The online world of YouTube and Instagram is filled with short videos of people talking into their phones to deliver a lesson about life to the millions of consumers out there, the worldviews of whom are largely moulded by such half-baked preaching. The worst are the Leftists, who usually take a topic associated with gender, sexual liberation, or equality, and begin their videos with some variant of, “I’m just going to, like, explain something to you, okay, for everyone who, like, just can’t seem to, like, get this…” Then the person, the sound of whose voice is like a sophisticated Asiatic torture, proceeds to explain to the world her—for it is almost always either a woman or a man with a severe testosterone deficit—intellectual and moral superiority.
Perhaps the ghastliest facet of such videos is that the airhead talking into her phone finishes each proposition with an upward inflection, as if it were a question. This habit adds insult to injury, as it gives the impression that the self-appointed teacher’s ideas are so complex that they must be explained to the viewer as if the latter were a three-year old.
Almost as insufferable as those videos are the ones authored largely in response to them, by right-wing YouTubers and Instagramers. These short videos follow the same format, namely someone talking into his phone to deliver some lesson on what’s wrong with wokeness. A friend sent me one such video recently. Therein, a man is strutting about in a gym, talking into his phone, saying, “If you think you are gender non-binary or whatever, if you want to chop your d*ck off, if you want to go around in a dress and put lipstick on, I don’t care; I only care when you start telling my children that they should go do these things…”
This is what stands for ‘conservatism’ in the shallow world of online video conflicts. A woke person comes along and argues for ‘progress,’ and a ‘conservative’ then comes along and argues for individualism. And if the debate is going to be framed like that, then I am decidedly on the side of the wokesters. Not, of course, because I believe in ‘progress,’ which is an obvious fiction, but because I do not believe in the private individual, which I deem an even more obvious fiction.
For some time, Jordan Peterson has insisted that the fundamental dichotomy with which the West contends is that of individualism vs. collectivism. According to Peterson, Western civilisation was never built on the maxims of the Left or the Right, both of which he sees as comprising collectivist ideologies. He says that if you’re a collectivist, you will eventually end up a socialist, a communist, or a fascist, all of which privilege the community over the individual. One of the central reasons why Peterson criticises the “radical Left” is because he thinks these activists are trying to reduce people to mere members of a group in the paradigm of ‘identity politics,’ rather than prioritising the irreplaceable individual. For him, then, what is unique about the West is its absolute commitment to the individual.
Peterson is wrong to accept the collectivist-individualist dichotomy. The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society.
Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.
So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community. We are not isolated individuals, or even atomised families; we are a society, or at least we ought to be. We must live on streets together, and when you run out of sugar, you should knock on your neighbour’s door, and when he runs out, he should knock on yours. We reside together because that’s how we flourish. When any one of us lives badly, we all suffer. If we each operate as insulated, atomic individuals, with our own private concepts of human flourishing, then the great work of civilisation-building is impossible, precisely because civilisation-building is a shared and common project, of which everyone is a beneficiary.
It is for this reason that conservatives have always valued the city as much as the countryside beyond its walls. Civilisation finds its apex in the polis. (That’s why God creates us in a garden that grows up from below, but He glorifies us in a city which descends from above.) Roger Scruton, in his Conversations conducted with the Irish philosopher Mark Dooley, remarked that the city is “the greatest human enterprise after farming—the second step that we took from the world of the hunter-gatherer, and which we took in trepidation and relying always on the help of our gods.” It is in the city that we commune in order to build a culture, and we do this partly by maintaining the bond between the urban townscape and the rural landscape.
The city is where people dwell for the purpose of civilisation-building, and that’s why the city has always been built around the temple. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, in his magisterial work The Ancient City, first published in 1864, writes:
The city was the collective group of those who had the same protecting deities, and who performed the religious ceremony at the same altar. This city altar was enclosed within a building which the Greeks called pryraneum, and which the Romans called the temple of Vesta. There was nothing more sacred within the city than this altar, on which the sacred fire was always maintained.
The city, then, right from its beginning, was the place of dwelling for those who shared a common conception of who they were, what their purpose was, and how they were to flourish together. They gave the same reasons for their existence, and worked for a common purpose, and did so to please the gods.
As the pre-Christian chaotic expressions of religious craving were superseded by the order and beauty of true religion, we continued to build the city around the temple, around the cathedral and the high altar. But in time the cathedrals were abandoned and the altars neglected, and under the various ideologies that orbited the fictions of individualism and self-authorship, the city became a mere conglomerate of atomic egos in a wallowing condition of alienation, the frustration and malaise of whom are on full display in any modern city.
It is to those very ideologies of individualism and self-authorship that so-called ‘conservatives’ flee in unthinking attempts to slow down the evermore aggressive colonisation of every aspect of life by the forces of Progress. But it is precisely the individualism and atomisation of modern life that has liquefied those sources of meaning that conservatives hold dear. And it is those sources of meaning that liberals think are such a threat to the so-called sovereign individual.
Those sources of meaning—like the family, the village, the nation, the church—are a threat not only because they may be seen as having some authority over the otherwise utterly emancipated individual, but they might also undermine the state’s claim to be the sole authority over the individual. That’s why any unifying sense of meaning is de facto unacceptable to the liberal state, which will therefore always privilege the abnormal, the minority, and the alien, and treat with contempt the traditional, the settled, and the native. Hence, liberalism seeks to unify for the sake of progress, and does this by a process of disunification and atomisation. Liberalism is thus a paradigm of political and social schizophrenia, and its adherents display all its internal disorder.
For conservative-minded people, then, to take refuge in the very paradigm which has successfully eroded all that they love and treasure is, from both conceptual and practical perspectives, deeply foolish. Conservatism is neither individualist nor collectivist, but intensely communitarian. What conservatives ought to be arguing for is the dignity and irreplaceability of the individual as someone who unfolds out of a community, to which he owes everything. Indeed, the dignity and irreplaceability of the individual could not be known independently of the common good by which he has achieved his relative flourishing.
When a blue-haired, stretched-eared, neck-tattooed progressive insists on subordinating the education system to his own ideological aspirations, the conservative response should not be “Can’t you do you, and me do me?” Rather, conservatives ought to accept that they are faced with two opposing conceptions of what a society and what human flourishing look like, and then they should enter into conflict with every hope of winning.
