this not what Sall Grover is doing in making these claims? She is asking us to believe that there is no connection between the fact of biological sex and sex based character traits.

This isn't credible. It is not credible that men and women would be so biologically dimorphous, with the female body clearly adapted for the bearing of children, whilst the male body is clearly more adapted for warfare and hunting, and for all of this to not be expressed in any way in our character traits. It's like someone asserting that genetics has no role in who we are. It is ignoring all the science of sex based hormones and of differences in the wiring of the brain. It ignores what parents observe time and again in their children. It ignores what we all observe in relationships with the opposite sex. It is a type of ideological suppression of reality - of thinking something is true because it serves our political values. It is an example of living within a hyperreality, in which the conditions of truth are not that something conforms to reality, but that it conforms to what people think is proper to believe in order to get ahead in society, or in order to advance the interests of a particular group or movement.

There's a second problem. TERF feminists often talk about transsexualism being an erasure of women and girls. However, the logic of TERFism is in its own way an erasure of womanhood. It empties the category of meaning. All that is left is a difference in body shape and reproductive organs. Apart from that, men and women are considered to be the same. For TERFS there is nothing distinctly feminine about women - they consider the feminine to be merely "socially constructed and imposed". In fact, TERFs often have very little understanding of what the feminine might even mean. They usually talk about it as if it only referred to external physical adornment, like wearing lipstick. But, if this is so, if men and women are exactly the same except for our physical shape, then "womanhood" as a category is mostly meaningless. It doesn't signify much about a person. So why are TERFs so keen to uphold the category? Because it has become associated with what they call "sex based rights". They treat it as a political category in which you compete for special rights against other groups. But, as they have found, other groups can do the same thing even better, with transsexuals generally being thought to occupy higher ground in the intersectional hierarchy.

Finally, the TERF position is not so much a bulwark against transsexualism as it is a preparation for it. The ground for transsexualism was prepared when feminists decoupled sex and gender, so that it was thought that men and women could not only swap natures, but that it was progressive and liberating to do so. When Sall Grover declares that men and boys can be feminine and women and girls can be masculine, she is being semi-trans - strictly speaking, she is advocating for transgenderism rather than transsexualism. She wants it to be the case that we can declare ourselves to be the opposite "gender" (masculine or feminine) but not the opposite sex (biologically male or female). She wants to go 90% of the way toward transsexualism, but to stop just before we get to the point at which we might declare ourselves to be the opposite sex.

And this position has done damage. One of the problems with it is that it often rests on an assumption that the feminine is inferior and therefore women should try to be more masculine, as criticised in the following social media post:

I've known a lot of Gen X feminists. Some of them strove to present themselves as masculine. They adopted a masculine personal presentation and masculine hobbies (boxing, motorbikes etc.). But underneath it all they were heterosexual women and could never really pass as men. They occupied a no-man's land (excuse the pun), in which they were neither attractively feminine, nor believably masculine, just confused about what they should be. As they aged, they gradually dropped the pretence and mostly returned to a more feminine persona, which always made me wonder what the point of it was. I just don't think they ever gave themselves permission to be women.

In the 1970s, TERFism was recognised to be a radically left-wing politics. Today, there is something of a push for it to be accepted by social conservatives. If this happens, it will be because it is thought of as a better option than transsexualism. Faced with Tickle v Giggle, social conservatives will choose Giggle.

But there is no need to do this. We should not allow ourselves to be pressed into choosing the least worst option. The TERFs need us a lot more than we need them. If they wish to garner support from us, then we should do so carefully and strategically, until that time that they are willing to abandon the more harmful aspects of their politics.

Postscript: Saw the following on social media and thought it relevant to the point I was trying to make about feminism preparing the ground for transsexualism:

The moral architecture of Hic Mulier

2026-04-11T22:16:00.001+10:00

In 1620 a pamphlet appeared in England called Hic Mulier. Its purpose was to condemn women who dressed like men. What is of interest to me is the moral framework used. On what grounds did the pamphleteer oppose cross-dressing?

Hic Mulier, title page illustration

I have previously written about a similar, companion pamphlet called Haec Vir. In this text, there are three potential reasons for supporting distinctions between men and women:

...by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman

There is considerable discussion in Haec Vir about the role of custom and the rules of religion. The focus of Hic Mulier, though, is an appeal to nature. The author considers it unnatural for women to dress as men.

Appeals to nature often blend together two differing claims. The first is to suggest that a particular behaviour is wholly outside the given nature of the person carrying it out and is in this sense unnatural (like it would be unnatural for a dog to miaow like a cat). A modern example might be opposing women in frontline combat roles because the nature of a woman's body is designed around her maternal role rather than being a warrior, and that this has been generally observed in sex roles over the course of human history.

This type of argument is not well accepted in liberal modernity. Modern philosophy has mostly rejected the idea of formal and final causes, where something is defined by its essence and its ultimate purpose. And modern philosophy often emphasises the idea that humans should be autonomously self-creating individuals, not defined by the givens of their being.

In Hic Mulier we see this kind of appeal to nature when the author argues that women who wear men's clothes are not being true to their own nature but are mimicking men, or putting on a mask or disguise - that it is merely imitation rather than a true representation of who they are and that in doing so they are being "monstrous" in the sense of becoming a deformed or hybrid creature not found in nature.

Examples from the text include the author condemning the "folly of imitation"; claiming that the cross-dressing women were substituting for modesty "all Mimic and apish incivility"; labelling them as "mermonsters" rather than mermaids; and describing cross-dressing as "barbarous, in that it is exorbitant (wayward) from Nature and an Antithesis to kind".

We see the language of disguise in the following:

What can be more barbarous than with the gloss of mumming Art to disguise the beauty of their creations? To mould their bodies to every deformed fashion, their tongues to vile and horrible profanations, and their hands to ruffianly and uncivil actions? To have their gestures as piebald and as motleyvarious as their disguises...

Oh yes, a world...so foully branded with this infamy of disguise.

The author goes on to suggest that some of the mannish women might have been imitating popular stories of the time in which a woman pretended to be, or was mistaken for, a man. He later returns to the idea that cross-dressing is disguising the women's real natures in the following excerpt (note, a vizard was a strange looking oval mask worn by upper class women when outside to protect their complexions):

The fairest face covered with a foul vizard begets nothing but affright or scorn, and the noblest person in an ignoble disguise attains to nothing but reproach and scandal. Away then with these disguises and foul vizards.

So the first approach is the one that sees the act itself as being outside of nature and therefore, in the eyes of the pamphlet writer, an abomination.

It's difficult to use this first approach widely. After all, there are things that exist within our own nature, rather than outside of it, that are not morally good. So it's not as straightforward as claiming that something that is natural is therefore to be praised.

This is made clear in the pamphlet. The author recognises, and describes in detail, the differences between the higher nature of women and the lower.

So a second supplementary approach is needed. This takes the form, in Hic Mulier, of the claim that a woman is more truly herself, more truly in her nature when she acts according to the virtues of her sex. When she falls into her lower nature, into the vices characteristic of her sex, this is a deformity of her nature. It is not how she was truly made to be.

How do we know what these virtues and vices are? In part, through the use of reason. If used well, our reason directs us to our nobler qualities, whereas a foolish person would be led to what is base.

There is an emphasis in Hic Mulier on the virtue of temperance. A virtuous person will exercise restraint, particularly over appetites and desires. This ability to exercise a degree of rational control over oneself is a true freedom that makes us fit for civility; an absence of temperance, in which we are carried along wildly by our impulses, is both licentious and barbarous.

And so there is a moral architecture that includes an appeal to nature, to virtue, to reason, to nobility, to wisdom, to restraint and to civility.*

Does the moral architecture of Hic Mulier make sense? I think so. In a Christian society, in which our original form is thought to be the image of God, it does make sense to believe that our higher, virtuous nature is the truer one that is natural to us (well-formed) and that the baser, vicious nature is the one that is fallen or de-formed. It fits too perhaps with the Platonic philosophy inherited from the classical world in which the closer you get to the original form, the more perfect a thing is. There might also be an influence here from the concept of the great chain of being in which there is a scale of nature from the lowest to the highest. Humans possess not only an animal like nature (such as physical appetites) but also a spiritual one (including a rational faculty). Therefore, to be fully within our nature would mean exercising rational control over our appetites - without this we would be reduced to the merely animal aspect of existence.

The moral terminology used in Hic Mulier is fitted to the overall architecture. Women are praised and criticised for a variety of reasons, but there is some emphasis, as you might expect, on the contrast between women who exercise restraint and those who do not. Virtuous women are described as modest, chaste, bashful, comely, shamefast and sober (shamefast meant being restrained in a positive sense by a sense of shame or propriety; to be sober meant having self-control, dignity and temperance). Vicious women, however, are termed wanton, loose, lascivious, shameless, skittish (inconstant, fickle), indiscreet (reckless, rash) and lustful (having excessive desires, not just sexual, as when we speak of "lust for power").

This is not the moral framework we commonly use today. This is to be expected as the moral architecture of our times runs almost directly counter to that defended in Hic Mulier. The current view is that we are empowered when, as autonomous individuals, we are free to choose in any direction. The logic of this position is that there should be minimal restraints on what people choose to do.

The more traditional emphasis on qualities of self-restraint will seem alien or archaic to those brought up within the modern moral architecture. This is a pity as there is a kind of freedom and dignity in cultivating the virtue of temperance. This virtue helps us to retain our moral integrity, or, more profoundly, it permits us to continue in life as an integrated self. Everything in reality is subject to entropy. If we make no effort to uphold beneficial order either in ourselves or in society, then there will be a falling away toward collapse and disorder. If we exercise no rational control over our passions, desires and appetites, then we inevitably fall into demoralising vices that we are increasingly subject to and which are a source of disempowerment (and will likely leave us jaded and less able to enjoyably experience the passionate side of life).

Temperance is, of course, not the only virtue. The entire moral architecture should not be built on this foundation alone. But I do think we can learn something from the way that temperance was once connected to man's higher nature and to highly esteemed traits of character.

*One positive aspect of this moral architecture is that it avoids the deadlock that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Freud had suggested that people did need to exercise restraint in the interests of civilisation, but that in doing so they would be unhappy. They would repress their instinctive drives (sexual and aggressive) which would cause distress or even neurosis. A counterculture led by figures like Wilhelm Reich agreed with Freud that repression would lead to neuroses but concluded that people should be uninhibited in expressing their instinctive drives ("let it all hang out"). Reich took a negative view of civilisation, connecting it to a violent authoritarian opposition to human freedom. The two options here are both unattractive: you get to be either a neurotic and unhappy member of civilised society, or else a spaced out hippy with no moral self-control. The model put forward in the 1620s is more positive. The person who is "got together" in the sense of being able to moderate their own actions is thought to be more themselves, to have more freedom of self, and to be more fit to participate in a civilised society. These things (nature, freedom, civilised society) are not set against each other as they were in the twentieth century.

Rethroning nature

2026-04-05T18:10:00.004+10:00

Germaine Greer was interviewed on British TV recently. She was putting the feminist argument against transsexualism. In doing so, though, she expressed with great clarity a fault line within Western thought.

This is Greer's attitude to gender:

Now gender can be anything you like. It's entirely cultural. But, unfortunately, sex is not entirely cultural. It's something you're born with whether you like it or not. And most of us who grow up to be women, who have our first period, 12, 13, 14, whatever, traumatising otherwise, a body we thought we knew becomes smelly and dirty and different. And then the boys come along. They've been watching pornography and say that we're not groomed, we have to remove our body hair and so on. We've got to spend our lives removing body hair. That's femininity, which is the fake version of femaleness. Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal and it's gender, and it's a role you play. And for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion.

Look, I wrote a book a long time ago about how you get made into a woman. In those days we called it conditioning. And you could see it, it happens from birth...And it goes right through our entire lifespan where we're learning femininity. And it's a masquerade, it's not who we really are. There is nothing feminine about being pregnant. It's almost the antithesis of that. There's nothing feminine about giving birth...There's nothing feminine about breastfeeding. That masquerade is what is now being presented to us back as the real deal, with the hair extensions and the false eyelashes, and I think, why do you think that's real?

I'd like to acknowledge that Germaine Greer puts the modernist position on gender with admirable clarity here - it's particularly impressive for an 80-year-old. And it does seem to be modernist. She was influenced as a young woman by the libertarian philosophy of John Anderson, and he developed his mature philosophy in the 1930s.

What is a tell that we're dealing with modernist philosophy? First and foremost, the erasure of nature. Most people would think that "gender" (i.e., the characteristics we most associate with men and women) is created by a combination of nature and nurture. But note that Greer insists that gender is entirely nurture, it is wholly a product of conditioning. She spends no time at all on the nature/nurture debate, as she simply assumes that nature has no role in the formation of gender.

She is therefore left with the human body alone (the denatured human body that is simply biological and nothing more). And so Greer thinks that the only other possibility for forming gender would be via the biological fact of a sexed body. But she rejects this possibility. She insists that pregnancy and breastfeeding are not feminine. And that leaves the superficial ornamentation of the body, such as fake eyelashes or hair extensions or hair removal. But she also thinks that this is not an authentic source of the feminine.

And so there is no real source of the feminine, which means that "gender can be anything you like".

These ideas are common amongst TERF feminists. It is usually assumed that the feminine is a negative and artificial quality and that it refers only to stereotypes of female body presentation like fake nails.

None of this is at all reasonable. It is unreasonable to think that humans, as dimorphic as we are, and having developed from the beginning of our long history with very different roles for men and women, would not have distinctly sexed natures. In other words, it is strange to think that we could be so biologically distinct but that this would not be expressed in differing ways of experiencing the world.

And this is what any observant person would discern. We are not the same. This is what makes heterosexuality what it is (an attraction to a person different to us) as well as challenging (difficulties in communicating with someone with a different mind to ourselves). The workings of women can seem mysterious to men, both in very positive but sometimes also in frustrating ways. And parents who have children of both sexes will observe deeply set differences from an early age, to a degree that does not seem to be entirely a product of social conditioning.

For most people, too, our "gender" is important to our identity. It is not thought of as merely something we perform. It is an inseparable part of who we are, and of what we were made to be. And so it runs against our own lived experience for Germaine Greer to claim that the only thing real is our sexed body and that even this is a largely negative aspect of our existence. Greer leaves very little for women to go on. She empties the category of womanhood, to make it almost meaningless. There is nothing authentically or positively feminine in life that Greer attaches to womanhood. And even the fact of having a female body is denigrated by Greer. So what is left? Just a cynical attitude that womanhood might be used as a political category to get certain privileges or to identify as a political class in opposition to men. It is merely strategic, part of a game, and it is a game that can easily be lost to others with a greater claim or with more political influence.

So where did all this come from? How did it come to be that Greer can so confidently assert that "gender can be anything you like"? Why is it not seriously considered that men and women have given natures that might be relevant considerations in thinking about the masculine and the feminine?

Here I'd like to turn to Pierre Manent, a French professor of political science. He wrote a book in 1995 titled An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Manent argues that it was the Rousseau who decisively ended any appeal to nature with Western philosophy:

Rousseau's thought incarnates that paradoxical moment in political thought when man's nature is most vehemently appealed to in the political debate, and when it ceases in fact to serve as its regulator and criterion.

The reason Manent gives is that Rousseau thought that modern society was unnatural. And so to discover what man's nature truly is you had to remove every social convention applied to man, so that you arrived at the original, solitary individual. But if natural man is pre-social, then, as Manent puts it, "Not just our society, but every society, even the best, is contrary to man's nature". This means that there is no longer much purpose in trying to conform society to man's nature.

Pierre Manent

And so there is a breaking point between the traditional and the modern. Most traditionalists would appeal to some sort of natural law in considering how a human community should function. We would say that because it is part of the eternal, created nature of man to "x" therefore we should consider this in how we frame a human community if we want that community to flourish.

But if we follow Rousseau, then there can no longer be an appeal to nature in terms of how we might organise society.

There is a further move. Rousseau thought that man was only naturally a unity in his solitary pre-social condition. To restore this unity whilst living within a society meant forcing man to follow the general will. This required changing man's nature. For Rousseau, this was possible because man was not his nature but liberty - the power by which man gives orders to his own nature or is a law unto himself. In Manent's words "man's nature is not to have a nature, but to be free....With Rousseau, freedom....is a feeling...of autonomy....If man is liberty, autonomy, if he is the being who makes his own laws, he cannot derive his motives from nature without demeaning himself". (p.77)

And at this point we can perhaps find one of the intellectual threads leading on to Germaine Greer. Greer thinks it demeaning that a woman might derive some of her qualities or character from her given nature. If not for social conditioning, she would not be subject to any of the qualities of the feminine at all.

This position, inasmuch as it derives from Rousseau, rests upon a false premise, namely that man is not by nature social, but is a unity only as a solitary, pre-social individual. And so it is up to us to correct this misstep within the Western philosophical tradition. We need to rethrone nature.

Manent set himself this task in a recent essay, in which he expands upon the role of the social contract theorists in undermining the idea of natural law. I'll take a look at this essay in my next post.

A reader comments on Peter Drew

2026-03-09T09:40:00.002+11:00

In my last post I looked at the beliefs of Peter Drew, an Australian left-wing artist, particularly on the topic of identity. Drew thinks of identity as something fluid and superficial:

All identity should be fluid in some sense, whether that’s the make up of our blood, that being our race or nationality, or our job, or the behaviour we exhibit, or the clothes we wear. It’s all superficial in some sense, it’s not entirely real...

I went on to argue that this take on identity reflects the liberal concept of freedom, of a self-determining autonomy, and that it is difficult to assert alternative understandings of freedom if you have a nominalist world view in which we have no natural ends toward which we would rationally want to develop.

A reader, Cameron, wrote a comment that I thought put the situation in a strikingly effective way:

One thing this piece (as many of your other ones) makes clear is that the claim of liberalism to make us "free" to be whatever we want is equally well explained, and perhaps better explained, by a denial of freedom to be anything FOR REAL.

Identity is "not entirely real." The true reason that anyone can be an Aussie, in this mindset, is that being an Aussie is not REAL.

This is the real tragedy of nominalism and runs through all of its promises. Men are free to be women only because women are not even free to be women--because there ARE no women, it's all just "labels."

This is something to ponder. Do liberals think there is a real quality to being Australian, but reject it out of principle? Or do they not think in terms of things having real qualities and therefore there is no real content to being Australian and so logically anyone can be one?

I'm not sure that the latter explains everything. For instance, liberals do give some real worth to indigenous culture and identity - which seems to reflect second-wave liberalism's idea that pre-civilised cultures are worthy in ways that Western bourgeois cultures are not.

Even so, if your philosophy denies essences (this would include postmodernism) that give distinct qualities, (i.e., a definite nature), to things, then you're likely to go down the path that these things are just conventions or constructs of some sort and therefore as Drew puts it "superficial in some sense" and "not entirely real" and so not really constitutive of self.

Poster boy of the Australian left

2026-02-15T17:03:00.001+11:00

Peter Drew is a left-wing Australian artist. He is best known for his posters which show people from different ethnic backgrounds being described as "Aussie".

Peter Drew with his posters

In an interview with a local Indian media outlet, Drew explained his views on identity as follows:

All identity should be fluid in some sense, whether that’s the make up of our blood, that being our race or nationality, or our job, or the behaviour we exhibit, or the clothes we wear. It’s all superficial in some sense, it’s not entirely real, there is some substance to it, but none of it can say who we really are, and so it is fluid in some sense and so it says Aussie on all my posters, it’s a provocation….it’s really to open up the discussion and then allow us to talk about identity in a fluid way, because I think that’s what ultimately is empowering to individuals and gives us the most freedom. [1]

This is not an original thought. It is an orthodox expression of the liberalism which has dominated the Western political class for many decades.

The basic idea of this liberalism is that the overriding good in life is a freedom to be an autonomous individual, i.e., an individual who is self-determining or self-authoring. This principle has momentous consequences. It means that anything that is not self-determined, but rather predetermined, is thought of negatively as a restriction on individual freedom. And traditional national identities, based as they are on our unchosen ethny, fall into this category. Someone who is ethnically Japanese did not choose to be so, they were simply born into this identity. This type of identity is relatively fixed - this Japanese person cannot suddenly decide that they are ethnically Nigerian.

Which is why Peter Drew is so concerned that identity be fluid, because this is what then opens up the possibility of moving between identities.

One cost of having easily discarded, or traded in, identities is that they then become merely external to the self-authoring individual. The "I" that chooses must be separate to whatever identities are either selected or abandoned. So therefore it would not be accurate for a person to say "I am Japanese" as the two things would be distinct. As Drew puts it, in this liberal view our identities are "all superficial in some sense" and "not entirely real". Our identities are also flattened - they are all equally choices, so our choice of national identity is spoken of by Drew in the same terms as our choice of the clothes that we wear. It is possible that Drew's use of clothes to illustrate identity is revealing, as a kind of metaphor for identity as he understands it, as he sees identity as something that we can put on or take off, as something that is more of an external cover or adornment, rather than being part of who we truly are.

So how do we challenge this liberal logic by which a commitment to individual autonomy leads to a rejection of deeper forms of unchosen communal identity?

One possibility would be to assert a different understanding of freedom. We could think of freedom not as a radical act of self-authorship, but as the liberty to pursue our given ends, the "telos" which is given to us as part of our nature.

Why don't we have this understanding of freedom? It would be possible to do so had we kept to an older Western philosophy:

...things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature?

In this philosophy, it makes sense to think of freedom as a freedom for excellence - to pursue that which makes us flourish and become more human; to orient ourselves toward the good; to become what we ought to be.

But there is a more modern strand of philosophy which blocks this path because it rejects the idea of essences. This philosophy took a nominalist and voluntarist stance:

Philosophical voluntarism is the doctrine that assigns a primary role to the will (Latin: voluntas) over intellect or reason in human action, metaphysics, and theology. It posits that free choice and desire are the fundamental drivers of reality and moral obligation, often arguing that truth and morality are created by divine or human will rather than discovered through rational contemplation.

If you hold to this kind of voluntarism you are more likely, I think, to support Peter Drew's claim that there is nothing all that real to be discovered within our given natures, but that what matters is the freedom to assert our own will, even if the identities that we self-create are necessarily superficial.

Nominalism denies the real existence of universals. This means that there are only individual instances of things, with universals being names we give to things:

Nominalists offer a radical definition of reality: there are no universals, only particulars. The basic idea is that the world is made exclusively from particulars and the universals are of our own making. They stem from our representational system (the way we think about the world) or from our language (the way we speak of the world).

If there are only particulars, then there is no "virtue," "apples," or "genders." There are, instead, human conventions that tend to group objects or ideas into categories. Virtue exists only because we say it does: not because there is a universal abstraction of virtue. Apples only exist as a particular type of fruit because we as humans have categorized a group of particular fruits in a particular way. Maleness and femaleness, as well, exist only in human thought and language.

Take, as an example, masculinity. For a nominalist this is not a real quality or essence that inheres to being a man:

For a nominalist, there is no "essence" of masculinity that exists independently; rather, there are only particular men and specific actions that society conventionally labels as "masculine".
Masculinity is viewed as a social construct or a useful fiction rather than a natural, fixed, or metaphysical reality. It is a label applied to behaviors (e.g., strength, emotional restraint) that may vary across cultures and time periods.
Instead of saying, "These men are masculine because they share the quality of masculinity," a nominalist would say these individual men simply resemble each other in certain ways, and we use the term "masculine" to describe that resemblance.
The characteristics defining masculinity are not fixed by nature but are arbitrarily selected and grouped together by human beings. Because masculinity is a label rather than an inherent property, nominalists recognize that its definition is subjective to cultural contexts, and it can change based on social conventions.

Again, if this is your understanding, then it becomes difficult to see freedom as a movement toward our natural ends, in which we cultivate virtue or identify objective goods to embody or to serve. The nominalist position suggests, first, that such things are merely conventions or constructs, and, second, that lacking an essential nature that might be held in common, that we cannot know what the good for others might be, that there is only what we know of our own selves. But this then pushes in the direction of the liberal definition of freedom, in which individuals are not part of a natural order of existence, but can autonomously make whatever they choose of their own individual being.

[1] The Indian Sun TV. “In conversation with Peter Drew Artist/Activist" (Video).” YouTube, 20 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1TJBnBiz9g

Postscript: When reading Peter Drew's account of national identity I was reminded of the writing of Judith Butler on gender identity. The quote by Butler below illustrates the nominalist position very clearly:

... 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...

You can perhaps see a connection here to Drew's claim that our identities are superficial and "not entirely real".

Mamdani, Weaver & the warm collective

2026-01-08T12:18:00.003+11:00

The newly elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, said in his inaugural speech that he wanted to replace "the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism".

Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration

Bishop Robert Barron responded negatively, with the comment:

Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people in the last century. Socialist and Communist forms of government around the world today - Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea etc - are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy , which people like Mayor Mamdani caricatures as "rugged individualism."

Fr Dave McNaughton disagreed, replying:

Bishop Barron is gaslighting...Reading the full text suggests that Mamdani was advocating for a very Catholic idea, the practice of solidarity. Shame on Bishop Barron.

So, do we follow the priest or the bishop on this issue? Even though I'm not as straightforwardly in favour of the market economy as Bishop Barron (as the market needs to be regulated carefully or else it too can be dissolving of society), nonetheless I was more disappointed with Fr McNaughton's position.

It is a rookie error to think that the meaning of words used by progressive moderns is the same as how those words were once understood in pre-modern times or in church theology. Moderns did not abandon traditional concepts like freedom, equality or justice, but instead colonised them so that they could be used within a modernist framework. It is therefore a mistake to assume that when figures like Mamdani use words like "collective" that this is an endorsement of traditional notions of solidarity.

Even though I am a long-time critic of the hyper-individualism of our culture, I understand why many people blanch when hearing the word "collective". It has become associated with ideological, centralised, statist, redistributist, technocratic, impersonal, distant and authoritarian forms of social organisation. This is not a type of solidarity that most people find appealing.

Some of these features come out in the politics of Cea Weaver, a young woman whom Mamdani has appointed to oversee rent control in New York. She wants to impoverish the white middle class; block the employment of white men; and discourage the procreation of white boys:

So the concept of solidarity as espoused by Cea Weaver does not extend to whites in general and white men in particular. Why? Because it has an ideological basis, as do most forms of modern "collectivism". She believes that the power structures that prevent humans from being truly free and equal are "whiteness" and "patriarchy" and therefore she sees things through a lens of white, male systemic privilege which makes her want to abolish white men rather than extend a hand of solidarity to them.

This is surely a long way from a genuinely Catholic understanding of solidarity.

Her viewpoint is also, predictably, redistributist (wanting to make the white middle class poor) and statist.

Ironically, the modernist view of solidarity is also, in its own way, individualistic. It seeks to "liberate" the individual from traditional forms of community, such as families, and instead provide a "socialised" care that is provided in an impersonal and detached way by a centralised, bureaucratically run welfare state.

We have travelled a considerable distance already toward this aim. Consider that in 1932, Leon Trotsky praised the efforts of the Bolsheviks to abolish the family in these terms:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note that Trotsky describes the family as a "shut-in petty enterprise". It was too local for him, too enclosed within itself, it was too much its own little world.

So what then of a more traditional understanding of solidarity? This was built around an organic concept of society, in which we belonged to social bodies such families and nations, drawn together through natural loves and loyalties.

I won't attempt a complete defence of this traditional understanding. I do, however, want to respond to Trotsky. Trotsky denigrated the family as a shut-in petty enterprise. At the surface level, this might seem to be true. The family embraces only a relatively small number of people. And it can become its own little world.

But it is not petty, not when it works the way that it should. It gives us the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of who we are as men and women. For men, to be masculine providers and protectors. To build and to leave a legacy. For women, to express maternal instincts and drives and to create a loving home. Families come with a sense of lineage, and so can connect us to generations past, present and future. They can provide some of our sense of identity and belonging. They can provide us with a sense of pride in familial achievements, and gratitude for the sacrifices of our forebears.

And the jibe about being "shut in" might also be challenged. First, because family at its best can lead to a sense of belonging to a unique little community, one with its own quirks and its own unwritten understandings, its own little culture and its own characters. If done well, family can become more than an aggregate of its parts, so that it takes on a unique quality of its own, a distinct way of being human in the world, and therefore a good in itself.

Second, if we are formed well by our upbringing within a loving family, then this is a foundation for us to reach out toward larger communities. We are capable then of the kind of loves that make us value our neighbourhoods, our towns, our regions, our nations. The smaller, local forms of community form us, and preserve us, and support us in ways that make us capable of radiating outwards, even to universals like a concern for humanity. And if we are truly connected to the particular, local social bodies we belong to, we are more likely to see the transcendent goods reflected in these, and this too gives us a higher and more expansive experience of life.

One final point. It is also somewhat artificial to set the notion of a rugged individualism against that of a warmth of collectivism. In the older concept of an organic society, the idea was that each person had a role to play as a distinct member of a social body. It was therefore important that individuals were able to carry out these social roles, or else the social body itself would suffer harm. To give one example, it was important for men to have the strength of character - the masculine toughness - to do the hard things required of them. This was not done in opposition to the collective good but in support of it, not so that a man could live alone outside of a community, but so he could effectively contribute to it.

The dilemma of female independence

2025-12-15T09:58:00.000+11:00

I saw the following comment from a single woman in her 50s:

I'm independent and capable but would actually like someone to look after me, make me feel like I'm a priority.

She is caught between two things. The first is the social programming that women experience, which tells them to be, above all, independent of men. I was reminded of the force of this programming recently when talking to a female colleague. She told me that her mother's core message to her was to be independent, and that she herself had doubled down on this in raising her own daughters. She not only told them to be independent but that they didn't need a man in their lives.

However, there is also another kind of programming that we have, one embedded into our created natures. It is part of this nature for us to need, for the good of our own souls, a loving relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

And so there is a conflict in the psyche of modern women. This conflict is not superficial because it touches on issues of formation. There is a pivotal moment in a woman's life in which she must choose between trusting a man, allowing her to release into her own feminine, receptive nature, or else relying on herself but then having to self-assert and control her environment.

It is never an easy thing for a woman to trust, as it requires something of a leap of faith. But in modern life it is assumed anyway that the woman will aspire to become the self-assertive "boss babe" who is focused on career and autonomy and independence.

Both of the possible "pivots" that a woman can make come with potential problems. When women decide to be independent, the worst outcome is that she does not self-assert in the cool, calm manner expected of men, but that her style is a blustering one that comes across as pushy or bossy, and in which self-assertion becomes a desperate need to micro-manage and micro-control. A man who accepts a relationship with a woman like this will need vast amounts of patience to deal with it - most men will be put off.

I don't think that this character type in women is entirely new. It is perhaps revealing that men in centuries past thought that it was most attractive for women to be demure, in the sense of being calm and settled, with composure and restraint, rather than being loud and attention-seeking. Maybe these men had seen the boss babe type in their own time and preferred something very different.

However, there are also potential negatives to women who pivot toward their feminine, receptive nature. In trusting to a man, and in being receptive, these women might develop an overly external locus of control. In other words, they will see the man as being wholly responsible for their own well-being and for their life outcomes.

This becomes especially damaging if a woman has unrealistic expectations; if she is constitutionally unhappy in life; if she is not oriented toward gratitude; or if she is not sufficiently capable in areas of life that require her own competence.

Rejecting the mantra of independence is not supposed to mean that a woman becomes helpless or incapable, or that she does not have a moral mission that requires her to cultivate virtues and strengths of character. It is more that she feels able to lean into her husband, particularly for protection and provision, but also to provide some of the emotional stability, prudence and structure that she might not always be able to provide for herself, at least not consistently. He, for his part, will be drawn to her emotional warmth, her caring nature and the maternal qualities that she brings to the lives of his children.

It is a mistake for a woman to take independence as a goal in life. In doing so, she is less able to release into her feminine nature. She is less able to put her walls down, and to have the trust in a man that love requires.

But a return to a vision of interdependence rather than independence won't be easy. It will mean challenging the liberal insistence on autonomy as the overriding good in life; it will mean rejecting a culture of casual relationships, which erodes trust between men and women even before a marriage has taken place; and it will mean rethinking the idea of the individual being supported within an impersonal, technocratic, universal welfare state, rather than through personal, familial relationships.

Can we bring form to marriage?

2025-11-21T10:04:00.001+11:00

I saw the following comment on social media this week:

To me this is importantly true, but in a particular way. It is a kind of higher truth, an aspect of Logos, or the divine order, the one that is available to our higher intelligence and that expresses a kind of ideal harmonising or fitting together of things.

It is not true in the sense that it is always present in the way people act in real life. To be present, there needs to be a polarity between the sexes. Men need to have a sense of what is required from them for women to relax into a feminine role. It helps if men project something like a masculine aura, and this is more likely to happen if men have a knowledge of their own role in creating the structures - including the religious and cultural structures - within which a woman might "feel" the masculine and respond to it. Men need to project their own masculine strengths and competencies for women to be receptive to and to allow their femininity to come into play.

Feminism, of course, rejects all this, seeking instead the aim of autonomous freedom in which we develop solo, through the efforts of our own independent will alone. Feminism has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. Even so, it's interesting to observe when the outward forms changed, i.e., when men stopped presenting masculine form and women feminine form. There was some change in the 1920s with the flappers - women who wore their hair short and who wore straight lined dresses which de-emphasised the contours of their bodies.

But I think men changed even more in the 1960s and 70s. Here, for instance, is a picture of street life in Perth in 1946:

The men are dressed to project a certain kind of masculine presence. In the 1970s there were still businessmen who wore suits, but nonetheless clothing for men had generally become more informal, i.e., lacking masculine form:

Notice as well that the woman in this photo is dressed much like the men. Again, you can still find examples of women dressing distinctly, but androgyny was becoming more common - there was a decline in outward polarity.

And women? I suspect that girls reach an age, sometime in their teens, when they have to choose whether to retain a feminine persona, or whether to pivot instead to a more masculine approach to life. Do they allow themselves to be enveloped by, and protected within, the masculine, while they themselves bring emotional warmth and care to those around them? Or do they become psychologically harder and self-protective and seek to control their environment?

Most women in modern life reject the feminine. Sometimes it's for personal reasons. Perhaps they had a poor relationship with their own father and so do not trust men. Sometimes it's for political reasons. They have been raised to be feminist and therefore an independent modern girl who does not need a man. Sometimes, it's spiritual. It is a non-serviam - I will not serve - response to God.

It can lead to an impasse in relationships. It is common now to hear women say that they can do everything themselves and so if a man is to have any chance with them he somehow has to figure out a way to "add value" otherwise "what is the point?".

Men, for their part, have started to ask women "What do you bring to the table?". The question itself betrays the underlying problem. If both men and women are the masculine part of the equation, then neither brings something that the other party does not already possess. What men would really like a woman to answer to their question is the answer to the polarity problem. They would like a woman to bring her "softness, emotion and warmth" to the table and to appreciate the masculine strengths that he provides.

It is unfortunate that today it is sometimes the least competent or even mentally unwell women who present to men as needing masculine support. It means that the masculine instincts in men can lead to a poor choice in a spouse. It would help if higher quality women could find a way to signal to men an openness to polarity, through some expression of the feminine.

This is an issue that will always need tending to, no matter the era. It is one of those human condition problems. It needs to be addressed both at the individual, personal level and more generally at the level of the wider culture. It is part of the need to create workable structures, a frame that can uphold human communities.

Zohran & the pathway to progress

2025-11-09T07:16:00.006+11:00

Zohran Mamdani has just been elected Mayor of New York. It's an interesting moment as he is both Muslim and radically leftist in his politics.

Zohran Mamdani

An Australian political analyst, Kos Samaris, has published a newspaper article on Mamdani's victory, which is interesting for what it suggests about the liberal understanding of progress.

Samaris recognises that the two party system is fragmenting. He sees one group of older voters as turning toward right-wing populism and another group of younger voters as turning toward left-wing politicians like Mamdani. Samaris believes that the left turn is the way of the future.

Look at how Samaris characterises the right turn:

...conservatives who think they’ve found their answer in Trump and Reform UK are catastrophically misreading the landscape. Yes, right-wing populism has grown. But look where: outside big cities, in declining towns, among much older angry voters watching their world disappear. Trump and Reform succeeded by harvesting the rage of Boomers and older Gen X in exurban and rural areas, places losing population and economic wealth.

Why does Samaris present this so unsympathetically? It is because he shares the liberal understanding of progress. Progress, for liberals, includes discontinuity and deracination (or rootlessness). Liberals have a faith that in bulldozing the past, in an act of creative destruction, you clear the way for the intended future of humanity. In this future there will be a universal system, in which deracinated individuals will act within the settings of a global economy, of universal rights, of an international political system and of their own individual identities existing within one universal human community.

That is why Samaris can so easily accept the idea of a certain generation of people watching their own worlds disappearing. In the liberal mindset, this is supposed to happen. This is the clearing away of the past that allows for the bright tomorrow. There is an acknowledgement that there will be upset along the way - but no real sympathy and certainly no regret.

And this is how Samaris characterises the left turn:

Gen Z’s left-wing response to establishment failure is concentrated where the future is being built: in cities, in diverse communities, in places experiencing economic and population growth.

Unlike the older voters Trump and Reform captured, Gen Z refuses to blame immigrants or minorities for their economic exclusion. They are the first truly post-national generation, digitally connected to the world, comfortable with diversity, and deeply sceptical of nationalist rhetoric.

They identify that the landlord pricing them out of housing and the property developer sitting on land banks are local elites, not foreign workers. When conservatives try to redirect economic anxiety toward xenophobia – the playbook that worked brilliantly with older voters – Gen Z simply doesn’t buy it.

This explains the split in populist movements. Older voters in declining regions embraced economic nationalism fused with cultural backlash because their lived experience was of stable communities disrupted by change. Gen Z in growing cities experiences economic exclusion within diversity – their problem isn’t cultural disruption but wealth concentration by their own established elite.

For Samaris, the left turn is about rejecting the nation, being digitally connected to the world, accepting economic globalisation, and accepting "diversity" (which here means not having local forms of connectedness - not experiencing the stable communities and the communal culture that the older generations grew up with).

As it happens, Samaris is not entirely right in suggesting that the younger generations are all orienting to the left. Right now the majority of young men in the UK support Reform and the majority of young men in the USA voted Trump. It is true that young women are pivoting left, but we will have to see if that lasts.

How popular is the idea of liberal progress? My feeling is that most people do not share the liberal concept of progress. It's common on social media to see posts about aspects of life that were better in the past and that should have been retained - this is a very un-liberal take. However, the liberal view is still very influential because it is strong in the corridors of power. We do still need to find ways to bring it more clearly into the light of day and to subject it to criticism.

What are some examples of the liberal concept? I'm reminded, for instance, of the views of former Australian Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser. Back in the 1970s and 80s, he was criticised by the left as being an arch-conservative. But he was nothing of the sort. He held to a liberal view of progress and was therefore radical in his politics, not conservative. In 1968, Fraser gave a speech in which he noted that one Australian university, as an entrance requirement, "recognises the following languages - French, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Japanese". He criticised this selection by claiming that "the list as a whole is one belonging to the last century except for one of the languages mentioned".

What Fraser is saying is that only Japanese was relevant to the Australia of the twentieth century, that the European languages represented a defunct Australia belonging to the 1800s. That was an extraordinary thing to say in 1968. It shows the degree to which he was willing to bury the culture of his own nation, to declare it finished in order to move on to something else, something more international. There was no sense in his own mind that there might be some sort of cultural continuity, or that Australia might have its own national culture worthy of conserving, or that people might need a stable form of community from which to derive a sense of connectedness.

I'd note as well that the way to oppose liberal progress is not to reject the concept of progress in general. Any living tradition needs to be dynamic. It needs to respond to the challenges and the opportunities of its own time. And, like an individual person, it should always seek to develop and to improve. Just like an individual person, it is subject to the laws of entropy, so that a mere passivity is likely to lead to a gradual disintegration and decline.

Not everyone on the left is committed to a liberal notion of progress. In the UK there are figures associated with the Blue Labour movement. The writer Paul Kingsnorth is also a prominent figure on the left who has written critically about the trend toward placelessness and globalisation in books such as One No, Many Yeses. Kingsnorth seems to recognise that liberal concepts of progress reduce the ontic triad of God, Man and Nature to just Man alone.

To try to clarify some of the distinctions I am trying to draw, I offer the following chart:

Liberal view of transformative progress

Conservative view of progress

A politics of discontinuity: bulldoze the past to clear a way to the future.

Radical vision of a New Man morally transformed through universal solidarities. Rejection of the parochial and national.

Diversity understood to mean a multiplicity of individual identities at the local level.

Emphasis on participation in a global economy, on quantitative economic growth, on mobility in the pursuit of economic self-interest.

A politics of continuity: retain rootedness within given traditions, even as these adapt to new conditions and challenges.

Vision of man embedded within a series of outwardly radiating communities, from which are derived identity, belonging, thick bonds of attachment, and social commitments.

Diversity understood to mean a multiplicity of regional and national cultures, with each community existing in place and therefore viable through time.

Loyalty to local and national economic interests; a commitment to people and place.

The Bourne identity - Randolph Bourne & a transnational America

2025-11-02T19:15:00.008+11:00

I'm currently reading Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen. In this work Deneen puts forward a different way of thinking about political distinctions:

a) the goal of classical liberals, progressive liberals and Marxists has been transformative progress

b) the two liberal groups saw the few, rather than the many, as the agents of this transformation

c) for classical liberals the concern was defending property rights against the potentially revolutionary many; for progressive liberals the concern was defending an elite class of innovators against the conservatism of the working class

What jumped out at me when reading this was how well Deneen's description of progressive liberalism fits the writings of Randolph Bourne - as well as many left-wing politicians of our own times.

Progress

When we use the word "progress" we usually mean something positive, such as an improvement in conditions. Its use can therefore sometimes pass by without scrutiny.

Deneen's book has helped clarify for me the radical way that liberals understand the term, particularly their commitment to a politics of discontinuity.

Deneen argues that in the premodern tradition liberty was thought to involve the cultivation of virtue, so that we were able to govern ourselves, rather than being slaves to our own appetites and desires. The institutions of society helped to raise "guardrails" for those less able to achieve this condition. Modernity changed the concept of liberty to mean freedom from inherited limitations:

The realization of a new liberty required the dismantling of older institutions that had cultivated the classical ideal of liberty.

What had previously been considered as "guardrails" came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation. (p.5)

This sets the backdrop to the politics of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century:

In his classic text On Liberty, Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favour of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill's parlance, custom was a "despot" over the lives of those who wished to instead engage in "experiments in living". (p.6)

Deneen points out that many people do not benefit from this attack on formative institutions that,

protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people that are not well served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder. (p.6)

The point to be made here is that liberals, both left and right, see transformative change as representing long term progress, even if there are short term costs. The idea is not to improve what exists, but to churn over what is inherited from the past, no matter how fine it is, because the assumption is that this clears a path for the new order that will eventually bring its benefits. In this view, you deliberately move on from what exists, as what exists has no relevance to the present or the future, apart from the record of it you might keep, as in a museum, as it serves only to "cage" the shift to the future new order. Deneen uses the term "creative destruction" to describe what moderns want to achieve.

Therefore, when heritage suburbs are bulldozed to make way for high-rise apartments, someone with this modernist view of progress will more likely see this as a feature of modernity rather than a bug. The same when a suburb that was 50 years ago part of an Anglo-Celtic culture becomes Southern European, then Vietnamese and then Sudanese. The churn seems both pointless and destabilising to a more conservative mind, but it will be thought of as representing a progressive motion of society by a modern. The disruption to a settled way of life is thought of either as a good, as being "vibrant" rather than "stale", or else as something to be regretted only as a temporary loss on the way to something better.

Just to underline this point, consider the views of Herbert Marcuse, an influential philosopher of the 1960s who often cited the works of John Stuart Mill. He wrote of the student radicals of his time that,

In proclaiming the “permanent challenge”...they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture...they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation.

What he is saying is that even the most sublime aspects of tradition are oppressive and therefore individuals must be liberated from them. This concept of progress really means abandoning tradition and starting from Year 0 over and over again. And so there will be instability and discontinuity and, as a result, a difficulty for individuals to achieve a level of connectedness that is a core aspect of our flourishing.

None of this means that we should cede the aim of progress to liberal moderns. If you love the tradition you belong to, if you identify with it and belong to it, then as a matter of pride you will want to contribute to it, so that you leave it in the best condition possible for those who inherit it.

This is why the men of Ancient Athens took the Ephebic Oath, in which they vowed that,

My native land I will not leave a diminished heritage but greater and better than when I received it.

In our own times, we must in particular think of progress in qualitative terms, in contrast to the quantitative progress (e.g. in GDP) that moderns often default to.

The nation

Mill himself did not entirely reject the idea of nations. He was a cosmopolitan at heart but believed, pragmatically, that political liberty was less likely to exist when there was a mixing together of different and incompatible nationalities.

However, there is a logic to his position on progress that would ultimately lead to something else. If you think that there is a liberal elite, the "few", who represent the progressive element of a society, in opposition to a backward and conservative "many", then nationality is undermined, because it is the "many" who form this national culture.

The national culture of the many will come to be seen by liberal moderns as parochial, stagnant, provincial, bland, conformist and uncreative. In contrast, the arrival of immigrant cultures, which disrupt and "churn" this national culture, will be thought of positively as adding vibrancy and diversity and colour and movement.

Deneen begins his explanation of progressive liberalism by comparing it with the earlier classical liberalism. Both shared the same commitment to transformative progress, but the earlier liberals had, as their anthropology, a self-interested individualism. Progressive liberals sought an ever "widening solidarity":

Progressives - as their name suggests - believed that a truer and better liberalism could be advanced...Rather than locating the primary human motivation in self-interest and greed, progressives believed that a social spirit could introduce a national and ultimately global solidarity...In the United States, figures such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Frederick Jackson Turner believed that the early liberalism of the Founding Fathers had reached its limit, bequeathing upon the nation a widening web of interaction and relationality that now required moving beyond the selfish individualism of Lockean liberalism. They called for a national spirt and widening solidarity to replace the parochial identities that limited people's capacity to understand themselves as part of something larger...
The greatest obstacle to this advance was...the parochialism of ordinary people...they suspected that "the many" were a conservative damper who were likely to oppose the transformative ambitions of progress as moral transformation...they saw "the many" as traditionalists who constituted an obstacle to the realization of progress. (pp.77-78)

Fast forward to 1916. A young American intellectual named Randolph Bourne publishes an essay titled "Trans-National America". It represents the emergence of the modern progressive liberal mind. Bourne is part of the intellectual lineage described by Deneen. He was as a young man an admirer of Dewey. The link to Mill is suggested in the following description of his work:

Though he wrote on politics, young people, literature and other subjects, he came back time and again to a demand for personal liberty. What mattered to Bourne, as Christopher Lasch wrote in “The New Radicalism in America,” was that everyone “resist the impulses to acquiesce.”...Often Bourne sounds like the John Stuart Mill of “On Liberty,” who worried over the destruction of individual initiative and spontaneity.

What Bourne attacks in his essay is the idea that migrants should be assimilated into a dominant Anglo-American national culture. He does so, in part, by claiming that there is no such core Anglo national tradition:

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant...
With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born

(I would point out here, as evidence of how enduring Bourne's way of thinking is, that just this year the premier of my state here in Australia, Jacinta Allan, declared that "Australia is nation of foreigners".)

Bourne looked down on Anglo-American culture because he thought it was too traditional - too much connected to its ancestral roots. He saw immigrant culture positively because through these cultures the American could be drawn out of his provincialism and into a cosmopolitan outlook.

And Bourne's hope was that America would become a kind of federation of nations, a "trans-nation" that might grow into a cosmopolitanism.

Randolph Bourne

The language Bourne uses in his essay matters, because it points clearly to the larger Millian framework. In the following quotes you will find him rejecting the existing American tradition because it is stagnant or provincial and praising the immigrant cultures because they are creative and transformative and help point to global solidarities.

For instance, in the following excerpt Bourne complains of the Anglo-Americans that,

They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country. So that, in spite of the ‘Revolution,’ our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging...

It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples—the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun—to save us from our own stagnation.

The assumption here is that what is needed is transformative progress in the sense that this was understood by men like Mill and Dewey.

Similarly, Bourne adds,

The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency.

What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.

Remember, Mill set a framework in which the continuity of established patterns of life within a community was a threat both to human liberty and to progress. And part of the movement of this progress was to be away from local identity and attachment toward more universal solidarities. And so you can understand why a settled, local way of life was associated negatively in Bourne's mind with a stale uniformity.

Perhaps the most telling excerpt is the following one:

Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind...

How do we respond?

Modern progressives have kept much of Bourne's politics. What I hope to have shown is that these ideas will not easily be countered unless their foundation in Mill's thought is challenged. We need to persuade people that there is a better way of defining both liberty and progress.

I think too that we need to defend the local. When I was younger, Australia had a more "parochial" culture, in the sense that you would identify not just as an Australian, but as a member of a state within Australia, and a city within that state, and a region with that city, and a suburb within that region. It might sound complicated, but it is the natural way of forming identities which "radiate outwards". The local identities do not prevent the larger ones from forming.

Nor did the local identities make life more stale or colourless. On the contrary, they vivified life, through the sense of connectedness to particular places and people. The sense of community was stronger, the sense of a particular way of life was stronger, and the social commitments were also greater.

One interesting quality about these local identities is that they also vivified the places that you did not belong to. These appeared more exotic to the imagination, like worlds apart, which made them more exciting to visit and to experience. This was true, back then, even of parts of Australia itself.

Bourne wants us to believe that you can reject local attachments whilst also having a "widening solidarity" with all the people of the world. Personally, I would be more impressed if he had achieved the natural affinities that he should have had. Bourne did not get along well with his sister merely because she had conventional interests. He wrote of his home town and family that:

I am constantly confounded there by the immeasurable gulf between my outlook and theirs and I feel a constant criticism of my futile high-browism and Godless pursuit of strange philosophers. My young sister is almost a passionate vulgarian and takes with really virtuous indignation any deviation from the norm of popular music, the movies, Chamber's novels, Billy Sunday, musical comedy, tennis, anti-suffragism, and the rest of the combination that makes up the healthy, hearty, happy young normal person of the well-brought up family of the day of the middle-middle-class. I find her an index to current America, but we scarcely get along.

Many progressive liberals of today will most likely be unaware of their own intellectual lineage. It will have been received by them unexamined. But these ideas have something of a life of their own. They have skipped down through the generations because there has not been much to stop them. The challenge will be to influence younger generations with an entirely different framework.

Transformative progress

2025-10-25T16:00:00.004+11:00

In Patrick Deneen's latest work, Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, he uses the concept of "transformative progress" to describe a common aim of those committed to the modern project. Deneen writes:

The first liberals - "classical liberals" - believed especially that economic progress through an ever-freer and more expansive market could fuel a transformative social and political order in which growing prosperity would always outstrip economic discontents. Far from seeking stability, balance, and order, the aim was the unceasing instability of an economy that has fittingly been described as a constant process of "creative destruction". (p.x)

Later liberals took aim at the conservativism of the working-classes:

Later liberals - "progressives" - decried the resulting economic inequality, but retained the belief that progress would eventually give rise to the reconciliation of the classes...they also demanded dynamism in the social order in order to displace...the instinctual conservatism of the commoners. This imperative has been especially pursued through transformations wrought in the social sphere, and has in recent years culminated in the sexual revolution and its attendant effort to displace "traditional" forms of marriage, family, and sexual identity based in nature, replaced instead by a social and technological project that would liberate humans from mere nature. (pp. x - xi)

This is a broad overview, of course, and it is possible to add all sorts of qualifications. There have been different approaches, for instance, by liberals toward the achievement of social harmony; and there have been conservative liberals who have wanted a somewhat slower transformation, though endorsing the general programme.

Nonetheless, I do think this is a fruitful approach to looking at modern politics. There are clearly people who do think in terms of transformative progress, in which the breaking of continuity or stability or connection is looked on positively, as a way to release innovation, particularly of newer technologies, which are thought of as the meaningful aspect of human activity.

Deneen's argument helps us with a theory of mind problem. It is difficult for most of us to understand why politicians would deliberately destroy the good things inherited from the past. Their commitment to transformative progress is a way of understanding why they find this so acceptable.

One example that springs to mind is the threat to the heritage suburbs of my own city, Melbourne. The state government has released a plan to replace these suburbs with high and medium density housing to accommodate large numbers of immigrants. These are some of the finest heritage suburbs anywhere, and the current population has a distinct and settled way of life - a culture - that is unlikely to survive the changes. An urban economist, Terry Rawnsley, justified all this with the telling comment that,

Local residents might be concerned about change, but we live in a city, not a museum.

The implication is that having a settled way of life in a beautiful heritage suburb is unjustifiable because it is a mere relic of the past.

Further examples are the comments I read this morning in response to a social media post by Drew Pavlou. He had quoted Singapore's former leader Lee Kuan Yew who wanted his own people to endure into the future in a recognisable and identifiable way. Here is how one "progressive" responded:

He sees nations as impediments to progress. And progress, for him, is the abolition of human nature in favour of newer forms of technological existence.

Similarly there was this comment:

He sees a nation, an extended family of our own, as something that is confining or limiting, and he dismisses it as being something like a "zoo exhibition", i.e., something artificial that holds us statically in place.

Clearly, we need to confront the politics of transformative progress head on. This might involve a number of different approaches. First, there is the issue of nature. There was a turn in the early modern period from seeing man as being embedded within a given natural order, to seeing nature as mere matter that humans were to seek mastery of. There was an earlier turn as well in the later Middle Ages towards a nominalism and a voluntarism which denied the existence of essences, and which therefore made it difficult to think in terms of the nature of things - of what was needed for a particular creature to flourish.

It would help if we returned to a more traditional understanding of nature, including our own nature, so that issues of connectedness and identity and belonging and community might be taken more seriously as aspects of the good in life.

We could also take aim at the "reign of quantity" in which progress is associated with material growth, for instance, in GDP, rather than in the quality of things. If we are only concerned with quantity, then replacing beautiful heritage suburbs with 10 storey apartment blocks would no doubt qualify as progress, as "growth". But if we are concerned with elements of quality, such as the beauty of our living spaces, or appropriate scale, or living close to nature, or connectedness to a culture and tradition, then the demolition of heritage suburbs will most likely be seen as regress or loss.

We could emphasise, as well, the issue of entropy. There is in the created world an inbuilt tendency toward entropy, which means that we must expend energy to hold things together, so that they don't disintegrate. Without this our bodies decline as do our social bodies - our communities disintegrate. Much of the social capital built up over time was aimed at helping to hold things together. When progress is understood as "transformative" in the sense of overthrowing the past, then social capital will be lost, and the force of entropy will be unleashed. This, as Deneen himself points out, will often hit the most vulnerable classes in society hardest, rather than the more progressive upper classes. The poorest are the ones least able to cope with the disintegration of stable family life or to abandon the meaning and purpose derived from a shared sense of community.

We could perhaps also try to combat the Promethean element within Western culture. It is interesting to note that Mary Shelley titled her famous novel of 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley had been involved with a Promethean circle of intellectuals, including her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her novel is a warning about the dangers of unchecked scientific hubris or scientific overreach. We still have aspiring Frankensteins today, such as the man posted above who has no qualms about mind uploads and suchlike.

In any event, there needs to be a questioning of the current understanding of progress. Many ordinary Westerners do not see what is happening to them and to their communities as a genuine betterment. The model of progress held by the elites needs to change.

An age of discontinuity?

2025-10-19T17:17:00.004+11:00

A young Englishwoman expressed her preference for her own national cuisine on social media:

This triggered the following put down:

Nasir, unsurprisingly, describes himself as a "global head of trading". I responded to his comment as follows:

It was perhaps unfair of me to even describe Jess's position as parochial, as she clarified that she happily eats other foods but just prefers her native fare. And, as I shall point out in a future post, there is an important place for parochialism regardless - the turn toward cosmopolitanism and against one's own culture can be traced back to a very unhealthy development within leftism.

For a healthier mindset consider the thought of Elizabeth Fenton, an Englishwoman who travelled to Tasmania in 1828. Her ship was crewed with Arabs and Bengalis and, to her dismay, a Greek who had abandoned his own national culture:

Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it, - a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice.
Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

For Elizabeth Fenton, having this social body ought to grant to this Greek man something much greater than the hedonic experience of eating a certain dish. It grants a certain kind of continuity: a connection to generations past, to their achievements and therefore something to contribute to and to aspire toward.

Sad to write it, but there are parts of my own home city now which are so diverse that it is difficult to imagine anyone living there having this sense of continuity through time. The lifestyle in these areas, unsurprisingly, is directed toward hedonic experience in the moment, particularly through the array of international eateries. It makes me wonder if this culture of discontinuity is not contributing to the current trend of young women turning away from the idea of motherhood - as this requires us to take on long term commitments, in part, to maintain an ongoing lineage and tradition.

The earliest of the early moderns did not want the culture to descend into this type of hedonic individualism (even if they unwittingly prepared some of the ground for it). Descartes, for instance, was adamant that we must think of ourselves as belonging to larger social entities:

though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth.

Francis Bacon thought that there were two levels of existence. The first was the individual one motivated by an appetite to preserve the inherent good of our own individual being. But he thought as well that there was a second level of existence, propelled by a motion toward contact and connection. Therefore, there was a "double nature of the good":

Here, he argues that there "is formed in every thing a double nature of good": "the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself": the other, "as it is a part or member of a greater body".

Put differently, there are two kinds of goods found in material nature: the one, goodness per se, or any given objects intrinsic value; the other, goodness insofar as it belongs, and thus contributes to, a collective reality greater than itself.

The appetite for self-preservation corresponds naturally to the safeguarding of a material body's essential goodness, whereas the appetite of union facilitates a basic level of material conjunction for the purposes both of self-preservation and the greater good. [Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, pp.236-37]

Finally, I'll just make the observation that we do seem to be wired to appreciate continuity. There are parts of Melbourne that were built very finely in the later 1800s and have been reasonably well preserved. When you walk through them you feel a positive connection to the past and to ancestry which then vivifies the experience of place. It's very difficult to impart this from a photo, but this is the type of streetscape I have in mind:

Postscript: One final brief thought. It's interesting that the imagery of "chains" has changed over time. In the older Western tradition, less prone to discontinuity, the imagery of chains was more positive, suggesting a necessary connection between created beings, as in the "Great Chain of Being". In modern times, we have a shift in which the aim is to break chains to achieve liberation. For instance, Rousseau's famous quote is "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains", whilst Marx declared "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains".

The heterofatalism of Jean Garnett

2025-09-25T17:28:00.006+10:00

There is a term doing the rounds, "heterofatalism", which refers to the disappointment that women feel about relationships with men:

Heterofatalism is a term coined by scholar Asa Seresin for the pessimistic view held by many straight women that heterosexual relationships are destined to be disappointing, even harmful, and that men's mating behaviors consistently lead to negative outcomes for women. This concept, also referred to as heteropessimism, captures a sentiment of weariness with the dynamics and perceived inevitable failures within heterosexual dating and relationships.

I am not at all surprised that such a term has appeared. There has been for a long time now a conflict between aspects of liberal culture and heterosexuality - the two are not easily made compatible.

Jean Garnett

To illustrate what I mean, I'd like to turn to a recent treatment of heterofatalism by Jean Garnett in the New York Times. It is titled 'The Trouble With Wanting Men: Women are so fed up with men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism. So what do we do with our desire?' (NYT, July 21 2025).

Jean Garnett is in her early 40s, is divorced and has a daughter. She is a progressive leftist writer from New York. She is very clearly libidinally drawn to men:

I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted — to be organized and oriented by his desire...I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down....

The bitterness does not replace wanting men, a man, the smell of a man’s thin T-shirt, the dampness of the hair at his nape after he exerts himself; the bitterness grows from the want and is mixed up with it.

But the men she goes out with, post-divorce, aren't as keen to commit to anything as she is. Some of them claim to be too anxious. Others just want the physical side of relationships.

So what is going wrong? Well, first there's the problem of the liberal concept of freedom. Liberals focus on an ideal of individual autonomy in which we are free to choose in any direction at any time. Logically, this means that we should prefer relationships which are fluid, open-ended, self-determined, cancellable. Jean Garnett spells this out herself in considering why queer relationships might be preferable:

But in queer relationships the roles are at least less determined, with perhaps more freedom and flexibility in who assumes which, and how. In other words, maybe our pessimism about straightness arises in part from a dawning sense of its anachronism. Maybe, like the surge of interest in straight nonmonogamy, it’s part of heterosexuality’s clumsy process of queering itself into a more fluid future.

In Jean Garnett's progressive milieu, heterosexuality has already taken this turn. Her own marriage was open, and she describes dating men who invited her into group arrangements.

The liberal concept of freedom has replaced a much older one in which we were supposed to discipline our own passions, so that they were integrated into the higher goods and purposes of our lives. What liberalism has tended to do instead is to remove cultural restraints as part of a sexual revolution. It's difficult not to notice, though, reading through Jean Garnett's description of her dating life, how disordered this has left the cultural landscape. Acting through impulse alone paves the way for a falling away into entropy, in which the culture becomes increasingly disorganised, leading to a fatalistic view - a heterofatalism - that relationships will inevitably fail or, perhaps, never be successfully formed.

The liberal concept of freedom, focused as it is on choice, also tends to emphasise the idea of consent as the one key aspect of sexual morality. As long as people are freely consenting to something, that thing is declared moral. Here is how Jean Garnett describes the man she dated who wanted a group arrangement:

He was partnered already, he had told me, and seeking only companionate sex; his dating profile referenced this clearly...I meet this type around sometimes: fluent in the language of polyamory, waving his respectful desire around like a plastic light saber...Good guy. Protesting a bit much on the consensuality front, but basically a stand-up guy. Evolved, transparent, an enlightened creature of our new romantic age. If only I could desire a man like that, a man bringing such clear terms to the table...

Which means that women like Jean Garnett can simultaneously be so demoralised with dating that they declare themselves "heterofatalist" but not have the moral language through which to raise some different standard. Mr Polyamory is the evolved, enlightened one in this world view. He is the one playing by the liberal rules.

This is further complicated by the lack of a vertical structure within a liberal cosmology. If something becomes the "good" by virtue of the fact that I desire it, then all things that are genuinely desired are equally the "good". There is no way to distinguish the higher and the lower, the noble and the base. There are just uniquely individual preferences, which by their nature are equally preferences.

So, again, in the absence of a vertical structure, it becomes difficult to justify standards that might make claims on people but that might also serve higher goods, or common goods, such as those involving relationships between the sexes.

Liberal modernity also sets its against heterosexuality by taking an anti-essentialist view of sex distinctions. In this view, there is no quality of "masculinity" that represents an ideal that men might strive for, that connects manhood to a transcendent good. And so you get the odd situation in which Jean Garnett is heterosexual but anti-male:

I haven’t been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.

She does not seem to connect the dots, that she wants men to be non-masculine but is then scathing when such men declare themselves to be too anxious to commit to relationships:

She told us about a woman she knew who was dating a man from another city. After weeks of saying “I can’t wait to see you,” the man ghosted her during his actual visit. His explanation later? He’d been “too anxious.”

“Aww, poor baby!” cried the historian, and we all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to “man up and [expletive] us.”

Or this:

“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low.”

“Totally understand,” I replied, but I didn’t. Feeble, fallible “looking forward” is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all.

Then there is the lingering issue of feminist gender war. There has been a strand of leftism which has explained the failure of utopia in terms of power structures within civilised societies. Feminists identified one of these structures as patriarchy, with men cast as oppressors and women as victims. This is why Jean Garnett can simultaneously complain that men are not sufficiently devoted to her whilst also attacking men as the enemy class. She wants closeness whilst also fearing and raging against men:

The men I want are not wanting me badly enough, not communicating with me clearly enough, not devoting themselves to me: All this certainly seems calamitous enough to warrant an “ism.” And if it is an “ism,” the problem cannot be me. It must be men, right? Men are what is rotten in the state of straightness, and why shouldn’t we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them? Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism...And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about “men.”

Finally, I'd note how she began the above quote: "the men I want are not wanting me". Jean Garnett is part of a professional class. Her friends include historians and therapists who are trying to date lawyers and surgeons. There is an unintended consequence of our society pushing female careerism so hard, which is that it makes it more difficult for women to find men they are likely to want to date, i.e., men with equivalent or superior resources and status. This is especially true for middle-aged divorced women with children, which is the situation Jean Garnett is in. The relatively small number of leftist, single men who would potentially qualify for a relationship with her will have many options, perhaps so many that they will not feel pressured to settle down. In theory, women like Jean Garnett should be trying to lock down such men earlier in life, but the culture they are part of does not encourage lifelong monogamy.

We need not be heterofatalists. It is not impossible for us to create better conditions for family formation. Jean Garnett herself writes that she could not accept the casual relationships on offer to her because "I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration". This is an underlying instinct that points in the direction of a healthier and more stable culture of marriage. But, as I have tried to argue, it is difficult to integrate her healthier instinct with other ideas and influences circulating within liberal modernity. If you read her essay (behind a paywall), you will most likely come away with the impression of a disorganised, perhaps even dissolute, progressive culture in which fatalism about heterosexuality is a predictable defensive reaction.

How would you like your society?

2025-09-18T15:25:00.003+10:00

Stefan Molyneux, who I generally respect as an independent minded thinker, posted the following comment on social media:

It's as radically individualistic as you can get. And it highlights why philosophy is so important when it comes to politics.

One issue that comes to mind is that of universals. If you take a nominalist view, that general concepts have no existence outside the mind, you are more likely to believe that only individual instances of things have real existence. In this case, that there are individuals but "society does not exist".

The comments to Molyneux's post were overwhelmingly against his position. There were two main objections to his claim. First, that it makes sense to talk about emergent properties, i.e., that a complex system has properties that cannot be found in its individual parts alone. Second, many commenters pointed out that if you strip something down to its individual parts, that you could not then stop at "individuals exist" because those individuals are made up of cells, and those cells of molecules, and those molecules of atoms and so on in a descending series.

Personally, I would go much further and defend a notion of philosophical realism. My own view is that there are universals, such as the masculine and the feminine, that do exist as qualities or essences. We can, as individual men and women, seek to embody and express the higher aspects of the masculine or the feminine, thereby connecting our own being in the world to a transcendent good that is inherently meaningful.

This was once more commonly accepted. Academics like Professor Judith Butler took aim at it, claiming that the masculine and the feminine had no real existence, but were merely socially constructed:

... 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...

Something similar is at play when it comes to communities, whether families or nations. Modern academics tend to emphasise the socially constructed and historically contingent nature of these communities. There is little recognition that these communities might have an 'essence' of their own, in the sense that they bear a distinct and uniquely meaningful character of their own, and carry this through time. People once discerned this as such a good, that they would make considerable sacrifices to defend it. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way:

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.

Family and nation, in this sense, also connect us to transcendent goods, which is why most people do not feel them to diminish their individuality, but rather to add meaningfully to it.

There is perhaps another philosophical divide at play involving cosmology. I've lately been reading Regime Change by Patrick Deneen. Deneen laments that in modern times the "few" (the elite) and the "many" (the working class) are set against each other, trying to defeat the other. He argues that in times past there were virtues attributed to each class:

Those in the upper class were more likely to attain cultivation and refined tastes. They were more likely to be the beneficiaries of liberal education, and hence liberal by the classical definition: people free from daily cares, and able to develop certain virtues or excellences of character that required leisure and refinement. They could come to appreciate and cultivate fine and high culture, often patrons and preservers of many of the world's most treasured objects of transcendent beauty. At their finest, they governed well for the sake of the whole polity, inspired by lessons of noblesse oblige and chivalry, a disposition that arose in recognition of the gift and privilege of their distinct positions, and the corresponding responsibilities and duties that such station entailed. (p.23)

He then describes the virtues once ascribed to the working classes,

They were more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits and natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tide, sun, and stars. If upper classes could set their sights on higher culture, the working classes often developed practices that reflected life's constant realities, its joys and pains, celebrations and suffering. They have been extolled as the political embodiment of "common sense," bearers of a deposit of practices and beliefs born of close experience with reality, largely untouched by distorted views of reality too often born of abstract theories made possible by a disconnection from limits. Because they lived in more straitened circumstances, they would develop certain virtues that came of necessity, such as frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and, often, stoic cheerfulness even in the face of penury and suffering. They were often the bearers of everyday culture that acted as a kind of bottom-up law and education, offering guidance to each successive generation on how best to make one's way in a challenging world. While lacking high culture, this "low culture" was often the very essence of culture in its widest and deepest sense: the social loam in which human life grew, persevered, and was memorialised and renewed. (pp. 23-24)

I would not usually quote at such length, but have done so because these descriptions reminded me that human societies were traditionally not conceived of as a collection of discrete individuals. Instead, individuals made up "estates" of the realm, which together formed the "body politic". Just as the different parts of a body need to function well for the good of the body as a whole, so it was with the estates. Perhaps to have a healthy society you need the social classes to develop toward the virtues they are most capable of, and to expect the other social classes to do the same.

I don't believe that the current elite sees things this way. They don't see themselves as part of one body politic together with the working classes and that each contributes significantly, albeit differently, to the health of the body as a whole.

What I am describing would fall under the category of an organic view of society:

An organic society is a concept that views society as a living, interconnected organism where the various parts work together to sustain the whole. This idea contrasts with the view of society as a collection of autonomous individuals

Or as Dr Tyler Chamberlain explains "the organic theory of society":

Just like a physical body, the body politic requires many parts, each of which must perform its assigned function if the organism is to flourish.

This view seems to have been gradually replaced by something like a "mechanical atomistic" view of society. Social atomism has been defined as,

the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms

Social atomism tends to see communities as merely aggregates of individuals:

Individualist – atomist – theories emphasize the self-sufficiency and moral autonomy of persons. They speak of freedoms, rights and exceptions; rarely or never of reciprocities, duties and connections. Individualism dominates our self perception. It encourages us to deny the ligaments and nerves of our social lives. Perceiving every society as an aggregate, it assaults or diminishes the systems ... where personal identity, security and satisfaction are achieved. Every such system is, in atomist eyes, no less an aggregate than the passengers in a bus.

Despite the emphasis on the individual, it can nonetheless diminish individuality by treating individuals as fungible (replaceable) within a technocratically ordered system. The sociologist Elizabeth Wolgast argues that,

From the atomistic standpoint, the individuals who make up a society are interchangeable like molecules in a bucket of water – society a mere aggregate of individuals. This introduces a harsh and brutal equality into our theory of human life and it contradicts our experience of human beings as unique and irreplaceable, valuable in virtue of their variety – in what they don't share – not in virtue of their common ability to reason.

This does not mean that those holding to such an outlook are uninterested in achieving social harmony. One wave of modernists promoted the idea of individual rights as a way of achieving harmony. Some second wave liberals wanted to achieve harmony by erasing distinctions. They wanted to abolish classes and nations and even distinctions between the sexes. What would be left would be equal individuals within a universalist framework of individual rights. Some moderns have called for the will of an absolute ruler to be the foundation of harmony; others have advocated for the general will of the people to play this role. I believe it's the case that some leftists today think that harmony can be achieved if all people can be made to join in a group consensus politically, with those who disagree being ostracised for "hate speech" or some form of prejudice or supremacism.

None of these strategies has functioned adequately. It is painfully obvious that the sexes have been set against each other in modern life, as have the classes. There is an evident absence of loyalty within modern societies, and an absence of a commitment to the common goods of social life.

I am not suggesting that past forms be revived just as they were. We should, however, look to them to see what principles within them are worthy of being taken forward into newer social conditions.

Responding to a modern day Millian

2025-07-26T19:03:00.000+10:00

I was on social media and, in a debate about transsexualism, saw the following comment:

It's an example of someone separating out sex and gender, which then allows the two to be set against each other. I responded with this comment:

The original poster then went for a Millian liberal response, along the lines of "everyone can do whatever they want as long as it does not harm anyone else":

In the past, this might have been a winning move. People who were brought up in the liberal frame might have accepted the premises of this argument and so have been influenced to accept a picture of society in which everyone simply stays neutral in terms of the human good and so tolerates whatever other people do.

I was happy to note that many of those who responded did not buy into this type of thinking. The Millian line was rejected, overwhelmingly, on the grounds that the supposed neutrality of liberalism is a fiction.

It was argued that, far from remaining neutral, a liberal culture forced people to accept and confirm the transsexual belief system, for instance, by threatening to remove children from parents; through the attempt to replace ordinary words so that, for instance, a biological woman is referred to as a "person with a uterus"; through forcing women to accept biological males in restrooms and change rooms; through pressure to adopt pronouns and so on.

There have been leftists who have argued, in principle, for this absence of real neutrality. Herbert Marcuse, a leading voice of the New Left in the 1960s, wrote a famous essay titled "Repressive Tolerance". In it, he argued that full tolerance should only be extended to those on the political left, who were agitating for socialist liberation and therefore against a "false consciousness". Marcuse was critical of,

the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity I call this non-partisan tolerance 'abstract' or 'pure' inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides

This is the earliest example I know of where non-leftist speech is categorised and made illegitimate as representing "hate". Whether the term "hate speech" is derived directly from Marcuse or not I'm not sure, but the mindset here is clear enough: that neutrality is abandoned when it does not serve the leftist cause; and that non-leftist politics is to suffer intolerance on the grounds that it represents "hate".

Marcuse even set out the specific conditions in which non-leftist thought might or might not be tolerated. He used the term "indiscriminate tolerance" to describe where neutrality might be permissible:

Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.

Again, modern society has taken this type of Marcusian turn. It is generally understood that something you might say in a private "harmless" context could not be said in a more scrutinised public context. And the level of scrutiny is advancing over time.

The larger point, then, is that society is not neutral in terms of competing goods. I think it's a good thing that people are recognising this and not complacently accepting claims about neutrality.

I myself went for a different option. I don't think the vision of a community in which we are studiously indifferent to what everyone might choose to do can work in the longer run.

There were moral concepts employed in the West that reflected this need to hold things together in a self-disciplined way. To fail to do so was regarded negatively as being wanton (a lack of restraint or control), or abandoned, or incontinent, or dissolute, or dissipated, or licentious, or debauched. The more positive moral vocabulary was that of having integrity or being sound or, in more recent times, of being centred.

These words now sound old-fashioned, but they nonetheless are grounded in something accepted by popular science writers of today like Steven Pinker who writes,

The…ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

Most people would be aware of this. If we just follow whatever inclinations or appetites happen to come to mind, then we gradually fall into self-destructive habits. We lose our integrity of being - our lives become increasingly disordered. And so we are all forced, to some degree, to make an effort - to apply energy - to maintain our health and our well-being.

If we care about our social bodies - the communities we belong to - then we will be concerned with upholding the integrity of these as well. This obviously has to be balanced with the good of individual freedoms. But it's not possible to have a society in which every individual acts in any direction and is indifferent to all other individuals, and expect this society to avoid the centrifugal effects of entropy - a drifting away into disorder and decay. There has to be a common commitment to upholding the larger integrity of the community.

The key to achieving this is to understand how much our own higher goods depend upon this life in common. It is difficult to sustain our own spiritual life, ourselves as embodied souls, without the particular loves and commitments that we find within our communal traditions. And so it makes sense for each individual to act purposefully and deliberately and meaningfully to uphold the integrity of these traditions and to encourage others to do the same.

Marcuse's Utopia

2025-07-13T20:49:00.006+10:00

In 1971 John Lennon released his famous song Imagine. It is a song that calls on us to imagine a certain kind of utopia, one in which there are no nations and no religions but only a global solidarity, a brotherhood of man.

From what intellectual milieu did this song spring from? It's hard to ignore the influence of a leading intellectual of this period, Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, studied Marxism as a young man, came under the influence of Heidegger, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. He ended up emigrating to the United States in 1934. He was a leading theorist for the New Left in the 1960s, but his influence subsequently waned.

Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse was a self-proclaimed leftist utopian. As such, he stands in a tradition that goes back to at least the later 1700s. Marcuse absorbed a great deal of thought from the past. Evident in his writing is the influence not just of Marx, but of Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Hegel, amongst others.

Leftist utopianism has certain common characteristics. It often involves a belief that you can achieve an absolute form of autonomous individual freedom, of perfect equality and lasting peace; that you can and should have solidarity between people, but only at a universal, global level; that human nature can be remade to make possible these achievements, so that you bring into being a New Man; and that human nature is currently corrupted by the institutions of civilisation, so that change requires an attack on these institutions and a subverting of culture and religion.

It is interesting to me just how similar the basic underpinnings of Marcuse's worldview of the 1960s are with that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1810s. Marcuse's ideas considerably overlap with Shelley's, albeit expressed in the language of Marx and Freud. Leftist utopianism has been remarkably stable over a long period of time.

The aims

What was Marcuse aiming for? He did not present this in an entirely systematic way, but it's possible to identify certain themes.

First, he believed in "liberation", by which he meant, in part, absolute individual autonomy. He wrote:

Liberty is self-determination, autonomy...It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do

This is a standard aim across most modernist political currents. It's noteworthy that Marcuse, who identified as a socialist, should share this belief with liberals of all stripes.

If you want to be completely free as an autonomous individual, then there will be nothing that might limit what you determine for yourself. Nor will you be defined by anything outside of your own individual choice. You will not be defined by nation or class, nor by family or sex. You will not be limited in your choices by religious belief. There will be nothing above you and nothing below you. There will just be you, a discrete individual, existing on the same plane as everyone else and everything else.

Here is how Shelley puts his vision of the new autonomous man:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

However, Marcuse did not entirely reject the idea of solidarity. But the only kind of solidarity that was permissible was a global, universalist one, that of humanity. He wrote of how the revolution had the aim of "creating solidarity for the human species" and said of happiness that "its validity depends on the real solidarity of the species “man,” which a society divided into antagonistic classes and nations cannot achieve".

He used Freudian concepts to try to make this scientific. Freud had claimed that Eros represented a life force that aimed at higher unities of life. Marcuse used this theory to argue that prior to all social forms of morality, there was a biological, instinctual one that aimed to create unities at the highest level possible (i.e., ultimately at the universal level, that of humanity):

Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a “disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unities” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.

But solidarity was not, in Marcuse's view, to impinge on our individual autonomy. He praised the student rebellion of the 1960s for not creating any hierarchy of leadership or any stable forms of organisation:

Socialist solidarity is autonomy: self-determination begins at home…. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.

Another angle to liberation for Marcuse was that surrounding the Marxist concept of alienation. Marcuse followed the idea that man is formed through his productive labour, but that he is alienated from this self-formation under the conditions of capitalism. His labour is treated as a kind of commodity, and he does not control the conditions of his labour, nor does he receive all of his productive output. He is forced to spend his life toiling for others.

Marcuse thought there was a way out of this. Modern capitalism had raised industrial output to such a level that if this output was distributed more equally, there could be a great reduction in the need to work for necessity.

The general aim here of reducing working hours is easy to support. The issue is whether Marcuse's political orientation was likely to help achieve this aim or not. My own belief is that he unintentionally made things worse (I will explain this further on). I would just note, for now, that one component of Marcuse's ideal of liberation, and the achievement of individual autonomy, was overcoming alienation from our labour.

A third aspect of Marcuse's utopia is more difficult to explain. Marcuse had a lifelong interest in aesthetics. It led him to the idea that in a utopia reality would be remade along artistic lines. He believed that if a repressive form of reason could be overturned that, "The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man." Art would no longer be a separate sphere of life, the whole of life and reality would be art. In Marcuse's utopia, the distinctions between science and art, logic and imagination would no longer exist:

Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.

For Marcuse, the imagination was a liberating force. Reason by itself would not liberate people, because it was too bound to current conditions of life. Marcuse therefore strongly supported the surrealists, and thought that dreams and the poetic imagination could envisage a different and better way of life. He quoted a leading French surrealist, Benjamin Péret, who held that a poet "can no longer be recognized as such if he does not oppose himself by a total non-conformism to the world in which he lives." Marcuse felt that the libertarian possibilities of the revolution,

are “sur-realistic”: they belong to the poetic imagination

The ideal for Marcuse was a world in which "mediations" would,

...reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism. Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream.

Note the similarity to the beliefs of Percy Bysshe Shelley back in the 1810s:

Shelley’s poetry often expresses a utopian vision of a better society...Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world. Through his writings, Shelley encourages readers to tap into their creative faculties, to dream, and to envision a more just and compassionate society. His emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination resonates with readers, reminding them of their capacity to bring about positive change.

And think too of John Lennon's song, with its title "Imagine" and the line "You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one".

A fourth aspect of Marcuse's utopia was the idea that we could not really know what the utopia might be like. He ends his "Essay on Liberation" on this note:

And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.

Marcuse was aware of the problem of describing his alternative vision. He refused to set out a blueprint for his utopia:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.

He recognised, though, that it was reasonable for people to ask for some vision of the new before committing to destroying the old:

However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action.

Marcuse did sketch out a vague and abstractly intellectual picture of what the organising principles of his utopia would be. But it is still striking how willing he was to subvert the traditions of his society, even what he terms the "most sublime manifestations of traditional culture", in favour of a roughly drawn, unlikely utopia.

How would Marcuse's utopia come about? Like other leftist utopians he thought that human nature was malleable. What was corrupting this nature was the influence of oppressive and exploitative institutions, and so there is much mention in his writings of the need to subvert these institutions.

He thought, as well, that it was both possible and necessary to create a type of new man and that this would not happen automatically as a result of institutional change. Marcuse suggested that if there were revolutionary changes to morality, that this might reach into the "biological" nature of man (by which he meant that the organism of man would be reconditioned so that it could only function along the lines of the new morality):

To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological" dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.

Marcuse did not believe that the working-class was likely to initiate revolutionary changes. He looked instead to social movements of his time, such as those of Black Americans and feminists. He placed particular hope in the feminist movement, because one other aspect of his utopia was the ideal of peace (Lennon: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace").

It makes sense for someone on the left side of modernity to emphasise peace. The original wave of liberalism had based its politics on an anthropology of conflict, making the starting point the claim that man in a state of nature would engage in a war of all against all. Marcuse makes reference to this in his Essay on Liberation, in which he notes the existence of classes and nations, and the absence of universal solidarity, and claims that,

As long as this is the history of mankind, the “state of nature,” no matter how refined, prevails: a civilized bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], in which the happiness of the ones must coexist with the suffering of the others.

And this is where his excitement about the radical feminist movement comes in. Marcuse believed in the Freudian idea that Eros, or libidinal energy, was the Life Instinct, that was locked in battle with aggressive energy, the Death Instinct. Marcuse identified feminine qualities (receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness) with the Life Instinct and masculine ones (aggression, dominance, performance, assertiveness, competitiveness) with the Death Instinct. He hoped that the feminist revolution would ultimately make traditionally feminine qualities universal, thereby ushering in an androgyny, in which men and women were equally feminine:

No other rational meaning can possibly be attributed to the idea of androgynism than the fusion, in the individual, of the mental and somatic characteristics, which in patriarchal civilization were unequally developed in men and women, a fusion in which feminine characteristics, in cancellation of male dominance, would prevail over their repression.

Marcuse was aware of the disorder and pain that such a transition would involve: "This will be struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment and suffering (mental and physical)". But it was his answer to the issue of creating an anthropology of peace - human nature would be remade to be universally feminine.

A brief reply

Marcuse's utopia can be criticised from many different angles. I want to focus on just one, his concept of solidarity.

Marcuse thought that you could position solidarity at the universal level of humanity, rather than, say, at the level of family or nation. I would argue that this is not realistic and is ultimately detrimental to the good of individuals.

Marcuse believed in the concept of reification, i.e., that under capitalism people are treated more as objects or things, and that relationships between people are treated as relationships between things. Marcuse was also critical of the "performance principle" in which the norms and values of a society are geared toward economic competition and acquisition.

I would argue that the family used to put certain limits on these things. Yes, the family has had a certain economic function in history, either as a household economic unit or, at the aristocratic level, via the arranging of marriages for economic and social advancement.

The family, however, has also been held up as a haven from the competitive pressures of the outside world, particularly following on from the industrial age. A well-functioning family was envisaged as being, ideally, a place where a certain kind of peace might be sought.

Rather than being "reified", relationships between family members were to be highly personalised, and based on mutual loyalty and natural affection. There was to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the common good of family life, rather than a competitive and self-seeking dynamic between family members.

The solidarity of family life, based on mutual support, was intended to help buffer individuals against the indifference of the outside world, and to make them less vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.

The feminism of the 1970s, which Marcuse championed as "liberation", pushed things in the wrong direction. It emphasised the idea of men and women as contending political classes, which not only undermined solidarity between the sexes, it represented a shift toward aggression and competitiveness in human relationships rather than away from it. It destabilised family life, with the rise in unmarried adults rising from 28% in 1970 to 47% by 2019. These adults do not have the same level of economic or emotional support (for instance, a married couple will accrue three times more household wealth than an unmarried adult, similarly 80% of married women express confidence in being able to retire comfortably compared to only 50% of unmarried and divorced women).

Nor did 1970s feminism push back against reification. If anything, this has intensified. Consider the feminists who complain about having to "perform" what they call "emotional labour" in marriages.

It seems likely, as well, that relationships between the sexes have become more, rather than less, transactional since the 1970s. It is not uncommon now to hear women argue that, as they don't really need a man (economically), that they will only consider a man who is able to "add value" to their lives. It has become less common to hear either sex talk about a loving spousal union as a primary aim of life.

It is a similar story when it comes to nation as a source of solidarity. National solidarity places limits on certain types of exploitation. For instance, open borders mean that the workers of one nation must compete for jobs with other workers around the world. If employers have no solidarity with the workers of their own country, they are free to employ whoever will work the longest for the least money. It is noteworthy that wages have stagnated since 1980 whilst GDP growth has continued to rise:

In other words, the share of national wealth going to the working classes has fallen over time as national solidarity has waned. This, in Marcusian terms, means that the alienation of labour has increased - it has gone in the wrong direction - as national solidarity has been undermined.

Again, when a country has a stable sense of national identity, then relationships between individuals involve a sense of a shared history and culture, with a deeply held connection to place and to a particular tradition. Relationships between people are not mediated as strongly by economics, by a sense of living in a society marked by labour and consumption on a mass scale, of existing within a kind of global entrepôt. In this way, too, national solidarity places limits on the reification that Marcuse so opposed.

The position I am arguing here is that Marcuse's utopia was self-defeating. By making solidarity universal, he increased the degree of alienation and reification, rather than overcoming them.

Which leads me to one final criticism of Marcuse. Marcuse thought that he could abolish the "performance principle", by which reality was shaped by norms of competition and acquisition, by making men and women equally feminine, and therefore androgynous.

Marcuse seems not to have adequately considered the way that women contribute to the drive to acquire material things. One of the reasons that men "perform" is to attract a wife. There are plenty of men who are kept hard at work to afford the renovations or the holidays or the house that their wife desires. Left to themselves, some of these men would most likely choose to live more simply. It is therefore unlikely that abolishing the masculine, if this were possible, would overcome the drive within human nature to be materially acquisitive.

And, to the extent that men do have a provider instinct, this is mostly a beneficial aspect of the masculine. A man might leverage some of his "aggression" to succeed in this role, but it is motivated by his love for, and commitment to, his family and it helps to create material comfort and security for his wife and children. To abolish the masculine would mean a loss of this provider instinct and the benefits to family life that go with it.

But, most importantly, the masculine cannot be reduced to these material functions. At its best, the masculine is able to discern the higher ordering within reality and then frame society in a way that is most conducive to human flourishing.

It is true that this creates a kind of hierarchy, as it involves a serious engagement with the vertical dimension of reality, where not all things are equal, but where we can aspire to higher things within our nature and within the nature of the reality we inhabit. It also requires a serious engagement with forms, with the essences of things, and therefore with their distinct natures and ends.

It is true, I think, that men need a certain type of receptivity, a quality identified as feminine by Marcuse, to best perform this highest of masculine tasks. In other words, if a man were entirely unreceptive he would find it difficult to discern "logos" - the ordering principles within reality. However, this is a refining of the masculine, rather than a turn to androgyny.

Men have largely been lacking in recent times in contributing this sort of masculine leadership. Perhaps part of the reason is that the New Left and second wave feminism, both influenced by Marcuse, managed to successfully malign the masculine, and to stamp it with negative associations, as being merely a social construct that unleashes aggression into society and that represses the life instinct.

It is time to move beyond Marcuse and the intellectual frame he helped to create.

Orbiting ourselves vs being needed

2025-06-28T10:39:00.003+10:00

I saw the following post on social media and thought it worthwhile recording it here. It describes, I think, a type of archetypal experience that we have as men and women.

It reminded me of a passage I read years ago from a biography of Alice James, the sister of the novelist Henry James. She lived alone as a spinster. In 1889, she was visited by her brothers:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left, Alice was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

As the "Feminist Turned Housewife" points out, modern liberal culture is pushing people toward this kind of solitude. In part, this is because the aim of life is held to be a freedom defined as maximal individual autonomy. This assumes that we can develop solo, outside of relationships with others, and that stable relationships can be sacrificed to autonomous choice.

Another reason is that the dynamic described in the post, one in which the man feels that his masculine qualities and efforts are needed by his family, and the woman feels that her feminine nurturing presence is needed, requires higher aspects of our nature to be successfully maintained. We have drifted a long way from a concept of virtue, of cultivating the higher qualities of our nature. Instead, there is an ethos of "empowerment" in which we are encouraged to act in any direction we choose, without negative judgement, as long as we uphold the same right for others. In this modern ethos, it is assumed that individuals are pursuing their own wants and desires, and therefore rejecting the idea of service to others.

And so there is little concept of a common good of family life that a man and a woman might deliberately seek to uphold. After all, for men to commit to the role described in the post, they would need to have some confidence that their wife would be both loyal and appreciative (and, also, to have some level of respect for him as a man). The wife, for her part, would need some confidence that she would be loved and supported, and that the man would use his position within the family for the good of its members (i.e., that he really would achieve a strength and steadiness in his presence within the family).

This represents a mission for both the husband and wife, one that tests their character and their commitment to the higher goods of family life. And it requires that both spouses deliberately orient themselves to this mission, rather than one alone.

It can be done, because it is such a deeply embedded aspect of our natures as men and women. But it's not easily done within the current cultural frame.

Can we reason about the good?

2025-06-09T15:33:00.002+10:00

Someone posted an AI generated image on X showing a 40-something single woman crying into a birthday cake she had to make herself. Which prompted this response:

I replied with:

Predictably it drew a rebuke:

This is a common mindset on social media and is worth picking apart a little. What it assumes is that there is no common nature to things and that therefore it is not possible to reason about the human good. Once this assumption is in place, others follow, including the belief that anyone who does reason about the human good does so maliciously.

It's not possible to move forward with this attitude. Aquinas once defined law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has the care of the community". But if it is an act of malice to reason about the good, then law must be understood differently, perhaps as an external imposition.

Origins?

Why might someone believe that it is not possible to reason about the human good? People who think this way see only one part of reality, namely a uniquely individual calling in life. Of course, this can and does exist. But what they fail to see is the nature we share, from which we can make general observations about the human good.

One possible reason for a person not recognising this shared nature is the influence of nominalism. Nominalism arose a long time ago in the Medieval era. I found the following treatment of it by Robert Reilly helpful:

This change started taking place in the late Middle Ages. William of Ockham is one of the most prominent thinkers who proposed this nominalist and voluntarist way of thinking, that was the obverse of Thomas Aquinas, and the synthesis of faith and reason that he had achieved.

The key to this is theological. As Aquinas said, God’s divine intellect is primary to the divine will. It’s the intellect that conceives, or knows, and it is the will that executes. The reason logos is primary, because it is reason in God’s essence, and will secondary or instrumental, is because it obeys the intellect.

Now, what William of Ockham does is he flips that relationship, he makes God’s will primary, and the divine intellect secondary. It is the will that decides, and there is nothing constraining the will, it can decide anything. The intellect is, then, just an executor, finding the best way for the will to reach its end, its decision, and it is unconstrained. William of Ockham was upset that this Pagan philosopher, Aristotle, who had infected Thomas Aquinas, was constraining the omnipotent God. And Ockham was going to set Him free, you see, by removing these restraints. But he had to do so at the price of reason and nature. Now that the will is primary and God can do anything, what happens to the essences of things?

In other words, things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature? Ockham says that we can’t know any of this, because there are no essences anymore.

[with nominalism]....the words you use for things....don’t relate to anything out there. There’s no correlation between the name you give things and what they are because you can’t really know what they are. There’s no order in nature, because there’s no nature. This is a terribly radical teaching, and you can see how this ontology of the will unmoors everything...There is nothing right or wrong in itself, other than God says it’s right.

It is possible as well that the mindset derives, in part, from the expressive individualism embedded in modern culture. Robert Bellah defines this as follows:

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

In short, the emphasis is on each of us having a "unique core of feeling" that must be socially expressed. There is, again, no room here for reasoning more generally about the human good. After all, we cannot know what the unique core of feeling for billions of humans is. So we have no way of reasoning about what the good might be for each of them. We have to, in one sense, be indifferent to the good of others, as we cannot know it. There cannot be prudence or guidance or social norms or inherited wisdom or learning from past experience. There cannot be any kind of preferring one thing over another at the social or public level. There has to be a learned indifference, in which we do not even register the possibility that someone's life situation may be less than ideal, the assumption being "this is how the person is choosing to express themselves, therefore I must affirm it as legitimate for them".

Let's say, though, that we do accept the existence of a shared nature. This does not in itself resolve the issue of reasoning about the human good. It is precondition rather than a solution.

There have been a number of approaches to connecting nature to morality in the modern period. In what follows, I'll attempt to sketch some of them, but obviously this is not a complete picture.

One radical approach has been to deny that nature provides any guidance for human behaviour. As a case in point, Yuval Noah Harari has argued that Charles Darwin changed our understanding of morals, because his theory undermined the idea that there are any purposes in nature. If nature has no purposes, then there is nothing that might be considered against nature. The end result is that anything goes:

A different approach was taken by the natural rights theorists. They did not want protections for the individual to be thought of as being granted by governments, but to be inherent and inalienable. This theory has been immensely influential in the modern world, but it has its limitations. It is a defensive approach to morality that sees a potential threat to individual life from governments and seeks to restrict how governments may act toward the individual. It does not, therefore, have a significant focus on how individuals themselves might guide their own behaviour and contribute to the social bodies that help constitute what the individual is. And, although the theory claims to rest on natural law, this has been done somewhat abstractly, with claims, for instance, that such truths are simply self-evident.

There have also been moderns who have sought to base morality on clear and distinct ideas that would be acceptable to all across denominational lines. They wanted a morality that could be grounded according to modern scientific principles. In doing so, they often tried to base their moral theories on some very basic observations about human nature, for instance, that people have a survival instinct and want to stay alive, or that people want to maximise pleasure and avoid pain, or that people have desires and prefer to have their own desires fulfilled rather than someone else's. Some of these thinkers accepted that this starting point led to very unconventional moral positions, but others tried to justify existing moral codes on the new foundations.

These "scientific" moralities have not borne good fruit. They were too crudely reductionist; and they sometimes had too fixed an anthropology - they identified certain negative traits within human nature, such as people being greedy and selfish, and attempted to leverage these for pro-social ends. Sometimes, as well, the anthropology was based not so much on nature but on a fictional nature, such as Hobbes's theorising about a state of nature in which people begin as individuals and then contract (defensively) to form human societies.

My own preferred option is necessarily more complex. It's an "order, frame, develop, maintain" approach to morality. The ordering is necessary because human nature has within itself the potential for both higher and lower expressions of who we are. This was a key aspect of the traditional Western understanding of the moral life, namely that we could act in ways that were either more noble or more base. There are qualitative differences, and so the lower has to be made subordinate to the higher.

Framing is necessary because there is a tripartite order of being. Lawrence Auster explained this as follows:

The order of being means the tripartite order of existence in which we live: the natural order, the social order, and the divine order—the biological, the cultural, and the spiritual. Everything that exists is a part of one or more of those realms, with man in the middle, a part of them all and experiencing them all.

When we consider human flourishing we have to take into account these different orders, so that they are harmonised as much as is possible. It is better, if possible, if they work together rather than against each other. If, for instance, we were to think through what kind of moral norms should apply to family life, it would make little sense to ignore the biological distinctions between men and women, nor basic biological drives involving sexuality and reproduction; but there would also be a consideration of the spiritual, such as the virtue of fidelity and the significance of sexuality as a procreative act; and, finally, there would need to be a realistic understanding of some of the social considerations that apply to marriage and family life, such as the significance of a husband's social status, the need to provide certain kinds of social supports to the wife and so on.

What this means is that a morality has to be framed in such a way that the pieces fit together and the larger framework is able to hold.

The "develop" aspect of morality acknowledges that we do have purposes given to us, in part, by our nature as men and women, and that part of the moral life is to develop in ways that allow us to give full expression to these purposes. If we are men, for instance, then one of our purposes is to develop the higher qualities of manhood, i.e., to fully express the higher aspects of the masculine, including in our roles as husbands and fathers.

The "maintain" aspect recognises that one moral aim in life is to preserve our original integrity of being. This is a difficult task as we are all subject to entropy, i.e., that aspect of reality in which an ordered state declines into disorder or chaos. The traditional moral language of the West often reflected this aim of maintaining an integrity of being. We were to avoid being dissolute, dissipated, licentious, decadent, debauched, incontinent, promiscuous, profligate and abandoned. This is the moral sphere in which purity is valued, i.e., being unblemished or uncorrupted. This aspect of the moral life is little valued today, and is sometimes cast negatively as being a denial of fun or of life experience. But it should be understood very differently as holding together our ability to live more fully and freely as ourselves - as not losing any of our capacities and in having a higher level of control over what we choose to do.

There is a final approach to morality that requires a person to have a religious worldview. It is one in which there is a sense that within the larger given nature of reality there is specifically a Logos, or a divine or sacred order. Again, this is a very longstanding tradition within Western thought. This order can be discerned through reason and revelation. There is an appeal to this approach in the declaration by the Catholic Church on sexual ethics called Persona Humana (1975):

there can be no true promotion of man's dignity unless the essential order of his nature is respected. Of course, in the history of civilization many of the concrete conditions and needs of human life have changed and will continue to change. But all evolution of morals and every type of life must be kept within the limits imposed by the immutable principles based upon every human person's constitutive elements and essential relations-- elements and relations which transcend historical contingency.

These fundamental principles, which can be grasped by reason, are contained in "the Divine Law--eternal, objective and universal- -whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community, by a plan conceived in wisdom and love. Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of Divine Providence, he can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth." This Divine Law is accessible to our minds.

Hence, those many people are in error who today assert that one can find neither in human nature nor in the revealed law any absolute and immutable norm to serve for particular actions other than the one which expresses itself in the general law of charity and respect for human dignity. As a proof of their assertion they put forward the view that so-called norms of the natural law or precepts of Sacred Scripture are to be regarded only as given expressions of a form of particular culture at a certain moment of history.

But in fact, Divine Revelation and, in its own proper order, philosophical wisdom, emphasize the authentic exigencies of human nature. They thereby necessarily manifest the existence of immutable laws inscribed in the constitutive elements of human nature and which are revealed to be identical in all beings endowed with reason.

One of my readers once framed modern politics in terms of how people responded to such a natural order:

I have long defined modern liberalism as the denial and the defiance of an immutable natural order of being, which traditionalist conservatism accepts and embraces along with the necessary constraints and trade-offs.

The transcendentals, such as truth, goodness and beauty, could also be included within this aspect of moral thinking.

One final point: I think it's a mistake to think only in terms of a finis ultimus - of the one ultimate end of human life. This is a worthy thing to ponder, but it seems better to me to recognise a range of life purposes.

For example, if it is accepted that we have a given nature as men, then one purpose derived from this is to develop along the highest masculine lines, so that we are fully formed as men. But this too generates specific purposes: we will need to cultivate masculine virtues; to develop intellectually, physically and spiritually; to become wise and loving as fathers and husbands; to reassure and inspire those around us with the masculine strengths available to us and so on.

And, if we accept a traditional anthropology, in which we are constituted in part by the social bodies we belong to, then manifold purposes flow from this as well. We must then have regard to the health of those social bodies, and contribute as best we can to them, whether this is family, local community, church or nation.

Formless modernity

2025-05-18T21:03:00.005+10:00

Patrick Deneen, in a conversation with Albert Mohler, made the following observation that has, I believe, a great deal to it:

I often think of a line in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in which he says Americans, that is liberal democrats, will find forms to be abhorrent, they will always be opposed to forms. And what did he mean by that?
Forms are that which create a shape or are a shape. Forms are all of the ways that, especially in nature but also not in nature, we draw distinctions. So you're [speaking to Mohler] dressed in a nice jacket and tie, I'm business casual, we would say you're more formal and I'm more informal and if I were my students I'd be wearing a hoodie and the tendency is to move toward the more informal in liberal democracy.
And so the same mechanism that leads us to have informal Fridays or informality in address or not to be addressed as professor or doctor but as Patrick or hey you or dude, all of these are manifestations of the same phenomenon that leads to the decrial of borders, that's a form, the nation is a form; that leads to the decrial of religion as opposed to spirituality; liturgy as opposed to just simply feeling and emotion that I have, or connection or spirituality that I have; and of course it leads to the denunciation of the idea that there is somehow in nature a man and a woman.
So it seems an odd thing to claim but the move toward informality is not disconnected in its deepest philosophical form.
[From a YouTube video, "Regime Change? A Future Beyond Classical Liberalism and Its Legacy? - With Patrick J Deneen", from 50:28, see here]

In short, a denial of form in philosophy leads, logically, both to informality but also to "formlessness", i.e., to a rejection of distinction. And so we see things "ratchet" within liberal modernity toward both of these things.

Just to underline this connection, consider the etymology of the word "formal". It first made its appearance in the late 14th century:

"pertaining to form or arrangement;" also, in philosophy and theology, "pertaining to the form or essence of a thing," from Old French formal, formel "formal, constituent" (13c.) and directly from Latin formalis, from forma "a form, figure, shape"

So the word "formal" originally had a sense of the form or essence of things, i.e., of the quality that constituted a particular thing. So what then happens when you get an early modern philosophy that stridently denies the existence of forms or essences? You will get a gradual shift to the "informal" and from there an effort to overthrow distinctions that once constituted "form".

Professor Patrick Deneen

This happened very gradually in Western culture but was already being noticed in the early 1800s. Professor Deneen cited Tocqueville describing the US in the 1830s. It was exactly in this decade that the American feminist Sarah Grimke decried the existence of distinctions between the sexes:

We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes...the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female...Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society

Similarly, in 1811 the English poet Shelley wrote a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener in which he prophesied of differences between the sexes that,

these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

In 1792 the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that,

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society

In 1820, the Austrian statesman Metternich observed of the liberals of his era that,

...one of the sentiments most natural to man, that of nationality, is erased from the Liberal catechism, and that where the word is still employed, it is used by the heads of the party as a pretext to enchain Governments, or as a lever to bring about destruction. The real aim of the idealists of the party is religious and political fusion.

The drive toward "fusion", i.e., toward a kind of oneness, is perhaps also a manifestation of the ratcheting of liberal modernity toward "informality" in the sense of indistinction.

In recent times, the drift toward informality is clear enough. I can see it in my own profession of teaching. Students now mostly call teachers by their first name; the wearing of uniforms is becoming less common; teachers themselves often dress casually; and some schools have even stopped using the word "teacher" preferring terms like "facilitator".

You can see the informality too in the way that girls often dress. Fashion is still a major interest to girls, but the way it is expressed is often casual and at least semi-androgynous. Teenage girls might typically dress in hoodies and tracksuit pants. These are clothes that do not express "form" in the sense of highlighting anything distinctly feminine. The lack of feminine form goes hand in hand with a casual sensibility ("relaxing into formlessness").

It's interesting to compare this with the traditional clothes worn in rural Europe ("Tracht" in the German speaking countries). These were very formal in the sense of making distinctions. The particular "Tracht" that was worn might show a person's occupation, marital status, social class, religion and home town, as well as being very distinct in terms of one's sex.

This topic also reminds me of a video I saw a few years ago in which a glamorously dressed woman (showing "form") walked through a shopping mall in a European city filled with very indistinctly dressed people, who looked at her with a degree of perplexity.

The many and the few

Professor Deneen sometimes talks about a tradition in classical thought (going back to Aristotle) which focuses on the problem any society faces of balancing the influence of the elite and the majority. Aristotle termed a society ruled by the few, but for the common good, an aristocracy, and a society ruled by the few for their own self-interest, an oligarchy.

Clearly we have drifted in the modern West more toward an oligarchy. Our elites have chosen to define themselves against their own working classes. The elite only allows itself to be distinct, as a class, in terms of having values that the working-class does not. If the working classes are patriotic, they are globalist and so on.

In the past, the elite were more aristocratic, in the sense that they held to an ethos of noblesse oblige, in which their privilege obligated them to certain responsibilities toward the larger society. And, in a society in which form was still possible, the elite could aim to be distinct through what was called "good form". Good form referred to the polite customs of dress, of speech, of manners and such like that a gentleman was thought to adhere to. This good form could be intricate, and might be thought burdensome by modern standards (an American was able to write an entire book about it in 1888), but it is a better way for an elite to identify itself than to set itself against its own majority, and it reflects something positive, namely that the culture still recognised form, rather than being committed to dissolving things into a formless mass.

Traditional Australia

It is possible that traditional Australian culture was more informal than elsewhere, at least in certain respects. There is a good side to this: it can make for friendly, sincere and relaxed social relationships. The traditionally warm and laid back Australian culture has its appeal.

Perhaps, though, we need to find a balance in this. A healthy society will inevitably have form, and therefore generate some level of formality. This is particularly true in certain social settings, for instance, in the interaction of men and women; in religious observance; in public office; in public ceremonies; in the arts; and in professional settings.

Individuality

If you lived in nineteenth century England, when formality was still more present in society, it might have seemed that the rules of society were stifling to your individuality. To rebel against form, and to live like a Bohemian or a non-conformist, might have been thought to promote a freely expressed individuality.

But time has proven this false. We now live in a more formless age. And it has not led to a flowering of individuality. Rather, we have become uniformly formless. We have been made fungible: we live as interchangeable units of a mass society. Our sex no longer stands for much, nor does any part of our identity.

In rejecting form we have jettisoned the aspects of self that connect us to the transcendent and that make us meaningfully distinct in our personhood.

John Lennon wanted all the world to live as one; Shelley wanted to abolish distinctions; Metternich warned that liberal moderns wanted to abolish nationhood in favour of religious and political fusion. This is not the pathway to genuine individuality. We have travelled far enough down this road to know this.

Forms represent essence and carry purpose and meaning. There must therefore be degrees of formality and distinctions in a healthy, well-functioning society. To become indistinct is not a welcome fate, but something to be firmly resisted.

Pleasantly surprised

2025-04-27T17:55:00.000+10:00

A woman on social media asked the following question:

I was not expecting much illumination in the replies. In our times, masculinity is often described as toxic or else it is redefined as being something much more akin to the feminine. So I was pleasantly surprised when one woman proffered the following list:

It's not a bad list. It could be added to, but it does capture aspects of the masculine personality. What's especially surprising is that this woman is not anything like a traditionalist. Though married, she is generally critical of men, and she has a materialistic, transactional view of relationships (her husband is supposed to enable the luxurious lifestyle she desires). Her life aim is to always get what she wants, and though she wants children she denigrates the motherhood role as being beneath her:

Some of the women in the discussion then challenged her to come up with a list of feminine traits. Again, she immediately produced a set of qualities that does seem to capture aspects of the feminine personality:

I would query the idea of magnanimity as being a more feminine quality, but apart from that it seems like a reasonable effort to me.

Just a couple of further points. First, if you read the social media timeline of this woman, she is at the most disagreeable end of the female personality spectrum. This makes her come across badly, but it has the benefit of allowing her to speak her mind freely, which perhaps explains why she did not just resort to the usual liberal platitudes when this topic was raised.

Second, a few thoughts occur to me regarding female sensitivity. This is a quality that can have both negative and positive expressions. On the negative side of the ledger, women can sometimes be overly sensitive to criticism. It can be a tough job for a husband to criticise his wife. No matter how diplomatically he frames the criticism, the response can be something along the lines of "This is a day that will live in infamy...." Similarly, women can be overly sensitive to tone, and can overdo the "tone policing" at times.

Nonetheless, sensitivity is part of the making of a woman. Women can be sensitive to the moods and emotions of others, which then supports their ability to nurture. There is a connection too, I think, between a sensitivity of feeling and a delicacy of manners and mores in women. You notice this sometimes in women who are more brashly insensitive - there is not the refinement that you normally expect in a feminine personality. Finally, men respond to women who are at least a little more emotionally sensitive than themselves. This is part of the quality of expressiveness listed above. It might lead a woman to react more emotionally, for instance, to a sad scene in a film or to express compassion for a person or animal in distress. When done well, it balances men's greater level of emotional reserve.

Deeper feminist regret

2025-04-19T18:17:00.002+10:00

There is a genre of confessional writing that might be called "feminist regret". I have chronicled many examples of this genre over the years, but I came across the most thoughtful one just this week. It is called "A Requiem for the Patriarchy" and is written by Darleen Lev.

Darleen Lev has also discussed her thoughts in a long interview with Leslie Boyce (see here) and I will be using this as well to draw out some of her ideas.

It's helpful to begin with some biography. Darleen Lev was born in 1961 and grew up in Chicago. Her (non-biological) father was Jewish and her mother Protestant (though she seems to have been raised Christian). Her mother discouraged her from being a homemaker and she was influenced by the changes in popular culture in the 1970s to think that she could do whatever a man did (she says that TV series like Charlie's Angels had this effect). When the pill became available, she and her friends took this as a freedom to be sexually promiscuous. She did eventually marry but chose to divorce her husband. She supported herself through her work as an academic. She is now in her mid-60s and childless.

Darleen Lev

She describes herself as someone who experienced two different worlds. The world she grew up in before the influence of second wave feminism and then the feminist one that followed. Surveying her life experiences she has come to a principled, and deep, rejection of feminism.

What made her change her mind about feminism? Well, in comparing culture as it was in her youth to what followed she sees an emerging wasteland. Both family and local community have disintegrated during the course of her lifetime. This has left herself and many of her peers single, unsupported, childless and socially isolated.

To her credit she does not take the option of blaming men. She has a more interesting analysis which I will break down into three parts.

1. Patriarchy

Darleen Lev draws a distinction between the patriarchy she grew up in and the present day matriarchy. By patriarchy she means something like a family structure in which men are present within the family, are respected for what they bring to family life, and who create stability and security for all those within the family. By matriarchy, she is referring to a social system in which this role of men has been dispensed with.

She does not have a naive view of the older family culture. She acknowledges that a small number of women were abandoned, and that some marriages were unhappy. Nonetheless, she has a sense that the masculine principle is necessary to uphold social life. Without it, communities lose a connection to both order and meaning. And, absent the masculine presence, women are less able to create local community as they once did.

She does not pull her punches in introducing this argument:

The ‘patriarchy’ was a fertile time. Life seemed to spill out of every door. The lively suburban street I grew up on had a patriarch in every home, and enough children, in most households, to form a chorus or one of those dad-trained acrobatic families who performed on the Ed Sullivan show.

But death is the essence of the matriarchy in which we now live, a time when abortion is labeled ‘health care’—the Democrats’ primary promise of a conduit to an ideal existence. Meanwhile, we’re in a fertility crisis that could bring the country to its knees; yet the matriarchy, with its tyranny of ‘care,’ scolds us as ‘right wing’ for caring about the fact that we’re not generating enough new life.

She develops the argument by listing the people she knows with chaotic family lives or who disavow having children as a matter of principle. I understand her completely in this. My parents' generation had stable marriages and many children. My own did not. To experience this decline can be bewildering. I think, for instance, of my best friend at school who had four sisters. None of them married. None of them had children. This has always seemed tragic to me - and unsettling, suggesting some deeper social malaise.

Darleen Lev seems to be reaching toward an argument I have made myself before, namely that men bring into social life the vertical structure of reality. This is how Lawrence Auster describes it:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

Without this, there is not the same conviction of participating in a reality that is, as Auster puts it, fundamentally good. And therefore there is not the same openness to creating new life.

2. Choice

I recently read an essay by Ted Sadler in the Observer & Review (Volume 2 Issue 2, Number 3) titled "Suicide of the West: Towards a Universal Homogeneous Superstate". Sadler views contemporary liberalism as a continuation of a longer project that had taken definite shape by the Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century looked to a new cosmopolitan super-culture that would replace Christianity: individuals would be uprooted not only from their national or ethnic or local traditions - which could only be the source of prejudices - but also from the similarly cosmopolitan super-culture of Christianity. The new mature enlightened individual would stand naked and proud 'above' all tradition, needing only his 'freedom' and prosperity. (p.236)

By modern times this project was expressed in terms of building a social order upon material prosperity and individual choice:

The homogenization process of the universal homogeneous state means that society is defined as an indiscriminate aggregate of individuals stripped of any other cultural identity: ethnicity, nation, tradition and religion...All individuals, it is assumed, are capable of taking their place in the economy as workers, consumers, tax-payers and benefit-recipients....The assumption is that the social and cultural identity of the universal homogeneous state is nothing in particular: this absence of identity is called 'multi-culturalism', a euphemism for the cultural vacuum that is liberalism....

Liberals themselves, of course, do not say they are affirming a vacuous negativity, but insist that their supreme virtue is freedom. The ideal liberal state is supposed to provide not just economic well-being for everybody, but the freedom of individuals to do what they like, say what they like, think what they like, live however they like, providing it does not infringe on the freedom of others. (pp. 232-33)

Sadler goes on to describe the drift of liberalism toward intolerance. Darleen Levy approaches things from a different angle. She has already identified the disintegrating effect of this project on social bodies like the family and local community. But she also questions whether the project really delivers meaningful choice the way it claims to do.

In her interview, she says (at 22:05) that:

From the moment I hit puberty all that I could think about was having babies. That was my instinct. That's what I wanted to do.

Despite this being what she most wanted to choose, it never happened. She had to contend with her mother pushing her toward careerism. But more than this, there was by this time a dating culture based around casual hookups rather than a culture of courtship as had existed in previous generations. People socialised in bars and at concerts and she found it a difficult environment to assert her desire for a more committed relationship (it had become "shameful and humiliating" to have to admit to the man she was with that she wanted more than something casual). On the occasions she did give voice to this "they would say that that's not what they wanted".

She is describing a flaw in the liberal model. Some of our more profound life choices cannot be made through our own volition alone. They are more likely to be realised in certain cultural environments and they depend on the choices other people make. In her social milieu, there were no longer rituals of courtship leading to marriage and then to children. The expectation was that encounters were to be casual. Yes, it might still have been possible to find a way through this, but her choice was made much more difficult to realise than it once would have been.

Her solution to this is interesting. She says that,

In my generation we were fumbling around, not knowing how to get what we deep down really wanted...And the lack of community oversight also lends itself to that. You are alone in the middle of nowhere and no-one's really watching you...But if we have to decide what really is better for everyone, perhaps it would be more connection around community...that we are all families that live in this place and we collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in.

This too highlights an issue within liberalism. If there are no objective goods that contribute to human well-being, but only subjective preferences, then there will develop over time an "indifference to the good". But this then leads to the kind of abandonment that Darleen Lev complains about. There cannot be "community oversight" if there are no agreed upon outcomes to be achieved. If, for instance, you were to say to a liberal "is it not unusual for all four sisters to remain unmarried and childless?" the most common answer you will receive is "well, that is just what they chose to do". As if there were "nothing to see here" and therefore no real concern for what might have led to such an outcome.

Darleen Lev also seems to be reaching toward the idea of a common good - the idea that we might "collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in". What is being recognised here is that our own individual good often depends on the health of the social bodies we are members of. So it does matter to us that others choose in ways that uphold the good of this larger body (an aspect of living in a high trust community - we can trust that others will do the right thing).

Leslie Boyce, the interviewer, makes a similar point when the two women discuss one of Darleen Lev's female students who has chosen to be a prostitute. Leslie Boyce observes that (1:02:54),

There's a bit of a paradox here because on the individual level we tend to respect choices, let people do things and we're not going to look too hard at what they're doing. And then on the zoom out social level, it's the aggregate of these kinds of choices that end up creating exactly the trends that we're sitting here describing today.

The choices people make matter not only to themselves but to others, because the aggregate of these choices forms the culture we all inhabit. And none of us can claim to live entirely isolated from our own culture.

3. Disposability

One of the problems identified by Darleen Lev is that marriage has become less durable, in part, because relationships with men are increasingly seen as being disposable. For instance, she writes that,

Most of the women I work with are childless, and destined to remain so. Most are not married, nor are they in lasting relationships. The relationships that I’ve heard about were generally ended by the woman because he didn’t measure up in some way.

She also recounts the story (at 33:58) of going for a walk in the park one day with a female friend and her baby. The husband of this friend had started a new restaurant and was working long hours to establish it. The wife felt aggrieved that he was not home more, but Darleen Lev pointed out that he was a faithful husband whose work was allowing her to spend time with her child. Years later the friend told Darleen that her words had helped save her marriage as her other friends had all advised her to leave.

This shift to seeing relationships as disposable was noted by one of the first writers of the feminist regret genre, the Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger. In 2002 she wrote a newspaper article titled "The Sins of our Feminist Mothers" in which she confessed that,

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

We should not be at all surprised by this trend. It is not possible for loyalty to be a feature of a society like ours. If the primary and overriding good is a freedom to choose in any direction, then loyalty becomes a vice not a virtue. Loyalty means declining choice. It means renouncing options. When we are loyal there are choices we will not even consider, that are ruled out.

Worse yet if the loyalty is to a cultural identity or tradition that the homogenizing state is set against. This is then doubly an offence. Little wonder that our politicians do not feel the moral weight of betrayal.

And little wonder that a modern day marriage therapist would argue with me as follows on the topic of what might be reasonable grounds for divorce:

She believes that the very foundation of marriage is the freedom to leave. This is our culture travelling to topsy turvy land, where the meaning of things is put upside down. Instead of a focus on fidelity, or religious commitment or even spousal love as foundations of marriage, it is the freedom to leave which takes centre stage. The notion of marriage vows would then seem to be redundant.

Depth

Some of the women who write feminist regret literature eventually lapse back into feminism. Their discontent relates to their failure to have children; once they reconcile themselves to this, they resume their former ideological commitments. Germaine Greer is something of an example of this. In 1991 she wrote "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child," and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year." As well observed as this might be she nonetheless remained broadly within the feminist camp.

It doesn't seem likely that Darleen Lev will end up in this group of women. There is more than personal regret at her own feminist choices, there is also a recognition that something is deeply wrong at a wider social level, to the point that there is a closure to new life and to community. And she is reaching toward explanations that put her well outside of the Enlightenment project, with its limiting of values to material prosperity and individual choice.

She clearly believes that a masculine principle is needed to provide a stabilising element within human relationships and even to provide the sense of meaningful order - the goodness - within which a commitment to future life is more likely to be made.

And she has reached beyond the idea of a society made up of a mere agglomerate of individuals, toward something like a common good, in which communities intentionally set out to uphold the conditions for human flourishing and in which people are supported in realising the more important aspects of life, such as forming a family.

Staying on course

2025-04-11T16:53:00.001+10:00

I was reading up on the origin of the word "sin". We often use the word today when referring to a person who breaks a moral law (emphasising the idea of transgression). However, the origin of the word for sin (both the Hebrew word in the Old Testament and the Greek word in the New Testament) means something like "missing the mark". I find this interesting as it describes something we all experience in life.

One aspect of our inner life is the effort to stay "on course". We try to build habits in our everyday behaviour that keep us "on target" in terms of what we should be, i.e. in terms of our integrity as a person and the kind of qualities we should ideally be developing. If we fail in this we find that we suffer a kind of "dis-integrity" - we experience disintegration.

This is where the idea of cultivating virtue and avoiding personal vices is at its most relevant. It is part of the effort to avoid the waywardness or crookedness of human nature and to remain ordered toward the good (and to avoid slipping away into an alienation from it).

Which is where the clash with aspects of liberal modernity arises. If you want to remain "on target" then there needs to be an aim. There needs to be an account of the good that you either hit or miss. Liberal modernity tends to deny that there is such an aim, at least one that exists outside of our own desires or subjective reality.

An example of this would be a man who begins to identify as a woman. In previous societies, this would have been thought to be, at an objective level, an example of waywardness, of going off course and therefore needing to be corrected. But liberal modernity claims that identity is self-defined. And so there is no larger picture of what it might mean to develop in an integrated way as a man. And therefore no possibility to take cues as to our own success or failure in steering a particular course.

It is a similar case when it comes to womanhood. The most "progressive" moderns famously will not define what a woman is. This is true for both the terf feminists and those who support transgenderism. The first group limit the definition of woman to "adult human female" and deny that it can mean anything more than this. The second group are often left confused and rattled when asked to define what a woman is. They sometimes say something like "a woman is whatever someone who identifies as a woman takes it to be".

For both groups, there is no possibility of an objectively ordered good within womanhood that represents an aim to be either hit or missed. There is no course toward a feminine integrity of personhood that a woman might be either steering closer to or further away from. There are no virtues associated with being a woman to be cultivated, no vices to be avoided.

There is a challenge here for traditionalists in putting forward an alternative to this aspect of liberalism. It doesn't make sense to be a lazy traditionalist and to reduce life to one or two "clear and distinct" ideas. Yes, we could talk about ultimate aims, such as an ever closer union with God, or remaining in a state in which we are receptive to grace and so on. But there is no avoiding for us an account of what it means to live an ordered, virtuous life and this is not easily reducible to sound bites. What does it mean, for instance, to be a good father? Or a good wife? How do we rightly order the different loves we might have and the duties corresponding to these? What aspects of masculine character do we consider virtuous? In what contexts?

Traditionalists therefore can be ideology busters but not ideology makers. This does not mean failing to set out a positive vision. It does not mean we just let things take their course absent corrupting ideology. We are not writing abstract ideologies but trying to observe, discern and describe what an integrated personhood looks like and requires, and how we might frame or harmonise the sometimes contending claims of different goods upon us. This is a complex task that our own individual reason can only partly grasp and that therefore requires some element of humility when we undertake it. But seeking this kind of understanding, to the extent we are able, is commendable.

Social bodies

Something similar is at play when we consider the social bodies that we belong to (that make up a part of who we are, and that carry part of the good that we participate in).

There is still a requirement to keep these bodies "on course" so that they do not dis-integrate. Let's take family as an example. For a family to hold together, the marriage needs to be stable. Marriage, in its very nature, is meant to be as stable as possible: that is part of the aim of married life.

But it is difficult for liberal moderns to concede this. For them, the focus is on maximising the autonomy of the individuals within the family. And so they will be increasingly reluctant to define marriage as requiring stable commitments, not if this is thought to limit individual choice. As an example, take the following exchange I had on social media with a marriage therapist. In the context of a discussion about marriage and divorce she wrote:

She is arguing that a woman doesn't need a good reason to divorce her husband. It is her choice to leave at any time, even if the reason is shallow and superficial. I pointed out in response that this position alters the very nature of the institution itself:

There is not, and cannot be, for this woman any real content to the term "marriage" because this would mean putting a limitation on individual autonomy. And so the social body of family automatically dis-integrates in theory, because it has no definite quality to it anymore, and increasingly in practice as well, because it is no longer possible to set marital stability as the aim that individuals and the wider culture might try to stay "on course" with.

And what of the social body of nation? This is an interesting one because when you have a traditional ethno-nation it will develop along the lines of a particular people. There will be, in other words, a degree of particularity when it comes to lines of development, because this will reflect the different temperaments and histories of each people. For instance, the joyous style of religious worship of some Caribbean groups might feel very alien to some Northern European nations which seek dignity and solemnity as part of worship. Anglo-Saxons might prefer a village style of habitation (even when living in cities) compared to the willingness of those on the subcontinent to live in close proximity in densely packed urban areas. The greater tendency toward rule oriented living in parts of Northern Europe can seem a little alien even to those with a British heritage, but both groups are more oriented to creating high trust communities than in some other countries.

What this means is that there are two potential ways for such social bodies to dis-integrate. The first is internal: some of those within the nation might put things off course by introducing aspects of culture that undermine the true spirit of that nation. Here in Australia, for instance, I would suggest that the high rise housing commission towers that were built in the 1960s and 70s were alien to local sensibilities. Similarly, Anglo-Australian culture developed for a long time around outdoor leisure pursuits, which the shift toward a more Japanese style corporate work culture has also undermined.

The second path toward dis-integration is the one we have today of combining different cultures together. It's not possible to organise public spaces and a public culture around the differing sensibilities of many different peoples. A Western liberal would most likely not recognise this as a problem as their mindset is to think only in terms of individuals pursuing their own aims, with "society" being conceived of as a multitude of individuals within a state - with the expectation that the state will give individuals equal opportunity to pursue these aims.

But nonetheless the issue can't be ignored, even by those who accept the liberal framework. What kind of housing is to be built? The garden suburbs with bungalows beloved of the Anglo population? Or fortress style housing closed off to the street popular elsewhere? Or the more densely packed high rise housing more common in East Asia? How are young men to interact with young women in public? Where is the level of trust to be set? The level of rule following? Of privacy? Of conformism? Of statism?

What I am suggesting is that each people is likely to develop a way of life and that the aim is for this way of life to best represent the good as reflected through the particular temperament, history and nature of that group of people. The development of each culture can, to a varying degree, either stay on or go off course, leading to higher levels of integration or to dis-integration. Even Western liberals will ultimately notice the effects of dis-integration, because the truth is that societies are more than conglomerations of individuals within a state.

Lysenkoism

2025-03-10T12:58:00.002+11:00

R.J. Stove has an essay in the latest issue of the Observer & Review titled American Academy's Khrushchev Moment. In it he mentions a Russian scientist called T.D. Lysenko and claims that Lysenko "probably slew more people than any other individual who ever lived".

I was intrigued and looked up Lysenko. It turns out that he is a significant figure who should be better known on the right. In short, there was a debate in Soviet Russia between the followers of Lysenko and the "geneticists". Lysenko believed that an organism could pass on traits acquired during its lifetime to its offspring. The geneticists believed that the characteristics of an organism are passed down through inherited genes.

Lysenko in 1938

Stalin backed Lysenko. First, because Lysenko was of peasant background, and Stalin wanted to create a new intellectual class from the workers and peasants. Second, because Lysenko promised miraculous results in food production. Third, the genetic account did not fit in well with the Marxist Leninist state ideology:

Lysenko claimed that the concept of a gene was a "bourgeois invention", and he denied the presence of any "immortal substance of heredity" or "clearly defined species", which he claimed belong to Platonic metaphysics rather than strictly materialist Marxist science. Instead, he proposed a "Marxist genetics" postulating an unlimited possibility of transformation of living organisms through environmental changes in the spirit of Marxian dialectical transformation, and in parallel to the Party's program of creating the New Soviet Man and subduing nature for his benefit.

To understand the significance of this, consider the premodern approach to Man and nature as described by Patrick Deneen:

Premodern political thought...understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order. Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was required to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world.

The Soviet metaphysics is modern rather than premodern in the sense that there is a rejection of essences that might give a stable and recognisable form to species and provide them with a distinct place within a natural order and with given ends and purposes. Instead, nature - including human nature - was to be directed to the ends that we ourselves determined. The Soviets had the intention of creating a New Soviet Man - a new and improved type of human - and so the idea that we might have genetically inherited traits was not approved by the Soviet leadership.

But this had momentous consequences. First, there was a purge of those scientists who held to the genetic view rather than the one promoted by Lysenko. I find this interesting because the left likes to claim that it is the Catholic Church who persecuted scientists several hundred years ago, but here is a much more recent case of an atheist state persecuting scientists on an industrial scale. The first wave of persecution was in the late 1930s:

While the Great Purge was at its peak, Lysenko openly accused geneticists of hampering his methods and named N.I. Vavilov and G.D. Karpechenko, who both perished later. A meeting of the VASKhNIL Presidium was held in April 1937, and Lysenko complained that VASKhNIL leaders supported his work poorly and that he was forced to ask for help. The VASKhNIL president, A.I. Muralov, and his deputies, A.S. Bondarenko and G.K. Meister, were shot soon afterward. Of the 52 VASKhNIL academicians, 12 were shot on false charges in 1936–1938.

Another purge took place in the late 1940s:

Academician Vladimir Strunnikov, head of the Commission for the History of the Development of Genetics in the Soviet Union at the USSR Academy of Sciences, wrote: “In autumn 1948 alone, 127 teachers, including 66 professors, were dismissed. The total number of those who had been dismissed, demoted, or removed from leadership positions after the session of the VASKhNIL of 1948 amounted to several thousands of people”

The persecution had a much wider effect on scientific research within the Soviet Union:

The decisions of the August session had a ripple effect within the total scientific community, affecting areas distant from genetics, as well as biology in general. In 1950, sessions on physiology, cytology, and microbiology were held in the USSR Academies of Sciences and Medical Sciences to condemn the most important achievements in biology, and glorify the “experiments” of Olga Lepeshinskaia, who claimed to have observed cells emerging from unstructured vital substances, or Gevork Bosh’ian, who claimed to have “demonstrated” that viruses turn into bacterial cells, and bacteria into viruses and antibiotics. Cybernetics, mathematical logic, certain fields of physics and chemistry, sociology, economics, and even philology were jeopardized. Party ideologists chose a “Lysenko” as the sole holder of true knowledge for each discipline.

But why does Stove make the bold claim about Lysenko killing more people than any other individual? It's because Lysenko had such influence over Soviet agriculture at a time when there were shortages of food. Lysenko is thought to have worsened and prolonged the great famine of 1932-33 (6 million deaths), and also that of 1946-47 (2 million deaths). Furthermore, Lysenko influenced the Chinese communists and so played a part in the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 (30 million deaths).

If you're interested there is a good article on Lysenko setting all this out in more detail here.

Different starting points, foreign nations

2025-02-18T19:48:00.001+11:00

The recent debate about the ordo amoris once again made clear that moderns conceive the world very differently to traditionalists. It did so particularly in reference to the relationship between the individual and the communities that the individual belongs to. It helps, I think, to try to understand why things that seem painfully destructive to those of us in the traditionalist camp can make sense to a modern.

A starting point is to consider the modern anthropology that made its appearance in the seventeenth century. It is described by James R. Wood as follows:

In this state of nature, society does not yet exist; rather, the basic unit out of which society is constructed is the detached, pre-social individual, shorn of all prior contexts, natural or social. These abstract, autonomous individuals emerge as naked wills, auto-originating and constructing everything around them driven by rational self-interest. Relations are not there from the outset, and they are entered into only voluntarily.

What does seeing things this way lead to? First, it means that the individual is prior to his or her social relationships. Therefore, these relationships do not help to constitute the self. The individual is already in place, is already self-constituted. Second, whatever social bodies do form are constructed rather than being natural or divinely appointed. Third, they are constructed for utilitarian purposes, as vehicles through which individuals can better pursue their individual interests or desires.

An Australian liberal politician, George Brandis, gave voice to this understanding of the individual and society in 1984:

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.

Note that social bodies here are described as structures; that the individual is prior to these structures and so is not constituted by them; and that the purpose of the structures is the pursuit of our own individual ends.

George Brandis

I'd like you to imagine now that you are someone with this kind of mindset. Consider how this would affect your understanding of nation. It would not matter much to you if there were, for instance, decades of open borders and rapid demographic change. You would feel little sense of loss. It might hardly register at all. After all, your membership of a nation would not constitute part of your identity, as you are self-constituted. All that you are precedes any membership of a nation. And the nation for you would only be a structure through which you pursue your own individual goals. It would not have deeper emotional resonances. As long as the structure is operating to allow you to pursue these goals, then all is well.

And there's a further aspect to all of this. Let's say you're a modern who has this mindset. You might not want to think of yourself as a selfish individualist. So you would adopt certain "pro-social" stances, to show your more idealistic commitments to society. What might they be? Well, on the left it often takes the form of advocating for the rights of the marginalised and dispossessed. What this means is that instead of just having the attitude that you yourself will pursue your own ends or desires via the social structures you live within, that you wish for others who are somehow excluded from this to be able to do the same. Everyone can join the party. And, again, if this means years of demographic change, it won't seem a difficulty to you, it won't register as an issue, because the nation is only a structure through which people pursue individual ends. There will not be significant change.

The difference between the traditional and modern mindset comes out in another way. If I as a traditionalist see myself as constituted, in part, by being a member of a family and a nation, then I will see them positively as allowing me to fulfil my ends and to more fully express who I am. Moderns however see themselves as being self-constituted. Therefore, the idea that we are formed within and grow and develop within these social bodies will provoke the negative response that this lowers the standing and status of the individual (that it makes the individual "derivative" in a negative sense) and that it limits an individual path of development.

You can see the flipping from the traditional mindset to the modern one in the following quote from a Girton College student. In 1869 Girton College was established as the first women's college at Cambridge University. In 1889, one of its young female students explained the new mindset she developed at the college this way:

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family ... One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

She puts the modern view in clear terms. There is no positive take here on having been formed by and grown up within a family. This makes someone, in her words, an "excrescence" - a pejorative way to describe something that grows out of something else. An excrescence is just a superfluous or abnormal outgrowth. She does not want to see herself as being constituted in part by her membership of a family. Instead, she is to develop solo, as "an individual and independent unit". She has fully modernised.

Girton College, now coeducational

Similarly, George Brandis chose to characterise the two philosophies he thought of as rivals to liberalism this way:

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

He uses the word "incidents". For Brandis, if the individual is not prior to the structures of a society, he or she is merely a minor or subsidiary outcome of that larger entity. It is a kind of inversion of the traditional view, which held that the entities that gave us our existence (that we are positively derived from) were to be justly honoured. Brandis casts this the other way: that an individual cannot be constituted by these entities because that would make us derivative and therefore lesser.

And so it is not possible to leave the defence of nation, as traditionally understood, to those with the modern view. To put this another way, we have to understand that when a modern uses the word "nation" it has a very different meaning to what we would understand. And this difference goes back all the way to the anthropology that was developed in the seventeenth century.

Nor should we assume that everyone understands our own approach. We need to be able to make the contrast between our understanding and that of the moderns. We can argue, in our attempt to do this, that social bodies are coterminous with our existence as humans, that they have always been, in some form, a part of human existence, and are in this sense natural rather than being later "constructs". We were social creatures from the beginning.

We are not prior to these bodies, and self-constituted, but our self-identity, our sense of belonging, and our deeper social commitments are partly formed through our membership of these communities. We are members of these bodies in a profound way, such that maintaining their integrity matters deeply to us.

Social bodies often have a familial character. Therefore, membership of any particular social body cannot be universal. Nor are they to be defined by the common to all purpose of being vehicles for the pursuit of individual self-interest. Extending or equalising the right to participate in this pursuit is therefore not the right approach to being pro-social.

We should act for the common good of the particular family or nation that we are members of through the close bonds of a shared history, culture, ancestry and language. We can do this whilst still recognising a common humanity, and contributing to this good, including the exercise of hospitality and charity to others who are not members of our own communities.

One significant reason for acting for the common good of our own family and nation is that because we are partly constituted by these social bodies, we must uphold them in order to remain integrated in who we are. We lose an aspect of who we are, and the ability to grow to full spiritual and emotional maturity, if we become atomised and rootless. In this sense, a living soul will want to exist as part of a loving family and a closely knit national community - a community that allows a person to feel a connectedness to people and place, to a history and culture, and to generations across time.