Over at I, Ectomorph, Andrew Cunningham reflects seriously on the crisis of the Enlightenment project and discusses the opposition between the Enlightenment’s ideal of universal man (championed by the Jonah Goldbergs of the world) and the particular kinds of men who actually exist.

I’m not sure what this means. Yes, Enlightenment thinkers placed normative priority on our identity as rational moral agents over our more parochial identities. However, most also did not deny the significance of the latter. ~Akrasia

No, they didn’t exactly deny the significance of the latter. But they did deny that these parochial identities compelled any moral obligation independent of the choice of the “agent”–family authority, kinship, nationality, place of birth, tradition and custom have no moral weight. These are accidental and they are incidental to what really matters. They do say that. They did (and their successors today do) regard these “parochial identities” on the whole as baneful influences when these “more parochial identities” condition and constrain the lives of “rational moral agents” (also sometimes known as people).

Akrasia assures us elsewhere that no one believes that an “abstract man” is actually out there running around somewhere. Well, I suppose not. Put that way, no sane person could believe in such a thing. Even universalists have to be from a particular place, and even liberals are heirs to a tradition. Maistre denied abstract man the same way Lady Thatcher denied the existence of society as something abstract. Society is not something theoretical to which individuals give their consent and thus constitute society, but it is rather a real network of obligations and relationships into which people are born. That’s the real problem for the Enlightenment liberal, or so it seems to me: we are defined by circumstances that we cannot control and that we do not choose. O, autonomous man, where is thy autonomy? Man does not exist independent of his nation, culture, traditions and the place and circumstances of his life, all of which define his identity. Many Enlightenment thinkers did acknowledge this, even if they despised it, but Mr. Goldberg could not even understand this much.

One could easily get the impression from statements just like the one quoted above that there are people who believe that we act as “rational moral agents” rather than as people with specific loyalties and obligations. Communities recognise and verify what is and is not normative, always in connection with some received tradition, and “agents” could choose to reject those norms, but everything that the agent does is defined and constrained by what he has received and learned from the community. To say that he is acting rationally in the sense that Enlightenment philosophers mean it is to assume quite a lot. By their standards, a man does not act or choose rationally until he acts and chooses independently of these things according to self-styled “rational” standards of, say, self-interest, and that it is unethical to impose obligations on someone who does not consent (or no longer consents) to them.

There are certainly more than a few people who would like nothing more than a sort of uniform man modeled on a man with as little “cultural baggage” (a term that must have been invented by a universalist) and “parochial identity” as possible. That is what Goldberg is seeking, what I believe most Enlightenment philosophers also desired, and what Maistre and I reject.

Akrasia goes on:

We have far more in common qua human beings than differences qua Englishmen versus Danes. If it’s a normative claim, then why privilege the local and contingent over the universal and noncontingent? That move needs to be defended. If it’s simply a claim about human psychology — so what?

I’m sure we’re all grateful for this basic lesson in anthropology, but I’m not quite sure what he’s getting at here. We do have more in common as human beings than we differ between different nations, but as a general rule Englishmen have the most in common with other Englishmen, Yorkshiremen with other Yorkshiremen and so on down the line. It seems to me that we privilege the “local and contingent” because it is at the level of the local and contingent that people identify with one another the most and the level at which they recognise their norms. The local is the field where all action takes place. A local or parochial identity (or a set of these) is the source of virtually all meaning in a person’s life.

Universalist ethics cannot, for example, really recognise patriotism as ethical, because it cannot recognise it as rational, as this sort of loyalty or sentiment has already been ruled out beforehand as irrational. Yet there seems to me to be few other more naturally occurring virtues than this.

One of my religion professors once observed that Kant’s ethics were remarkably similar to the sentiments and requirements of late 18th century German middle-class morality, to which I’m sure Kant would have taken exception. After all, to have one’s habits and customs overwhelmingly shaped by anything so irrational as inherited cultural norms would be rather embarrassing for the master of universalist ethics.