Steven Tucker has an interesting Mercatornet piece on John Stuart Mill and what has now become a curiously oppressive pursuit of liberty.
The cult of progress: John Stuart Mill’s prison of compulsory eccentricity
150 years on from the death of JS Mill, has the philosopher really just beamed humanity up forcibly into a new, alien world of infinite ‘freedom’?
I used to like John Stuart Mill. Then I actually read him...
What I did not realise when I cited Mill approvingly in my book was that, enamoured as he was by “experiments in living”, Mill dreamed of a world in which everyone was now an eccentric – or, to put it another way, a complete and utter freak. Ironically, in such a world, compulsory eccentricity actually becomes a new form of oppression of the constitutionally normal.
Mill famously castigated “the despotism of custom” and the received mass opinion of non-progressive proles. Yet, if the new received opinion becomes the contemporary liberal denigration of custom instead, then this becomes a new “despotism of custom” in its turn, the new “custom” being a kind of “anti-custom” and celebratory repudiation of previously prevailing social norms – i.e. State-enforced deviance-worship and mandatory cults of diversity.
Mill’s key text may have been called On Liberty, but it really should have been called On Compulsory Liberty – and compulsory liberty is no true liberty at all.
What I did not realise when I cited Mill approvingly in my book was that, enamoured as he was by “experiments in living”, Mill dreamed of a world in which everyone was now an eccentric – or, to put it another way, a complete and utter freak. Ironically, in such a world, compulsory eccentricity actually becomes a new form of oppression of the constitutionally normal.
Mill famously castigated “the despotism of custom” and the received mass opinion of non-progressive proles. Yet, if the new received opinion becomes the contemporary liberal denigration of custom instead, then this becomes a new “despotism of custom” in its turn, the new “custom” being a kind of “anti-custom” and celebratory repudiation of previously prevailing social norms – i.e. State-enforced deviance-worship and mandatory cults of diversity.
Mill’s key text may have been called On Liberty, but it really should have been called On Compulsory Liberty – and compulsory liberty is no true liberty at all.
The whole piece is well worth reading because we do seem to have a problem with prejudice. We could view at least some prejudice as a rational defence of the familiar against the risks of the unfamiliar. Yet for decades we have been encouraged to be generally prejudiced against prejudice. Where we end up with that is merely another, more risky form of prejudice.
Identity-politics ideologues today speak of dismantling oppressive norms of white, cisheteropatriarchal normativity, which, by judging people against a standard template, fit minorities into neat little boxes and so drive them towards despair. Mill likewise complains of the painful impossibility of eccentric geniuses like him successfully “fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its [ordinary] members the trouble of forming their own character.” Well, such moulds have indeed by now been well and truly broken: gender is now a spectrum with approximately 12,697 or more separate entries on it, rather than a mere two as in bigoted Victorian times, for instance.
Identity-politics ideologues today speak of dismantling oppressive norms of white, cisheteropatriarchal normativity, which, by judging people against a standard template, fit minorities into neat little boxes and so drive them towards despair. Mill likewise complains of the painful impossibility of eccentric geniuses like him successfully “fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its [ordinary] members the trouble of forming their own character.” Well, such moulds have indeed by now been well and truly broken: gender is now a spectrum with approximately 12,697 or more separate entries on it, rather than a mere two as in bigoted Victorian times, for instance.
2 comments:
I studied Mill in depth at University, under someone who considered themselves a Millian liberal. That's an excellent essay by Tucker; it covers all the main points very clearly.
What's really odd is that I knew all that stuff, but had retained only the "positive" bit about others not having a right to shut you up. I had completely forgotten all his radicalism and elitism, the obsession with "experiments in living" and the extra votes for educated individuals. It has only just come back into focus in the last few weeks, as the essays (UnHerd has been good) to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death have been published. I've been wondering why I had forgotten it. Certainly, when younger, I was a lot more radical than now. And perhaps, in the 1970s, there was more of a threat from conventional opinion and group-think. But the main reason seems to be that we have now seen all those "experiments in living", and the glorification of eccentricity, and the results have been utterly disastrous.
One of the main themes in my (very radical) university course was that the main divide in modern (i.e. 1970s) politics was between socialists, who would force the outcome they preferred upon society; and liberals, who would allow people to choose. Liberals were considered to be less adventurous, slightly old-fashioned, and boring. But perhaps they have done more damage in the long run. Perhaps our target should not be the Marxist radicals who dominated universities, but the dippy weak-minded teachers and parents and writers who think that anything goes, and it ought to, because it's just jolly good fun.
Sam - that's interesting. I've read his On Liberty essay a few times and in a sense it's a masterpiece but I never read anything else of his. I knew about the extra votes for educated individuals from somewhere now forgotten, so maybe that put me off.
Also interesting that you retained only the positive bit about others not having a right to shut you up. Maybe that's because it is often quoted and this reinforces the positive aspect of Mill more generally. It is positive and in that respect Mill is still valuable. The trouble is, quoting him on that feels selective and not quite comfortable - now even more so.
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