Misunderstanding Liberalism (4) - The Individual Is a Collective Project - Self-Interest Provides Social Security and Wealth

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Continued from here.

Classical Liberalism's Hero - It Is Not The Individual

Their conception of human nature prompted the classical liberals to accord politics a pivotal position in a free society. 

Classical liberals held that — under a wisely chosen institutional regime — politics would be instrumental in harnessing the destructive potential in humans, channelling the simmering furor in them appropriately and blending it with the constructive side of man so as to gain from the mix a plentiful source of energy to fuel peaceful and productive co-existence.

Their starting point was the individual only in so far as they viewed it as highly defective in the absence of proper constraints. The ideal that they were driving at was not some sort of reformed individual whose self-reliance would furnish the building blocks from which the best of all worlds was going to be raised.

As the classical liberals saw it, for the individual to gain a station in life more beneficial to himself than in the past and for him to become at the same time a benign and productive force to his fellows, it was necessary to change the conditions under which social relations were formed in society, rather than effect the release of some magic power inherent in the individual as such.

To see through its promises, classical liberalism did not solely put trust in the independence of the individual, but recommended rules and institutions to which the individual would have to subject itself if it was ever to escape the dreadful abuse that man has been inflicting upon himself and his fellows from time immemorial. Greater personal autonomy comes into its own only after its social boundaries have been carefully drawn. 

Classical liberalism does not idealise the individual — instead it takes a sober look at man's shortcomings and seeks what remedies it can come up with to mitigate the social dramas of human imperfection.

What Is Wrong with the Individual?

Ever alert to the ambiguities of human nature, the classical liberal recognises that man is ridden with irrational desires. The extent to which humans are able to marshal what rational faculties they command is strongly dependent on social circumstances. For the longest period in human history, social circumstances do not exactly invite the currency of rational calculation that we have nowadays come to expect as a matter-of-course. In human history, men are mostly playing out a preordained identity; they are players, echoes and shadows enacting the story line of a culture forced upon them by custom and tradition. In being what they are, they follow something that is outside them, for which they kill or give themselves up. They are not in a position to assert an identity of their own, for they are lacking

• sufficient awareness of independent personhood, 

• a confident enough sense of entitlement to pursue strategies of systematic self-interest, 

• the cultural license and experience (socialisation) and 

• the material means 

to stay apart from family, kin, caste or whatever community demands their loyalty.

Man is largely without protection against cultural enlistment.

Self-regarding personal identity cannot serve as a barrier against cultural imposition.

The borders between a biographical personality and the culture into which a man is born are open; the communal traditions dictate the interests that man will adopt as his "own".

If the tribe requires him to die, it is in his interest to die. If the tribe requires him to represent the honour of the tribe and an outsider insults tribal honour, he has been insulted and it is in his interest to fight and kill to restore the balance of honour.

What is wrong with the individual? Well, the individual is hardly an individual, that is what is wrong with it.

Man is tied to the wrong kind of loyalty. It is this troublesome bondage that is the true target of classical liberalism.

Self-Interest Makes for Social Security and High Productivity

When humans lack cultural license to pursue a systematic strategy dedicated to the pursuit of self-interested goals, it does not even make sense to warn the individual that in a given situation she may not be acting in her own best interest. Extensive personal self-regard is a modern invention, a hallmark of recent liberty.

We may, therefore, contrast

• the pursuit of self-interest by free individuals in modern open-access societies with 

• the rather common exposure of communal man to severe personal disadvantage, harm, and even self-destruction at the behest of a higher cultural mystique.

Releasing the power of self-interest represents both

• an advance in "security technology" shielding man from avoidable detriment, as well as 

• a major boost to human productivity, 

always assuming that self-interests are made to interlock by social regulation.  

Continued here.