Eventually, though, I realized that my two intellectual priorities led neatly into conservatism: first, I was concerned with creating meaning through community and human connection, as I saw in Eliot and Arendt; second, I felt strongly about human virtue.
We need a set of values that makes us feel guilty about wanting to do the things we should not do; we need a culture that sanctifies those urges and channels them into something beautiful.
Like many conservatives - and by this point I included myself - he was troubled by the decay of the traditional institutions that gave us meaning. The results were just as Arendt had diagnosed: alienation, isolation, susceptibility to totalitarianism. “The historic emphasis on the individual,” Nisbet wrote, “has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual’s sense of integrity.”
Clearly here is a serious person intellectually engaged, reading widely and most important someone who is developing their own thought a process of critical importance for true thought and character creation.
But what I don't understand is why these new values identified of community and virtue lead to conservatism? Her references to Burke in this regard make the most sense, but he was a wig from a very different era to anything like conservatism as a modern intellectual movement.
In fact more so, I dont get how one can read Nietzsche or Kierkegaard and come to identify virtue as co-habitable with community? Other than taking a turn like Arendt with a longing wistful look back to ancient communities, scrubbed free of their imperfections through histories passage, such writers most clearly identify that individual virtue can only come through self-creation, almost exactly as demonstrated in this young girls own experience. She has engaged in an act of self-creation towards a virtuous character in spite of her community! Just as her rebellion against her parents views was a necessary first step of this journey, so too must all community institutions, especially those that permit no real change in power relationships (family, church etc) necessarily deny and prevent this act towards individual creation of a virtuous character.
This conclusion however is only challenged if you hold the assumption that non-state communities can create and shape the virtue of their citizens far better than individuals can, and that they ought to have the power to do so, whether or not the individual wants them to have it. For to endorse such structures, many will be merely dragged along, forced by society into pre-set roles and acts. Intellectuals such as the young girl at the heart of our story might be smart enough to recognise this and change it, but for everyone one who can escape a conservative society to self-create independent of the community structures, dozens if not hundreds will simply be left prostrate before it.
Yet why would the author be willing to grant such sweeping powers to society to have control over individuals, in ways that few individuals can ever respond, yet take such a negative view of that other traditional creation of society: Government
State intervention is dangerous not because it’s “coercion” (I don’t mind coercion), but because of its inhumanity. The more we depend on government, the less connection we have with one another. My burning hatred for both major Presidential candidates is due entirely to their New Deal liberalism, their conviction that if something is wrong it must be the government’s job to fix it, their utter disregard for limited government.
Yet government, especially now as we move into the democratic era (one strongly resisted by conservatives old and new alike) is the only institution of power in our society which gives individuals a real chance to participate, change and challenge the relationship between this institution and society. Government is an easy target due to its size and slothfulness, but unlike the churches or million little family units, this one permits even encourages participation and dissent. Not as well as it can have, but the option is there.
And if the option is there, so is the responsibility. The state is no more inhuman than the church or your family unit. Its of people, by people, and if its not for people (and no church ever has been) then the fault and responsibility is our own.
Virtue ? That is your responsibility, whilst it may be nice to think of the spartans whipping virtue into the young, wishing you too could have the rest of modern society from its crack addicts to perverts to slothful today tonight watchers pushed towards a life of virtue, to do that is to deny their humanity, deny their choice and ultimately deny that they have any possibility of a virtuous life. For virtue can not simply be external behaviour rote learned. It has to be valued and sought after by the individual, not simply a pattern of behaviour forced upon an individual if they are to survive and participate in the community.
We may not be a virtuous society today, and many individuals may not express such a character. But for the first time in human history it is at least possible and an option. One built on a real foundation of respect towards us as humans who can choose individual achievement towards nobility, not a forced behaviour as if mere pet dogs trained to beg and bark on command.
You can seek community, or you can seek virtue. Not both, and likely neither with modern conservatism.
3 comments:
"...virtue ...has to be valued and sought after by the individual, not simply a pattern of behaviour forced upon an individual if they are to survive and participate in the community.
Bullshit, unless you define "virtue" as the behavior of a predator. Children are not "innocent", and the Romantic view of them as such is the excuse of pederasts. Neither are adults. Absent some source of definition and coercion, there are no "virtues" beyond every man for himself.
This is the pill that no communitarian can swallow, and the lack of that nutrient dooms them to failure. They begin by removing constraints, so that everyone can behave naturally -- by which they fully expect mutual consideration, generosity, kindness, and similar qualities defined as "virtuous". What they get is selfishness, murder, and rapine. They then conclude that it is only a minority that exhibit those qualities; eliminating them will enable the emergence of New Soviet Man, "naturally" kind and virtuous. Several mass graves later the Movement falls of its own weight.
Virtue, whatever its specific qualities, is defined by the community and must be enforced by the community in order to persist. Anything else leads directly to Pol Pot.
Regards,
Ric
"Virtue, whatever its specific qualities, is defined by the community and must be enforced by the community in order to persist."
In which case virtue is left as nothing other than acting properly so as to avoid punishment. This almost negates any actual human involvement in it, making it one that a child as much as a man can be said to have acted virteously simply through seeking to avoid punishment.
Now it may be true that removed of this concern that like Gyges and his ring we would all go about raping and pillaging if we werent liable to punishment, but all moral judgements depend on a assumption that the person is responsible for their behaviour.
If we found out tomorrow that everything we did was due to pre-determined chemical interactions in our brain, we would no longer have a basis for moral judgements.
Virtue can only be identified when the person is responsible for that behaviour and when the community is focused on such strict control of behaviour, that responsibility is removed. Certainly in the case of positive actions where we seek to reward and acclaim such as by applying the tag 'virtue' to their actions. It is a mockery of the term to see it first require an abject surrender to the values of the majority of others.
"Anything else leads directly to Pol Pot."
Actually there in cambodia, much like all socialist countries, was a case of clear community enforcement of specific values. So the rural peaseant was worshiped, the intellectual shot.
Only when we are responsibile individuals, able to identify and choose our own behaviour (and allowing people this choice is not inconsistent with a clear legal system) only then can we say that some of those are of a virteous nature. This is not about simply being good which can and is community enforced. Virtue is a higher standard that requires self-choice to be honestly recognised.
p.s Cheers for visiting and commenting.
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