Mamdani, Weaver & the warm collective

The newly elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, said in his inaugural speech that he wanted to replace "the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism".

Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration

Bishop Robert Barron responded negatively, with the comment:

Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people in the last century. Socialist and Communist forms of government around the world today - Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea etc - are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy , which people like Mayor Mamdani caricatures as "rugged individualism."

Fr Dave McNaughton disagreed, replying:

Bishop Barron is gaslighting...Reading the full text suggests that Mamdani was advocating for a very Catholic idea, the practice of solidarity. Shame on Bishop Barron.

So, do we follow the priest or the bishop on this issue? Even though I'm not as straightforwardly in favour of the market economy as Bishop Barron (as the market needs to be regulated carefully or else it too can be dissolving of society), nonetheless I was more disappointed with Fr McNaughton's position. 

It is a rookie error to think that the meaning of words used by progressive moderns is the same as how those words were once understood in pre-modern times or in church theology. Moderns did not abandon traditional concepts like freedom, equality or justice, but instead colonised them so that they could be used within a modernist framework. It is therefore a mistake to assume that when figures like Mamdani use words like "collective" that this is an endorsement of traditional notions of solidarity. 

Even though I am a long-time critic of the hyper-individualism of our culture, I understand why many people blanch when hearing the word "collective". It has become associated with ideological, centralised, statist, redistributist, technocratic, impersonal, distant and authoritarian forms of social organisation. This is not a type of solidarity that most people find appealing.

Some of these features come out in the politics of Cea Weaver, a young woman whom Mamdani has appointed to oversee rent control in New York. She wants to impoverish the white middle class; block the employment of white men; and discourage the procreation of white boys:

So the concept of solidarity as espoused by Cea Weaver does not extend to whites in general and white men in particular. Why? Because it has an ideological basis, as do most forms of modern "collectivism". She believes that the power structures that prevent humans from being truly free and equal are "whiteness" and "patriarchy" and therefore she sees things through a lens of white, male systemic privilege which makes her want to abolish white men rather than extend a hand of solidarity to them. 

This is surely a long way from a genuinely Catholic understanding of solidarity.

Her viewpoint is also, predictably, redistributist (wanting to make the white middle class poor) and statist. 

Ironically, the modernist view of solidarity is also, in its own way, individualistic. It seeks to "liberate" the individual from traditional forms of community, such as families, and instead provide a "socialised" care that is provided in an impersonal and detached way by a centralised, bureaucratically run welfare state. 

We have travelled a considerable distance already toward this aim. Consider that in 1932, Leon Trotsky praised the efforts of the Bolsheviks to abolish the family in these terms:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note that Trotsky describes the family as a "shut-in petty enterprise". It was too local for him, too enclosed within itself, it was too much its own little world. 

So what then of a more traditional understanding of solidarity? This was built around an organic concept of society, in which we belonged to social bodies such families and nations, drawn together through natural loves and loyalties.

I won't attempt a complete defence of this traditional understanding. I do, however, want to respond to Trotsky. Trotsky denigrated the family as a shut-in petty enterprise. At the surface level, this might seem to be true. The family embraces only a relatively small number of people. And it can become its own little world.

But it is not petty, not when it works the way that it should. It gives us the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of who we are as men and women. For men, to be masculine providers and protectors. To build and to leave a legacy. For women, to express maternal instincts and drives and to create a loving home. Families come with a sense of lineage, and so can connect us to generations past, present and future. They can provide some of our sense of identity and belonging. They can provide us with a sense of pride in familial achievements, and gratitude for the sacrifices of our forebears. 

And the jibe about being "shut in" might also be challenged. First, because family at its best can lead to a sense of belonging to a unique little community, one with its own quirks and its own unwritten understandings, its own little culture and its own characters. If done well, family can become more than an aggregate of its parts, so that it takes on a unique quality of its own, a distinct way of being human in the world, and therefore a good in itself.

Second, if we are formed well by our upbringing within a loving family, then this is a foundation for us to reach out toward larger communities. We are capable then of the kind of loves that make us value our neighbourhoods, our towns, our regions, our nations. The smaller, local forms of community form us, and preserve us, and support us in ways that make us capable of radiating outwards, even to universals like a concern for humanity. And if we are truly connected to the particular, local social bodies we belong to, we are more likely to see the transcendent goods reflected in these, and this too gives us a higher and more expansive experience of life.

One final point. It is also somewhat artificial to set the notion of a rugged individualism against that of a warmth of collectivism. In the older concept of an organic society, the idea was that each person had a role to play as a distinct member of a social body. It was therefore important that individuals were able to carry out these social roles, or else the social body itself would suffer harm. To give one example, it was important for men to have the strength of character - the masculine toughness - to do the hard things required of them. This was not done in opposition to the collective good but in support of it, not so that a man could live alone outside of a community, but so he could effectively contribute to it.

Is the left really collectivist?

It's common for right-liberals to frame politics as a contest between supporters of individualism (themselves) and collectivism (the left).

There are at least two types of individualism. The first relates to individual responsibility, and here left-liberals do seem to be more collectivist. Whereas a right-liberal will stress the ideal of self-reliance and the aim of successful competition in the market, left-liberals are more likely to claim that "it takes a village to raise a child" or to stress the need for social security.

The second kind of individualism relates to identity. Right-liberals often strongly oppose the notion of collective identity (think Jordan Peterson), seeing it as an affront to the sovereignty of the individual. They see themselves as defenders of individualism against the collectivism of leftist identity politics.

But it's not as straightforward as this. Leftist identity politics has a lot of individualistic assumptions built into it. As an example, consider the following criticism of Jordan Peterson's politics by Anne Gallagher in The Spectator. Gallagher is criticising Peterson from the left. She gives this as one of the reasons she became disenchanted with Peterson:

The first relates to Peterson’s conviction (shared by many conservatives and some progressives) that the bulk of our current social and political ills are the fault of ‘identity politics’: of groups organising and advocating on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender orientation, etc. This idea is attractive because it helps us to make sense of the sharp divisions we see everywhere in public life. It also presents the alluring prospect of a quick fix: by eliminating identity politics we can somehow make whole what is so badly broken.

But the truth is likely much messier. As one African-American debate opponent pointed out to him, racial identity was not something that black Americans happily assumed for themselves. It was imposed by force in order to separate them from the dominant identity and, through that separation, to withhold basic rights and freedoms. The same goes for women and other disempowered groups that are now using their externally imposed ‘identity’ to seek more space, more opportunities and greater power. It is those who inflicted the identity in the first place – and who sense a threat to the disproportionate space, opportunities and power they have enjoyed as a result – who are made most uncomfortable by ‘identity politics’. Peterson is right that identity politics, taken to the extreme, represent a threat to valuable liberal ideas about the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. But his unwillingness (or inability) to explore contradictions and inconsistencies, and his simmering displeasure when they are noted, is telling.

This is an admirably clear statement of leftist identity politics. It assumes that group identity is wholly unnatural and that it is forced onto minority groups as an act of oppression and disempowerment. These groups then use this artificially imposed identity to fight back against the oppressor.

Canadian professor, Dr Ricardo Duchesne, draws out this point about the individualist assumptions underlying leftist identity politics in the following:

It is not that one side is into identity politics and another is not. Insomuch as leftists say that males and females are really equal, they are saying that males and females are just individuals. The difference is that for the left the playing field in the West still favours males, and for this reason leftists insist that we must play identity politics. While leftists are always finding new victims, in principle their identity politics is meant to be temporary. They want a future individualistic world in which social conditions allow for the development of the full potentialities of all individuals regardless of race and sex.

...The same logic applies to the way postmodernists use racial categories. They don't believe in races. They believe that in our current society minorities are "racialized" by dominant Whites, and that overcoming this racial hierarchy necessitates race identity politics. Their aim is to transcend altogether any form of racial identity for the sake of a society in which everyone is judged as an individual.

Leftist identity politics is extraordinary when you think about it. It requires us to believe, for instance, that women only have a distinct female identity because men "inflicted" it on them, imposing it "by force." It makes a female identity sound like a terrible thing to have, a punishment; it gives to men an almost god-like power of creating a female identity out of nothing; and it ignores the more obvious natural origins of women identifying as women.

So leftist identity politics does lead to "collective action" but the underlying philosophy is individualistic. The answer to it is not a right-liberal rejection of identity. This only leaves the targets of leftist identity politics weakly disorganised and unable to defend themselves.

And, more than this, humans are relational creatures. So you do not defend the individual by making him autonomous of others or by denying the sense of identity, belonging, connectedness, commitment and security that comes with membership of natural human communities (see here for a defence of identity).

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Breaking the right way

Some encouraging news. The young women of the alt right are making up their minds on the national question and they are choosing to reject civic nationalism.

It began with a YouTube video by Lauren Rose which I have already posted on (here).

Then Faith Goldy posted the following tweet:

I find it interesting that civic nationalism has some emotional hold on her. I'm not sure why, as it seems emotionally empty to me. Instead of a deeper hold of shared ancestry, history and culture it is based instead on a shared allegiance to some wrongheaded liberal political principles - and in practice most Western nations don't even insist that new immigrants share these principles. Still, I have to accept that something about civic nationalism once appealed to her, but that she now recognises that there is no future in it, and that it leads to ethnocide.

The "coming out" of Lauren Rose and Faith Goldy emboldened the YouTuber "Blonde in the Belly of the Beast" to make the following thoughtful video explaining why she too has shifted away from civic nationalism:




Part of what motivated Blonde to make the video was her negative reaction to the following tweet by Jordan Peterson:

Peterson is good on many issues but this is straight out right-liberalism in which individualism is set against the evil of collectivism. I wish that Blonde had developed a point that she alluded to in her video, namely that this is a false opposition. If you support the individual, then you have to support healthy forms of collective life as well, because humans are in their natures social creatures who develop themselves most fully and readily through these forms of collective life.

The family is one obvious example. This is a collective, and not even a voluntary one. Nonetheless, it is how individuals experience maternal love and paternal guidance; it is how individuals are socialised through relationships with their siblings to have successful peer relationships; it is how individuals develop an appreciation for the efforts and achievements of past generations and part of how they form a commitment toward future generations; it is how men exercise masculine instincts to provide, to protect and to guide and how women exercise feminine maternal instincts; it is how individuals have the opportunity to experience enduring loving relationships that might endure into old age; it is how children experience the stability and "rootedness" that is part of creating an enduring resilience in later life....need I go on?

The right liberal opposition between the individual and the collective is a false one. Instead, the relationship between both has to be ordered the right way, so that individuals uphold the necessary forms of collective life, and make some sacrifices to do so, but without the dignity and significance of individual life being denied by the collective.

Does it not make sense, for instance, for an individual to make some sacrifices on behalf of family, if this is such an important institution in the life of the individual? The real point here is not to deny the importance of family as a collective, but to try to arrange things so that the individual sacrifice is worthwhile, i.e. to arrange things to that there is a viable and healthy culture of family life.

Blonde focuses on a different issue in her video. She notes that in practice it is only whites who are pressured to follow the idea of existing only as individuals, without a collective identity or a collective interest, whereas others are allowed to organise effectively as collectives. This leaves whites defenceless and unable to uphold any right to a future existence - or even to defend themselves against the aggressive politics that is increasingly being directed against them.