The Political Dead End of "Rights and Freedoms" pt. 2

Conservatives, right-wing reactionaries and other allies of the post-liberal right need to develop a new language of politics. Abandoning liberal ideas like "rights and freedoms" would be a start.

This is an continuation of my previous piece: “The Political Dead End of "Rights and Freedoms" pt. 1.” If we are going to win any war with the left — whether we battle with classic liberals, progressives, or cultural Marxists — conservatives, right-reactionaries and post-liberal thinkers need to engage the battle of language. We have to learn how to fight “The Narrative.” It is not sufficient to simply reclaim the ideas of a “good liberalism” of years past. We cannot return to the American Founding or some such, reset the clock, and get it correct this time. The past is not coming back. It is time for the political right in its many forms to recognize that a large part of the current political and cultural battle is over language. It is not enough to redefine certain words like “rights” or “freedoms” so as to purify them and reclaim them as proper foundations going forwards. The problem is with the ideas to which these words give expression, with the posture and attitudes they engender, and with the actions they generate. I will plant a flag on this hill and argue that a big part of the problem with the West is its quest to reify the twin ideas of “rights” and “freedoms.” If we hope to move on to something better, or to start something new, they must be abandoned. A new language must be forged (or recovered). Let’s take those first steps.

We first need to recognize that “rights” and “freedoms” as concepts are universal ideas, abstract constructs of reason. They were born out of the Enlightenment quest to free morality from the constraints of religion and superstition and ground it in reason alone. In the realm of the abstract, they seem like good and lofty ideas. But the question is one of means. How do you make concepts like “rights” and “freedoms” work at a practical level?

As Patrick Deneen has observed, prior to the Enlightenment, with its universal ideas based on human reason alone, all moral truths were imbedded in a community. They did not live as abstract ideas, but were rather incarnated into a living culture. They were personal and concrete. All social values used to be part of a social and cultural web, they were the given background of society. Often they would seem arbitrary and irrational. Very often they were restrictive and suffocating. They limited your choices on multiple levels.

The Enlightenment thinkers made the argument that the existing culture was based on superstition and religion and not on reason. They saw it as oppressive, something from which any right-thinking rationalist would need to free himself. “Freedom” meant being liberated from the dictates of one’s own cultural confines. Reason alone would be the new foundation of men’s interactions with each other. The problem comes in the achieving of such an idea of “freedom.” The devil is in the details, as they say.

In practice, this quest for “freedom” places society on a trajectory towards all people become autonomous self-choosing individuals who divorce themselves from all the things that used to provide meaning and structure. They are emancipated and free, but they are also cultureless, history-less, decontextualized, depersonalized and abstracted. We tell ourselves that we can make any choices we want, that we are free. We can be anything we want to be, we are free individuals. Each of us is out there making our own free personal choices.

The difficulty with this is: living cultures are social superstructures that have been developed and worked out over a long period of time. They impose an unchosen hierarchy of values. Some things you can do. Some things are forbidden. Some deeds are higher. Some are lower. Some are taboo. When one person’s desire to do something conflicts with another person’s desires, there is an unspoken priority given to some desires over others. Some things can be done and others cannot. Some things can be said and others cannot. They fit into a structure — often unspoken and working in the background — that people absorb simply by being members of the community. They are often enforced by mechanisms of shame and ostracism.

The idea of the autonomous moral agent, the idea that I am free to use my own reason to develop my own moral framework so as to guide my choices on my own — no one telling me what to do or how to live my life — has a disastrous effects on a culture. In effect, it obliterates it. There is nothing between the individual and the universal to stop him from seeking after and embracing universal ideas. Or so that is what the brochures tell us. In practice, someone, some entity, will be tasked with stepping in and adjudicating those situations when the desires of two different autonomous moral agents collide. That entity is the state. Culture gets replaced with the instruments of the state, through legislation and the courts, enforcing whose “rights” will triumph. If you game out the idea of the free autonomous moral agent making their own choices without influence from anyone else, you either end up living as a mountain man type hermit, or you end up with some form of authoritarian state.

Likely it will be not just authoritarian, but also totalitarian. This is because nature abhors a vacuum, the space between the individual and the universal will get filled. Isolated individuals without the buffers and protections that community and culture give them — a sense of place, a stable world view, human attachments and obligations and more — they become vulnerable to various forms of what is known as “mass formation.” The two most common forms of mass formation are political propaganda and commercial advertising. Freed from the constraints of culture, we have a society of isolated autonomous moral agents at the mercy of the marketers and propagandists who shape their thoughts and their identity in order to sell them products and secure their political loyalty. They are made to feel like they are autonomous moral actors who choose to belong to something larger. But that something is a simulacrum of a culture. It is the construct of the marketer and the propagandist. There is no true life to it. It is a dead fossil pretending to be a living entity. This is the lesson of Oswald Spengler. Culture becomes civilization, and in the process it ossifies and dies. Those who belong to this civilization remain isolated and vulnerable, believing they are making their own free choices, yet they are at the mercy of the marketer and the propagandist.

You hear a lot these days about the need for bringing back what are called “mediating institutions.” The problem is that all these mediating institutions were themselves a rear guard action to replace an already dying culture. Rotary Club, the women’s society, the bowling league, the political machine, the lodge and often the churches were little more than weak efforts to replace a living culture. Their voluntary nature distinguishes them from the involuntary nature of a living culture. If you as an autonomous moral agent can choose whether or not to join, it isn’t alive in the way that a true culture is alive. What makes a living culture, well “living,” is that it imposes itself upon you. You don’t get to choose.

This is the depth of the problem that conservatives, and the right in general, faces. We do not need another mass political movement, but rather a revival of culture. We cannot go back and retrieve what was lost. We cannot construct a culture using reason alone. The power of technique and technology are not enough to make that a possibility.

But this still does not get at why the ideas of “rights” and “freedoms” are so dangerous and should be antithetical to the conservative or right-wing mind and spirit. We have seen how dangerous the idea of the free autonomous moral agent is upon society and culture. But beyond that, why are they destructive ideas? As universal ideals, they seem so promising. We might argue that a true liberal society has never been tried, or some such. It is the same claim all ideologues make. It’s never really been tried. The ideology of liberalism has been just as ruinous as those of communism. The problem with Enlightenment Liberal ideals boils down to two basic realities: they are fundamentally selfish and they present themselves as the easy path.

Let’s unpack that. A “right” or a “freedom” is all about me. It is my right to free speech. It is my right to own a gun. It is my right to freely assemble. It is my right to property. It is my right to worship in the way I choose. Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine. Its all about me and what YOU owe ME. Even if they are negative rights, it still places the obligation on the other people in society to grant you the “freedom” to do whatever you want. You are making the demand that nobody is allowed to tell you what to do. You don’t owe any one anything and you are free to make your own choices and everyone else just has to live with that. Anything or anyone who infringes upon that is robbing you of your freedom. Nobody should be allowed to tell you what to do. You are free.

For example, you can say whatever you want and no one should be allowed to punish you for your words. That places all the obligation not on you to give wise speech and sound council, but rather on the listener to simply accept whatever drivel comes out of your mouth. Also, you expect to say whatever you want without fear of punishment or penalty. You want to say whatever you wish, even to the point of trying to justify things like pornography as speech, without any penalty what so ever. You have “rights” don’t you know.

It is inherently a “passive” idea. You are making it the responsibility of everyone else to accommodate your choices. You can say and do whatever you want because you are free and people just have to deal with it. The obligation is on them to accept your moral autonomy. You place the demand on everyone else who are then expected to fall in line and tolerate, respect and even celebrate your choices. Whether that choice is to own a gun, go to church, abort your baby or live a homosexual lifestyle, everyone else is expected to just roll with it. It is about me and my rights. My moral autonomy needs to be trumpeted and celebrated. I am free. I have my rights.

I would also argue that this idea of “rights” and “freedoms” has contributed to the feminization of our society, in that the people who can cry the loudest and make the most emotional appeals generally win the day. The expectation that someone else will be there to protect my rights, typically the state, is not a stereotypically masculine trait. A man is expected to fight his own battles. He does not rely on others to grant him his status and place in the world. He is expected to earn his way through his own efforts and achievements. Our regime of “rights” and “freedoms” undermines this basic impulse in a subtle way. By shifting a man’s own personal agency within a living cultural web to a passive universal reality to which he contributes nothing, we create a society of whining man-children crying about their “rights” and what society “owes” them. They are God-given and you owe them to me.

The truth is that these so-called “natural God-given rights” are neither natural nor given by God. Nor are you owed anything. They are neither fundamental, nor self-evident. We talk nothing about what we have earned. We talk nothing about obligation. We say little about duty. Virtue is a forgotten concept. We want to shoot our mouth off but are unwilling to pay any price for our words. Society is expected to absorb the cost of our speech. A man is willing to speak the truth with courage, knowing he may have to pay a price for his words. A man is willing to listen, knowing he might hear something uncomfortable, something he does not want to hear. The very idea of “rights” and “freedoms” undermines virtue, especially in men.

So what is the alternative? To start, stop talking about “rights” and “freedoms.” There are a lot of words that we can use, such as duty and obligation. Love God with all your heart, soul and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. But we need something to replace the idea of “freedom.” A word or short phrase. On a personal level, from a Christian perspective, “freedom” is not what you would expect it to be. It does not mean personal moral autonomy. In fact, that is a form of bondage. In Christian thought, there are two categories of people. Those who are prisoners of the devil, who are his captives and slaves. Then there are those who are slaves to Christ. People who are slaves to Christ are “free.” This is a very different thing from the “freedom” of the Enlightenment. So how else could we talk about political freedom? Isn’t that all something we all want, to be a free people, free from oppression and tyranny?

We use the word “free” in these contexts, but it has been so burdened with this selfish, unmanly idea of “I just want you to leave me alone to do my own thing” that we need to find a positive way to frame the concept of political freedom. Instead of talking about “freedom” we as conservatives should be talking about “political self-determination.” It is the declaration that we do not want people far off governing our affairs. We will shoulder the burden of governing our own lives. We want a “self-governing society.” I think that this was the intent of the Founders. They were hoping that what they put in place would be the foundation for a self-governing society. But the Enlightenment base upon which they built was flawed as we have now come to see. And looking back, once you see the dark side of the whole regime of “rights” and “freedoms” exposed, there is unlikely going to be any path in which replaying the American Founding does not end up in a place very similar to ours, or worse.

Let us understand first of all that “political self-determination” is not an individual thing. Unless he is a completely self-sufficient mountain man, the individual is not free to do whatever he pleases. He is part of a community, a body politic, that takes upon itself the burden of governing its own affairs. There are limits to the size of a society that can be self-governed. I see that as a feature, rather than a bug. Many of the problems we face today are problems of bigness, of scale. A network of small self-governing regions would of course be varied, even if they all shared the same basic religious faith or core philosophical convictions. That would be ok. We live in a finite world, not in the realm of the universal. They would be a patchwork of real communities and not a mass civilization. No Globohomo.

So what does a real community look like? A very helpful book on the subject is Alan Ehrenhalt’s “The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950’s.” Ehrenhalt found himself at a time when some of the people who lived during the pre-war and post-war period of the early 20th century were still alive. In his present, the effects of Enlightenment Liberalism, in both its cultural and economic forms, had pretty much finished off the last vestiges of living community. He interviewed people who could still remember living in an actual community, told their stories and came to some conclusions:

“To worship choice and community together is to misunderstand what a community is all about. Community means not subjecting every action in life to the burden of choice, but rather, accepting the familiar and reaping the psychological benefits of having one less calculation to make in the course of the day.”

Ehrenhalt gives us a binary. You can either be a free autonomous moral agent, or you can have a healthy community. You cannot have both. He argued that moral liberalism worked hand-in-hand with free market liberalism to destroy the community life that makes political self-determination possible. If you root the political in the individual, in the morally autonomous individual, you will destroy the communities that make a self-governing society possible. Politics is inherently the business of people figuring out how to live together. As we have discussed, if you destroy the community, you leave the individual at the mercy of the centralized, universal state. This is why liberalism pushes towards globalism. It strives for the universal. To regain political self-determination, we will have to sacrifice personal liberty, that is the universal ideal of “freedom,” for the involuntary reality of the living culture as instantiated in a functioning community.

It is not an easy thing to recreate, once lost:

“We don’t want the 1950’s back. What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmistress, the inflexible rules and the lectures on 100% Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent. But there is no easy way to have an ordinary world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about re-creating community with the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream.”

Lest the Reagan Republican, anti-woke, anti-sexual revolution people — your bog standard culture warrior — think this is simply a problem of immorality, cultural Marxism and the sexual revolution, think again. Ehrenhalt argues that a commitment to the free market has been just as corrosive. Once we sundered the bond between business and community and the moral obligation that a business has to its community, it was equally, if not more, corrosive to community life than was individual freedom of choice.

“Once the pressures of the global market had persuaded the Lenox Corporation that it had the moral freedom of choice to make air conditioners wherever in the world it wanted to, the bonds that had tied it to a small town in Iowa for nearly a century were breakable.”

And:

“In the end there is no escaping the reality that the market is a force of disruption of existing relationships. To argue that markets are a true friend of community is an inversion of common sense.”

Finally:

“To idealize the markets and call one’s self a conservative is to distort reality.”

Ehrenhalt makes the argument that the twin forces of a love and worship of the idea a free market combined with a love and worship of the freedom of individual choice were together the acid that destroyed our communities and culture. Without a living culture embedded in healthy living communities it is impossible to maintain political self-determination. Instead, we have the simulacrum of voting and the faint hope that politicians and Supreme Court justices will somehow ensure the “rights” and “freedoms” we believe we are owed.

What does this imply in practice? It means that conservatives and people of the right — if you want to avoid the dead end of being a reactionary who believes that all that is needed for some strong man to get in power and bend the system to his will and thereby restore society (cough, cough, Trumpism) — have to do the work of building small autonomous communities. Conservatism and right wing politics are something you do. They are secondarily something you think. We have to focus not on individualism and the individual as the foundation of society; but rather the community as the basic building block of society.

Going forward, these will likely be parallel communities at first. But they need to have the will to self-governance and the will to defend their way of life, the culture they are giving birth to. They will not lean on what is owed to them, but they will shoulder the responsibility of forging a living community. They may even have to do insurgency work to rid their home of other political entities that threaten them.

They will have to understand that what they are building and defending is their way of life, their own way of existence. They will have to protect that, peacefully if possible, but with arms if necessary. This is the essence of Carl Schmitt’s concept of “the political.” The threat to our way of life defines who the “us” is, and who the “them” is: the “friend” and the “enemy.” When there is no culture, no community to defend, is the political even possible? There is no politics of the individual according to Schmitt. The whole project of post-liberalism revolves around the willingness to build culture, not a different “mass culture” which is no culture at all, but real living communities.

A large part of this is the necessity of shouldering the burden of self-protection. As Schmitt argues, “no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist without protection and obedience.” The one who protects you is your master. This is why the state wishes to control policing and law enforcement as well as the military. This was the Founders impetus for enshrining the idea of “a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state” into the bill of rights. But such a thing is meaningless unless the members of the body politic take it upon themselves to shoulder such a burden, not passing it off to the state. If it is just a theory that is only reified in your possessing, collecting and hording firearms, it is meaningless. You are still relying on someone else to protect you. As Schmitt says, “A people not willing to protect itself is a people not able to maintain itself.” If you pass off the true obligation of your protection fully onto the state, then the state is your master. How many guns you own is irrelevant. This is the problem of the individual moral agent. He can only rely on himself or the state for his protection. If he cannot protect himself from the state, he is its servant. He has lost his ability for political self-determination. In this sense, because of autonomous individualism, much of the bluster of American second amendment advocates is mere play acting. A community, on the other hand, motivated and disciplined, presents a far greater challenge to any larger entity wishing to dominate and subjugate it. A disciplined, hardened, community wishing to preserve its way of life can be a long term thorn in the side of any occupying force. There is the possibility of dying and being wiped out, for sure, but this willingness to sacrifice one’s life to preserve one’s way of living, one’s existence, is at the heart of the political community.

More could be said in terms of fleshing out this idea of masculine personal agency rooted and expressed in and through the life of the community, and I am sure I will say more in the future, but this should be sufficient to get the conversation heading in a different direction. These ideas are not really new, but we live in a time where they need to be spoken again.