John Stuart Mill and the decline of the West

I bought a leather bound copy of Mill's On Liberty for 50p when I was 16 and haven't read it. I assumed I knew what it said and that J.S. Mill was an arch libertarian, a Thathcherite avant la lettre. I should have read it and shall do so now, followed by Maurice Cowling's arch-conservative demolition. How I wish I'd gone to Peterhouse and Cowling had taught me.

Only today I was wondering yet again whether my personal philosophy of finding an authentic life by relating to people openly, regardless of their nationality or class (or sex for that matter) and keeping a distance from conventional or fashionable ideas, was really my own or was one I had taken from elsewhere. I see now that it is J.S. Mill, mediated through John Fowles, whose novels and philosophy greatly appealed to me when I was 18. It is an admirable but somewhat adolescent philosophy.

One forms or finds ones ideas and lives them. I remember a Muslim friend of mine describing Fowles as godless - now it all makes sense. Mill's philosophy is a substitute for religion, like so many things since Mill. 

I realised all this by reading a wonderful essay published this month in Foreign Affairs by Eric Kaufmann, which I urge you to read. In case you are too lazy to click, I quote from it.

In a famous essay from 1969, the Anglo-Jewish liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between “two concepts of liberty.” The first concept, negative liberty, implies freedom from external coercion. “By being free in this sense, I mean not being interfered with by others,” Berlin wrote. The second concept, positive liberty, is more prescriptive. It asserts that freedom lies in self-direction and self-mastery.

These two concepts of liberty correspond to two types of liberalism: negative and positive. Negative liberalism, championed by Berlin, is value-neutral, maintaining that all forms of human endeavor are equally worthy and that people should be free to pursue them so long as they don’t interfere with others’ rights. Positive liberalism, on the other hand, asserts there are nobler and baser human values. For advocates of positive liberalism, such as John Stuart Mill, individual autonomy and freedom from tradition are themselves noble values, and people should use their liberty to pursue them. The implication here is that what is new and different is in some sense morally superior to what is familiar and comforting.

Mr. Kaufmann explains the ideas of John Dewey and Randolph Bourne, two influential (WASP) American liberal thinkers from the early twentieth century who wanted America to become cosmopolitan.

Both of these strands—Dewey’s melting pot and Bourne’s multiculturalism—shaped the form that positive-liberal cosmopolitanism would take in the West. The social upheavals of the 1960s added a new moral imperative, antiracism, to this mix. Although early twentieth-century U.S. Progressives had opposed racism, their cosmopolitan millenarianism concerned European immigration, which they saw as unrelated to the domestic struggle for black rights. It was not until the 1960s, after the civil rights movement and the start of large-scale non-European immigration, that pro-immigration and antiracist positions fused in both North America and Europe. Positive liberals used the new idiom of antiracism to reframe their prior appreciation of diversity, adding the emotional heat of an emerging social taboo to older appeals to generosity. Activists now spurned Dewey’s melting-pot cosmopolitanism, which envisioned all groups dissolving, in favor of Bourne’s multiculturalist position that the majority throw off its traditions while minorities maintain theirs. 

As the white majority share of Western nations declined after the 1960s, a white backlash might have been expected. Yet just as immigration diversified their countries, more and more Westerners were exposed to cosmopolitan perspectives via newly expanded university systems and television media. These two developments offset one another to produce a polarized response: white communitarians viewed rising diversity negatively while cosmopolitan multiculturalists elevated it to the status of a moral imperative. Today’s culture war is a product of this split.

This is a large explanation for the current anti-discrimination ideology (which can be called a heresy, in the sense of a truth taken out of proportion), which has become a secular religion. It attempts to fill the vacuum left by faith and the sacred, which in Mill's day ceased to have a hold on intellectuals. This is the explanation for a phenomenon of the greatest historical importance, which before today baffled me.

This, in turn, has somehow (I still don't fully understand it) created the feeling among 1968-ers and their children that mass immigration is a good thing per se. These ideas are rapidly transforming the formerly white world. 

The other factor, incalculably influential, is revulsion from Nazism and the gas chambers. Western history since 1945 and especially since 1960 is a meditation on Auschwitz.

In my case, everything with me is paradoxical. I am a reactionary anarchist and a Catholic with a Protestant mind (especially when I think about Pope Francis). I'm a conservative, but I am also a liberal and combine uneasily both the sorts of liberalism identified by Isaiah Berlin. I believe in a very small state, a lot of negative freedom, am attracted to rigid, traditional societies like late nineteenth century England, De Valera's Eire, even sometimes to Salazar's Portugal, I rejected positive liberalism as a guide to politics, yet consider myself, and set importance on being, a free spirit, which means positive liberty. I am a cosmopolitan, an Englishman living in a street in the old town in Bucharest surrounded by gypsies.

I reconcile these things by being conservative for others, but open minded for myself. Salazar's Portugal might sound appealing in principle but I might not have fitted in. I like the colourful, multi-ethnic parts of London, though I mourn the London of 1950, class conscious, shabby and as English as a pint of bitter. I like the things positive liberals like, but they have unintended consequences. An increasingly un-European, increasingly non-Christian Western Europe is one.

I suppose I want to be a free minded person, but I want most people to be conservative, to provide the ballast that keeps the ship afloat. This is a pleasant, but adolescent, way of thinking. 

When it comes to politics, in the crisis in which we are living, it is very clear that only (real, old-fashioned) conservatism can help us. The open-hearted and open-minded positive liberals in all parties have been completely, inexcusably wrong. The grown-ups were right (some would say but repulsive) but there don't seem to be any around any more, at least not in positions of authority. You find them driving taxis and keeping shops. Positive liberals are admirable people but positive liberalism is taking the West to destruction. 

How do we row back rapidly?