Individualism, Atomisation, and Our Society
"Certain predominant ideas" hold our society together. De Tocqueville was right.
“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”[1] The world is a collection of civilisations and has always been. To think we can escape the shadow of our own is foolhardy.
The great conceit of American life is that it was something new, that it emerged as anything other than a permutation of the British Enlightenment applied in a landscape of virgin forests and land. This consensus around values of personal liberty and the right to happiness, reflected in the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the American Constitution and regurgitated at varying levels of complexity by numerous pamphleteers of the time finds its root in Enlightenment philosophers, who in turn were rooted in Christianity and the classics. It is here, with some permutations, that we find conventional wisdom until yesterday.
Today, the Americanised West (and let us be honest, Western Europe is more Americanised than anyone would like to admit), finds itself at a serious inflexion point, a dislocation in which enlightenment values feel unfit for the current moment. There are numerous reasons for this dislocation, but, as usual, I find De Tocqueville, the prophet of Americanism, presented what became this simplest of explanations long ago in the Jacksonian era.
“If everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it is not to be supposed that any considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. But obviously without such common belief no society can prosper—say rather no society can subsist; for without ideas held in common, there is no common action, and without common action, there may still be men, but there is no social body. In order that society should exist, and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is required that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the case, unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source, and consents to accept certain matters of belief at the hands of the community.”[2]
The West in its urge to repudiate wholesale its own heritage in pursuit of tolerance has embraced the politics of postmodernity. Objective morality is scorned, and objective history cannot exist and must be rewritten through the lenses of materialism, racial theory, and gendered critique. Internet snark and 24-hour news cycles thrive on “gotcha” moments, where complications and contradictions become cancellations and banishment to the dustbin of history. Thomas Jefferson, Cecil Rhodes, and even Winston Churchill are reduced to racists and Theodore Herzl transmographied into a proponent of ethnic cleansing. Notwithstanding the intellectual dishonesty of this intentional misreading of history, the most pernicious aspect of this trend is the necessary fracturing of the “common belief” De Tocqueville described, which has created cleavages that go far deeper than the superficiality of whichever individual faces the Jacobite guillotine of cancellation each week. This undermines the unity of Western society through fracturing common thought and the common exercise of life, liberty, and happiness.
In his excellent recent article on Britain’s prospects for survival, Tom McTague notes that “states that have forgotten who they are tend not to last long.” He writes this not in the assumption that the collapse of the West will necessarily be violent, but rather that union states founded on shared ideals, history, and culture beyond the simple, conservative notion of shared ethnicity have a history of undermining themselves when elites no longer freely associate with those shared ideals, history, and cultural elements. He points to Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union as examples; in Austria-Hungary, elites became Austrian, and in the Soviet Union the independence movements of the periphery resulted in an independence movement for Russia itself.
Tom McTague’s article is a must-read, and it highlights many of the central issues at play. In today’s Anglosphere, the idea of individual liberty is taken to an extreme in which the individual is not only more important than society, but society has actually become an encumbrance to the development and freedom of the individual. For this, I point to the individual’s right to demand that society reconceptualise its understanding of language to accommodate the individual’s gender identity, to the individual’s right to demand that complicated history is reduced to being viewed through a single lens, to the individual’s right to demand that society enforce equal outcomes that reduce certain individuals’ chances to excel, and to the individual’s right to demand that speech that disagrees with this parasitic takeover of society is silenced, chilled, until only correct thoughts dared verbalised.
That illiberal people who fear the free marketplace of ideas use the language of individual rights to hijack liberal society is deeply ironic, and this irony has spawned its own culture industry. Apart from endless meme-makers on Left and Right (whatever those labels mean anymore), satirical films that appeal to the need for people to feel profound obscure the object of their scorn through a layer of rice paper. Viewers feel like they are “in on it,” and feel further separation from their fellow citizens. A common worldview retreats further into the past, and along with it, a common sense of shared nationhood.
And yet, the satire is weak. Take, for example, “Don’t Look Up,” with an all-star cast that included everyone from Leonardo Di Caprio to Ariana Grande. It recycled recognisable political theatre to conflate and politicise issues that are not at all related and not necessarily political, most notably climate change and COVID-19.
Life is simply more complicated than the plot of a film that was co-written by a Bernie Sanders speechwriter, who, tellingly, never had to sully the righteousness of his cause with the complicated compromises one must make when actually governing. Though I personally found the film entertaining, it played into the Manichean Lie that one side is right and one wrong. Most uncomfortable was my realisation that those who like this film draw a one-to-one relationship between the satire of the film and the reality of political life, with the same sense of righteous indignation as if a genuine apocalypse were at hand. Indeed, even for thoughtful observers, it is increasingly difficult to identify the difference between politics and entertainment. Perhaps this is intentional, but more likely than not, it is unintentional, like all great conspiracies. When political advisors make a movie, how can it not reflect the spin factory in which they have spent the entirety of their professional lives? When there is horizontal integration of media elites, political elites, and business elites, and that integration crosses the Atlantic, is that not the explanation for the paranoid conspiracy theory that the globalised elite rule at the expense of everyone else?[3]
When members of the Netflix-cum-New Yorker tote bag class see satire and “get it,” they feel plugged into high-brow society, but they do not understand that they are merely consumers of a political cleavage manufacturing system at once profitable for its masters and devastating for society. The individual feels righteous because she has come to believe in an illiberal perversion of Western ideals, in which the individual’s whims are more important than the health of societal discourse. This ideology, reinforced through social media algorithms, increases this sense of certainty and requires an ever-increasing amount of narcissism as an input. People feel a need to be overly unique, to be “traumatised” by normal life, to redefine more words and demand the working classes who do not have time to listen patiently to their prolonged adolescence apologise for their transphobia, homophobia, chauvinism, Karenism, racism, and privilege. The irony becomes complete. The chasm becomes uncrossable.
There is no good reason why one must believe that because climate change is real we must all eat bugs instead of meat. Similarly, there is nothing inherently left-wing or right-wing about being sceptical of the value of lockdowns or whether society should restrict the freedom of those who chose not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet, here we are. What these politicised shouting matches reveal is that we are missing “consent to accept certain matters of belief at the hands of the community.” We start from different sources, we ask different questions, and we get upset when the answers we come up with are at odds. Of course, the answer to “What will result in fewer COVID-19 deaths” is different to the answer to “What do we value in society, and what risks to that which we value are we willing to accept?”. Perhaps, when we ask the same questions and exist in the same information environment, compromise, respect, and a shared vision of the future become achievable – one without a culture war, for we will acknowledge that we share the same culture.
If the West is to remain liberal, it must return to its civilisational roots. It must be proud of its cultural values, including its shared communitarian values stemming from the enlightenment and Judeo-Christian traditions. Not least of these values is of course individualism. Nothing is more important than reaffirming longstanding definitions of words; we must fight redefinition at every turn. Individualism means that individuals are free to be different. For any difference to be meaningful, there must be a norm, otherwise men are simply atomised, free energy unbounded by gravity. As De Tocqueville wrote two centuries ago, “It is required that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.” These certain predominant ideas are clear. We must take pride in our civilisation and allow the weird and wonderful to flourish alongside – but never in spite of – our civilisation.
Note: This was originally written in January 2022, but I am publishing now. Why? Because I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to start writing my commentary into the void. I’ve changed my mind. Why wouldn’t I add to the cacophony?
[1] Ecclesiastes 1:9
[2] Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter 2.
[3] Indeed, it should be noted that this conspiracy theory exists to varying explanations on the Far Left and the Far Right. Interestingly, both seem to have a fascination with Israel on this point.