Transformative progress

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.

How would you like your society?

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. 

The rape of nature, left and right

I'm re-reading Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. One of the arguments Deneen makes is that when proto-liberals reconfigured the Western understanding of liberty in the early modern period, one prong of their attack was an attempt to overcome "the dominion and limits of nature." The proto-liberals favoured a belief "in an expanding and potentially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world."

Deneen argues that there were two phases in this attempt to assert dominion over nature. In the first wave, the emphasis was on the conquest of the natural world:

Liberalism...embraced and advanced as well an economic system - market-based free enterprise - that similarly promoted human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable - human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered. (p.36)

By the later 1800s, however, a second wave of liberal thinkers criticised the earlier view by asserting that human nature itself could be conquered or mastered. Deneen goes on to make the following interesting distinction:

First-wave liberals are today represented by "conservatives," who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends...[my emphasis]. Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Deneen writes further that,

Liberalism...seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions - its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature - created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity. [my emphasis]

It is this second revolution, namely the liberal insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature, that I want to focus on.

I attended a victory celebration today. Some "conservative" (i.e. right-liberal) councillors gained the upper hand in the last council election and suddenly announced that they were going to sell off 17 public reserves in my suburban area of Melbourne, with the idea being that they would be sold to developers to build more units.

A lot of us were shocked to hear the news. Why would anyone want to sell off these pockets of nature within suburbia just for short-term profit? Well, the mentality of these councillors fits in with the description provided by Deneen of first-wave liberals: they assume that human nature is self-interested and that nature is there to be exploited for utilitarian ends.

But there are a lot of lefties in the area I live in. They campaigned against the sell-offs, mobilised public support and ultimately saved most of the reserves (hence today's victory party). In my dealings with these left-wingers, I noticed that they were genuinely non-utilitarian in their attitude to the natural environment. They spoke at times about the importance of the beauty of nature and of its spiritual effects.

But here's the thing. When it comes to human nature, the left-liberals are no better than the right-liberals. They are just as willing to slash and burn, and to tread all over whatever there is of beauty and spirit within human nature, in order to assert a conquest and dominion over it.

They are no better - it is just that the focus of their efforts differs.

For prime evidence of this have a read of how left-liberalism operates in Sweden's preschools. The teachers at these schools have, as their prime mission, to eradicate distinctions between the boys and the girls. They are fiercely dedicated to this aim of destroying one significant aspect of human nature. They do not care if, by doing so, they eradicate what is beautiful within womanhood or what is strong and admirable within manhood. Just like the right-liberals, they assume that humans should stand separate to and in opposition to nature - to our nature as men and women.

From the New York Times article:

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

It is normal, in many Swedish preschools, for teachers to avoid referring to their students’ gender — instead of “boys and girls,” they say “friends,” or call children by name. Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture

This began in 1996 in Sweden when Ingemar Gens, a journalist, realised that preschools were a good place to suppress sex distinctions:

Preschool struck him as the right place to do this. Swedish children spend much of their early life in government-funded preschools, which offer care at nominal cost for up to 12 hours a day starting at the age of 1.

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

The teachers are expected to watch videos of how they interact with the students, to pick up on any subtle differences in how they treat the boys and girls:

“It was hard at first to see patterns,” she said. “We saw more and more, and we were horrified at what we saw.”

In Sweden the idea that any distinctions based on sex might still exist is considered "horrifying".

One trainee teacher so much dislikes it when she sees her friends dressing their children as boys or girls that she makes a point of trying to re-educate them:

Ms. Gerdin’s friends have begun to have babies, and they post pictures of them on Facebook, swathed in blue or pink, in society’s first act of sorting. Ms. Gerdin gets upset when this happens. She feels sorry for the children. She makes it a point to seek her friends out and tell them, earnestly, that they are making a mistake. This feels to her like a responsibility.

Finally, you can see in all of this an error that is often made in politics. The left-liberals reacted to something they didn't like in right-liberal politics, but opposed it from within the same political framework. They weren't able to think outside of the framework itself.

You have to be careful that you don't become merely reactive to the thing you have grown to dislike. What should exist instead is an independent orientation to the truth.

Traditionalists do not want to live outside of nature, whether that refers to the natural world or to human nature. We want to be connected to it, deeply, and to draw from it what is best within the human experience. We orient our lives, in part, through our place within a natural order (an order of existence that encompasses the biological, the social and the spiritual). That does not mean rejecting efforts to employ technology for useful purposes, but this is not the principle we live by, or that we wish society to be ordered by, or that we measure progress by.

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

Patrick Deneen: Why liberalism failed

Here's a positive way to end 2017. Patrick Deneen, an Associate Professor of Politics at Notre Dame, has written a book called Why Liberalism Failed. I have ordered it and will review it once it arrives. But from the publicity it is clear that Deneen has a political philosophy that is similar in parts to that of James Kalb and myself, as I hope you'll recognise from the excerpts of an online interview below. It's heartening to see this happening within academia, where it will hopefully have some influence.

Patrick Deneen

The first thing that Deneen usefully recognises is that Western politics is dominated by two variants of the same liberal philosophy. He calls them classical and progressive:

Camosy: When you say that “liberalism has failed,” you don’t mean that liberalism-as opposed to conservatism-has failed. Can you say more about what you mean by liberalism?

Deneen: By “liberalism,” I mean the political philosophy and the resulting political institutions, practices and beliefs that dominate the governments and societies of much of the western world. Its founding fathers were philosophers like John Locke, and in the United States, the architects of our Constitutional order. But I also include in their number those considered to be “progressives,” such as John Stuart Mill, or in the United States, John Dewey.

Most of our political debates pit “classical” against “progressive” liberal visions, holding the two views as diametric opposites and thus circumscribing the whole of our political imagination.

He also believes that liberalism has gradually unfolded over time, but that its very success has led to its failure:

What I seek to describe is a gradual but accelerating “realization” of a set of philosophical beliefs that have transformed practices, making us more fully liberal over time, and as a result, giving rise to a slow realization that its success leads to its own set of systemic failures. My thesis is that liberalism has failed precisely at the moment that it has succeeded

Deneen recognises that liberalism is not just a neutral position but an ideology based on a view of man as being an atomised, autonomous individual:

Camosy: Why do you think so many liberals fail to understand that liberalism, rather than a neutral political and ideological space, is a particular ideology and worldview?

Deneen: Liberalism has shrouded its substantive commitments behind a veil of neutrality, although some of its classical and contemporary philosophers and defenders are forthright about those substantive commitments...

...liberalism advances by positing the belief that humans exist in a state of nature as autonomous, disconnected, wholly free and rights-bearing creatures.

But what is claimed to be merely a description of human nature over time becomes an aim and goal of liberal society itself, gradually but ineluctably shaping people in the image of what it merely claims to describe. Thus, we increasingly see a liberal people defined by absence of interpersonal commitments, whether marriage, family, children, or memberships in longstanding cultures or a religious community.

Further, where commitments are taken on, they are subject to perpetual revision - whether through divorce in the matter of marriage, abortion in regard to children, or church shopping or the rise of “Nones” in the case of religion. Such people are driven above all by demands of consumption and money-making, claiming the right to self-definition while abandoning any longstanding cultural practices of self-limitation, which become increasingly regarded as unjust and unjustified limitations upon one’s freedom and autonomy.

More ironically still, a massive growth of the state is required to make this experience of individualism possible, thus enthralling purportedly free subjects to a pervasive political order.

He believes that Roman Catholic culture in the West is no longer clearly an alternative to liberalism, but tends to divide along classical vs progressive liberal lines:

Camosy: How have Roman Catholics-and even Roman Catholic moral and political theology-accepted certain aspects of liberal ideology? What might this mean for the Church as liberalism fails?

Deneen: Tragically, at least in America but perhaps more pervasively in the West, Catholicism has come increasingly to be defined by and experienced as the two political iterations of liberalism, whether “classical” or “progressive.” Rather than offering a distinct alternative, many Catholics have come to understand their faith through the lens of these dominant expressions of liberal philosophy.

...Catholicism rejects both anthropological individualism and collectivist statism, but today we are divided into Catholic tribes who by default advance one or the other as a central political project.

Deneen holds that liberalism has destroyed genuine cultures, which then have to be replaced more formally by state organisation, which then means that politics becomes a matter of contesting for the levers of the state. He wants in the longer term to return to more traditional, non-statist ways of life:

I argue in my book that liberalism advances an “anti-culture”: whether through blandishments of the market or the power of the state, it seeks to weaken and eviscerate culture and replace it with a homogenous anti-culture of “free” people who consume pre-packaged, monetized “popular culture,” but no longer live in actual cultures of memory and tradition.

Inasmuch as we see deep instability and forms of systemic failure in our politics, this dysfunction occurs not in spite of an otherwise healthy culture, but to a great extent because of the destruction of culture and its replacement with an anti-culture. As cultural norms, practices and forms of belonging are eviscerated, informal codes must be replaced by legal systems and state enforcement of legalized directives.

From what I've read so far, it is possible that Deneen will not go beyond the concept of "cultural communities," but I'll have more to say on this once I've read his book.

Regardless of this, I am hopeful that the book will have a very positive effect in breaking down the liberal hegemony within academia. It's so timely as well - there is an audience out there now for intelligent and principled criticisms of the liberal ideology.