Liberals, leftists, progressivists (or whatever we should call the opposite number of conservatives) are usually identified as individualists.

Who is it who experiences conflicts with the society that conservatives wish to conserve? They answer, the individual.

What are we, most essentially? Individuals.

Conservatives who talk about human rights ‒ the rights of the individual ‒ are often charged with being closet liberals.

What is the error of individualism?

The self is fundamentally a social self. We are not individuals who come into contact with others and then decide our various levels of social involvement. We are not “I’s” who decide to identify with certain “we’s”; we are first of all “we’s” who discover our “I’s” through learning to recognize the others as similar and different from ourselves. Our individuality is possible only because we are first of all social beings.

That is Stanley Hauerwas, who then makes a very interesting remark about the so-called primacy of the experience of self. There is no ‘self’ except as something distinct from others; there is no ‘primacy of the self’.

After all, the “self” names not a thing, but a relation. I know who I am only in relation to others, and, indeed, who I am is a relation with others.

Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in
Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 96.

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But if liberals are individualists there is a point at which, characteristically, they let down the side. In a fascinating and complex account in this week’s New York Times Magazine ‘P. Carl’ writes about his father as a negative lesson, an example of

toxic white masculinity.

P. Carl, “Becoming a Man,” New York Times Magazine (21 January 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/magazine/becoming-a-man.html

(The apparent pseudonym obscures this man’s identity.) What follows is a portrait of three men: the father and his father (both highly unpleasant individuals) and the author’s father-in-law (a contrast).

Our entire lives my father, whenever he was home, has been sitting in a blue leather recliner barking orders at us…. It’s total control, all of us held hostage to his cruel sense of humor and his tightfisted attention that centers on only himself.

Just as his father had done. The father and grandfather are selfish, mean, cruel, racist, verbally abusive. I see them as failed people; they fall short of the measure, as people. Who was supposed to shape them into decent men? They were. They had a million decisions to make and made seven-hundred-thousand bad decisions. They did this to themselves (says Aristotle, Christianity, etc.).

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What we read about in this unpleasant account looks every bit like a failing of individual character.

But just where you would expect to find the individual and his free choices ‒ where you think the blame should fall squarely on specific people choosing the behaviour that just suits themselves, as individuals, since this is the problematic way in which they see themselves ‒ what is set out for pillory is not the individual at all but a system:

My father’s masculinity was shaped by my grandfather’s, shaped by poverty, shaped by military service, shaped by bars and poker games and the freedom of not feeling responsible to be home with his children. Men like my father and grandfather … practice a burned-­out masculinity that is still at the center of American life, still the building block of patriarchy.

Why are they individuals until they go wrong and then are products of a system?

You are a decent person, innocently seeking happiness as you conceive it (individualism). But if in the process you become a jerk ‒ ah, then you are the product of tradition.

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If tradition made these characters then shouldn’t traditionalists defend then?

But it so happens that a defender of tradition (a person who does not think that the inherited view of the family is a system of oppression) does not see these men as representatives of their culture. They are not good fathers and husbands; they are terrible people and, because of it, bad fathers and husbands.

They are individualists.

Patriarchy did not make them. If social norms encouraged them to joke about beating their wives ‒

“I like to have an excuse to hit her.” He thinks he’s funny…. How many times have I heard my father make these “jokes” about my mom? 

‒ the society too is sick; the norms need fixing. But this is no call for an attack on tradition, a new social structure.

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What should we say to the individualist ‒ that is, the proponent of perfect autonomy, rule by laws he gives to himself? If you are an individualist then be one: don’t be an individualist of convenience. An individual is made bad all by themselves; the problem is not the culture.

But if you are not satisfied with that ‒ and you are not: there is such a thing as culture and you see very well how it can go wrong ‒ why not just get the whole picture in place? Individual and society. Why not say what you mean: evil is encouraged by bad social norms.

Social norms matter. Culture is indeed a formative force and what we want in a society ‒ and this is your point ‒ is the right culture. Politics and laws are not all about the advance of individual freedoms.

The view of both the liberal and the conservative is really Aristotle’s:

Political science spends most of its pains on making the citizens to be of a certain character, viz., good and capable of noble acts.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, ch. 9