Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

by Kevin MacDonald

  Monogamy is a central aspect of Western uniqueness and may well be a necessary condition for the unique European “low-pressure” demographic profile.[427] In a sexually competitive society such as classical China, female servants would also be concubines of the head of the household,[428] so that household resources could be directly translated into reproduction. In the northwest European model, wealthy males were supporting far more non-relatives than in the sexually competitive societies of Eurasia.

  There are sound reasons for supposing that monogamy was a necessary condition for the peculiarly European “low-pressure” demographic profile described by Wrigley and Schofield.[429] This demographic profile results from late marriage and celibacy of large percentages of females during times of economic scarcity. The theoretical connection with monogamy is that monogamous marriage results in a situation where the poor of both sexes are unable to mate, whereas in polygynous systems an excess of poor females merely lowers the price of concubines for wealthy males. Thus, for example, Wrigley and Schofield find that toward the end of the seventeenth century approximately 23 percent of individuals of both sexes remained unmarried between ages 40–44, but that, as a result of altered economic opportunities, this percentage dropped at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 9 percent, and there was a corresponding decline in age of marriage.[430] Like monogamy, this pattern was unique among the stratified societies of Eurasia.

  In turn, the low-pressure demographic profile appears to have had economic consequences. Not only was the marriage rate the main damper on population growth but, especially in England, it had a tendency to lag well behind favorable economic changes so that there was a tendency for capital accumulation during good times rather than a constant pressure of population on food supply:

  The fact that the rolling adjustment between economic and demographic fluctuations took place in such a leisurely fashion, tending to produce large if gradual swings in real wages, represented an opportunity to break clear from the low-level income trap which is sometimes supposed to have inhibited all pre-industrial nations. A long period of rising real wages, by changing the structure of demand, will tend to give a disproportionately strong boost to demand for commodities other than the basic necessities of life, and so to sectors of the economy whose growth is especially important if an industrial revolution is to occur.[431]

  There is thus some reason to suppose that monogamy, by resulting in a low-pressure demographic profile, was a necessary condition for industrialization. This argument suggests that monogamy may indeed have been a central aspect of the necessary architecture of Western modernization.

  Similarly, in a paper on age of marriage and its effects in a wide range of areas, it is concluded that without the late-marriage regime, living standards in England would not have improved until 1870.

  Later marriage not only constrained the number of births but also provided greater opportunities for female informal learning, especially through ‘service’. A high proportion of unmarried females between the ages of 15 and 25 left home and worked elsewhere, instead of bearing children, as in other societies. This widened female horizons compared with a passage from the parental household directly into demanding motherhood and housekeeping [as occurred in the joint families of southern Europe]. Throughout this period the family was the principal institution for educating and training future workers. Schooling was not compulsory until 1880 in England. In the early nineteenth century few children attended any school regularly and few remained at school for more than one and a half years. Such skills and work discipline as were learned were passed on and built up over the generations primarily by the family. [We show] how, over the centuries, the gradual rise of this human capital raised productivity and eventually brought about the Industrial Revolution.[432]

  Monogamy and Investment in Children

  Polygynous mating systems tend to result in resources being devoted to reproduction and relatively less to investment in children. For a male in a polygynous society it is attractive to invest in another wife or concubine and her low investment offspring.[433] Investment in additional concubines tends to have a large reproductive payoff and requires little investment in children. Offspring of concubines were typically given relatively small inheritances and allowed to descend the social ladder. There is a low sex ratio of offspring among harem women—a preponderance of daughters.[434] In theoretical terms this implies a bias toward low-investment offspring because in general it is easier for females to be able to mate.[435] Although the daughters of these concubines will have low social status compared to their father, they will tend to mate. On the other hand, sons of the upper classes were targets of dowry competition for lower status families. In either case, there is little need for fathers to invest time, energy, or money in the offspring of their concubines.

  Monogamy, however, restricts the investment of individual males to the offspring of one woman. With the decline in extended kinship relations (see below) and the institutionalization of monogamy for all social classes, support for children came to rest completely upon the independent nuclear family. As described below, this family, based on the simple household was the critical precursor of Western modernization.

  Christianity in Opposition to the Ancient Greco-

  Roman Aristocratic Social Order

  Roman family structure was discussed in the Appendix to Chapter 2. Larry Siedentop argues that St. Paul fundamentally turned this world of natural hierarchy upside down.[436] Within Christian ideology the individual replaced the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy. Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of moral egalitarianism, at least within the Christian community, rather than natural hierarchy. Individual souls were seen as having moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God.

  Nevertheless, Christianity did not invent moral universalism but rather built on intellectual currents that had already developed within the Greco-Roman world:

  [Christian universalism was] profoundly indebted to developments in Greek thought. For the discourse of citizenship in the polis had initiated a distancing of persons from mere family and tribal identities, while later Hellenistic philosophy had introduced an even more wide-ranging, speculative ‘universalist’ idiom. That intellectual breadth had, in turn, been reinforced by the subjection of so much of the Mediterranean world to a single power, Rome.[437]

  In other words, the tendencies toward universalism were already developing prior to Christianity within Western societies beyond those already apparent in ancient aristocratic culture, likely ultimately exacerbated by the large influx into Greco-Roman societies of peoples with no family connections to the original aristocratic elements. This is not surprising given the tendency for group boundaries to become permeable over time in Indo-European cultures.[438]

  Siedentop argues that the social roles ascribed by natural inequality no longer defined the person; people were now defined subjectively, by their conscience and intentions in performing an act, and they were free to make voluntary associations and assume voluntary roles in a no longer rigidly hierarchical, hereditary system.

  Another subversive aspect of Christianity was that Christian heroes were martyrs, whereas Indo-European heroes were aristocratic warriors —“Springing from a leading family and often associated with the foundation of cities, the ancient hero was typically male, strong, wily, successful.”[439] Christian martyrs were the opposite, but they “gained a hold over popular imagination.”[440]

  Siedentop emphasizes the cruelty and lack of restraints on the powerful in the ancient world. Christians by the end of the third century “became spokesmen for the lower classes,” developing a “rhetoric founded on ‘love of the poor’”—a “kind of Christian populism.”[441] Bishops reached out to “the servile, destitute, and foreign born, to groups without standing in the hierarchy of citizens. They were offered a home. It was an irresistible offer.”[442]

  “The equality of souls in search
of salvation was at the heart of Christian beliefs.”[443] Such beliefs began to have a wide social influence in Roman society in the second century.[444] As an indication of how much Christian attitudes had pervaded Roman society, when Julian tried to restore paganism in the mid-fourth century, “the new priesthood he sought to create was to have as its test ‘the love of God and of fellow men’, while ‘charity’ was to be its vocation”[445]—hardly an aristocratic world view. Rather, it was a world that “at least approximated to Christian moral intuitions.”[446]

  The eclipse of the aristocratic world of military achievement continued in the fourth century when monasticism began to be organized on principles utterly opposed to the traditional aristocratic ethic involving the pursuit of wealth and worldly success. Convents were established; it became common for women in upper-class families to take vows of virginity. And the aristocratic worldview of disdain for work was rejected; work had dignity. St. Basil (c. 330–c. 378) based his monastic community on equality and reciprocity, lack of personal property, and public service (e.g., in schools or hospitals). The disrepute that monasticism fell into in the sixteenth century,

  makes it hard to recapture the prestige it had in earlier centuries. Yet at the end of antiquity the image it offered of a social order founded on equality, limiting the role of force and honouring work, while devoting itself to prayer and acts of charity, gave it a powerful hold over minds. Monasticism preserved the image of a regular society when the pax romana was being undermined, first by the overthrow of the Western empire (476) after the Germanic invasions, and then by Muslim conquests in the East.[447]

  The eclipse of the aristocratic worldview can also be seen in Christian philosophy. Because of his emphasis on the will (which mediated between appetite [based on evolved desires] and reason [based on the higher brain processes and decision making]), some have attributed the rise of individualism to St. Augustine. Whereas a bedrock proposition of ancient Greek philosophers was that reason was motivating, Augustine argued that reason doesn’t act in isolation, and is influenced by emotions (e.g., “delight,”[448] love, or hatred—a proposal that any modern psychologist would agree with). Augustine rejected natural inequality because all are subject to God’s power, even though intuitively he thought that people with higher intellect or fewer sins had more value. Augustine thus “completes the demolition of ancient rationalism. The patriarchal family, the aristocratic society underlying the polis, the cosmos as a hierarchy of ends or purposes: all of these became suspect and vulnerable without its support.”[449] Ancient rationalism was replaced by the need for prayer, “for through prayer humans can seek the support of grace for their better intentions.”[450] Humans need “divine support” to act uprightly.[451] Yet we can never achieve moral perfection.

  There is thus a close connection between individualism and the notion of moral perfection as something always to be sought but never attained. “For Augustine (and Kant), none of us can ever claim to be a success in moral terms. We all fail, and it is this failure—tragic, but also humbling—that contains a powerful egalitarian message.”[452] In any case, moral perfection becomes the ultimate measure of a person’s worth—something that should be kept in mind in the present age when subscribing to multicultural ideology and replacement-level immigration has been successfully propagated as a moral imperative throughout the West. The importance of maintaining a reputation as a morally upright person is a major theme of Chapters 6–8 which emphasize the rise of moral communities as fundamental to social organization in the West, the ultimate eclipse of the aristocratic worldview, and the psychological mechanisms underlying moral communities.

  Christianity, by lessening the power of the paterfamilias, also meant less power of fathers over children and a higher status for women. Wealthy women were crucial to the success of early Church, and adultery was seen as a sin for both men and women rather than only a transgression for women (as is generally the case cross-culturally). There were also humanitarian changes in the law of slavery due to Christian influence, although Siedentop does not claim that Christianity ended slavery. There were both Christian apologists (e.g., Augustine) and opponents of slavery (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa[453]).

  Nevertheless, there was a profound egalitarian thrust of Christianity in the late Roman Empire. The rhetoric of urban bishops was highly inclusive: “It was a rhetoric that encouraged women, the urban poor and even slaves to feel part of the city in a way that had not previously been possible.”[454]

  Christianity in Post-Roman Europe

  In The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity,[455] James Russell describes Christianization as accommodative and gradual, typically not beginning with a requirement that converts accept all Christian doctrines, and in particular, exempting the “Indo-European warrior code” that was at the heart of the culture of the Germanic peoples.[456] The Germanization of Christianity

  was primarily a consequence of the deliberate inculturation of Germanic religiocultural attitudes within Christianity by Christian missionaries. This process of accommodation resulted in the essential transformation of Christianity from a universal salvation religion to a Germanic, and eventually European, folk religion. The sociopsychological response of the Germanic peoples to this enculturated form of Christianity included the acceptance of those traditionally Christian elements which coincided with Germanic religiosity and the resolution of dissonant elements by reinterpreting them in accordance with the Germanic ethos and world-view.[457]

  Christianity did not attempt to eradicate the world-accepting, fundamentally Indo-European Germanic warrior culture, where everlasting fame from earthly deeds was sought after, in favor of promoting Christian other-worldly hope for salvation. Rather, popes harnessed the warrior spirit in the interests of spreading Christianity—for example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s tract for the Knights Templars justified killing non-Christians. In other cases, Christianization reinterpreted previously existing Germanic concepts—e.g., the king’s sacred Heil (charisma), which was bound up with the health of the kingdom, became imbued with connotations of holiness and individual salvation.[458] The Old English word for the leader of a comitatus (männerbund) was translated as dominus, the Latin term meaning ‘lord’ and also used to refer to Christ.

  Christianity was also more individualistic than traditional Germanic beliefs in the sense that it prized individual salvation rather than a folk-centered religious orientation that emphasized the community.[459] Traditional Germanic ethical standards “appear to have been ultimately derived from a sociobiological drive for group survival through ingroup altruism. Ethical misconduct thus consisted primarily in violating the code of honor of one’s kindred or one’s comitatus.”[460] Violation of these standards was a stain on the entire kindred, while heroic acts reflected positively on the kindred. As indicated above, the Church acted to break down extended kinship relations and to generally promote individualism in all spheres of European life, albeit within a context in which there were pre-existing tendencies toward individualism among the Germanic peoples (see Chapter 4).

  Nevertheless, Christianization was quite limited, at least by the mid-eighth century:[461] “From the persistence of Germanic attitudes and values in the secular Germanic literature, and the Germanization of liturgical practices and hagiographic canons, it appears that the success of such a world-view transformation effort was limited.”[462] Of course, this does not imply that a more thorough Christianization had not occurred by the High Middle Ages; nor does it imply that Christian influence in the direction of egalitarian individualism and the ultimate eclipse of the aristocratic worldview did not continue in later centuries.

  The Church in Pursuit of Power

  As noted above, the Church energetically pursued policies opposed to the reproductive interests of the aristocracy. This behavior of the Church in the post-Roman world is understandable in terms of seeking power. But besides the campaign to regulate the marriages of the aristocracy, the Church also acted to diminish th
e power of extended kinship groups and often championed the rights of individuals and cities against feudal lords. Any institution seeking power for itself seeks to diminish other power centers, and the Church was no exception. In this campaign, the ideology of moral egalitarianism was a powerful weapon.

  The Church’s Ideology of Moral Egalitarianism as an

  Instrument of Furthering Its Power

  Trends toward egalitarianism in opposition to aristocratic interests were encouraged by the Church’s ideology of moral egalitarianism. This campaign reached even to reconceptualizing morality itself. For example, Christianity favored explanations by intention because it privileged the inner conscience, whereas Germanic law codes emphasized damages regardless of intention. The Church combatted the inegalitarian (aristocratic) Germanic idea that different people had different value for punishment, maintaining that rank or status as free or enslaved shouldn’t matter. Siedentop argues that canon law sought generalizations because of their universalist ideology: people were fundamentally the same—had the same rights, etc. “Law should be understood as applying to ‘all (souls) equally.’”[463] Roman law avoided abstractions because, since people were seen as having different natural rights due to natural status differences, generalizations were not possible.

  Natural law came to be understood as implying natural rights of individuals (e.g., the right to a fair trial), not as mandating natural inequality based on different status, talent, or intellectual ability. Thus, Gratian and others argued that all humans have an “intrinsic moral nature.”[464] Such thinking “laid the foundation of modern liberalism.”[465]

  The Visigothic Code in particular (decreed in 642–643 by the Visigothic Kingdom which ruled southwestern France and the Iberian Peninsula) was deeply influenced by the clergy and was more egalitarian than other Germanic codes. Christian intuitions of moral universalism “began to impinge on the Carolingian conception of the proper relations between rulers and the ruled. … But only within limits.”[466] For example, Charlemagne was famously ruthless against unbelievers—Saxons and Muslims—despite the idea that everyone is moral agent. Christian influences on the laws on slavery reigned in the power of masters—slaves could only suffer capital punishment with a public trial; married slaves could not be separated. There was thus a blend of Germanic customs and Christian influences.