A Framework for the New Right
Part I: The Problem
Power and Morality
Power is the emergent property of cooperation in a social species.
Morality directs the use of this power towards coercion and compulsion for the purpose of safeguarding the social unit. Those who are deemed immoral may be coerced and compelled by force through use of this power.
Charles Darwin, who some have claimed had the single best idea anyone ever had, showed us that the fundamental principle governing all living species is the achievement of survival and reproduction. Thus, cooperation (i.e. power) increases a social species’ ability to survive and reproduce. For example, if an enemy or a predator threatens my survival, I can depend upon the social unit to come to my defense. As social units become larger and larger, through more and more cooperation, so too power expands. Power has grown so much in our social species that predators have ceased to be a serious threat to our survival or reproduction.
Enemies, however, remain a threat. If someone steals my food, or my means of acquiring food, they are a threat to my survival. If someone aims to kill me to enclose as their land the land that I have cultivated, they are a threat to my survival. If someone rapes my wife, they are a threat to my reproduction. If someone aims to kill my children, they are a threat to my reproduction. Therefore, they are immoral and criminal, and must be coerced and compelled through force or through power. Those who attempt to assault, batter, or murder are immoral, criminal, and must be coerced or compelled by power. Thus, morality is the discernment of who power is to be used against.
Liberation Morality
Contemporary morality can trace its first principles back to the execution of Socrates by the Athenian democracy. It is universally believed that in the case of Socrates power was used against him because it misidentified him as an immoral man. Socrates encouraged the powerful, and those who would become powerful, to ask, “what is good (i.e. moral)?” Socrates himself did not know what was moral, and by trying to learn through public conversation with others (one may say through dialectical reason), he embarrassed many of the powerful when he revealed to them that, although they believed themselves to know what was good or moral, they did not. Socrates’ willing execution was his last testament, revealing to the world that the powerful could not discern who was to be coerced.
The wisdom of Socrates (and the other great Greek thinkers) was immediately recognized by the Romans who conquered them, and later by the Byzantine and Catholic Church, who preserved their writings. They took with them the lesson that democracy was a dangerous endeavor, liable to to place power into the hands of those who could not discern the moral from the immoral.
As religious wars with Islamic caliphates began to wane and global trade began to wax, an interest in the Greeks began to spread beyond a small scholarly elite. The Renaissance Period was marked by imitation of Greek art recast in Christian themes. An interest in natural philosophy, what today we call science, and at which the Greeks excelled, also began to spread.
When Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was published, and he was subsequently excommunicated, he was immediately recognized by many as embodying the spirit of Socrates in being coerced by a power that could not discern the moral from immoral. So too many saw the spirit of Socrates in Galileo Galilei when the Catholic Church coerced him into recanting his defense of the Copernican System.
Thus, a moral system began to arise which rested on the foundation of an individual’s right to think and speak free from the coercion or compulsion of power. A new power began to arise which questioned power itself and began to develop all varieties of rights to be afforded to individuals. Socrates was an individual, coerced unto his death by a collective, or rather a power. Surely Socrates, being a good and moral man, had a right to think and speak freely. Never again would we allow power to be used against Socrates.
And thus, liberation morality was born. Power must be used to prevent power from being used. This morality led to the Glorious Revolution in Britain, the American War of Independence, and the Abolition Movement. It also led to the French Revolution. This morality is embodied in Jefferson’s words known to all:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Jefferson too writes of “...the laws of Nature and Nature’s God…” God had no representatives on Earth, rather God represented himself in nature. The divine right of kings and the Catholic Church were obstacles set in the way of access to God rather than mediators or conduits of God. God had created individuals as natural beings with the capability of thinking independent thoughts, thus God must have intended individuals to think and speak free from the coercion of power.
Those who fail to have reverence for these individual rights granted to us by God through nature are thus immoral, and must be coerced by power. Liberation morality knows what Socrates did not.
But even more, nature had endowed every human being with the ability to think, and, therefore, God through nature had created every human being politically equal. How then had a society so stratified and hierarchical, with kings and nobility and clergy, with slaves and masters, grown up around us? It must be a case of Socrates all over again. Power had been unable to discern the moral from the immoral because it had not enforced the natural law of political equality.
We must dispense with clergy, dispense with kings, dispense with nobility, and dispense with masters and slaves. But the war for liberation does not end there.
On Communism
Is it by coincidence that the very same argument used to justify private property was eventually used to justify its abolition? Nature endows humans with their free ability to think and speak, which according to liberation morality is evidence of their right to it. Likewise, nature endows humans with the ability to freely act, and through this action an individual can reshape the world: by making tools, by making shelter, and by cultivating the land for food. Therefore, because nature allows for this free action, the right to the ownership of the products and results of that free action is justified by nature. Thus, the right to private property too, is self-evident.
The right to private property was well-established for a time, its existence enforced by power as an individual right. That is, until, a spectre arose.
There were some who remembered that liberation morality was to use power so that power should not be used. Suddenly they realized that there was little land and material for them to freely act upon and transform into private property. They realized that the land and the means of production were the private property of others. They realized that they could not maintain their individual right to life without being coerced and compelled to act as instruments of the free actions of others.
This was unacceptable. Liberation morality demanded that power be used so as to not allow property owners to compel or coerce others to labor for them. Property owners denied individuals the right to food, to shelter, and to warm clothes. Property owners were immoral; property owners were immoral. And so, in the Paris Commune, in the Bolshevik Revolution, in China, in North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and Vietnam… communism spread.
Indeed, the Second World War mostly rid the world of every power which is not based on liberation morality, but in two forms: communism and the earlier classical liberal version. Thus, the Cold War began and ended and though communism was the more advanced form of liberation morality, it could not maintain itself in its centralized forms.
Liberation morality, however, is still in perpetual revolution. Liberation morality had forgotten that men incorrectly laid claim to political equality; that fact that it was men who risked their lives in violent wars for it was irrelevant. As liberation morality reflected on itself, it realized it had neglected that women too by nature could think and speak freely, and therefore had a right to political equality and liberation as well.
Everyone must have rights; liberation morality demands it. Liberate women from their families. Liberate the citizens of other nations. Liberate blacks, then liberate them again, and then again. Liberate sexual deviants. Liberate trans children from their tyrannical parents. The revolution is never complete.
On Conservatism
Liberation morality is a contemporary cultural phenomenon, but moral judgment is largely based on intuition. As we discussed in the beginning, power is an emergent quality of cooperation in social units. Social units in deep evolutionary history that had inclinations towards reducing harm, increasing fairness, maintaining loyalty to legitimate social units, obeying legitimate authorities, and reducing practices which could spread disease (such as deviant sexual practices or bad hygiene) would have been better able to cooperate, increases their power, and thus survive and reproduce. Jefferson was not far from the mark by asserting the right to life first, as the purpose of power (i.e. social cooperation) is to preserve the lives of those in the social unit.
This is why the political right (i.e. conservatives) has never fully disappeared. Those on the political right have intuitions that loyalty, duty, and purity are to be regarded as moral goods. Because reproduction is also a fundamental motivation of all living species (as Darwin taught us), the political right also have an immense intuition that the family unit is sacred.
Yet, the political right have no language to express these moral goods. The political right is trapped within a framework which uses the language of liberation morality. They speak of the right of the family, the right of a nation, and the right of a people. But families, nations, and collective peoples cannot think and speak independently by nature, and therefore, according to liberation morality, have no rights.
Collective Liberation
This, however, is the fundamental problem that liberation morality has confronted, and that communism was quick to understand: that power is a collective phenomenon. Power is the emergent property of social cooperation in order to enforce morality. As Marx understood, when history is reflected upon, liberation morality casts history in a narrative of collectives which wield power against other collectives which yearn to be liberated.
Therefore, the individual is lost. Liberation morality no longer seeks to save Socrates from power, it rather seeks to save patriots from tyranny. It seeks to save to workers from capitalists, to save indigenous from colonial imperialists, to save blacks from whites, to save homosexuals from heterosexuals, and to save women from men. Thus, as liberation morality reflects upon itself, it discards its care for individual liberation in lieu of collective liberation.
Yet again, the political right is trapped by the language of liberation morality. They cast themselves in terms of collective liberation, as patriots who must be liberated from tyranny, yet contradict themselves when they speak of individual rights. Liberation morality is in perpetual revolution, yet the political right has been captured by both the past and the present forms it inhabits. Their instincts and their intuitions, to survive and reproduce, for self-defense and the sacred family, cannot withstand coercion and compulsion from power when it is framed in the language of liberation morality. An individual right to self-defense cannot withstand the collective liberation of shooting victims. A right to preserve the family unit cannot withstand the collective liberation of wives from their husbands.
Ultimately, power will do what it has always done when it has decided what is moral and immoral: it will coerce and compel the immoral. Thus, even the individual right to free thought and free speech will be dispensed with when it is at odds with the liberation morality of collective liberation of protected classes.
The Pre-Modern to Modern Transition
Recall that liberation morality was born as a revolution against the Catholic Church in the Protestant Reformation. In the advanced, reflective form of liberation morality, it recast the Protestant Reformation not as a struggle for individual rights to worship, but as the collective liberation of the faithful from the tyranny of the clergy. If a liberated people need not a clergy, they too need not a nobility. But also if a liberated people need not a king, why then should they need a God? The pre-modern liberation morality was grounded in God, through nature. But if we are to be liberated from God, we must have a modern grounding of liberation morality in nature alone.
An admittedly impressive attempt at this project is to be found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Jefferson seems to have anticipated their modern project when including “the pursuit of happiness” among his list of unalienable rights. For Bentham and Mill, pleasure and happiness were to be the foundation of their morality. This shift from the pre-modern to the modern was perhaps inspired by Aristotle, who wrote that the purpose of all human political activity was the achievement of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is generally translated into English as “happiness,” but the Greek word had immensely more depth and breadth which the English word does not capture. The word “happiness” has much more in common with the word euphoria, rather than eudaimonia, such as the euphoria one feels when intoxicated or experiencing sexual pleasure.
Stangely, the experience of pleasure was integrated into the liberation morality, though anyone born before the 19th century could not have imagined such a convergence. Kant, for example, expressed that a moral action must be autonomous, and that actions motivated by self-gratification and pleasure were not autonomous or free because they were submission to animal instinct. Indeed, temperance, self-restraint, and self-regulation have generally throughout the vast majority of human history been regarded as virtues.
Yet, Amsterdam, in our contemporary age, has long been viewed as a liberated city, because euphoria can be easily obtained there through access to psychoactive drugs and prostitution. In the United States, and increasingly elsewhere, access to fast food, every variety and flavor of consumer products, and pornography are regarded as signals of greater liberation. Sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and sexual gratification by any means (including gender transition) are too regarded as expressions of liberation.
Certainly, God, through nature, would not have intended human beings to behave in such ways. But, in dispensing with God, and attempting to establish liberation morality in nature alone, through pleasure, Thomas Carlyle clearly saw the future that such an idea entailed: a morality suited for pigs. And even though John Stuart Mill tried to steer the future away from the pig morality, he failed to realize (as Jefferson did) that moral ideas adopted by power have an inertia all of their own.
Thus, we have been tracking the historical inertia of liberation morality: from individual rights to collective liberation, and from its pre-modern grounding in God through nature, to its modern grounding in nature alone.
The Modern to the Post-Modern Transition
Yet Darwin was able to achieve a transition from the pre-modern (grounded in God) to the modern (grounded in nature) outside of the realm of liberation morality. But Darwin was not interested in power, rather he was interested in truth, and therefore was not interested in establishing a morality which would determine who was and who was not to be coerced.
Thus, Darwin understands the lesson of Socrates in a more fundamental way. Socrates did not want to be liberated, evidenced by his refusal to be smuggled out of death row by his pleading friends and students. Socrates, rather, wanted to be virtuous, and his most beloved virtue was pursuit of truth.
Liberation morality has only one virtue: liberation. Thus, liberation morality wielded by power will always supersede truth. When facts conflict with liberation, the facts must be dispensed with. Nature is the truth manifest, therefore when nature and liberation morality contradict each other, nature itself must be overcome or obscured. By the inertia of the liberation morality, just as in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, God had to be dispensed with, so too in the transition from the modern to the post-modern, nature had to be dispensed with.
Thus, liberation morality has created a political situation where facts do not matter: the post-modern liberation morality is the Orwellian. Only in the post-modern liberation morality could a claim be perpetuated that white people in Western culture of European descent are responsible for the institution of slavery, when in fact white people in Western culture of European descent were the first people throughout all of human history to abolish the institution of slavery.