The great contradiction within Western conservatism is its focus on individualism. True and unadulterated conservatism is a collectivist philosophy, not an individualist philosophy. It is differentiated from Leftist collectivism not through individualism but first in having multiple layers of relational identity rather than reducing identity to one level, such as class or race and secondly in the voluntary element of the collectivist identities, which are based on love, not upon compulsion.
The overlap between classical liberalism and conservatism is not ideological, but pragmatic. It is best represented by Dr. Jordan Peterson in popular culture, but goes back as far as Edmund Burke the Whiggish father of British conservatism and was politically most effectively implemented by President Reagan and Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher.
Individualism became the shibboleth of conservatism during the Post-war period, under the influence of Friedrich Hayek, a liberal political philosopher, who clearly spelt out his rejection of conservatism in his magnum opus, the Constitution of Liberty, in which he identified himself as a Whig and not a Tory.
At root conservatives and liberals have a different anthropology. For liberals the human being is an atomistic individual motivated by self interest, for the conservative the human being is a person, defined by his relationships with other people, with traditions and identity.
This fundamentally different starting point explains some of the confusion in the position of the highly popular and influential Dr. Jordan Peterson. In Thatcherite wording he talks of individual responsibility as being the cornerstone of civilisation. This fails to grasp that to be in relationships one must be more than a self -interested individual as per Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer.
In misidentifying conservatism Peterson then misidentifies the Left, regarding the modern woke movement as a sort of cultural Marxism, rooted in collectivist identity. He does not understand that breaking all familial, cultural and historical ties to assert one’s identity is the supremely individualist move. Yes there are superficial groupings in the world of intersectionality. But these have no collectivist depth and are so superficial as to be a mere coming together of deeply atomised people alienated from all the collective identities they have inherited.
In misdiagnosing the problem, liberal individualists such as Peterson also misdiagnose the solution - it is not more individualism, but a reassertion of all the collective and traditional ties that bind human beings together. Such ties are the Church, the family, national and ethnic identity, one’s local community, be it town or village. These are collective identities, although they do not compel via bureaucracy like a Marxist system.
Marx is held up as the arch collectivist and yet much of his philosophy was devoted to the destruction of collective ties as false consciousness leaving only class identity - which would be overcome when everyone would live as liberal individuals in the communist utopia after the temporary collectivism of Socialism.
A conservative solution is not to reduce us to individuals, but to re-establish the hierarchy of the ties that bind. Individualism emphasises the revolutionary, the atypical, the innovative, but also alienation and selfishness. Individualism is a threat to conservatism.
If we turn to Greek philosopher theologian Yannaras we can understand that the human being is more than an atomised individual - individual from the Latin for indivisible, essentially a unit - and is rather a person, from the Greek prosopon, which is again related to hypostasis (from the theology of the Greek Fathers). Just as the Trinity is relational so we in its image are relational and the word prosopon brings with it an emphasis on looking towards others.
Thus who we are is defined by a complex network of identities, not a reduction to an atomised individual. The individual is the person abstracted from the organic and spiritual reality of life and this concept led to such contractual and reductive understandings of politics such as the social contract following an imagined state of nature and the emphasis on a progress that moves away from that which roots that ground us.
This deep contradiction, which is not a synthesis, can be found in the policies of the Conservative Government of the 1980s, which undertook radical economic reforms that atomised people and alienated them from communities built around the imperfect world of the industrial economy. The Conservative Government was in part fighting the revolutionary Marxist movement that was controlling the working class through the trade union movement, but used the weapon of liberalism not conservatism to fight that war.
Margaret Thatcher herself famously said that there is no such thing as society. In a seeming paradox she went on to contradict herself by caveating that there did exist the social fact of the family, which surely transcends the atomised individual and is the foundation of a cohesive society. Nonetheless her neoliberal economic policies turned Britain into a country not of communities, but of individuals seeking wealth and material advancement. This was then to be further progressed by the Blairite Labour Governments that undertook a radical policy of social liberalism thereby further alienating and atomising us, to be taken to the furthest extreme with same-sex marriage under Cameron’s Conservatives - in which marriage became not a social good but a contract of disconnected individuals manifesting their non-communal and non-familial emotions and desires. Marriage as the complementarity of the genders for social cohesion and the procreation of children was redefined.
The intellectual surrender of conservatism to liberalism, so that the modern Conservative Party is a classical liberal party today has meant the dismantling of British society. The Left has continued to push not for collectivism, but rather a consumer social society to match consumer economics. Through a Leftist philosophy of self realisation and autonomy people have alienated themselves from a collective identity seen as oppressive in favour of autonomy and irregular and ad hoc identities. Such a social trend and such reductive cultural values cannot be resisted by classical liberalism, which has a very weak idea of society. Now even gender is a consumer choice.
What needs to happen instead is a smashing of the idol of free market economics as an end in itself and the replacement of an anthropology of individualism with a Christian idea of the person - relational, communal and not defined by autonomy but by his traditional society. In this we should look more to the Church Fathers than the reductive thinkers of liberalism from Locke to Mill.
What differentiates conservative collectivism from Leftist collectivism is the emphasis on love rather than statist compulsion. We love our families, we love our countries, we love our God. This is not a system either of bureaucratic or commercial corporate compulsions. Individuals bereft of collective identities other than the State will find themselves compelled by State and Multinational Employer in a way that the person of enriched and traditional identities cannot be.
We need a rich understanding of the human being and human culture, not a deracinated and reductive ontology of random and autonomous individuals for whom the demands of relationships and hierarchies are seen as a compromise of identity, whereas they are of course the very framework of our identities - they make us human.
