Seeking to defend the family within the discourse of modern rights is like trying to save Gondor by using the Ring. By Sebastian MORELLO Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su Liberalism is not simply a social philosophy centred on personal liberty, the consent of the governed, equality before the law, and the protection of private property, though it is often presented as little more than commitment to these tenets. Purportedly, liberalism advocates for freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, emphasising individual autonomy and limits to governmental power.
But in fact, under a liberal regime, we observe the incremental disappearance of such things. People find themselves restricted, increasingly poor, with vast wealth concentrated among a tiny elite. They are subjected to policies for which they never voted, with the law used as a weapon to punish dissent. And they find themselves struggling to acquire property, vulnerable to ever more governmental dependence and intrusion, and thought-policed.
I believe that liberalism’s inescapable tendency to realise the opposite of what its claims entail is due to liberalism’s grounding in an anthropological assumption which is often unspoken, for speaking it would immediately reveal its falsity.
Liberalism contains within itself a subterranean and largely unexamined hubris: basically, liberalism is deemed by liberals to be the natural and inevitable worldview of human beings once they are fully emancipated from everything that encages them. It is assumed that if the imposition of liberalism is successful in its endeavour to emancipate the members of society—from their history, cultural attachments, unchosen obligations and duties, customs and mores, and everything else that might otherwise hinder the establishment of a fully liberal society—then those people will become their authentic selves . They will be unhampered by the baggage that hitherto prevented them from becoming their authentic selves, and they will consequently discover that all authentic, emancipated selves are naturally liberals.
Liberalism thus contains a circular logic: liberalism emancipates; the emancipated will unavoidably be liberals; those emancipated liberals will advance liberalism. And so it goes on and on.
One of the most famous liberals of my own country of England, John Stuart Mill, wrote the following:
Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.
So you see, according to Mill, the person’s own character—that is, the supposed pre-social ‘authentic self’—must be emancipated from tradition, and tradition’s stranglehold on social conduct, if we are going to secure human happiness and progress. The great challenge that liberalism has found itself contending with in our own age, however, is that its internal circular logic has been revealed to be faulty in the concrete .
When, for example, Muslims come to Europe from Syria, or Pakistan, or North Africa, or any other Muslim country, and are provided with the social, moral, and economic conditions to become supposedly emancipated, we find that, very often, such Muslims do not become liberals but fanatics and extremists. Consequently, we have the so-called ‘diaspora radicalisation’ phenomenon, which is the object of growing sociological study, analysing the rise of jihadism throughout the Western world.
What is especially interesting is that when liberals try to understand why Muslims residing in the West are becoming jihadis rather than liberals themselves, they routinely blame not the Islamic texts, nor the imams and preachers, nor the attitudes of the Muslim community, nor anything else connected with Islam. Rather, they blame indigenous European populations.
In my country, it is thus the beer-drinking, St George-waving patriot who is blamed as the reason for ongoing failures of Muslim integration in the West, and consequently he is denounced as ‘far-right’—a term whose abuse and misuse has rendered it more or less meaningless. Last week, for example, the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer condemned Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy as “far-right” because he had the audacity to query the growing phenomenon of public prayer demonstrations by Muslim populations across Britain, suggesting that these demonstrations intimated an appetite for domination.
The liberal will tell you that Muslims are becoming jihadis not because jihad is integral to Islam, but because Muslims were prevented from integrating. They found themselves in a society in which people were still attached to their national inheritance, their traditions, culture, history, customs and so forth, which were broadly perceived by Muslims to be exclusionary. And that is, of course, the only logical analysis available to someone who has adopted as an a priori prejudice the notion that liberalism is the natural condition of the emancipated individual.
What has this social challenge to do with the future of Christian families in Europe and beyond? My interest is not principally in the West’s Muslim populations, but in the example that they provide to illustrate a structural problem within liberalism: Liberalism’s underlying assumption is that all people, irrespective of background or religious conviction, will become liberals in a liberal society. If, in a liberal society, it is observed that everyone is not becoming liberal, it must be because the society was never made liberal enough. Either way, within the liberal paradigm, there can be no other solution to any challenge other than that of more liberalism.
This means that a liberal regime must, sooner or later, address whatever persists in any given society that continues to undermine liberalism’s endeavour to re-create that society as a fully liberal society. Thus, a liberal regime, to preserve itself, cannot avoid morphing into an illiberal regime, and in its call for individuality and diversity, it cannot avoid demanding ever more uniformity. A liberal regime must consequently seek out and extinguish any native traditions, unchosen pieties, pre-political attachments, and so forth that might hinder its emancipatory mission.
And where are such traditions, unchosen pieties, pre-political attachments inculcated? Primarily in the family. Hence, within the liberal paradigm, with all its peculiar legends about the pre-social authentic self, the realisation of progress, and the historiography of ongoing emancipation, it is inevitable and unavoidable that the crosshairs will fall on the family.
A liberal regime will accordingly ever more seek to weaken the marriage bond by making it easy to dissolve marriages; it will redefine marriage; it will identify children as possessions of the state; it will regulate home education and uniformalise curricula; it will seek to free procreation from intercourse altogether by means of new technologies. In short, it will deny the existence of nature as foundational to reality.
This is not some error of individualism merely going too far within a liberal regime that has failed to check it with other aspects of the liberal tradition, such as, for example, responsible citizenship and the private-public distinction. No. This corrosion of the family is inherent to the interior logic of liberalism. No one, it is assumed, can be fully emancipated until the family is weakened to the level of a rescindable contract, over which the state is arbiter.
Unfortunately, it is very common that defenders of the family believe that they can achieve their objectives by first accepting the terms of liberalism’s rights-based discourse. Both individual scholars and the Christian Church have increasingly adopted the terminology of human rights in seeking to mitigate the corrosion of the family. Taking note of the interior logic of liberalism calls such an approach into question and highlights why the liberal rights-based attempts to defend the family have invariably failed.
We should recall that the contemporary liberal conception of a ‘right’ is not the same as the Christian or classical conception of a ‘right’ (or ‘ius’). Rights were first understood to be things in the world, objects on which one could make a just claim. Then they were later developed to mean moral powers to fulfil obligations or duties. Then they were later developed to include negative pronouncements to protect oneself against harm or inordinate interference. Finally, in response to the worst excesses of wartime utilitarianism, they came to mean the moral powers that are seemingly infinite in number to fulfil the one obligation by which we’re all supposedly bound, namely to become our authentic selves.
Within a discourse framed by such a fiction of ongoing emancipation, of which the liberal conception of rights is just one part of the repertoire, a natural outflow of nature like marriage and family simply cannot survive. Seeking to defend the family within the discourse of modern rights is like trying to save Gondor by using the Ring.
We cannot allow the debate of the future to be framed by a narrative of competing rights which strive for primacy within a liberal order which is a priori accepted as the only possible political order. Such a debate’s terms are already set by the fictions of the prevailing regime that’s intrinsically hostile to marriage and family. The argument for the family has thus lost the debate before it’s even begun.
Really, the debate must be about whether we still believe in nature—which is ultimately everything from which our liberal, progressive paradigm wants to free us—above all that part of nature called human nature. In the end, with nature, the family stands or falls. Original article: europeanconservative.com