Name Your Poison

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, by Robert Nisbet

There is not one way to look at history or an event in or era of history.  What might be deemed progress when viewed through one lens could appear as decline when viewed through another.  This is most certainly true regarding the topic that has occupied a good amount of my reading and writing over the years:

Thus, if we value the emergence of the individual from ancient confinements of patriarchal kinship, class, guild, and village community, the outcome of modern European history must appear progressive in large degree…. From the point of view of the individual – the autonomous, rational individual – the whole sequence of events embodied in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution must appear as the work of progressive liberation.

A valid view of the history, but not a complete view.

If, on the other hand, we value coherent moral belief, clear social status, cultural roots, and a strong sense of interdependence with others, the same major events of modern history can be placed in a somewhat different light.

The changes have brought on moral uncertainty, confusion in cultural meanings, and disruption in social contexts.  In other words, changes that seem to move society away from a possibility of freedom.

As you know, it is my view that since man cannot be reduced to a mere economic being, he will find social contact where he can.  This has been found in the state, as all other social contacts have been made less and less relevant.

The changes can be summarized in the transition from medieval to modern Europe.  Nisbet offers, regardless of one’s view of medieval society, a few characteristics cannot be dismissed: first, the pre-eminence of small social groups such as family, guild, village and monastery; second, the centrality of personal status.

The reality of the separate, autonomous individual was as indistinct as that of centralized political power.  Both were subordinated to the immense range of association that lay intermediate to individual and ruler….

The patriarchal family, church, and guild were such intermediating institutions.  But if one accepts that someone or something will be in charge around here, which of the two is preferable: centralized political power or decentralized intermediates?  And, I guess, if one does not accept that someone or something will be in charge around here, finding examples in history are like finding needles in a haystack.

Medieval law is incomprehensible if one ignores this decentralized reality: property belonged not to the individual but to the family; law could not penetrate the threshold of the family.  Even the relatively “freer” air of the towns was a model of corporate association: one can consider guilds (or associations of merchants and tradesmen), for example, as controlling institutions; on the other hand, one can consider guilds as a form of decentralized governance.  Those in the guild were expected to live within its customs as sure as the peasant was on the manor.

Law and custom were virtually indistinguishable, and both were hardly more than the inner order of association.

Imagine if the laws of the west were nothing more than generally accepted custom – even our custom of today, distorted and abused by decades and centuries of subsidized destruction.  We (libertarians) will often say that most people live in a manner consistent with the non-aggression principle in their daily activities and relationships.  This is custom.  What if this was also the law?

Although there were both “Pharisees and Protestants in the medieval Church…the ethic of religion and the ethic of community were one.”  This unity of ethic came under assault both from decay within and from reformers without. 

In Wyclif we find an almost modern devotion to the individuality of conscience and faith and a devotion also to a political environment capable of reducing the powers of the religious and economic institutions in society.  He was opposed to ecclesiastical courts, to monasteries, to hierarchy within the Church, to all of those aspects of Christianity that hemmed in, as it seemed, the right of individual judgment. 

Ultimately, this “devotion” was used by political leaders to wrest authority from the Church and monopolize authority in themselves – the beginnings of the modern State.

Not without cause has Wyclif been called the morning star of the Reformation.

The modern economy is certainly a contributing factor to this lack of functionality in traditional governance institutions and decentralized authorities, yet Nisbet does not see it as the primary agent in the transformation:

For with all the recognition of the influences of factors, technology, the free market, and the middle class, the operation of each of these has been given force only by a revolutionary system of power and rights that cannot be contained within the philosophy of economic determinism.  This system is the political State.

Conclusion

Nisbet offers:

The affinity between extreme religious individualism and allegiance to central national power…is an actual historical affinity.

I think history cannot be ignored on this point.  There may be more causation than correlation, given that the rise of individualism and the decline of competing governance institutions are two sides of the same coin.