‘A Revulsion from Distinctness’

Left-wing comedian Julia Claire tweets:

This is more or less the basic premise of the long-standing skepticism of homeschooling — or, for that matter, any viable alternatives to the public-school cartel — on the left.

“The lack of protections and the historic dominance of conservative evangelical political interests in the world of homeschooling leaves many children vulnerable to neglect or abuse,” Teen Vogue argued in 2021. The year before, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet published a paper asserting that “many homeschool precisely because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy” and “are determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives.” In response, Bartholet recommended “a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.”

This June, Slate wrote: “Many politically powerful conservatives promote home-schooling as a way to undercut or weaken the influence of public schools, and to shield their children from the liberalism they believe public schools foster.”

The British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was onto these neurotics a half-century ago. In On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott described modern politics as a psychological dispute, pitting two impulses — the “individual” and the “anti-individual” — against one another. “The determined ‘anti-individual,’” Oakeshott wrote, is “intolerant not only of superiority but of difference, disposed to allow in all others only a replica of himself, and united with his fellows in a revulsion from distinctness.”

As a result, this character is terrified by the thought that somewhere, someone is living, thinking, and acting differently than he is — he seeks “a solidarité commune in which there [is] no distinction of persons and from which no one [is] to be exempt.”

For him, the natural diversity of human experience and conduct that characterize free societies are a source of persistent anxiety: “No promise, or even offer, of self-advancement could tempt this ‘anti-individual,’” Oakeshott wrote in a separate essay. “He was moved solely by the opportunity of complete escape from the anxiety of not being an individual, the opportunity of removing from the world all that convicted him of his inadequacy”:

This condition of human circumstances was seen to be impossible unless it were imposed upon all alike. So long as ‘others’ were permitted to make choices for themselves, not only would his anxiety at not being able to do so himself remain to convict him of his inadequacy and threaten his emotional security, but also the social protectorate which he recognized as his counterpart would itself be disrupted.

Elsewhere, Oakeshott described this character as “mass man,” whose intolerance of distinction and difference was often packaged in the language of “equality” and “solidarity”: Mass man’s “sole distinction,” Oakeshott wrote, “was his resemblance to his fellows”; his “salvation lay in the recognition of others as merely replicas of himself.” He “can have no friends (because friendship is a relation between individuals), but he has comrades” — and the political movements that he associates himself with “are not composed of individuals; they are composed of ‘anti-individuals’ united in a revulsion from individuality.”

Just so. The rhetoric of the anti-homeschooling Left is laced with the language of equity and social cohesion, and a commitment to “democratic values.” But it is the politics of radical sameness. Ironic, given that this is the same political movement that routinely extols the virtue of “diversity.”