The Con of "One Nation" Conservatism

It's ironic that so-called One Nation conservatism was actually responsible for the grievous fractures and fault lines that now exist in our formerly homogeneous culture. It is the enemy of all true conservatives, the cuckoo that ousted us from our own nest and even stole our name (nowadays we have to get used to being dismissed as alt-right or at best swivel-eyed loons mired in nostalgia for a vanished or never-existing past).

One Nation conservatism has its intellectual roots in a certain bogus strain of conservatism which:

1) seems to attribute a value to institutions simply because they exist, and without regard to how they came into being, how well they perform their functions, or whether their supposed "functions" are actually socially necessarily or desirable;

2) seems to accept change as inevitable, but not as something that conservatives themselves should initiate or sponsor (although they should remain completely free to jump on the bandwagon once somebody else has dictated the direction of change); and

3) seems to boil down to little more than political opportunism, unencumbered by "dogma" (or what ordinary people call principles), whose raison d'être is gaining and retaining political power and the enjoyment of its perks and perquisites.

This kind of conservatism is bankrupt in modern politics. There is certainly a case for resisting radical change to institutions that have evolved organically and piecemeal over a long period of time (our language and culture, our traditional built environment and countryside, our demographics), and which perform their functions largely successfully, but the trouble is that there are few areas untouched by the frenzy of half-baked meddling legislation from the post-war period to date, and that to claim that institutions created by this flawed and haphazard process are somehow worthy of preservation simply by virtue of their lazy acceptance by the New Establishment is nonsense.

But such bogus conservatism, except for the brief interlude of the Thatcher years (which were themselves more about economic liberalism than conservatism), has dominated the post-War Conservative Party, and the fruits of its lazy opportunism, and its cringing to political correctness and cultural relativism, can be found in the catastrophe of multiculturalism, which is nothing less than a concerted effort to abolish Britain and any meaningful concept of what it means to be British.

At some point in the Cameron years the "British values" championed by the Conservative Party ceased to be about the traditional combination of faith, flag, family and freedom, and became, by diktat of the Party Establishment, equality, diversity and "tolerance" (where the latter is selectively applied so as to be inimical to the freedom of the majority). And at stroke, traditional conservatives found themselves disenfranchised, irrelevant, without a voice, and increasingly anathematised and marginalised by the Party Establishment. But all this was the perfectly logical result of multiculturalism and its sister concept of political correctness, which must destroy our authentic cultural heritage in order to supplant it with its own version of cultural relativism and the false values - equality, diversity and "tolerance" - that sustain it.

It is this state of affairs that the so-called One Nation Tories, with their support for post-War mass immigration, have brought about. But what is the "nation" to which they would have us pledge our allegiance? It seems to be an amorphous entity, drained of the concrete values of our true national identity, cultural heritage, customs and way of life; an empty shell, sustained only by a few hollow abstractions, in which migrant minorities can nurture their separate and dysfunctional ghettos.

The idea that "Britishness" is about cultural identity, not accidental place of residence, is now taboo. Even the idea of a separate White British or English cultural identity as one among many cannot be allowed to stand. It's simply no longer available to us. Our culture must be that of the cosmopolitan and metropolitan elites who preach and dictate to us, and we and our benighted values must stand in the same relation to them as Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens. Guilt, not pride, is the only permissible attitude to our national and cultural heritage. It seems that cultural relativism only extends so far.

So what should be the response of traditional conservatives to One Nation (or No Nation) conservatism? We are sometimes apt to forget that Burke, a figure sometimes associated exclusively with piecemeal compromise and gradualism, was a fierce counter-revolutionary, whose opposition to the French Revolution was relentless and uncompromising. Today's conservatives should not be afraid to show the same fighting spirit. Change is inevitable, and often desirable; but conservatives shouldn't be afraid to oppose undesirable change, or to advocate the reversal of harmful innovations, simply because they are fashionable in New Establishment circles. Conservatives who abdicate responsibility for initiating and driving radical change of their own (like the pre-Thatcher post-war Tories or the neo-Blairite Tory "modernisers") lose control of the political agenda, and lose sight of the institutions and values which it ought to be goal of every conservative to preserve. There's more to politics than the unprincipled pursuit political power. And there is more to conservatism than the counterfeit "One Nation" variety.

Know thy Enemy: the New Clerisy

Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. 

Edmund Burke

The twin pillars of the Liberal-Left Establishment are propaganda and censorship: the lies to which we must assent and the truth that we must not speak. They fear an agenda they do not control. They shun a debate they fear they will lose.

But the Liberal-Left love to preen themselves on their supposed intellectual superiority. They revel in paradoxes and shun common sense. They think it makes them enlightened and profound, the intrepid seekers of counterintuitive answers to questions that have confounded inferior minds, mired in the pedestrian and conventional. But it's really just symptomatic of the fact that they're ready to believe anything that fits their agenda. They hate simple (and obvious) solutions to "complex" problems, equating "simple" with "easy" when simple solutions are often the most arduous and demanding. That's why they love to equivocate and prevaricate, manufacturing easy and comforting reasons why the common sense solution won't work, and why the convoluted and factitious obfuscations they favour will.

The Liberal-Left are driven by paranoia and a self-dramatising sense of martyrdom and victimhood. They love to indulge in hysterical masochistic fantasies of oppression by the Right in media products like the Handmaiden’s Tale or Bushwick, but the reality is they’ve been the oppressors for decades.

Control is their objective, loss of it their nightmare. Hence the panic of Liberal-Left big tech as they realise they no longer dictate or control the political agenda on social media. The rush to censorship is a testimony to their loss of nerve.

The Liberal-Left Establishment control education, particularly higher education. The purpose of a modern university is the continuous replication of a would-be Liberal-Left clerisy in its own self-image, each member warranted to parrot reliably uniform PC views, a class of self-identifying “thinking people” who’ve been told what “thinking people” should think. Anyone who questions this indoctrination flunks the course. And anyone who fails to conform to type is ostracised, excluded, censored or de-platformed.

Profound hypocrisy lies at the heart of the Liberal-Left mindset, to which a twisted sense of self-hatred and a misplaced guilt complex are fundamental. But despite the handwringing, their contrition is insincere because they are determined that the rest of us should be made to suffer for their self-indulgent guilt trip. As the new clerisy, they get to superintend the ritual self-flagellation of our society without partaking of it themselves. Ours are the burdens and the sacrifice, the groans and the lamentations, theirs the wild ecstatic dithyrambs of atonement and redemption, the intoxicating thrill of phoney moral edification.

Equality and diversity are the gospel of the new clerisy - except, of course, when they might backfire on their own privileged position. That's why they love to pose as enlightened social arbiters, the liberators of the oppressed, and the champions of the downtrodden. Affirmative action seldom seems to weaken the stranglehold of wealthy, well-connected Liberal-Lefties on positions of power or prestige, but it's always the indignant stock response to the rest of us when we complain about having to pay more for a worse service, or for the dubious privilege of making it harder for our children to get good jobs or university places.

The new clerisy are the high priests and prophets of political correctness, or the imperative to ignore, skirt around, downplay, suppress or deny an obvious truth, and to call for sanctions against those who refuse (or simply forget) to do so, because it’s “offensive” to an officially privileged minority. But for all the self-righteous lip-service to equality, political correctness is an esoteric doctrine, designed to confer phoney moral superiority on a self-regarding elite, and anathema and degradation on the (non-minority) plebs. Confecting charges of racism has become a sinister parlour game played risk-free by self-important Liberal-Lefties with the stakes of the livelihoods, liberty and reputations of ordinary people.

This game becomes more sinister still when played in the politics of our public institutions. As Roger Scruton says:

"… political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists."

The ubiquity of the corrupting culture of political correctness explains the systematic cover-up, collusion and active conspiracy of the professionals and public officials who should have exercised a duty of care and served the public interest over Muslim grooming and other scandals. And it's also why the same bureaucrats, whose negligence and perversity made these scandals possible, have been allowed to reinvent themselves as the solution to the problem they created and why virtually nobody has been, or ever will be, held to account for their egregious failure.

But like it or not, the Liberal-Left Establishment are our political masters and political correctness is the official state dogma. When one contrasts the energy, quiet efficiency, continuity and unity of purpose through changes in government with which the Establishment prosecutes its woke agendas with its apparent impotence to deliver anything we voted for, one starts to take conspiracy theories seriously.

But as Roger Scruton says, conservatives are united by a love for and a desire to protect those very things - our culture, our country, our countryside, the family, the truth - that the Liberal-Left hate and wish to subvert, corrupt or destroy. And it is upon the sure foundation of this common bond that we must build our resistance to the tyranny of the New Establishment.

The serpent Ouroboros: or the paradox of the sceptical outlook

I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. 
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, 
If faith o'ercomes doubt.

Thus Browning’s Bishop Blougram speaks of the strangely intimate, if not quite symbiotic (“If faith o'ercomes doubt“), relationship of “faith” and “doubt”. “Faith” is to be understood here not as uncomplicated and unequivocal assent - a state scarcely conceivable outside the most childlike innocence or blissful ignorance - but as the precarious result of a strenuous act of will. The result is “precarious” and the act “strenuous” because, in this endeavour, the will may find the intellect an inconstant ally and a reluctant conscript. I have often wondered whether a similar relationship might not be said to exist between scepticism and superstition.  

Before we can fully grasp this proposition, we must draw an important distinction. Scepticism is a double-edged sword: one edge - the one pointing away from us - is the familiar scepticism of the Socratic kind, rational and reasonable, and sustained purely by the intellect (or rather that part of it formerly called “the understanding“); but the nearer edge represents scepticism of a different order; drawing its strength from the imagination, and from the unconscious and irrational forces with which that peculiar hybrid faculty - part power, part sensibility - is allied, it is not content with casting rational doubts on irrational beliefs, but is impelled inexorably to challenge and undermine the clear and unencumbered world view of the sceptic himself: like the serpent Ouroboros, it devours its own tail. It is this second kind of scepticism - let us call it “reflexive scepticism” (not to be confused with the social science methodology) - which fosters that strange dialectic between scepticism and superstition we sometimes find even in, or perhaps especially in, those of an aggressively sceptical outlook.

Take the case of the arch-sceptic, Sigmund Freud. He wrote a widely influential essay, 'Das Unheimliche' ('The Uncanny'), where he described the "uncanny" (insofar as his concept overlapped with our ordinary ideas of the supernatural) as the effect arising from a "conflict of judgement as to whether things which have been "surmounted" [e.g. belief in ghosts, witches or fairies] and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible". Freud evidences a keen interest in the subject, particularly its depiction in art and literature, but never seems seriously to entertain the thought that it could ever arise in real life, other than through some sort of misunderstanding or delusion. And yet, privately, Freud was notoriously superstitious, obsessed by numerology and omens.

I suppose I'm of a similarly sceptical cast of mind to Freud, and yet, like him, I'm certainly not immune to the influence of “the uncanny” or the supernatural. This subject has always held a peculiar fascination for me, and - these necessary preliminaries now being addressed - I propose to explore it at greater length in future posts.

The worst estate of man

Hogarth's satirical prints, with their lively and thought-provoking scenes of vice and folly, have always fascinated and delighted me in equal measure. My own personal favourite, "A Modern Midnight's Conversation", depicts a group of apparently well-to-do peruked and periwigged gentlemen at a late-night drinking party, each representing by his gestures, facial expressions and degree of composure or dishevelment one of the various stages or types of drunkenness. This print presides over my dining room, not only, as one might suppose, as a kind of jovial memento vivere (our age is better attuned to comedy than to satire), but also as a salutary reminder that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

And yet, while I concede that “drunkennesse” may sometimes prove an inconvenient, not to say an humbling experience, I cannot quite bring myself to agree with Montaigne when he decries it as "the worst estate of man”. A short anecdote will, I hope, explain why.

I was at one of those work-related social functions which only the most extreme blackmail or blandishments can ever induce me to attend (my presence on this occasion was, as I recall, explained by the former motive). My aversion to such events is visceral and unalloyed. Not only do I find myself precipitated from my habitual bookish solitude into the society of those I would normally cross the street to avoid, but I must also listen, with every appearance of rapt attention, to their inane prattle, respond on cue with appropriate expressions of admiration, sympathy or concurrence to vain boasts, self-pitying whinges, and boorish rants, and, hardest of all, laugh uproariously at coarse and hackneyed jests. And all this without letting slip the slightest hint of misplaced mirth, as wicked little barbs of sarcasm and irony flash spontaneously across my otherwise vacant mind.

Although still early, the conversation was already promising to be more than usually dull and insufferable. I glanced in the mirror behind the bar, behind all those temptingly arrayed bottles which seemed to shout "drink me!", and noticed that my rictus grin already wore a distinctly demonic aspect. The strain, at once benumbing and maddening, of concealing burgeoning feelings of boredom and disgust behind an increasingly unconvincing mask of forced conviviality was evidently beginning to tell. I cancelled the tonic water and ordered my first pint, pretending not to notice the look of ominous disapproval the managing partner darted in my direction.

“Speak the language of the company that you are in”, Lord Chesterfield counsels us, “speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with ... Remember … most carefully to conceal your contempt, however just, wherever you would not make an implacable enemy”. Mindful of these admonitions, I resolved to say as little as possible for the remainder of the evening. But even this apparently prudential course of action is not without its attendant risks.

Having thus unburdened myself of the obligation to contribute further to the conversation, and feeling the pleasantly soporific effects of my third or fourth pint, I allowed my mind to wander to other, more congenial, thoughts. It was not long, however, before the demands of uncongenial reality recalled me from these reveries. Suddenly, I was the focus of attention: somebody was asking me about my “holiday reading”. Caught off my guard, I absent-mindedly blurted out the truth - that I'd been reading Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. My confession was met with blank incomprehension. My boss was glowering angrily. Why couldn't I have just said Terry Pratchett? I found myself rather foolishly trying to explain what "metapsychology" was, but soon sensed that my ill-judged attempt to head-off the threatened hiatus in the conversation was just digging me into a deeper hole. Just as my faltering explanation was coming to a juddering halt, I heard somebody remark that they had once read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Perhaps you can imagine my sense of relief and gratitude at what I thought was a well-timed jest? Of course, I roared with laughter. It was therefore with a sense of disappointment, as well as some considerable embarrassment, that I learnt that the remark was made in earnest. My boss had turned a shade of puce. Lord Chesterfield turned in his grave.

As my initial relief at an earlier than expected nunc dimittis subsided into vague anxiety about the prospect of a disagreeable interview the following morning, I reflected upon my situation. In the eyes of my boss, my colleagues, and at least one implacable enemy I had made that evening, my over-indulgence in alcohol was to blame for an unpardonable lapse of attention and judgment. But while an “estate of man” where “he loseth the knowledge and government of himselfe”, even so partially and temporarily as I had, is clearly no very exalted one, it is surely not the worst. Would it not have been worse to have abstained from alcohol and dutifully performed my allotted role of reluctant confidant and insincere flatterer to people I despised? Or worse still, to have performed this demeaning office with something approaching inward assent?  Was I not, rather, like the plump clergyman with the pipe and the punch-ladle in my Hogarth print, an island of comparative serenity and self-possession among my degraded companions?

The original of this jovial clergyman has been identified by Mrs Piozzi as a Dr Cornelius Ford, an uncle of Dr Johnson‘s. Ford, a friend and protégé of Lord Chesterfield‘s, was distinguished by a frank and ingenuous nature, but notorious for his indulgence of the pleasures of the bottle and the table. When disappointed of his hopes of a place in his patron’s entourage when he was appointed ambassador to the Hague, Lord Chesterfield explained, “You should go, if to your many vices you would add one more.” “Pray, my Lord, what is that?” “Hypocrisy, my dear doctor”.  If only my own boss would take such an enlightened view …

In praise of … inconsistency

This piece picks up on the theme of my earlier post, ‘Of light and shadow’.

"Who wants to be consistent?”, asks Oscar Wilde. “The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I." Nor I. 

Those who allow themselves to be seduced by a procrustean desire to explain away inconvenient truths, to resolve every vital conflict in a spurious “higher unity”, or to render every paradox a platitude - the monomaniac, the reductionist, the system builder - can only ever realize a distorted and diminished view of the world, and however brilliant, elegant or persuasive their own peculiar species of blindness and folly, they can never wholly escape the taint of hubris, shallowness and self-delusion. This is why all truly great thinkers and artists are inconsistent. They are complex beings, within whom powerful opposing forces - good and evil, passion and reason, romantic and classic - are constantly striving for, but never quite attaining, supremacy. And they know that the price of consistency is intellectual dishonesty.

“All true opinions are living”, Ruskin tells us, “and show their life by being capable of nourishment, therefore of change.” But those obsessed with consistency - whether in thought or art or life - always assume a single unchanging truth, valid for all men at all times, and to deviate from which must be fatal. Isaiah Berlin describes this mindset, and its consequences, with admirable clarity:

The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truths that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious pattern in which all values are reconciled, and that it is towards this unique goal that we must make; that we can uncover some single central principle that shapes this vision, a principle which, once found, will govern our lives – this ancient and almost universal belief, on which so much traditional thought and action and philosophical doctrine rests, seems to me invalid, and at times to have led (and still to lead) to absurdities in theory and barbarous consequences in practice.

But the inconsistency I speak of here shouldn’t be confused with mere incoherence or woolly-mindedness. Ideas and values should always be explored fully and rigorously, and pursued - in theory, at least - to their logical conclusions, for it is only in this way that they can reveal to us the aporia - the moral, intellectual or artistic impasse - that defines and limits their peculiar relation to the real world, and which is the seal of their authenticity. “I never met with a question yet, of any importance“, Ruskin declares, “which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer … For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself  at least three times”. 

Nor should it be confused with mere relativism, or taken to imply any kind of panegyric to the idea of progress.  There are shallow and superficial ideas as well as profound ones, and no truly great ideas are ever wholly superseded: the insightful exercise of what Burke called the “moral imagination”, or what Coleridge termed the “suspension of disbelief”, is all that we require to retrieve them from obscurity, as from Ariosto’s valley of lost things, and restore them to their former vigour and beauty.

Something of myself

Since the view of the world put forward in Plus ultra will be a highly personal one, it is perhaps appropriate at this juncture to say something of myself.

Picture to yourself the scene. It is a sultry midsummer evening in one of the Home Counties. A small party of guests has just adjourned to enjoy a few after-dinner drinks in a well-appointed drawing room in an old country house. There are gasps of affected admiration as the hostess is complimented on her skill and taste in furnishing the room in a sympathetic period style. This topic is soon exhausted, and the initial buzz of interest begins to die down. At this point, one of the guests - acting with a laudable resourcefulness and presence of mind to head-off an anticipated hiatus in the flagging conversation - volunteers what he supposes to be an innocuous observation on an uncontroversial subject. But just as he pauses with a not unbecoming modesty to receive the gratitude and compliments which are surely his due for so timely an intervention, there is the ominous sound of someone clearing his throat. Suddenly, everybody’s attention is directed towards a rather crumpled and dishevelled-looking figure, slouched indecorously in a corner, and evidently already somewhat the worse for wear with drink, of which he had been partaking liberally at table. Previously taciturn almost to the point of truculence, this preposterous individual now erupts with an impetuous volubility. Heedless alike of the embarrassment of his hostess or the consternation of his interlocutor, he proceeds with a self-assurance bordering on presumption ungraciously to question assumptions, peremptorily to demand explanations, and insidiously to divert the stream of conversation into uncongenial and recondite courses …

Max Stirner and the "almighty ego"

It is a strange paradox that the concept of the individual should turn out to be a social artefact, when for centuries the opposite was held to be incontrovertibly true. Whether as a nightmarish vision of a bestial state of nature, or a delightful myth of a golden age, the natural state of mankind was universally represented as anarchic and atomistic; and, depending on whether original human nature was perceived as essentially good or bad, the transition to civil society was explained either as an act of deliverance by divine providence or a heroic will, or as an unfortunate descent from a primitive rationality and ingenuity into a mode of life corrupted by luxury, blinded by superstition, and enthralled by tyranny. The individualism of the social contract theorists of the early modern and Enlightenment periods was accentuated by Romanticism, with its celebration of the cults of the hero and the genius, and it is towards the high-water mark of this movement that we find Stirner, with his bizarre and nihilistic philosophy of the ego.

Stirner's peculiar vision of "ownness", or self-mastery, involves an absolute autonomy, not only from the external constraints of law, morality and custom, but also from those internal forces - ideas, passions, or appetites - which might otherwise "possess" the ego, and turn it into "a tool of ... [their] realisation". "I am my own", he says, "when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered ... by anything else". Stirner claims his philosophy reflects our true and original human nature. He urges us to "shake ... off" the "thousands of years of civilization [that] have obscured to you what you are", and to "recognise yourselves again ... recognise what you really are". So, who are we, and what aspects of our true and original nature does Stirner draw upon to explain our world, both as it is and as it should be?

His belief that "ownness" is consonant with our true and original nature appears to be based on little more than the false premise of a primitive individualism, appropriated more or less uncritically from the social contract theorists. (This is despite his claim elsewhere that it is society, and not the ego, which represents "the state of nature" - a claim which appears to owe more to a desire for his twin "dialectics" of historical and individual development to tie in felicitously than anything else, and which he never attempts to reconcile with his position on human nature.)

His argument from human nature is supplemented by a highly schematic account of human history. This purports to demonstrate that it is the destiny of the ego to throw off the yoke of dependency and self-delusion, and embrace "ownness"; but the absence of any kind of objective analysis, its reliance on anecdotal evidence, its fixation on a pseudo-scientific "dialectical" method, and its consequent subdivision into factitious epochs (i.e. "Negroid", "Mongoloid", and "Caucasian") corresponding to the analogous phases of individual development (i.e. childhood, youth, adulthood), make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it assumed what it was supposed to prove all along.

In a word, Stirner claims that his philosophy is grounded in human nature and history, but for all his ostentatious display of sham and superficial scholarship, he makes no serious attempt to investigate either. So where, if not in human nature or human history, should we look for the roots of Stirner's philosophy? Perhaps we should examine Stirner's own motives. Stirner's is a philosophy of the ego, recognising no separate realm of truth or morality to contrast with the private sphere of the ego, so his personal motivation would apear to be a good place to look for insights into his philosophy. Why, then, if not motivated by "love to men", love of truth, or indeed any other disinterested motive, would he condescend to share his thoughts with us? "I write", he tells us, "because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world"; "I sing", he decalres, "because - I am a singer. But I use you for it because I - need ears". Something does not quite add up here. Neither statement offers a very compelling, or even a plausible, motive for a self-sufficient ego, whose avowed aim is "ownness" or self-mastery, and for whom "all things are nothing". If we follow Jane Austen and define pride as relating "more to our opinion of ourselves", and vanity as pertaining "to what we would have others think of us”, then vanity would appear to offer the better description of Stirner's motivation here. For all his hubristic rhetoric about banishing illusions, Stirner appears to be essentially parasitical upon those towards whom he affects indifference. His nihilism wouldn't even appear to have the merit of intellectual honesty to recommend it.

But Stirner's apparent insincerity isn't the biggest problem here. Mightn't he who would strive for "self-mastery", without first having attained to some reasonable degree of self-knowledge, risk falling into the trap of self-deception? - isn't this the very fault with which Stirner reproaches his benighted contemporaries? His account of self-mastery, or "ownness", is sketchy in the extreme. It would appear to be a state of absolute autonomy, where the "almighty ego" - supposedly freed from all trammelling constraints, internal and external - can realise itself as pure will and instinct. The only limit Stirner would impose on the ego is that it should not allow itself to fall into what he describes as a "one-sided ... narrow egoism", a state of monomania or "possessedness", where one idea or passion threatens to turn it into a "tool of its realisation". It is perhaps significant that his favourite example of such a controlling and consuming passion was "avariciousness", hardly a vice to which the profligate Stirner would be likely to succumb. Apart from this sole admonitory injunction, he is content to dismiss the problem of evil and allow us to follow our instincts: after all, does not "the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice) ... [nevertheless take] ... very correct steps"? But while the advice to avoid obssessiveness and monomania is fine in so far as it goes, it is hardly adequate to deal with the dangers posed by the many complex emotional states - anger, hatred, sadism, envy, pride and vanity, to name but a few - to which a human being is subject, and "the beast" is not. Instinct alone is not enough to ensure that we take "correct steps".

Not content with leaving us a broken compass, Stirner would also have us use a woefully incomplete map. His wholesale and arbitrary dismissal of every part of the great spectrum of human emotion which corresponds to any kind of altruistic or disinterested sentiment leaves us with vast tracts of unelucidated terra incognita, of which Stirner, following the best traditions of medieval cartography, has nothing better to say than "there be illusions". Stirner's cavalier and Procrustean treatment of the human psyche blinded him to the fact that man is naturally a social animal, and that the concept of the individual - his "almighty ego" -is just as much a social artefact as the laws, the morals, the customs, and the rest of the institutions of civil society he would have us destroy.

Anthropology and psychology have long ago debunked the myth of primitive individualism. Man has always existed as a social animal, and the spectrum of human emotion, comprehended as a whole, reflects this fact very clearly. It is not difficult to see that the individual, as an entity regarded as enjoying certain basic rights, and from which the state and other social institutions ultimately derive their authority, is a social artefact, and one of fairly recent manufacture. But it is far harder to understand how the same could be true of our very existence as independent self-conscious entities, capable of rational thought. And yet it is true nonetheless. Oscar Wilde was wiser than he knew when he said that "language ... is the parent, and not the child, of thought". And, of course, language is indubitably a social artefact. Wittgenstein famously demonstrated the impossibility of a so-called "private language" in his Philosophical Investigations. The only medium through which we can articulate rational thought is a public language, one which evolved through interaction with our social and physical environments, and which is potentially intelligible to others. Without this, individuality as we understand it is quite literally inconceivable.

This is not to say that we should place a lower value on individuality, only that we should attempt to understand it for what it is, rather than pretend to ourselves that it is something else. There's nothing wrong with following a path of self-realisation or self-fulfilment, as long as one makes a detour via self-knowledge on the way. At the risk of stating the obvious, Stirner is not a guide I would choose.