Political theory

A puzzling and annoying feature of the left-wing rhetoric that passes for mainstream thought today is its tendency to reduce everything to immediately personal likes and dislikes. If you think immigration should be reduced or homosexuality is a moral disorder then you’re “anti-immigant” or “anti-gay,” and your attitudes are examples of “hate.” The rhetoric may be mindless, but it’s evidently sincere, and people who are otherwise quite intelligent see nothing wrong with it. Educated people use it more than others.

To be like one thing is to be different from another. The things that divide are therefore the same as the things that unite. That’s so obviously true that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could ever have seen “inclusiveness” as a possible ideal.

If it’s presented as an ideal there’s a shell game going on. “Inclusiveness” is in fact a demand that we accept a particular point of view and adhere to it in all aspects of life. As such, the inclusiveness of “inclusiveness” is rather like the catholicity of Catholicism or the universality of Islam. It’s a universal that includes everybody, where “everybody” means those who accept and submit to it. A distinction is that Catholicism, at least, feels obliged to explain itself to others while “inclusiveness” does not. Those who reject the latter are simply confused, ignorant, psychologically deformed, or evil.

More thoughts on liberalism! (Sorry for devoting so much space to the topic, but it’s better than pederasty and prison rape.)

Liberalism wins arguments each step of the way, because it is concerned only with the articulate. It refers to the inarticulate as prejudice, stereotype, obscurantism, and so on. It therefore has no interest in the whole, because the whole cannot be stated.

Since liberalism ignores the whole, it is shortsighted. That turns out to be an advantage: it deprives it of the perspective needed to see its own weaknesses and the strengths of other views. The nagging feeling there is something wrong with liberalism can never find articulate statement and so comes to seem only a temptation.

What would be necessary for the rebirth of traditional society?

Traditional society is society oriented toward transcendent good. To say a good—the good life, say—has a transcendent element is to say we can’t make what it is altogether explicit or know it sufficiently on our own. If that is so, however, we must rely on something beyond ourselves when we pursue it. Unless we have some special inspiration, which is unlikely, the best we can do is rely on understandings that have grown out of accumulation of the inspiration, experience and reflection of many times and places. And since the knowledge we need cannot be rationalized or even fully stated, it must take the form of attitudes, practices, formulae and symbols passed on by those who themselves received them—in other words, of tradition.

Is liberalism politically necessary, because there’s too little agreement on basics? That’s what is said. Any attempt to enforce non-liberal views, special recognition of a particular religion for example, would be hopelessly divisive and require unacceptable coercion. Religious establishments have been in decline for a long time, and serious attempts to re-impose them today soon run into terminal difficulties, as seems to be happening even in Iran. That’s the natural consequence of better education, more communication, and greater social diversity.

Traditionalist conservatism has an air of paradox in America. It reinterprets or rejects things often identified as American in the name of understandings people find unfamiliar. After all, many would ask, haven’t Americans always idealized science, progress, material prosperity and individual success? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants from a variety of traditions? Isn’t it freedom, equality and democracy and not ancestral ways that unite us? And if all that’s true, isn’t traditionalist conservatism a denial of everything that makes us Americans?

The tradition to which American traditionalists appeal can thus seem something more imaginary or constructed than inherited. Nonetheless, in spite of all paradox their position must be accepted, because rejecting the principle of traditional authority leads to worse difficulties. Tradition is necessary to human life. Human life is not only instinctual, it is also cultural. Culture exists only through tradition, however, and without it—without the habits, attitudes and beliefs that define particular ways of life—coherent thought and action would be impossible.

A traditionalist is someone who accepts tradition as authoritative.

That’s not someone who believes that tradition is a good source of suggestions or an acceptable guide when no better can be had. Nor is it someone who thinks that all traditions must always be followed. It’s someone who recognizes that tradition knows more than any of us, and should be followed unless there are very good reasons to the contrary. Rejecting tradition is like a novice rejecting the advice of a master. It might be a good idea, and on occasion it might even be necessary, but it’s not something to be done lightly, especially in important matters. When you do it you’re usually wrong.

How did we get where we are in America today? Was it in the cards from the beginning? Right-wingers sometimes argue about whether America was well-founded. It’s very awkward of course if it wasn’t, but the question must be considered soberly.

The strongest argument that it was not is that the supreme political power the Founders established was based on contract, with no real appeal to any law higher than human purposes. The problem with putting the federal government on that basis that is that whatever principle is authoritative in the highest political community eventually becomes authoritative in all things. The highest community has ultimate responsibility for ensuring peace and so must be able to demand a loyalty that overrides all others. Concretely, it runs the army and must be able to insist that men die for it. To do so it must claim that the principle it stands for is the highest principle.

What kind of conservatism is needed today? Whatever it is will have to be different from that of the past. Conservatism as such is simply the desire to keep what’s good in an existing way of life. Conservatives today, however, have seen liberalism transform the world they once loved beyond recognition.

The movement of modern life is still evidently toward the “left”: toward hedonism, rationalism, egalitarianism, technocracy, making man the measure, eradication of any sense of the transcendent, and all the other things we have come to know so well. Seems bad, if you happen to be an antimodernist and right-winger.

Still, overall formulations leave things out. Big words don’t tell you everything. That’s true of one’s own theories, but also of the way things are formulated in public discussion. You can’t trust what you read in the papers. Life includes everything, even the things that aren’t what we talk about.