Culture, Literature, and Private Communities
Culture
According to the late Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot said that culture is made up of, in Kirk’s words, “a mingling culture, aesthetic attainment, and intellectual attainment.” There are also three important ways to canvass the cultural state of society. To do this one must observe and make note of the average individual, “the development of a group or class or the development of a whole society.” One thing I gather from this discussion, from Kirk, is that culture is not just “democratic,” but also has ingrained the importance of cultural elites. Modern man, of course, cannot stand the idea of natural (non-governmental) elites. Man is Equal! Is the cry of the egalitarian ethic. His nature is of the robot, waiting to be programmed by the State. In this Albert Jay Nock and his disciple Frank Chodorov made the point that the mass-mind, in a democratic government, will always try to squash natural differences between men-----education being the best example (gone are the days of teaching Latin and Greek).
Culture, a healthy one, is one that is inegalitarian, but this does not mean that the public at large does not benefit from such a culture.
T. S. Eliot wrote:
Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures, and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one culture activity alone. . . . If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has already taken place in Western Civilization----as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and private, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.
(Paleo)Libertarianism, in a way, is the foundation of thought. It is the foundation to which to build up from. A stronger foundation, the better the civilization develops and flourishes. That is to say, the more incline the foundation is with libertarianism: natural rights, private property, etc., the more civilization can grow and expand. A weaker foundation produces a weaker civilization to build to towering heights. You see, libertarianism is not the be-all and end-all of thinking. It is really confided to the foundation. (Libertarianism is not a philosophy of life.) Some old-time conservatives go after libertarian thought because they think it leaves out culture or religion or whatnot. However, they fail, in my view, to see that libertarianism is just a foundation. A society does build up from that foundation. Families, Church, markets, etc. arise. There is a hierarchy to families, as there is a hierarchy to the business world and Church. (Forgive me for being so bold, but a plus the Roman Catholic Church has is that it is hierarchical and undemocratic. By the way, Hans Hoppe made that point in a lecture.)
A couple of days ago I was speaking with one of my aunts. The topic centered on culture, God, sex, and social pressures. We talked about how society is so sex crazed. I had two general comments. One of which was from Albert Jay Nock. I said that Nock, once I explained who he was, believed that the mass-mind can only express itself on sex at its lowest levels. It does not know how to do anything else. Give it the environment to spread and it will spread at these levels. The second comment was that social pressures and constrains have disappeared. In a free society there are hierarchical outgrowths of pressures and competing authorities. These have been all lost because of statism. No longer do these social pressures have much effect. We have become atomized and isolated as individuals, detached from any tradition or norms. As Robert Nisbet said, we now have the “loose individual.” This is the necessary result of statism.
Chapter one out of Chodorov’s Out of Step, for instance, very briefly had a sentence or two about how social pressures helped “regulate” the business world. Although, not of culture, it applies just the same.
Restoring and Protecting Organic Culture
As Tom Woods said in his book The Church and the Market, traditional conservatives should understand that private property is a “major bulwark against leftist assault.” The foundation (private property) and its outgrowth give something solid for traditional conservatives. Looking to the State for answers to social or cultural problems, Dr. Woods says, is naiveté.
Fred Foldvary has done considerable work demonstrating the viability of purely private communities, and how they make provision for those things that mainstream economists have historically labeled “public goods” whose nature allegedly requires that they be provided by the state. There is in fact an enormous literature on this subject. It turns out that the reasons typically cited to justify taxation on behalf of the “common good” are entirely specious, since the goods and services in question can be provided by the private sector, without the disadvantages of a public sector monopoly . . . . .As for such property-related issues as pollution, noise, and the like, Rothbard showed . . . how such issues can be resolved within a common-law, property-rights framework. Such a framework possesses an overwhelming advantage over one that would decide such questions on the basis of the “common good,” such a vague concept could never provide the predictability, fixed rules, and peaceful social interaction that a property-rights regime makes possible.
During such times, far from looking around for excuses to curtail the right to private property, Catholics [and traditional conservatives in general] should want to have recourse to all the protections that private property can afford. If the rights of private property were respected across the board, without exception, we would have reason to expect a substantial improvement in the cultural and moral health of the American people.
To be clear, this is not to say that complete uniformity or utopia would arise. A free society, however, would allow man to develop as far as humanly possible. Man is different vis-à-vis another man, of course. Different societies and cultures would develop. And man, being human, will still engage in foolish activity. (How can he learn and grow otherwise?) One of the many problems with coercion, that violate human and private property rights, is that it brings about unintended consequences and will typically increase the very problem it is supposedly trying to cure. As Dr. Woods says, private property provides a "bulwark" against cultural leftism, which statist interventions increase and subsidize by the welfare state, and to the way it destroys social pressure and intermediate institutions (and then therefore detaches the individual from any cultural or social norms).
But beyond that, it is not possible for man to truly pursue virtue without the freedom to choose nor does the current institutional setting of today's statist society allow the flourishment, for the limited freedom man does have, of that to be the norm (i.e., values compatible with traditional conservatism and family)---the incentive structure is just the opposite. And, again, the State has destroyed all of the normal social pressures that curve man to activity that is more wise. As Lew Rockwell writes: "It is no accident that the rise of free love in the U.S. accompanied the rise of the fully developed welfare state. The goals of liberation from work (and saving and investment) and the liberation from our sexual natures stems from a similar ideological impulse: to overcome fixed realities in nature. The family has suffered as a result, just as Mises predicted it would."
To go back to Woods and his excellent book, he partially quotes Hans Hoppe on how Catholics (and traditional conservatives) should embrace libertarian anti-statism, and therefore, the rights that go with private property. Here is Hoppe, using his usually very sharp edged language and acidic style:
one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. There would be signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and, once in town, requirements for entering specific pieces of property . . . and those who did not meet these entrance requirements would be kicked out as trespassers. Almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.
The more decentralized and privatized, the greater the ability for various private communities to uphold norms. Society can be built up from the solid foundation. Private Catholic communities (and others) can develop. Here is Woods:
This is how Catholics faced with the collapse of civilized order should be thinking, rather than concocting rationales for state aggression against and expropriation of private property owners. Apart from the injustice involved, such misguided policy would only empower the state, the very institution that has done so much to undermine the kind of normal community life on which living out the Faith in practice has traditionally depended.
Hans Hoppe says that "to exclude other people from one's own property is the very means by which an owner can avoid 'bads' from happening: events that will lower the value of one's property. . .
In not being permitted to freely exclude, the incidence of bads----ill-behaved, lazy, unreliable, rotten students, employees, customers----will increase and property values will fall. In fact, forced integration (the result of all nondiscrimination policies) breeds ill behavior and bad character. . . . [I]f one is prevented from expelling others from one's property whenever their presence is deemed undesirable, ill behavior, misconduct, and outright rotten characters are encouraged (rendered less costly). . . . [T]he "bums"----in every conceivable area of incompetency (bumhood)---are permitted to perpetrate their unpleasantries everywhere, so bum-like behavior and bums will proliferate. The results of forced integration are only too visible. All social relations----whether in private or business life----have become increasingly egalitarian . . . and uncivilized.
To discriminate is an essential part of life. We "discriminate" as we pick our friends, allow and disallow visitors in our homes, we discriminate in the food we eat, and so on. It is part of life. It should be not be a "dirty" word. It should be a complement when one tells you "You have a discriminating mind!"
Imagine if we were not allowed to "discriminate;" boiling it down to its bones we could not even act because action itself implies discrimination as we pick one goal over another to aim for. Man, after all, acts because of uneasiness of his current state of being. If this were not true, then there would be no reasons for him to act. He would be in bliss. Action would just upset that bliss. To act implies to prefer X to Y and to discriminate against what is unwanted (at least, relatively speaking in one's preference of X to Y).
Culture and Literature
Turning back to Russell Kirk... How does a general culture express itself and how does it hold itself together?
T. S. Elito’s argument [is that] any healthy culture is represented at its higher levels by a class or body of persons of remarkable intelligence and taste, leaders in minds and conscience. Often such persons inherit their positions as guardians of culture; to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, these are the men and women who have been reared in “the unbought grace of life.”
Kirk says that the “culture of the crowd, then, is dependent . . . of the man of genius and the culture of the educated classes.” The egalitarian ethic would smash, for example, Shakespeare. How dare genius define the moral imagination! Subscribers to this ethic, while maybe not going that far, must only push down development.
While there are things, as I read the late Kirk, I think he is off, the one major lesson to learn from him is the importance of culture and how the moral imagination expresses itself through, very importantly, literature. It is in literature that we can and should find truths of human nature and existence. It brings life to culture----to society; i.e., the individuals who compose society. At least, this is what proper literature does. Eliot said that it ought to display “the permanent things.” That is to say, as Kirk put it, “enduring truths of human nature and society.” According to Kirk, modern literature treats life with no meaning. It does not give us “enduring truths.”
To quote him at more length:
Genuine relevance in literature, on the contrary, is relatedness to what Eliot described as “the permanent things”: to the splendor and tragedy of the human condition, to constant moral insights, to the spectacle of human history, to love of community and country, to the achievements of right reason. Such a literary relevance confers upon the rising generation a sense of what it is to be fully human, and a knowledge of what great men and women of imagination have imparted to our civilization over the centuries.
An important cause, it seems to me then, is the home schooling movement. It is here that these things can be truly taught because they are not taught well in public schools. Nor will they because they go against the agendas of statism. We as individuals should do our best to educate ourselves. To learn from classical literature. To avoid, says Kirk, today's “literature of nihilism, or pornography and of sensationalism.” We need to bring back norms of “an enduring standard” and ones of the “law of nature.”
“Normality,” say Kirk, “is not with the average sensual man ordinarily possesses: it is with he ought to try to possess.” [emphasis mine]
[Thoughts and quotes of Russell Kirk are pulled from various essays of The Essential Russell Kirk edited by George A. Panichas.]
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