Is the Left Collapsing in Real Time?

 The left seems to be experiencing cognitive dissonance. A poet friend, politics well to the left, responded to the release of the Epstein files with these lines:

Individuality, 
Sinful seed that 
It is, discounted 
From the congress, 
Shell game intent 
Leads us towards 
Discord & murder.

He blames the Epstein pedophile cult on “individuality.” 

Individuality was obviously not a feature of these crimes. That would be, for example, Jeffrey Dahmer. This was a group—a cabal, a conspiracy. But this presumably does not fit in with the leftist world view: that the collective is good by its nature and even gets to determine good and evil; while the individual and individualism is bad.

The Epstein Hellfire Club is actually the perfect application of the left-wing postmodern idea that reality, and morality, are "social constructs." By these lights, the Little Saint James crowd had every right to decide among themselves that, for them, there was nothing wrong or immoral about pedophilia, or cannibalism, or rape, or murder. QED

In the same discussion, he then condemns globalization as “colonialism nouveau.”

This seems to be to be pulling away from the leftist line. Isn’t the left in favour of globalization? After all, Trump is famously opposed to it. And logically, they should be: it is the ultimate in collectivization. The ultimate move away from the individual.

It seems incoherent. Perhaps he is mulling things through in his own mind. He may be turning into an individual.

Individualism

 

The height of selfishness

My students, asked to explain “individualism”—it comes up in our readings—invariably come up with “selfishness.” Xerxes seems to think the same. 

I suspect that this is the baleful influence of our Marxist/fascist education system. Which would sneer at "rugged individualism" and "cowboys." No doubt that is "White supremacist and "partiarchal."

If you think “individualism” means “selfishness,” then you must think Oskar Schindler was selfish; or Socrates, Qu Yuan, Thomas More, the Buddha, or Jesus Christ. Not to mention Einstein, Newton, Tolstoy, Picasso, Casey Jones, Father Damien, or Pasteur.

Individualism means you believe it is the duty and right of the individual to make decisions for himself or herself. To exercise free will and make ethical choices. No more going along with the crowd.

Without individualism, there is no morality, and no human progress. Only evil and decline.

“Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.”

The Wisdom of Magpies

 

The proverbial thieving magpie

Friend Xerxes believes magpies can teach humans a thing or two. In an Australian experiment, magpies fitted with tracking devices pecked them off one another. This, to Xerxes, was a display of altruism, shaming humans, who fetishize competition instead. We ought, like the magpies, to learn to cooperate.

He blames the human love of competition, surprisingly, on Darwin, not on Adam Smith.

What the magpies did was cooperation, but not true altruism. Cooperation is not altruistic, as it implies a quid pro quo. As Darwin himself could no doubt point out, herd animals derive a survival benefit through cooperation. By cooperating, they increase each individual’s chance of survival.

Altruism: OED: “Behaviour of an animal that benefits one or more others (typically of its own species), but which carries a cost for the individual concerned.”

True altruism would therefore be conduct that actually reduces the ability of an individual organism to survive, while increasing the ability of another organism to survive. Such cases have been found in nature, but the Australian magpies do not qualify. A magpie incurs no significant cost by pecking something off a fellow. He might do as much out of curiosity.

Xerxes’s larger point is to claim that cooperation, which he identifies with collectivism, is more moral than individualism, which he identifies with competition.

This does not work when you realize that, in microeconomics, cooperation or collectivism means a cartel in restraint of trade. 

Sometimes cooperation is more moral than competition; sometimes competition is more moral than cooperation. Do you cooperate with a rapist? With a bully?

On the other hand, individualism, which can involve either cooperation or competition as circumstances require, is reliably more moral than collectivism. Collectivism is the central premise of fascism, expressed in the fasces itself. A lynch mob is a collective endeavor.

Flag of the Italian Fascist Party

The problem is that only individuals have a conscience; groups or collectives do not. The pull of the group—peer pressure—is a force operating against conscience. Altruism, when it occurs, almost necessarily occurs at the individual level. Even if a moral leader leads a group to act for the greater benefit, he or she is not acting morally: it is not moral to demand self-sacrifice of others.

Born with a Gift of Laughter, and a Sense that the World Was Mad

Friend Cyrus opines that morality is derived from the practical needs of society. More generally, “cultural relativism” has become a common position: morality is what your society says it is.

This goes against one of the most vital of all insights: that the world is mad.

So says Christianity: God came to the world, and the world crucified him.

Not just the civil authorities, either. The religious authorities were very much in on the act. And not just the authorities, either. They judgment is ultimately confirmed by the mob, by democratic vote.

Seems pretty definitive: whatever society as a whole is pushing, it is not reliable. You can’t derive morality from social authority.

This is also a possible understanding of Jesus’s warning “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

A pessimistic reading is that very few get to heaven. A more optimistic reading is that we only get to heaven one by one, never by following the crowd.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says of his disciples—that is, of Christians—“I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world…. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”

Christians are to be in the world, but not of it.

What about the Church? Isn’t it a social authority?

Yes, it is—and have we not seen ourselves, even in very recent days, that as a social authority it is not reliable? What is reliable is the “deposit of faith,” the scriptures and time-tested traditions it preserves, and must exist to preserve. But not the USCCB or CCCB, meeting as a group—and not the Vatican.

The common phrase “whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name, I am with you,” often used to describe the Church, is a misquotation. Jesus actually said, “whenever two or three of you.” This suggests an upper limit as well as a lower one for his true presence.

There must have been a reason why, of his many disciples, he chose only twelve to be apostles, to whom he delegated authority. Only twelve to join him in the Upper Room. The apostles themselves understood this number as significant, for when Judas apostasized, they chose one successor.

Twelve seems a reasonable upper limit at which all members of the group will know one another and interact with one another as individuals. It is the upper limit of human sanity.

Noah

The same insight, that the world is mad, or is no moral guide, is found in Judaism, only a little less centrally. It is the story of Noah, of Lot—only the individual, only one man, is righteous. It is the story of the prophets, almost invariably, as Jesus notes, persecuted by their society. It is the story of the Jews as a whole, in the diaspora.

It is also clear enough in Buddhism—Sakyamuni literally rejects “the world”—he was fated to be a world ruler. He abandons his city and his palaces, then even his few companions in the forest, to achieve his enlightenment in solitude.

To me, the most worrisome thing about Islam is the absence from its mainstream of this awareness that the world is mad.

The Sufis understand it.

Beyond our great religious traditions, the insanity of the social plane is also the core insight of much of our greatest literature. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is always struggling with an irresponsible crew. In the Iliad: nobody listens to Cassandra or to Laocoon. And Troy falls not by force of massed arms, but through the cleverness of an individual, Odysseus. In the entire Medieval “knight errant” tradition; like the cowboy tradition that followed it. In Don Quixote—superficially Quixote is mad, and those around him are sane. Yet we sympathize with him, and see them all as dullards by comparison. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Gulliver’s Travels. Kafka’s entire corpus; Lord of the Flies; Catch-22; To Kill a Mockingbird; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “High Noon.” Orwell’s 1984.

It is a convenient error to understand 1984 as solely a prediction of the future. “1984” is “1948” transposed, the date the book was written, for a reason. Orwell meant that, if looked at carefully, the situation in England in 1948 was already that described.

Is there any similar literary or philosophical argument for communitarianism?

There is. It is called fascism.

The Madness of Crowds

Isaiah

Given that people in groups are prone to madness, how can we prevent this and stay sane? It becomes an urgent issue. Perhaps the most important issue for any culture or civilization.

Freedom of speech. If someone sees the delusion, he or she must be free to announce it to others.

Ancient Israel had the tradition of prophecy. The system was not perfect, but the office of prophet was recognized: the individual could speak truth in against the social authority. And a Hebrew prophet was not without honour.

It is troubling therefore that we no longer recognize prophets.

Ancient Greece had a more accidental system. It had professional philosophers. Broken into city states, it was easy for a thoughtful individual who alienated the consensus in one city to escape to the next for asylum. Socrates was famously put to death for dissent—but in Plato’s account, he did have the option of instead slipping off to Thebes.

I suspect it was these two systems allowing perceptive and sane individuals to openly call out the mass delusions and popular sins that gave Judea and Greece, tiny nations, their overwhelming cultural and intellectual dominance over the ancient world; a dominance that persists into the present.

More recently, the British and American legal traditions of freedom of speech, imperfect as they are, are surely what has led to the modern global cultural and intellectual dominance of the Anglosphere.

Perhaps, it is true, a chicken is here in hot pursuit of a hypothetical egg. An honest group will naturally be more open to freedom of speech. A polity that is aware it has something to hide will naturally suppress it.

Either way, it is obviously ominous that free speech is now under attack. To believe in free speech is now automatically “racist.” It is not just the formal legal assault of “hate laws,” but “political correctness” and the social shunning of those whose opinions differ. Amplified and abetted by the cult of psychiatry, which essentially holds, in Orwell’s words, that “lunacy is a minority of one”—whatever the majority believes is necessarily true, and anyone who thinks otherwise necessarily mad. If some bearded, hair-shirted senior declares today in the street that we all risk divine retribution for our wrongs and errors, we do not respect him as prophet. We silence him as insane. Psychiatry is a tremendously effective tool for the matrix.

Individualism vs. Community

Nuremberg shows its community spirit.

I think my leftist friend Xerxes has hit upon something in his latest column: the essential difference between the modern North American left and right. He speaks of joining his church choir as a transcendent experience:

“We have stopped being a collection of individuals, and have become a collective organism. A single mind. And in a sense, a single body – we even have to breathe as one, line by line.

We transcend our individuality. And it feels wonderful.”

And he concludes:

“Worship also attempts to connect with the most transcendent reality of all – merging with the divine.

Granted, not everyone in a choir will reason that singing derives from a universal desire for transcendence. But they all know intuitively they’re part of a community.”

And that's probably the key to it all. To a leftist, this sense of losing the individual in community is a self-evident good. After all, it transcends “selfishness.” So it partakes of the divine. The group is divine.

But any rightist reads that first sentence with horror, and thinks of the tight coordination of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies or the North Korean mass choreographed displays in sports stadia. The solidarity bred by a choir? Like Jack's choir boys in Lord of the Flies? Community is the danger; individualism is what partakes of the divine. 

Pyongyang shows its community spirit.

And I am here to explain why the left is wrong and the right is right.

Individualism is no more “selfish” than community. Every community, by definition, excludes as well as includes. Not all sentient beings are members, or we would not refer to a community. If, then, the members of that community seek their own mutual interests, they are corporately acting as selfishly as any individual would be who did the same acting alone. So selfishness is unrelated to individualism. Either a group or an individual can act either selfishly or unselfishly.

At the same time, individualism means taking responsibility. If you surrender that moral responsibility to a community, and defer to their judgement, you are waiving any ability to act morally. You are, on the other hand, perfectly able to act immorally: if you do something immoral as a member of a group, you are still individually responsible. You cannot say you were “only following orders.” But if, conversely, you help the poor only because you see others doing it, or because it improves your social position, it is no longer a moral act. 

Jonestown shows its community spirit.

This is why “Community,” losing your individuality in the group, is in fact traditionally considered one of the great temptations to sin. “The world, the flesh, and the devil.” Following the social consensus, the community, is “the world.” First named.

Community was the whole idea behind Fascism. That's what the symbol of the fasces was meant to represent. And, of course, community was also the whole idea behind Communism, as the name declares. It was the community of the day who put Jesus to death. A sense of community is, in turn, the underlying essence of all racism, all discrimination, all prejudice. It is the reaction to one "not in our group."  Communitarianism has produced the worst human evils in history.

Community is indeed a human need, or at least a natural human want. Just like food and sex. Accordingly, we legitimately seek community. There is nothing wrong with that. But we do not idolize it, any more than we should food or sex. Bad things then quickly happen.

The important thing is that, when we seek community, we seek it on the basis of morality; we seek to belong only to groups engaged in moral behaviour. And retain our individual judgement.

Selma shows its community spirit.

The Left Is Not about Community

A left-leaning friend who shall this time remain nameless wrote a column, which I understood as offering the proposition that the left was all about “community,” while the right was all about “individualism.” I sent him an email arguing that the premise was false, and he wrote back only the simple sentence “No, I didn't say that.”

Rereading, I still think that is exactly what he said. He wrote, for example, “The alternative to community is individualism.” So far, so good--but it sets up the opposition. Then: “The right tends to takes a vigilante response. If you don’t like something, you take individual action against it -- the lone gunman who shoots up a newspaper, a night club, a concert, a school.” “By contrast, the so-called left knows that it needs government to control the corporations it doesn’t trust. So it has to take collective action.” “So the characteristic of the left is that it organizes.”

Even if it was not, it is certainly what I have heard many times from those on the left: the left is about community, the right is about individualism. Consider Obama's statement that “government is just our word for things we choose to do together.” 

The subtext, of course, is that “individualism” really means “selfishness.” With a mental image of the cartoon “greedy capitalist.”

"Organized big business interests."

I suspect that my friend's response really reveals that my points in rebuttal to this claim were strong enough that he did not feel able to counter them. So I think they may be worth posting here.

Because the premise is wrong. Edmund Burke, for example, was all about community and people helping one another in human solidarity. And he is considered a founder figure to most modern conservatives.

“Seems to me your association of community with the left and individualism with the right does not work on several levels. Beginning with the fact that you are quoting the ideal of Canada as a community of communities from Joe Clark, who was overall on the right of the Canadian spectrum. The response of the Liberals, the party to his left, at the time, was, in rough translation, 'like hell it is.' Note that small towns, real communities, “with lots of face to face interaction,” also actually tend to vote on the right; the big cities are more likely to be jammed with leftists, and leftists are more likely to congregate in the big cities. Where nobody knows one another. It would seem that either the right values community more than the left, or communities see their own values in the right more than the left.

Leftist ideologue?

I think Robert Reich [whom my friend quoted on this] is closer to the mark when he says that the right trusts corporations more than government, and the left trusts government more than corporations. The left thinks government is necessary to restrain corporations. The right thinks private enterprise is necessary to restrain government. But either a government or a corporation is a community in the basic sense. Neither is an individual. The essential difference is not community versus individual, but that a corporation is, for all participants, basically and theoretically a voluntary association, while being subject to a government is, by and large, a forced association—you can move, but within limits. That is a different issue, voluntary or forced, not community or individual. Or perhaps it is not. I think it could be argued that no forced association is a real community, on the grounds that any real community is based on love, not power.

You also mention, as examples of community, churches. Right. Perfect example. But any number of polls show that, the more people are involved in a local church, the more likely they are to vote on the right, and vice versa. I believe this is true as well of just about all other voluntary associations: service clubs like Rotary, amateur sports associations, charity groups, Scout troops, and so on. Think about it. Strong evidence that, in fact, community matters to the right, and not to the left.

You almost seem to suggest that the right is somehow in support of lone gunmen. That is, of course, outrageous. To begin with, lone shooters are themselves no more likely to be from the political right than from the political left. Indeed, I think historically, the left would predominate on that score. Sacco and Vanzetti were not Republicans. I guess you admit that in saying their politics do not matter. Second, it is the right, generally, that calls for more police and stricter law enforcement, presumably to prevent just such things. The left seems generally down on law enforcement agencies of all kinds. There are now calls on the left, for example, to abolish ICE. The right also tends to support tougher penalties for such crimes.

I suspect you are basing your claim here solely on the US issue of gun rights. This is not correct: the right's argument here is that more guns in private possession will prevent such incidents, or end them more quickly; it is not meant to promote them.

Again, the emphasis on 'law and order,' traditionally heard from the right, is the political position diametrically opposite to 'vigilante action.' Which, therefore, is probably more properly assigned to the left. Isn't it the left who are always talking about 'taking it to the streets'? And surely we are seeing just such “vigilante action” currently down south, with groups like Antifa resorting to violence in support of their preferred politics. No doubt factions on the right are capable of such misbehaviour at times as well; but that is not what we are seeing most often currently.

Perhaps there is a valid distinction to be made, and perhaps you are making it, in saying that the left organizes around single issues; perhaps indeed there is a contrast here. The left organizes around single political issues; that does seem to be right. The right, by contrast, organizes not primarily for politics, but for community. Churches, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, and service associations do not exist for political purposes. The left is by this standard again more individualistic: they live as individuals and apart except in the case of some common political interest. Not sure whether this holds up, but it looks right.

At the same time, it is important to point out that “community” is not without its own problems. Whenever you define any group as a community, you are also, automatically, defining everyone else as “other.” Nazi Germany was profoundly communitarian, as was Pol Pot's Kampuchea or Mao's China or Karadzik's Serbian Bosnia. So was the KKK.

Community Barbeque

It does seem that the left currently is far more favourable toward such “group identities,” such divisions into opposing factions, than the right. I do not think this is a good thing. And I do not think these are real communities, because they divide as much as unite people.

This is one vital reason why voluntary associations, like corporations, are better than enforced associations, like governments. The former is about love; the latter is about power. Keeping membership voluntary—on both sides—tends to prevent such problems. Because the “other” can become “one of us.” Note too that by this definition, the KKK, although non-governmental, or the Nazi party, were not voluntary associations: blacks or Jews or Catholics or immigrants could not join."

The Supposed Evil of Individualism

One more example of the way so many people get things exactly reversed: a friend feels guilty for nursing urged for freedom from community, and supposes such urges are immoral. He writes:

     

I don’t think it came from my church or my religious faith. If anything, they taught me to value community.
      An oft-told sermon illustration says that a fire burns hot while its embers are gathered together. Remove any single ember from that fire, and that ember soon grows cold and lifeless.
      The same applies to human interaction. I have been known to argue that a truly isolated individual can never be fully human. Our relationships make us who we are.

The error of thinking that communitarianism is more moral than individualism is an old one, as well as a very common one among the modern left: many of the ancient Greeks, including Plato, thought disciplined Sparta was somehow more moral than individualistic Athens on this basis.

But they were, and are, wrong.

In the gospel, it is pretty plain that Jesus took pains to cut all conventional tendrils of community. He did not marry. He rejected allegiance to family (“What have I to do with you, woman?”) and demanded that any true follower do the same (“Let the dead bury their own dead.” “Whoever does not despise his own father and mother for my sake is not worthy of me.”) He apparently rejected ties of nationality, speaking openly to Samaritans, praising Samaritans and Roman soldiers; and this stance was affirmed by the early church (“neither Jew nor Greek in Christ”). Given that, as an itinerant teacher and preacher, his occupation was “Pharisee,” he obviously felt no strong allegiance to his class or trade (“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees!”).

In this “rugged individualism,” he stands, of course, directly in the tradition of the prophets, who almost to a man left their settled communities and lived a life of wandering, often in the desert. Truly isolated individuals.

So it would seem that Christianity and Judaism (not to mention Buddhism) are clearly on the side of individualism being more moral than life in community. Not all communities, clearly, are equally bad—the church, too, is a community—but the need to reject community seems to be prior in all of this. A principled, strict, individualism comes first, and then voluntary communities can be formed by a conscious contract among individuals retaining their inherent individual rights.

The lesson of history agrees. The idea that community comes first was, as the names imply, the core ideal of both Fascism and Communism, not to mention the Cosa Nostra and the Ku Klux Klan. The greatest crimes of mankind have always been in the name of community and communitarianism.

The problem is that community--”peer pressure”--subverts conscience and free will. “Following community values” can be a great excuse for doing deeds that, if we accepted individual responsibility, would seem plainly immoral.

Every tie that binds us closer to the other members of a given group, after all, automatically and equally also loosens our bonds to all the members of humanity who do not belong to that group.

We will not be saved because we belonged to the right club.

Sparta is long gone, and there are few traces remaining. Fascism, too, is gone, and the old Soviet empire. Freewheeling, trading, Athens went on to found Western Civilization, and is still there, thriving.