There’s an old aphorism, variously attributed to Edmund Burke or Clemenceau or Churchill or any of a dozen others, saying that if one is either a conservative or at the very least not a socialist (or communist, or liberal, or insert era-appropriate label for the elevation of the common good over individual benefit) before the age of 25 (or 20, or 30, or whatever), then one “has no heart.” The punchline, of course, is that if one is a socialist or at the very least not a conservative (or a Republican, or reactionary, or insert era-appropriate label for the elevation of capital and the individual over the common good) after the age of 40 (or 30, or 29, or whatever), then one “has no head.”
This came to me over the past week in reading John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”, his classic essay on his beliefs regarding the fundamental responsibilities of the individual towards society and the state and vice versa. One of my co-conspirators on this site talked about it as a kind of declaration of independence on the part of Mill (the lack of capitalization is intentional, as he is British and likely would take a small, 244 year old offense to referencing a particular document), in which he said effectively, I am an eccentric, I am my own person, and society has no claim to me and in return, I claim nothing over another unless they seek to harm someone other than me. I hadn’t read Mill’s work in over twenty five years and even that last time, I had read it in a very specific context – reading Bentham and Mill’s father and Ricardo in the same week for the same course in university – and reading it now, I was struck how personal it felt.
It was personal, I think, because I sense the constructed narrative I have of my life feels a bit like that of J.S.. John Stuart Mill, son of James Mill, was regarded as “precocious” and he is famous for his autobiography in which he recounts learning Greek barely out of diapers (nappies for you UK folk), studying algebra and Latin when he was eight, and his father apparently encouraged him to write verse before he hit puberty. For those of us who have lived through puberty, this is probably the oddest thing of all: how can you write poetry before you know what it is to have hormones course through your body and declare you to be a wholly insane adult human being? But that, really, is the gist of it. I’ve talked in prior essays about how there was a weird kind of spark of recursion, of self-awareness, in me long before I hit puberty. And that really is a kind of curse, which makes me feel a kind of kinship with J.S. Mill (not so much his father, who seems a bit of a prig).
Mill got a job at age 17 with the East India Company, rising steadily to mid-executive level postings for thirty five years until the Company was dissolved due to some unpleasantness in the Great Mutiny of 1858 which more or less showed the fundamental corruption and evil of having a private enterprise owned by a few thousand shareholders attempt to rule in the form of agency corporatism some 400 million people. He had senior roles in the Company’s “Political Division”; in essence, he was responsible for propaganda, and the manipulation of the bought and paid for local rulers and magistrates who exercised the will of the Company on the ground. His youthful conservatism – indicating the lack of a heart, as the aphorism would suggest – lasted quite some time, and his full-throated belief in the need for white men to shoulder the burden of stewardship over their brown fellows comes through in “On Liberty,” as harsh and distastefully ironic as that is to a modern ear.
But then as he grew older and thought more and, importantly, fell in love with an intelligent woman who given the strictures of his day was hamstrung both intellectually and in the fullness of her being, he began writing and espousing beliefs a bit far afield of what the directors of the East India Company would likely have approved. He was a strong advocate for the emancipation of women from the strictures of early 19th century legal and moral bounds; he was in favour of women’s suffrage, of labour unions, of Irish home rule. He became, in other words, a liberal, a lover of social values, as he grew older. In the words of the aphorism, clearly, he had no head.
I know quite a few people who start off as conservatives and never let go. They found certainty as children or as students or in those weird formative years just after university where we get tested hard for the first time. Permanent conservatives usually have some formative event that makes them grasp desperately for certainty, for a kind of unchanging truth with a capital T that will make all other decisions clear. The certainty usually comes from some solid historically built social edifice – a church, a long line of philosophers – but they also include the romantics, the German romantics I mean (not the Harlequin ones). Goethe and Holderlin and the like were all fundamentally conservative, not linking themselves to foundational social institution but trying to find it in a foundational condition, of nature, of the primitive, of the pre-institutional man. They were reaching back to find some condition in the past which they could anchor themselves to and then find the origins of beauty, and art, and culture. That’s not that different from de Maistre anchoring himself to the Church and the aristocracy, or Burke anchoring himself to the yeomanry and the gentry and the French ancien regime.
Permanent conservatives everywhere seem like children, and reading de Maistre recently felt like reading a very prim and proper but precocious young eleven year old’s treatise on how the world was Just So, a learned and Enlightenment non-fiction version of Kipling. But they are appropriately faced off against by permanent socialists. I used to refer to such folk as “empty headed utopian idiots” back in my halcyon youth – my first real girlfriend was a lovely, comely example of one. These used their minds to transform their empathy for suffering, for inequality, for injustice, into a logic of earthly salvation, which could exist if only it could overcome the petty, selfish criminality of those who stood in the way. Those villains, by the way, were actually only rarely the rich and the powerful and the corrupt: most of the villains were the victims of the injustice themselves, who needed to be reeducated and taken out of their own way to be made better, or rather, to be remade in the image of the socialist dream. Instead of anchors, the permanent socialists were looking for a current and a knife: the current to sweep, and the knife to cut away the ropes keeping society, people, individuals bound to their false ideas.
The aphorism came to me early – I think my sister’s godfather first told it to me, along with advice to never accept a cocktail from a person you don’t know personally – and it makes me realize that there is a kind of sadness in the person who starts out as a social liberal and ends up a conservative. What they face, unfortunately, is the reality that most people have a decent reason for wanting what they want – despite any objective reality that it might not be in their direct best interest – and that enough of that wearies one, and makes one long for their own anchor. It implies a life which has been worn out on the current.
Mill the Younger, on the other hand, shows us something different. If you start off firmly anchored, but stay open to the idea that there might be something worth casting off for, you might find something vast. If you start in a world of certainty but remain open to learning – remain open to hearing the voice that erodes that certainty, pulls away your anchor and sets you to sea – then you might find something even greater than whatever the Company can offer. You might find love.
Mill’s father was one of the original, and thus one of the most dogmatic, of the British utilitarians. I can only imagine the difficulty of the young John Stuart asserting himself as a person – as opposed to an object which was amenable to education and indoctrination, as a demonstration piece for a theoretician instead of as a son to a father. But some part of him stayed listening, stayed aware, and found love, and ultimately found a soul, as a person who could see the value of each individual within society as individuals, not as utilitarian objects. Even as he rejects the power of the state, of the shaming power of society, he still sees all of us as members of a whole but as worthy because we are ourselves, each one as one.
I realize now that my professor assigned John Stuart Mill incorrectly, alongside Bentham and Ricardo. He belonged with Emerson, and with Thoreau. Mill found – in his reversal of the path of life, of starting as a conservative and realizing the need to be open and social as he matured – his own soul. The Company would never have granted him that luxury.