Freedom without norms?
Lives, livelihoods and our way of life (Part 2 of 2)
I ended Part 1 of this essay by suggesting the clamour for ever-stricter lockdown rules during the pandemic indicated a significant cultural shift across the Western world. It was not that a ‘new normal’ replaced the old one. What was striking was that ‘temporary norms’ like stay-at-home orders and masking could be imposed with so little consideration for the ‘civilisational norm’ of individual freedom. The entirely reasonable imperative of protecting lives came with an unreasonable dismissal of concerns about preserving our way of life. This is worth considering in more depth.
A second, related development was that the rollout of furlough schemes sparked debate about the possibility, and desirability, of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea had first emerged in response to economic changes that threaten to render millions redundant. What if the rise of automation and AI mean many or even most people don’t need jobs? States could simply tax the productive part of the economy and use the proceeds to pay everyone a modest salary for nothing. Economically unimportant people could then seek a higher income from work of some kind, spend their time on creative pursuits or simply play video games all day.
Depending on your point of view, it’s a utopia or a dystopia. By the lights of Western civilisation as we know it, however, it’s very much the latter. Work has always been valued as a source of meaning as well as income. And, crucially, of independence and self-determination. That’s why slave and serf societies gave way to societies of free smallholders, craftsmen and merchants – and why entrepreneurship has always been esteemed over exploitation. The Protestant work ethic was the crystallisation of an attitude that was hardly alien to Catholic Europe.
Crucially, it’s also why Western societies have never been entirely at ease with capitalism. For all the system’s obvious benefits, critiques of its tendency to reduce workers to cogs in a machine are as old as capitalism itself. But, to take its most prominent antagonists, trades unions have always fought for workers to enjoy the fruits of their own labour, not someone else’s. As the good book has it, ‘The labourer is worthy of his reward’. The idea that the world owes anyone a living really is at odds with Western civilisation in its broadest definition.
Marx himself argued that full communism (‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’) would have to be preceded by a transitional period in which ‘bourgeois right’ – the direct link between work and reward – was respected. Only when society’s productive forces were sufficiently developed and everyone was confident they were not being cheated would we be able and willing to prioritise universal human flourishing over mere fairness. Implicit, though, is that some kind of work is key to that flourishing.
UBI does not seem to be motivated by human flourishing at all. Instead, it evokes a practice of the classical world that has long since been considered uncivilised: the provision of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the plebs compliant. For some advocates, it’s as simple and cynical as dissuading the useless hordes from rioting or making a nuisance of themselves politically by voting for the far right (or at all).
For others, though, UBI is a more utopian idea, explicitly intended as an affront to ‘bourgeois right’. The workers are to be re-educated out of their reactionary belief that they are more deserving than those who can’t or won’t work. And society as a whole must be weaned off its environmentally destructive addiction to economic growth. The state (or ‘community’) has a duty to protect and provide for us all.
It is telling that UBI was endorsed by Black Lives Matter even before Covid. The organisation – as distinct from the wider anti-racist movement that embraces the slogan – speaks to an influential current in contemporary radicalism. Part of this is an avowed anti-capitalism that has little to do with organised labour or any kind of recognisably working class politics. In fact, while the BLM protests during the pandemic involved the mass violation of lockdown mandates, in an important sense they echoed the politics of lockdown itself. Over 1,200 American public health experts signed an open letter arguing that breaching lockdown was justified because, ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19’.
For some, the protests were about saving lives from ‘the American way of life’ itself. But in rejecting America, what do such protestors stand for? The organisation shows no particular affinity with the distinct characteristics and achievements of African American culture or any putative ‘black way of life’. Indeed, the utopianism of BLM’s wilder aims, including not only UBI but radical affirmation of transgenderism and abolishing the nuclear family as well as the police, put it at odds not only with the beliefs of many most black Americans, but with any established way of life.
The persistence of norms
BLM is also associated with the slogan, ‘sex work is work’. Leaving aside the accidental affirmation of ‘work’, the point of course is to do away with the traditional taboo around prostitution. To undermine the civilisational norm that sex is sacred, or at least special. While we can argue over whether prostitution should be legal, though, the moral norm surely runs much deeper. Only the most unhinged of ideologues could welcome the news that their own daughter was embarking on a career in ‘sex work’. And this raises the question of whether some norms are not only civilisational but more fundamentally human.
In that case, what might be more distinctively ‘modern’ is the idea that we should extend our moral imaginations beyond the family. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call this Christian, however, since it’s in tension with another Western value, personal autonomy. In tension, but not in contradiction. At least partly in response to the sometimes oppressive history of Christian moralism, we can get into more of a tangle over this than is necessary.
Liberals who express concerns about the realities of prostitution – or indeed the excesses of the trans movement or the cult of Pride – often preface their comments with elaborate assurances that they ‘could not care less’ about other people’s sex lives. This is surely a pre-emptive overcorrection. You can strongly affirm the idea that the state should stay out of people’s private lives without feigning indifference. I would not want anyone I care about to get involved in prostitution or pornography. And shouldn’t I care at least a bit about everyone?
It's important to acknowledge that different people have different preferences, but within reason. ‘Whatever makes you happy’ cannot reasonably include prostitution any more than it can include a life of homelessness, drug addiction and petty crime. We all know the ‘freedom’ to live that way is no freedom at all.
Some kind of work and some kind of family life are the foundations of any kind of human flourishing. Western civilisation is more rather than less demanding in that it also requires individuals to be free and to maintain the kind of society in which free individuals can flourish. That means people make different decisions and live different kinds of lives, but again, within certain parameters. Paradoxically, a wider variety of lifestyles draws our attention to the fact that there is such a thing as a basic way of life shared by just about everyone in the developed world.
In the modern West, arranged marriage continues to be practised among some minorities. Is this un-Western? Yes. Is it at odds with Western civilisation? Not necessarily. Observing the difference between coerced marriage, which we rightly outlaw, and arrangement by mutual agreement, which works for many, we clarify what matters for our broader way of life. Individuals must be free to make their own choices, but not necessarily in glorious isolation.
By the same token, it might seem positively un-Western today to abstain from sex before marriage, and perhaps marry earlier as a consequence – even if this is in line with one of the pillars of Western civilisation, Christian teaching – but again, self-imposed restraint is entirely consistent with personal liberty. Indeed, it’s an essential part of marriage itself. Disdaining religious approaches to marriage as freakish is no more enlightened than stigmatising those who ‘live in sin’.
Of course, the insistence that relationships should always begin with the thrill of sexual attraction (and probably a process of trial and error) is a relatively recent development even in the West. Arguably, it has reached its apotheosis in apps that make people miserable by driving them to compete on the most superficial grounds for concomitantly unsatisfying liaisons. But, again, this is not to say the dating game itself is anti-civilisational. Far from it.
The evolution of norms
As a speechwriter (available for weddings and bar mitzvahs), I know a huge number of modern marriages result from online dating. But they tend to happen when people use apps quite deliberately to find a partner; marriage is rarely the happy by-product of people hooking up. Pairing for life – or aspiring to – remains a fairly robust social norm, even if it’s considered bad manners to suggest it’s for everyone. Nevertheless, there is a serious tension there.
Making the case for same-sex marriage in 2011, then prime minister David Cameron said he supported it not despite being a conservative but because he was a conservative. It was a clever line, subverting expectations but also appealing to common sense in two distinct ways. Taken for granted was the small-l liberal commonsense view that some people are just gay and that’s fine. Cameron then spelled out the small-c conservative commonsense view that ‘society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other’.
Most people of all political complexions agree that human beings tend to flourish most when they pair off in stable couples. And – even if it’s whispered – that this is by far the best context in which to bring up children. Given that some people are gay, then, the case for same-sex marriage was obvious.
What’s fascinating is that this commonsense argument was almost immediately put out to pasture. The bill enabling same-sex marriage was comfortably passed by Parliament in 2013, but nearly all the accompanying rhetoric was about equality, respect and love – not commitment, stability and families. The unspoken implication of Cameron’s case – that gay people not only should be allowed to marry, but probably should marry, or at least settle down – is utterly at odds with the prevailing public morality of the past decade.
What is not generally appreciated is that two quite different things happened more or less at the same time. One is that homosexuality became accepted as a normal variation in human sexuality that can be accommodated within traditional moral norms. The other is that it became unacceptable in polite society to talk about, let alone insist on, traditional moral norms.
This is not liberalism. Norms are not laws. They are both more flexible and more robust. And they don’t even have to be for everyone. Tolerating those who depart from norms – even romanticising non-conformism to some extent – is very different from rejecting the very idea of norms. From expecting each new generation to reinvent the wheel. That is neither reasonable nor fair.
There is a lot here to unpack in further essays. The point of this one is not so much to warn that our civilisation is in danger of unravelling. I have no idea if it is or isn’t. But I do think it’s important we acknowledge that the success of Western societies rests on a creative tension between tradition and individualism. On inherited norms that include an unusual emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility. To pretend there is no such thing as ‘Western civilisation’ is beyond charmingly self-deprecating. It is simply dishonest.