How Individualism Leads to Tyranny
The individual is crucial, but is no match for a mammoth politics, unless protected by the family, church, and business
Dear friends and supporters:
The e-newsletter’s title seems flatly self-contradictory. We ordinarily think of individualism as the highest protection from tyranny. In the modern world, the individual enjoys the right of self-determination. You call the shots for your life. In the West, this started with classical liberalism, which, spawned by Protestantism, created a zone of privacy around the individual.
In most of the ancient imperial world, society and the state were basically coterminous. You were born into an empire, and your place in that political system determined your place in life. Even the family had its meaning only within politics. There was no separation of society and state. Everybody was a “ward of the state.”
The Western church, following the fall of the final world empire (Rome), challenged this paradigm. In some ways, the church replaced the empire. The Pope was the replacement emperor. The clerical hierarchy was the replacement bureaucracy. And the saints the replacement patriots. The church, not the state, dominated life.
But not in the same way the pagan empires had. Gradually, non-political and -ecclesial institutions rose to compete for citizens’ allegiance. These included some that were already around, like the family, but also guilds and feudal lords and other examples of what we today all “civil society.” These non-political institutions served as a buffer between the individual and the state. In fact, this unwieldy collection of institutions contributed to the seeds of political liberty in the West.
Moral Individualism
Protestantism restored religious liberty for the individual (Jn. 8:36). But the implications of this religious liberty contributed to a fuller political liberty that we know as classical liberalism. The logic that would demand that the individual be free to worship according to the dictates of his conscience would also demand freedom to act out his liberty in the fulness of his life, not just church life.
At the heart of classical liberalism is a web of beliefs and practices that preserve individual liberty: universal morality, the rule of law, blind justice, due process, checks and balances, and deconsolidated political power. The state is restrained by law from impinging on vital aspects of the individual’s life. Under most circumstances, the life of the individual is inviolate.
The U. S. Founders enshrined classical liberalism in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former breaks with ancient political and much medieval tradition in asserting that governments are instituted to protect individual liberty. This was just the opposite of the ancient imperial world: the individual existed for the purpose of the state. This newer U.S. idea led to a responsible individualism.
But — and this is vital — protection from the intrusion of political government that permitted individual liberty was assumed to be bounded by self-government. Only a moral (in the religion of the time, Christian) people could be expected to govern their own appetites such that their compulsion to obedience came from within. Internal restraint rendered most external restraints superfluous. And the family and church were the chief human factors inculcating that restraint.
This created what is today sometimes called ordered liberty, liberty within the constraints of legitimate moral order, specifically, God’s moral law. This moral individualism is fully compatible with a narrow role for politics. Since the only legitimate role of politics is suppressing external evil (specifically crime), a majority of moral, self-governed individuals make the ancient form of oppressive state unnecessary.
Autonomous Individualism
With the erosion of Christian culture in Europe and, later, the United States, this moral individualism degenerated into an antinomian (anti-law) individualism, which resulted in radical autonomy. Classical liberalism devolved into modern liberalism, almost its opposite. The late Thomas Oden communicated its four pillars: “hedonic self-actualization, autonomous individualism, reductive naturalism, and absolute moral relativism.”
This has not only been an ideological cocktail for personal and social self-destruction. In addition it has fostered a reinstitution of the oppressive state, which was necessary to guarantee the kind of radical autonomy modern man craved. The post-Christian individual wanted to break the restraints of God’s moral law that alone made political liberty possible, while retaining the political liberty. What soon became apparent is that political liberty is incompatible with certain kinds of individualism.
Rousseau’s bargain
This is best understood by considering the thought of 18th century luminary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, than whom few intellectuals have had greater impact on modern life. Rousseau’s best-known line is the first one in chapter 1 of his book The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” By chains, he didn’t mean the chains of the state. He meant the chains of civil society. The harshest and most enslaving chains are not those of the physical coercion of the state, but of the hierarchical conventions of society. These would include the family, church, customs and manners among the upper (titled), lower (servant), and middle (merchant) classes, the guilds, and other aspects of medieval life that survived into the 18th century. Rousseau abhorred the deference, the bowing and scraping, the condescension, and other conventions of the 18th century. In other words, the great chains of human life were cultural, not political. Rousseau wanted not just liberty from political coercion, liberty he thought unnecessary. More deeply, he wanted the liberty of the individual from the sorts of non-coercive rules and customs non-coercively demanded by the family, church, and other institutional pillars of society. The most onerous chains were the family and church chains.
Rousseau proposed, as it were, a bargain to his contemporaries: “Give me a power sufficiently strong to break the chains of family, church, guild, and other cultural authority, and I’ll free you from their tyranny. The only authority necessary will be the benevolent state.” He writes:
Each citizen would then be perfectly independent of all the rest, and at the same time very dependent on the city [the state]; and these two results are brought about always by the same means, because only the strength of the state can secure the liberty of its members. (ch. 12, emphases supplied)
According to Rousseau, the liberty that the state secured was not the liberty the American Founders had in mind: liberty from political coercion. Rather, the state wields coercion to marginalize institutions like the family and church that chain the individual. We willingly chain ourselves to the state in order to free ourselves from the chains of the family and church.
Rousseau had an ingenious theory called the “general will,” according to which it was simply impossible for the state to be tyrannical. Citizens yield their will to the common good, led by wise, simple, altruistic individuals who have a good heart. Rousseau much preferred the outcasts, the tramps, the marginalized, because they are less corrupted by society. It is when people form cliques — civil society — that conflicts emerge, and there must not be conflicts. If we could strip away all cultural conventions we could get back to something closer to the state of nature, in which, Rousseau believed, people were virtuous, generous, and free. It was society and culture that chained them. When people yield to the general will, enforced by the state, they can never suffer tyranny, because it is their own will that is acting. So, political tyranny is an impossibility.
To get rid of civil society is to restore to a large degree the state of nature, in which man will finally be free and happy. But to make sure that cliques and civil society do not reemerge, man needs the state. The state is necessary to guarantee autonomous individualism. This is the root of today’s expressive individualism: politics secures my right to display my true, internal, “authentic” self, the more bizarre the better, as long as I don’t harm anybody else and as long as I don’t try to assist or foster a civil society (family and church) that would crimp everybody’s individual autonomy.
Every modern revolution starting with France’s is heavily indebted to Rousseau. The goal is to overturn the tyranny of the family and church and business and cultural norms to make room for the democratic equality of all, enforced by an all-powerful state. Everywhere Rousseau’s vision has prevailed, it has created political tyranny, because it crushes or eclipses cultural institutions like family, church, and business that function as barriers to political tyranny.
Rousseau’s autonomous individualism longs for the naked individual before the state, with no intervening social impediments to that relationship. It is in this way that individualism as such is not an enemy of political tyranny but, in fact, a necessary presupposition of that tyranny.
Communal individualism
The only individualism, therefore, that can resist political tyranny is communal individualism: individual liberty fostered and perpetuated by communities like the family and church.
The family is God’s basic institution, and it is there that we first learn (or should learn) ordered liberty. Our liberty is at first almost nil, but our parents train us gradually to exercise self-government within the bounds of God’s moral law.
The church of Jesus Christ is God’s central redemptive institution. Jesus is Lord, and he demands ultimate allegiance: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Ac. 5:29). This is why Rousseauian regimes always suppress Christianity. Christians are not revolutionaries. They obey the state in most instances. But they are committed to a higher authority, and they see ultimacy in the triune God revealed in the Son, not in the state.
Communities like these are valuable in themselves but also because they compete for citizens’ allegiance. They draw us away from the ultimacy of the state. The communitarian conservative Robert Nisbet wrote in his classic The Quest for Community:
We are prone to see the advance of power in the modern world as a consequence, or concomitant, of the diminution of individual freedom. But a more useful way would be to see it in terms of the retreat of authority in many of the areas of society within which human beings commonly find roots and a sense of a larger whole. The alleged disorganization of the modern family is, in fact, simply an erosion of its natural authority, the consequence, in considerable part, of the absorption of its functions by other bodies, chiefly the state.
The loss of the authority of the family and church has not created an unfilled vacuum. That vacuum has been occupied by the state. It is obliged to fend for himself against a seemingly omnipotent politics. George Orwell’s Big Brother sees and directs all, with no institutions to impede his will.
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Conclusion
All of this means that if we want to rescue individuals from the clutches of the modern state, we must revive and cultivate institutions like the family and church (as well as deep friendships, businesses, clubs, and other “private” links between individuals) that draw our attention and loyalty away from politics.
In short: individual liberty is not found in individuals, but in membership in God-established, non-state institutions.
Individual liberty is found within institutional liberty.
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Personal
I thought you might enjoy a blast-from-the-past photo. Since a young man I’ve lectured quite a bit, and here’s a photo from one of my summers in the late 90s at the Christian Worldview Student Conference at Christopher Newport University in Newport Beach, Virginia, sponsored by Calvary Reformed Presbyterian Church (Pastors Pete Hurst and Byron Snapp). I lectured on philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche. These are fond memories (the conferences, not Plato and Nietzsche).
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We are the victors, so live in victory.
Yours for the King,
Founder & President