Exceptional thinkers often struggle to take account of the ordinary. Consider the following passage from John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689):
A child is born a subject of no country or government. He is under his father’s tuition and authority till he come to age of discretion; and then he is a free man, at liberty what government he will put himself under, what body politic he will unite himself to.
Liberalism forces the immense existential burden of self-invention, a power disclosed at best to the mere handful of Elon Musks in this world, onto the great mass of humanity. To the self-regarding few, Locke’s understanding of the human person as an autonomous individual, a free agent whose identity is chosen rather than inherited, will taste like liberation. To the humble majority, it will be felt as a crippling weight—akin to the kind of choice-oversaturation we are liable to feel at an obscenely varied all-you-can-eat buffet. Except that in this case, the saturation is writ large, applying not only to food but to life’s most fundamental questions.
Such considerations have prompted a notorious right-wing internet meme: “Liberalism but exclusively for 130+ IQ Anglos.” A society that consisted solely of Lockes and Musks, the idea runs, would unquestionably benefit from a liberal ethos in which all were free to think, act, and innovate for themselves, each man doing so in accordance with a self-fashioned conception of the good life. But since no such society has ever existed, the next best option is to make do with the less impressive species we have before us: a human race that naturally organises itself into tribal collectives and craves the security of order and tradition. If only the wary 99% were cut from the same cloth as their intrepid superiors in the 1%, the conservative brakes on liberalism might be relaxed without danger. In the event, prudence dictates that they cannot be.
The rarer move is to doubt whether this celebrated 1% in fact exists. To be sure, intelligence and other forms of natural hierarchy are very real. But, albeit to varying degrees, are we not all prone to tribalism? Is there any man who does not stand in need of the innumerable funds of social knowledge greater than himself?
Of course, nobody falls into the 1% across every possible domain. I would sooner enlist the services of a perfect randomer for relationship advice than call on the most credentialled boffin in the Cambridge faculty of mathematics. But even those who really do belong at the apex of their discipline are not blessed with an absolute power of self-invention. We all have our debts. No individual can get by in life without outsourcing at least some of his activities, even those at which he excels most, to external streams of knowledge, both social and inter-generational.
This is as true of Musk in tech as it was of Keats in poetry. All geniuses encounter a pre-existing tradition before they can set to work remaking or building upon it. No finite being invents ex nihilo. In something of a rebuke to earlier Romantics, T.S. Eliot’s insight was that there are degrees of originality for which artists strive against the background of a canon that precedes their individual talent. More than that, their achievement—including its most sublime, creative features—is only intelligible against such a background. Otherwise, even the most rebellious, avowedly anti-traditional poets would have to be understood as rebelling against nothing at all. This is absurd.
Taken literally, ‘to think for oneself’ would involve nothing less than the power of unconditioned will at the level of mental activity—the sort of attribute a theologian might ascribe to God. The anti-nominalists among them would want to stress that even the Almighty Himself cannot be a liberal: God, after all, cannot will anything contrary to the goodness inherent to His own nature. If it is ontologically impossible for the personal ground of all being Himself to be an independent thinker, I struggle to see how Bill Maher manages it.
Still, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) was guilty of regarding the accolade ‘independent thinker’ as the measure of all things. The tribe was dominated by figures best described as left-wing apostates, from Maher himself to other anti-woke Democrats like Sam Harris, typically keen to rebuff the unspeakable charge of ‘right-winger’ with such observations as: “I didn’t leave the Left, the Left left me.”
In most cases, these ‘independent thinkers’ were little more than the conformists of the 1990s. Their rebellion consisted in their desire to continue inhabiting the 1990s beyond 2015. True, this made them resistant to the Left’s increasingly strident methods and hostile to some of their newfangled dogmas around race, gender, and sexuality. As casual left-wing throwbacks to the ’90s, however, they continued to indulge many a complacent blind spot.
Feeling a revulsion to the idea of coordinated political action, fearing the charge of anything so vulgar as tribalism, and tending to believe that virtue lies always in the middle (wherever that happens to be) of the boiler-plate centre, their hope was that calling out ‘both sides’ would embarrass the pugilists engaged in America’s culture war—now a global export—into re-entering the seemingly apolitical bliss of the ’90s. In truth, culture wars are effectively cold civil wars. Every thinking person should aim to instruct and enlighten his own side, but it is sheer self-flattery to pretend that standing impotently in the middle represents a kind of heroic neutrality.
Wars can be fought in the name of individual freedom, but those who really believe in the individual—in addition, one hopes, to some higher goods for him to pursue—have no choice but to organise collectively when their perceived value is under threat. Diffusely dispersed, proudly atomised individuals, all in love with their own claim to intellectual independence, will get bulldozed by even the most primitive tribalists. Whether the barbarous hordes who supplant them are properly briefed or hopelessly rusty on John Stuart Mill’s intricate arguments for free speech will not alter the calculus of war.
Moreover, individual freedom can neither flourish nor enjoy public support without social order. Government with a light touch, such that each man can call his soul his own, is only practicable in a high-trust society. If incivility becomes the norm and trust consequently breaks down, the state will face pressure to expand its role from placid night watchman to omnipresent invigilator. However, the fact remains that high levels of social trust only really operate within cohesive countries—national homes in which a strong sense of collective identity, not a dysfunctional mess wrought by competing varieties of tribalism, prevails without question.
While it may trouble the cheerleaders of ‘independent thought’ to admit it, their cherished individualist ideals require a fair bit of national communitarianism to be anything other than a sentimental pipe dream. Until they manage to get individualism up and running in Papua New Guinea, a nation in name only if ever there was one, I will feel no pressure to re-evaluate my position.
Rather than forget our shared condition of radical dependence, we would do well to recall G.K. Chesterton’s quip about the five minutes he once spent patting himself on the back for his proudly heterodox posture: “When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.”
