Perusing the illiberal critiques of Western modernism these days presents a common charge against the supposedly liberal shape of our modern politics: “atomism”.
The general theme is that a combination of the Enlightenment, scientific thinking, and Western philosophers from Rousseau to Rawls have left us a metaphysics so solvent that it is slowly dissolving entire communities and civilizations, leaving their members unmoored and rudderless in matters of identity, ethics, and politics. The looming threat of a war of all against all hangs like a Sword of Damocles.
Philosopher David Wiseman gives us the gist of it in the introduction to his “A Social Ontology”:
“Individualist – atomist – theories emphasize the self-sufficiency and moral autonomy of persons. They speak of freedoms, rights and exceptions; rarely or never of reciprocities, duties and connections. Individualism dominates our self perception. It encourages us to deny the ligaments and nerves of our social lives. Perceiving every society as an aggregate, it assaults or diminishes the systems – including families, schools, businesses, and states – where personal identity, security and satisfaction are achieved. Every such system is, in atomist eyes, no less an aggregate than the passengers in a bus.”
For Weissman, among others, we ought to perceive every society as a sort of body itself, a sort of individual he describes as a System. The system is the thing. Systems include crystals, galaxies, just as they do families, businesses, schools. All systems “derive their coherence or integrity from the reciprocal causal relations of their parts”. Any emphasis on the flesh-and-blood human beings involved in these systems should only serve to remind us that each of us are the “parts” of these systems, like the brick and mortar, or the furniture. Among atomism’s critics some systems are more important than others. Communitarians speak of The Community. For neorepublicans, it’s The Republic. For Hobbes it was that mortal god, The Commonwealth. For nationalists, it is some variation of The Ehtnos, The Race, The Nation. And so on.
But one might wonder: how does atomism encourage us to deny “the ligaments and nerves of our social lives”? Social lives do not have ligaments and nerves. Yet, according to Weissman, human society is a system because human beings are “proper parts joined by reciprocal causal relations”. Joined? By what?
Note the ever-occurring metaphor of a fleshy thread connecting one person to another. Even though we already know that each and every human being ever involved in any given system has had their umbilical cord severed long before they started participating in it, the metaphor of humans fused one to the other persists in holistic descriptions of these systems. It’s almost as if they cannot do otherwise. I’d like to consider a minute what might induce one to speak of “connections”, “ties”, “bonds”, “attachments”, or “links” precisely where there are none.
The Social Tissue
When French philosopher Pierre Leroux coined the word “socialism” he gave it a definition that could apply to most political theories in general. He described it as “the exaggeration of the idea of association or of society”. Though that definition is no longer fashionable, it does help to illustrate in plain words how holists throughout the Western tradition have struggled to maintain the value of social bodies wherever no such bodies exist, and the confounding results of their efforts.
Contra Weissman, one such exaggeration is the treating of society like a human body rather than an aggregate of individuals. This is a surprisingly ancient and enduring technique that still persists to this day, even in our supposedly liberal and modern world. The rather innocuous and common term “member” is a valuable and interesting example here. We are often told we are members of this or that group, even if we have never met nor interacted with a vast majority of our fellow members. So how is one a member? The etymology of the term attests that the archaic form of “member” in English and Latin once referred to parts of the body, like an appendage or limb, and not to members of a group. But eventually it took on a figurative sense, most notably as it began to refer to the members of the body of Christ—which was not an actual body, of course, but the institution of the Church as it was first conceived by its founders, with individual Christians conceived of (and treated) as the Church’s many appendages. Some passages from Ephesians show how such a technique was used to protect us from atomism and bring us into perfect unity with the rest of the system.
Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;
But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:
From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.
So when someone claims that another is a member of this or that “community”, or some other fuzzy term, I suppose one could picture himself dangling between a community’s legs.
Given its use at the highest levels of church and state, it is no doubt that this metaphor has served best to defend and preserve power, and maintain the “systems” that protect it. In his famous work The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz cites the numerous legal cases wherein Tudor jurists believed and argued that the king had two bodies: a natural one that gets sick and dies, and a political one, the Body Politic, that is immortal. One interesting case had proven, for instance, that King Henry VIII was still “alive” even though Henry Tudor had been dead for ten years. The sovereign can rule beyond the grave. All of this arcane legal hoopla only helped to insert the fable deeper into the Western legal tradition and beyond. If it wasn’t for Hobbes our great legal minds might still believe that the sovereign was an actual person rather than an artificial one. But he only helped to shift the incidence of absolutism from an accountable body, one we could rip from the throne, to an immortal and unaccountable one that lives on long past all of us. This precisely the character of the persona ficta of corporate and international law.
The preceding examples are just variations on the fable of the “Body Politic” as it has been portrayed throughout Western political history, perhaps starting with Aesop’s fable “The Belly and the Members”. The famous analogy of treating human individuals as if they must form like Voltron can also be read in Plato, Cicero, Livy, and St. Paul. Therefor it is found among the sandy foundations of Greek, Roman, and Christian political philosophy. It is seen in Bodin and Hobbes, Blackstone and Pufendorf, and so has graced the highest echelons of statist discourse through the mouths of the fathers of medieval and modern law. It has allowed the figurative mind to conceive of kingdoms, corporations, and states as singular individuals, complete with moral agency and human rights, and a body that can then be diagnosed with any sort of medical or psychological metaphor as soon as its institutions were attacked, or worse, criticized.
As for the ascendance of social and political atomism, recall that nowadays artificial persons such as states and corporations have by far the most political power on the world stage, and the holists have built entire legal systems to conjure them, maintain their existence, and to defend them from threat. Still, they will blame the conditions of modern life on the simple fact of human individuation and the philosophies that such a brute fact imply, whether right or wrong. We are to think Mills, Rawls, and Nozick have led us to the abyss, but not the religious and state historians who have conjured beings from nothing and implored us to love and obey them. I suppose we can compare Nozick’s to the Bible’s readership if we need more proof. At any rate, the philosophies of human individuation are up against thousands of years of tribal myth-making, as found in the ancient concept of the body politic. In tracing the history of this idea we also realize that we have founded much of statism, law, and the history of politics itself on a brand of political theology common to many collapsed empires, slave states, and waning religions, where all the exaggerations of the idea of society and association have already proven what they are capable of.