Prof. Deneen has a nice summary at Front Porch of the state of play in our Great American Renegade Right Throwdown. Any critique of that summary is far above my pay grade! So, Pomocon being a dogma-free zone, I’m inspired simply to throw out my own take on the issues and what’s at stake.
1. Front Porchers are rightly concerned about the obsessive and destructive tendencies implicit in Locke’s every-genius-for-himself approach to man’s stewardship of the natural world. But they are also worried about those of us who aren’t geniuses — the great all-too-washed of Hobbes’ big fat commodious regime. In Strauss’ idiom, Front Porchers seem to dread in the ‘first wave’ of liberals something really dreadful — a state in which the ‘best’ men manipulate nature ever-more-comprehensively courtesy of endless technological progress, while the rest of us grow complacently fat off the violently, irresponsibly, and unsustainably liposuctioned fat of the land.
2. But wait — is it liberalism or modernity that’s the problem? Front Porchers seem inclined to treat liberalism as the false consciousness inculcated to justify modernity, or some such, while Pomocons, I think, are inclined to recognize that liberalism is not simply a symptom of modernity — or, in Alan Wolfe’s language, the only way that a person atomized and disoriented by modernity can flourish (or, as Lasch would say, eke out his survival). The presupposition here is that modernity is prior to liberalism, and in Strauss’ treatment, that means that liberalism is the consequence or application of the wickedly nature-manipulating Machiavelli’s view of the world. It’s almost as if Machiavelli wouldn’t have had all those horrible ideas about cutting your enemies in half and showing them off in the public square if he hadn’t thought first of nature as a woman meant to be slapped around! Cruelty to nature, in short, destines us to be cruel to one another.
3. There’s another interpretation, though — in which liberalism is not the inevitable, and inevitably tainted, consequence of ‘modernity’ (which turns out to be shorthand for ‘an understanding of the relation between reason and nature that decisively and willfully breaks with that of the ancients’). This interpretation — which I share — views the advent of the individual as the thing that’s seminal to liberalism. And it holds that the advent of the individual is not a mere consquence or logical outworking of the ‘modern’ attitude about man’s manipulation of nature. There’s little doubt that, nowadays, there are plenty of ways in which our fascination with manipulating our own natures (think birth control designed to stop pesky periods altogether) bespeaks the kind of super-instrumentalist analogical thinking that upsets the Front Porchers. But I’d say there’s even less doubt that the kind of manipulation that rules our regime actually isn’t man-on-nature, or even man-on-himself, but us-on-one-another. Indeed, the manipulative turn away from the natural world, and toward the artificial world that we as mass amateur actors and performers create, suggests strongly that something is afoot which we can’t pin on modernity as man’s manhandling of nature. However often they cross paths in our complicated world, the intellectual history of the individual and of individuality is a different one from the histories often told about modernity.
4. So it’s to be expected that individuality comes in for great scorn among Front Porchers and sympathetic parties. But this is just the beginning of the story I want to tell. The individual is a thing incarnate — a noun, an irreducible being, a person; individuality is a disembodied superstition — an adjective, an abstraction, a fantasy with all the pelagian proteanism of the pantheistic All. To make a long story short, we can find evidence of two types of liberals — one thinking individuality to be descriptive shorthand for individuals, and one thinking ‘individual’ to be honorific shorthand for people fully experiencing individuality. Pomocons, I wager, tend to be staunch defenders of the first kind of liberals — and quite sharp critics of the second. I am, anyway! For pomocons, the last sentence of Natural Right and History is very telling — Strauss shows all this talk of modernity to mask or dramatize a wholly different ‘cosmic struggle’ or ‘eternal politics’: that between Virtue and the Individual. Strauss’ critique, importantly, is not of ‘individuality’; the individual himself, who set liberalism in motion, is bad enough as he is! It’s almost as if Strauss is hinting that the advent of the individual turns out to be to blame for, say, Machiavelli’s cruelly instrumental vision of man’s relationship with nature! That’s quite an inversion.
5. And is there any escaping the judgment that the advent of the individual — as we know it and as Strauss meant — was the consequence of Christianity?
June 26th, 2009 | 3:42 pm
A quick note on Strauss:
I think his position is a bit more complicated than your sketch of it. You say that there’s an “eternal struggle” between “Virtue and the Individual.” But, for example, while Burke (whom that sentence is about) is in the camp of the moderns, he himself a partisan of virtue (at least, he is said to not “allow the concern with individuality to overpower the concern with virtue”). Maybe Burke is confused, and can’t really hold both of those positions at once. But that’s not the obvious sense of Strauss’ remark, so you need to make an argument.
Also, I’m not sure why you insist so strongly that Strauss’ critique is about the individual, not individuality. His language actually is about “individuality.” If you want to say it’s really only about the latter, you could explain yourself a bit more. The classics certainly had a concept of an individual (even within NRH, see 105, 107, 134, etc; the Republic is built around a [highly questionable] analogy between the individual and the city). It’s not like no one ever imagined there was such a thing as an individual before Christ came along.
It’s true, the “individual” is understood differently if the “universal” is taken to be a “creature” (top last page NRH) rather than natural. If we are naturally part of larger wholes, that certainly changes what it means to be an individual.
June 26th, 2009 | 4:08 pm
Brilliant as ever, James, and touching on something I’ve been trying to work through lately. I think that, to some degree, to whittle this down a bit, the problems with “individuality” are of degree. Over-emphasis on the individual, on the potency of the Individual Man Alone, lead not so much to rugged genius but to entitlement, a divorce from community and thus history, and so forth. This is to place no judgment on the individual as part of society but rather on the individual apart from society.
June 26th, 2009 | 9:43 pm
[...] James Poulos: So it’s to be expected that individuality comes in for great scorn among Front Porchers and sympathetic parties. But this is just the beginning of the story I want to tell. The individual is a thing incarnate — a noun, an irreducible being, a person; individuality is a disembodied superstition — an adjective, an abstraction, a fantasy with all the pelagian proteanism of the pantheistic All. To make a long story short, we can find evidence of two types of liberals — one thinking individuality to be descriptive shorthand for individuals, and one thinking ‘individual’ to be honorific shorthand for people fully experiencing individuality. Pomocons, I wager, tend to be staunch defenders of the first kind of liberals — and quite sharp critics of the second. I am, anyway! For pomocons, the last sentence of Natural Right and History is very telling — Strauss shows all this talk of modernity to mask or dramatize a wholly different ‘cosmic struggle’ or ‘eternal politics’: that between Virtue and the Individual. Strauss’ critique, importantly, is not of ‘individuality’; the individual himself, who set liberalism in motion, is bad enough as he is! It’s almost as if Strauss is hinting that the advent of the individual turns out to be to blame for, say, Machiavelli’s cruelly instrumental vision of man’s relationship with nature! That’s quite an inversion. [...]
June 27th, 2009 | 11:56 am
ED, you’re right that I’ve given an extremely reader’s-digest-y version of what has to be a fuller argument to come out on top. It’s preposterous to attempt to do this well in a comment on a post that couldn’t do it, but the internet is a preposterous place. So let’s try.
Strauss’ Burke is a veritable Mill when it comes to conflating the individual with the person who’s immersed in the full experience of individuality. I want to argue that our character as individuals is *not* fixed or defined by our “individual feeling and individual interest”. Many of these change too frequently to be relied upon; ultimate individuality is corrosive and corrupting to our individual being. And some of our constant individual feelings and interests may be bad or unhealthy, corrosive to our being in this other fashion. In short, Strauss, Mill, Burke, and anyone else who believes it are wrong to say, with Strauss, that “the free development” of “individuals” is “in their individuality;” this aestheticization and abstraction of our incarnate individual being leads to a bad infinity in which we discover only the arbitrariness of ’selfness’, not even really ’selfhood’. The “free flowering of individuality” cannot be “natural” if individuality itself is a superstition that lures us errantly away from our individual character, our proper object of knowledge. But the fundamental question for political philosophy, in this vein, would appear to be whether what I have said about the character of the individual person applies also to the character of “the sound social order,” the whole, the civitas, the ‘political individual’ which mirrors in its unity the soul of an individual man. Here I have to side with Hobbes against the classics, and against Strauss insofar as the contrast between the sound social and political order (Strauss says OR) must not be swept away.
June 27th, 2009 | 10:07 pm
Well, at least Deneen is right that at least one of the main pomocon interlocutors in this recent fracas is a Hobbesian at heart.
Yes, in some important way the advent of the individual owes a great deal to Christianity. A drastically brief version of this story goes that in Aristotle, one is either primarily understood as a member of a household or as a member of a city (the two being not entirely harmonious) unless one is an ambiguously situated fellow called a philosopher. Then along comes Augustine and says that, metaphysically and morally prior to all of these, we are members (or not) of the City of God. He also says (well, actually it’s the New Testament) that the Logos is personal, that the fundamental source of all being is a person, and that persons as individuals are more eternal than the cosmos and nature as understood by philosophers. This gives the human person a status beyond the family and city, though not entirely incompatible with either (pace Machiavelli and Rousseau). What liberalism (at least of the Hobbesian-Lockean lineage) typically seeks to do is to hold on to this individual that stands prior to the family and polity while jettisoning the metaphysics and all but the surface of the theology that gives sense to this priority.
There’s another plausible story to be told in which the metaphysical individual — the creature of nominalism, whose ascendancy is indeed a very modern phenomenon, especially among the main architects of liberalism — does play a role in Machiavelli’s vision of nature. Because in a nominalistic vision of reality, which Machiavelli’s arguably is, the classical understanding of contemplation loses its sense and its status as the natural end par excellence.
You’re quite right to point out that neither of these lines of filiation get much attention from Strauss or his followers.
Now to put on my FPR hat, I’ll suggest that the concrete individual is more fully such when their “individuality” unfolds within a community to which they have binding personal responsibilities weightier than those recognized by liberal theory as binding in terms of rights.
June 27th, 2009 | 11:16 pm
By his concluding remark re “individuality” in NR&H, Strauss tips his hand: the whole problem with modernity originates in Christianity, more specifically, in the Christian critique of the pretensions of ancient virtue. (See the discussion of Weber, which seems to set aside the Christianity-Modernity (capitalism) thesis, and then… ends up hanging it all on Augustine.) That Strauss is not wrong is all but proved by the fact that Tocqueville agrees. But how to respond? If the individual’s transcendence of any politically representable virtue is true, and if any decent human existence requires politically represented virtue, then what? The answer, obviously, will be complicated and subtle, like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But how to update to our times? The theory is more pomocon, but the practice would involve some Frontporchism.
June 29th, 2009 | 5:40 pm
[...] who write over there.) A few weeks later, Patrick threw down the gauntlet and, well, the debate rolled onward (and continues) from [...]
February 6th, 2010 | 12:09 am
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