It’s to rebuild our civilization in the rubble left by the bourgeois Bohemians.

Western societies have been consuming the cultural preconditions – their cultural and social capital – that made their freedom possible.

Étienne describes this as process as one of ‘anti-civilization.’ Civilization, we should think of as the gradual pacification of human conduct through law, social interdependence, internalized self-restraint, and shared norms. Families, communities, nations, and the state teach people to subordinate some desires to the common good, creating “social capital,” which makes possible all sorts of higher order cooperation and contributes to the ‘modus vivendi’ – living together in peace – characteristic of a healthy society.

“Anti-civilization” is the reverse process that he argues has been underway for some time. Unrefined impulses are given free rein and even praised, social obligations are treated as oppressive and individuals are encouraged to understand themselves as autonomous beings who are beset upon by society, norms, and obligations – all deemed to be mere impositions rather than sources of guidance and our most fruitful human bonds. The promise of this adolescent demand for unlimited autonomy is always emancipation, but the results are in fact atomization, declining trust, weaker families, and attendant cultural fragmentation.

He proposes a new fusionism – and a politics of the centre – a genuine centre that is like most voters, economically moderate and slightly left, and to the right on social, cultural and identity issues, by grounding politics in the pursuit of the common good within the context of the nation.

The common good is not the aggregate of individual satisfactions. It is a qualitatively distinct good that arises through the rightly ordered exercise of human capacities, enabling thereby forms of flourishing that no individual can produce or possess alone. Families, friendships, workplaces, civic associations and political communities are relationships and institutions with particular ends and stable normative forms. They cannot fulfil their purposes when those ends and forms are treated as endlessly plural and fluid.

They do much more than coordinate private interests. They generate goods that exist only through shared participation, as harmony belongs to a musical ensemble rather than to any single musician. The distinctive good of a shared meal is conviviality, not merely the satiation of each diner. The good of family life lies in the development of human capacities, the raising of children and the fulfilment of reciprocal responsibilities and the complementarity of men and women —not in the fluctuating emotions and preferences of spouses.

None of these goods can be reduced to the sum of individual satisfactions. Each arises only when people participate in a properly ordered shared life. Unlike goods divided into private portions, they grow through participation and perfect each member by joining them to something greater than themselves.

For Canada, achieving a better balance in our society requires a diversity that is within a greater unity. Practically speaking, an expansive interpretation of the Charter has multiplied individual rights, while official multiculturalism has promoted ever greater diversity, often at the expense of unity and integration. Immigration should be ordered toward integration and membership in a coherent national identity and set of values, particularly as low birth rates deepen Canada’s dependence on population growth from abroad. We see in permissive drug use laws an inability to promote even the good of drug users in recovery, let alone broader public safety above a false autonomy and right to drug abuse. Labour institutions, families and local associations should properly mediate between increasingly isolated individuals and the managerial state, as they can and should when they are properly conceived.

These were some of the topics Étienne and I discussed in our conversation about his new book, Anti-Civilization: the Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good

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