George F. Will
Prophecy is optional folly but an irresistible end-of-year temptation. So, at the risk of allowing a wish to be the father of a thought, a plausible prediction is that in 2022 the current fever of racial thinking will break, for two reasons.
One is that such thinking has become something fatal in politics: boring. It is now a recycling of predictable boilerplate about “systemic” and “structural” this, and “unconscious” and “intersectional” that. The impulse, presented as a moral imperative, to view the nation’s past and present exclusively through the narrow lens of race became in 2021 so pervasive and fierce that it resembled something perishable: a fad. Albeit one that has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry whereby corporations hire “diversity” consultants to teach them how to regret their “privilege” without shedding any.
A more intriguing reason climate change is coming to the nation’s intellectual climate was given in an essay published exactly 60 years ago by an eminent British political philosopher. Michael Oakeshott’s “The Masses in Representative Democracy” is uncannily pertinent to the United States’ distemper in 2021 because it explains how today’s supposedly avant-garde ideas are pre-modern.
Modernity’s greatest achievement, which was the prerequisite for its subsequent achievements, was the invention of the individual. Oakeshott argued that, in the 14th and 15th centuries, conditions emerged that were “favorable to a very high degree of human individuality,” meaning “persons accustomed to making choices for themselves.”
Hitherto, this process was “narrowly circumscribed.” Persons knew themselves only as members of a family, a group, a church, a village or as the occupant of a tenancy: “What differentiated one man from another was insignificant when compared with what was enjoyed in common as members of a group of some sort.”
This began to change in Italy with “the break-up of medieval communal life.” As the historian Jacob Burckhardt would write, “Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved.” Individuals detached themselves from derivative group identities, becoming eligible for individual rights grounded in the foundational right to an existence independent of any group membership.
The invention of the individual, Oakeshott wrote, entailed the idea of the private — a zone of personal sovereignty independent of communal arrangements. Hence the American Revolution: Government exists to protect the individual’s right to the pursuit of happiness as the individual defines it, not the pursuit of the good life as government defines it. Government must be powerful enough to protect (in Oakeshott’s formulation) “the order without which the aspirations of individuality could not be realized” — security of person and property — but not powerful enough to threaten individuality.
Oakeshott understood in 1961 that modernity’s emancipation of the individual from the “warmth of communal pressures” did not exhilarate everyone. Indeed, in 2021, U.S. “national conservatives,” who are collectivists on the right, recoil against modernity in the name of communitarian values, strongly tinged with a nativist nationalism and with a trace of the European blood-and-soil right.
These “national conservatives” have an unacknowledged kinship with their collectivist cousins on the left, the race identitarians. Their critical race theory subsumes individualism, dissolving it in a group membership — racial solidarity, which supposedly has been forged in the furnace of racist oppression.
Today’s progressives, who fancy themselves the vanguard of modernity, are actually modernity’s enemies. In progressivism’s jargon, History is a proper noun designating something autonomous. People “on the right side of history” propel History toward a knowable destination. It is known by theorists whose special insight makes them society’s rightful rulers.
Their supposed insight is that all of life is a power struggle between History’s helpers and History’s hinderers. In the previous two centuries, progressives expected that the proletariat, purged of false consciousness and infused with revolutionary consciousness by instruction in true theories, would wage the class struggle. This would be History’s propellant. Individual identity would mean nothing; class membership would mean everything.
But the incorrigibly non-revolutionary proletariat has disappointed History-worshipers’ expectations of a climactic class struggle. So, the oppressed-versus-oppressor dynamic of History has been Americanized through critical race theory. The working class has been replaced as History’s fuel — replaced by non-Whites seeking emancipation from “systemic” oppression by Whites.
Oakeshott’s insight about the nature of modernity illuminates the anti-modern aspects of today’s racial progressivism, which is a tactical revision of economic-materialist progressivism. So, today’s advanced thinking is not fundamentally unlike yesterday’s — the 19th century’s — advanced thinking. As a wit has said, everything changes except the avant-garde.
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