I recommend the recent reissue of Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, which includes an excellent introduction by Ross Douthat. The book is a critique of both leftism and the right-liberalism (more “freedom,” less “equality”), so prevalent in today’s conservative coalitions, which the author considers to be an invitation to statism. People need their community, and they are willing to look to the state for it. Humans are, intractably, social creatures built for communion. So prevalent is the belief that an equal satisfaction of preferences is a high social good, and that the purpose of politics and morality is the working toward that supposed good, that Nisbet can be a bit of a shock. As this blog argues, liberalism is very insufficient to maintain social order. Freedom and equality as high principles can harm other realities necessary for social harmony. Even as it is very important to recognize the many strands of individualistic liberalism in modern American conservatism, critics of liberalism from both the “left” and the “right” could state: personhood (not the “individual”) is reduced by liberalism to subjectivity and ripe for manipulation by impersonal institutions and processes following their own, frequently status-seeking, logic. As such, the aspirations that inspired the founders of modern thought – the conquest of nature through science, perhaps even the conquest of human nature, and the emancipation of power from moral restraint – could be “achieved” at a great and unpredictable cost. Nisbet’s response is that community, culture, and family, which are intimately bound together, are ultimately about membership: a grouping partaking in a network of memory and “belonging” to one another. Far too many lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentically familial would hold together – consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue. Abstract, unrooted “freedom” is an invitation to loneliness and despair. Down with the statist-individualist symbiosis! It is through the many associations where a more fulfilling sense of freedom can be found.
Thursday, November 18, 2010, 12:42 PM
November 19th, 2010 | 12:08 pm
On this theme, Pierre Manent also has valuable observations in his analysis of liberalism. To paraphrase:
One of the principal ideas of liberalism is that of the “individual.” This is the being who, because he is human, is naturally entitled to “rights” that can be enumerated, rights that are attributed to him independently of his function or place in society and that make him equal to any other man. As familiar as this idea may seem, it is strange. How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of a right presupposes an already instituted community or society? How can political legitimacy be founded on the rights of the individual, if he never exists as such, if he is always necessarily linked to other individuals, to a family, class, profession, or nation? Yet it is this on this idea, so obviously “asocial” and “apolitical,” that the liberal body politic was progressively constructed. The inhabitants of Western democracies have become every more “autonomous,” ever more “equal,” and have felt themselves to be less defined by the family and social class.
November 19th, 2010 | 3:18 pm
This is what I said about a year ago on a blog about “seasteading” on the nature and requirements of true community:
“The demands required to build a new community necessarily selects for competency and efficacy on the part of individuals. This selection process is necessary for the emergence of true community because such can only arise among individuals who have true respect and admiration for each other. Established cultures, based on the worship of mediocrity and ineptitude, can only engender a loathing contempt and hostility on the part of more competent individuals. This, of course, makes true community impossible.”
November 23rd, 2010 | 11:55 am
“Established cultures, based on the worship of mediocrity and ineptitude, can only engender a loathing contempt and hostility on the part of more competent individuals. This, of course, makes true community impossible.” ”
Only if you judge people by their competence and feel a need to look down on those you feel more competent then.
November 23rd, 2010 | 6:52 pm
“Only if you judge people by their competence and feel a need to look down on those you feel more competent then.”
I judge others on competence and character. Such are the people I feel a commonality with and a connection to. It has nothing to do with “looking down” on anyone.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact