Right-wingers puzzle over how to explain liberalism and the Left. Where do they come from—a sheltered upbringing, arrested emotional development, scientism, a general lack of realism, managerial class self-interest? Some even look at modern culture and politics and conclude that the love of equality is simply the love of degradation and death, so it’s the latter that really explains everything.
When several things all imply each other to varying degrees it can be difficult to say which is most basic. At Turnabout we mostly like simple conceptual explanations. They seem to explain basic issues more clearly and comprehensively than speculations about histories or motives. In order to understand what a whole society consistently does you have to look beyond what people want or even what they value to how those wants and values come about. Modern culture isn’t degraded just because people like degradation. There are always people with every conceivable motive, including the drive to degrade themselves. How does it happen that in our time that drive is able to present itself as truer and more in accord with the way things are than anything else—and therefore, weirdly, as good and morally compulsory, so that anything else would be a cop-out? And values like freedom and equality don’t explain themselves. People always have things that they value. How does it happen that today it has come to seem obvious that things as abstract and empty as those particular values are supreme and everything else must give way to them?
To my mind the reason things have turned out as they have is that something has gone radically wrong with the way we sort out impulses and goals and make sense of them and declare some good and others bad. In other words, it’s because of a basic problem in our most general concepts of what things there are and how we know about them and attribute meaning to them. To my mind, the problem is that we’ve fallen into the Cartesian abyss—that we’re only willing to accept the reality of things that are immediately and obviously present to our consciousness. If you assume that’s what’s happened, then all the rest falls into place. What’s real is what we can see, what’s compelling is desire, reason is formal logic, and life becomes a matter of getting what we want simply because we want it. Freedom and equality, the satisfaction of desire and the equal validity of all desires, become fundamental principles. But then our integrity, which is now the only basis for understanding what we are, demands that we debunk and throw off transcendent and therefore vague and external and false conceptions of what we should do. The consequence is that moral degradation, defiance of all evolved and inherited understandings of what’s good, becomes a sort of discipline through which we hope to break the chains of unreality and attain a sort of personal godhead. Sade becomes the new Christ who shows the way to salvation and theosis.
Why does the liberal mind feel so COMPELLED to reject tradition
“But then our integrity, which is now the only basis for understanding what we are, demands that we debunk and throw off transcendent and therefore vague and external and false conceptions of what we should do. The consequence is that moral degradation, defiance of all evolved and inherited understandings of what’s good, becomes a sort of discipline […].” (— from the log entry)
If true, this postulated mechanism would answer a question that pops into my head every time I read Mark Richardson’s explanation of how one of the defining characteristics of liberals is their preference for throwing off anything inherited, anything they were “born into” (as, for example, a sex with all the characteristics and obligations that entails, or a nationality, and so on) as opposed to having explicitly willed upon themselves. I say to myself, yes they prefer to reject what they haven’t explicitly chosen, but shouldn’t they often prefer instead to keep unchosen inheritances where the joys offered by many things we were born into, such as sex roles and nationality, are genuine and considerable? Why reject what can bring so much satisfation and pleasure? The answer suggested in the present log entry is that they feel they must reject these things, for the sake of their own integrity: “our integrity […] demands that we debunk and throw off [etc.].” (Emphasis added.) So, Mark Richardson’s liberals are not merely those who attempt to throw off inherited things in favor of what they’ve chosen themselves (“attempt” because many of the inherited things under discussion—race and sex for example—can’t really be thrown off), but more precisely are those who feel compelled to do this even with inherited things that normally hold great promise as sources of pleasure in people’s lives.
That was point number one. Point number two: Something here sounds eerily familiar to those who have been parents of toddlers. Where, for instance, have all parents of toddlers heard this before?: “No! I want to do it myself!,” as the one making this declaration rejects every bit of help that has just been offered and proceeds to start over from scratch doing everything completely by himself? Does, say, the expression “terrible two’s” ring a bell here, parents? And does this hearken back in some way to what was alluded to at the beginning of this same log entry, about “arrested stages of emotional development”? Could the advent of the widespread phenomenon of relatively overprotective parents in all the post-WWII generations—parents whose overprotectiveness may perhaps have actually stifled some of the normal progression of emotional development in young children—be part of the problem, so that in certain respects these children continue to act like toddlers into adulthood?
As the log entry sagaciously points out, it’s hard to assign primordial importance to one or another contributing factor when so many of those listed as being under consideration seem to imply each other and feed off one another. What we are dealing with is for sure a multifactorial pathology.
Clear thinkers in our neighbor to the north share our concerns.
The Ambler (the blog of Kevin Michael Grace, a wonderful Canadian blogger) has a “Thought for the Day” up, taken from Thomas Fleming, which is à propos:
“[…] [Conservative political action] cannot be made effective without a principled commitment to a […] reactionary movement or party with clearly articulated goals. So far as I can see, such a movement will have to be: 1) Christian, 2) Western, 3) virile, 4) based on the principles of the civilization that our enemies have destroyed. […].”
( http://www.theambler.com/aug1-15_04.htm#thought13ag04 )
Agreed, but how do we go abou
Agreed, but how do we go about creating such a critical mass of true trad-cons in a culture so violently opposed to everything we hold dear? Sadly, the churches – where one might hope to create real trad-cons – seem today to mostly produce mindless droids, when it comes to political matters, easily hoodwinked by a few bones of rhetoric tossed their way, even though there’s no substance, and government continues to expand and become ever more tyrannical, with no real opposition on the “Christian right”.
Will S.
Why have these things happened?
I’ll begin, if I may, with a hat-tip to Fred. His view of the nursery liberal is very close to my own. In fact, it was the great Viennese psychologist, Alfred Adler, who found that the overwhelming majority of revolutionaries in 19th and early 20th century Europe were second sons. He postulated that the merciless and irrevocable dominance of the elder child – this being the way of elder children – provoked a deep desire in Junior to disrupt the natural order of things. Because said desire could never be sated within the constraints of family it survived, transmogrified, into adult life.
That said, one must look for causes of our wider condition beyond child psychology, even one like Adler’s predicated on the Will to Power. The inherent drift of Jim’s argument is surely correct in that, no less than marxism, liberal capitalism attacks the meaning of nationhood and, especially, that hereditary connection from which flows our senses of identity and belonging. We are both product and victim of economism. We are Economic Man.
It is depressingly likely that liberal capitalism must, by its action and as a measure of the completeness of its triumph, slaughter all the attributes of more ancient and heirarchical forms of social organisation. Those attributes have survived their progenitive societies. But all will crumble in the vapid, mass pursuit of rapid consumption and constant economic expansion. Liberal capitalism is a historical process from which social and personal degredation and the triumph of de-nationed cosmopolitanism are inseparable.
That begs the question as to whether there is any social organisational form in which free enterprise and a free market can be safely contained and, if so, how to get from here to there. This really ought to be the principle focus of traditional conservative and radical right thinking. More centres to stimulate such thought are perhaps the way forward for now.
The problem is evidently very big
The longer you pursue the cause the deeper it seems to go. The psychology of second sons doesn’t seem to be the explanation because there have been second sons for a long time but the current situation seems unique. And liberal capitalism doesn’t seem an adequate explanation because the main thing people oppose to it is rule by experts and PC socialism, which seem no improvement. So the problem must be something behind both liberal capitalism and PC socialism have in common as guiding principles. That’s why I get into what I see as a fundamental disorder in what people think is rational and what they think the world is like. What one does about something so fundamental is of course another problem.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Jim,
I do concede that old
Jim,
I do concede that old Alfred, the second son of Sigmund Freud psychologically-speaking, begs disagreement. As far as leftism is concerned, I think his value to us today lies in his separation of psychological impulse from extanct political theory or practise. Essentially, he proposed – and I agree – that left-inclined adults are answering a deep, inner imperative. He says that it is a morbid imperative, the product of negative life experience. Leftist politics merely provide an appropriate field of upon which these people – or the more intelligent among them – may act out their personal traumas and anxieties.
The question then arises as to the origins of said field – or, as you put it, the “something behind both liberal capitalism and PC socialism” the destruction of which thay have, to quote you again, “in common as guiding principles.” Well, perhaps not quite as guiding principles – more as an older brother against which one might react.
Here I should explain that I do not consider that freedom and equality are polar or mutually exclusive opposites. The ideal of equality flows from the ideal of freedom. In a sense, the ideal of freedom is the only game in town. Equality is just a different way to discuss it. By way of example, this afternoon I re-read a paper by Douglas Kellner of UCLA, written in December 2003. It is titled Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies and it concludes with these words:-
“Cultural studies can become part of a critical media pedagogy that enables individuals to resist media manipulation and to increase their freedom and individuality. It can empower people to gain sovereignty over their culture and to be able to struggle for alternative cultures and political change. Cultural studies is thus not just another academic fad, but can be part of a struggle for a better society and a better life.”
Alright, the modern left analyses all social interaction from the presumption of there being a downtrodden or oppressed party (that Adler thing again – very satisfying, very self-justifying). But liberal capitalism is hardly antipathetic to modes of personal sovereignty. If one discounts left-totalitarian government on the basis that left totalitarianism has failed, and also grants capitalism its economic battle honours for the same reason, one is left only with shades of cultural grey between the two.
They don’t amount to much. To both modern liberal capitalism and modern neo-marxism the bulwarks of the old, long-deposed cultural order – nation, faith and family – are absolute anathema. They represent stability. They are founded on love and they bind one to a natural, heirarchical order which is the very staff of life. They are incommensurate with self-dissatisfaction and therefore the antithesis to, on the one hand, getting on and, on the other, getting even. What I am saying, Jim, is that both liberal capitalism and leftism are reactions against Man’s social nature. The addition to Man earnt by economic freedom is not qualitatively different to that bestowed by freedom from oppression, and neither bestow upon us truly vivifying results.
I agree that freedom and equa
I agree that freedom and equality as ultimate standards are really two sides of the same thing (basically, nihilism). I also agree that a liberal capitalist society is a bad thing if “liberal capitalist society” means a society that doesn’t just say it’s ok to own productive property and make contracts but says that those rights are really what social life is all about.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Nihilism
First, thanks Fred for the kind words.
Second, to Jim a reply on nihilism. It bothers me slightly when I hear this word. It has about it something of the hue and cry of “racist”. I guess you mean that freedom and equality as paramount values imply a denial of all but the immanent, and I think this is true. The problem is that freedom is rooted in the transcendent, equality is not. There IS a disjuncture in the transcendent but equality has no connection to it.
By way of illustration, the Naq’shbandi Sufis (I think) pursue two quite distinct spiritual goals. One is union with God, the other self-perfectionment. To me the latter speaks of progress along a Way, implying the gradual acquisition of self-consciousness, unity and will: the elements of freedom. I hold, then, that freedom has its aetiology in the potential of individual man. It truly is an ultimate standard. But since we are not treading a Way by which we can realise it we accept the bastardised, common notions of freedom or liberty or even Randian objectivism (which is pretty nihilist) that arise in ordinary life out of our profound, collective ignorance.
So what I am saying here, Jim, is that freedom through political action (of which leftism is one, extremely bastardised form) is what ignorance has made of the unobtainable. You can call that nihilism but I don’t think it quite does it justice.
In any case, we are still stuck with the consequences. Retiring to pursue self-perfectionment is not an option for us. I suppose discussions like this one at least demonstrate that we understand that, are engaged and contemplative. But real answers? None yet, I think.
“Freedom” can mean different
“Freedom” can mean different things depending on what’s in the background:
They were referring to freedom within an objective moral order. That’s not what I had in mind when I mentioned freedom as an ultimate standard. If freedom has no standard other than itself then it becomes a matter of being able to do what you happen to feel like doing.
I don’t see anything wrong with the word “nihilism.” In an extended discussion you’d have to say just what you meant by it but that’s true of almost any term for a general tendency of thought. In the case of nihilism I suppose there’s the problem that it’s not possible as a general outlook so the term never fits completely. Still, you could say the same about any basic tendency of thought that’s erroneous.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Darryl Dawkins senses a deep truth as it applies to basketball.
Jim Kalb:
” ‘Freedom’ can mean different things depending on what’s in the background […]. [In the passages quoted, St. Augustine and Richard Lovelace] were referring to freedom within an objective moral order. That’s not what I had in mind when I mentioned freedom as an ultimate standard. If freedom has no standard other than itself then it becomes a matter of being able to do what you happen to feel like doing.”
(— posted today, 9:39 AM)
Herewith are some of Dawkins’ thoughts:
“Dawkins believes that the best NBA teams combine the best of both. ‘In basketball and in civilian life,’ Dawkins says, ‘freedom without structure winds up being chaotic and destructive. Only when it operates within a system can freedom create something worthwhile.’ “
(— from a log entry up tonight at http://www.iSteve.com entitled “Darryl ‘Chocolate Thunder’ Dawkins explains what’s wrong with the US Olympic BBall Team“; may have to scroll down: Steve’s log entries don’t have individual permalinks)
Mysterious Stranger really nails it there.
“To both modern liberal capitalism and modern neo-marxism the bulwarks of the old, long-deposed cultural order – nation, faith and family – are absolute anathema. They represent stability. They are founded on love and they bind one to a natural, heirarchical order which is the very staff of life.” —Myst. Str. today, 3:31 PM
That goes in my collection of quotes. Very well said!
Adler’s contribution?
“As far as leftism is concerned, I think his value to us today lies in his separation of psychological impulse from extanct political theory or practise…”
I would have to agree with Jim; namely, second sons and/or whatever psychological circumstances you adduce have been with us forever. And yet, leftism as we know it is relatively recent. It does not seem to me that Adler contributes much to our understanding of the phenomenon.
Why have these things happened?
Another commentary:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/belt0033/123597.html
Liberalism, requiring greater energy input, is innately unstable
Mark Richardson has a new piece up at Conservative Central called Who Would Send Mothers to War?, in which he shows indirectly why our side will inevitably win. He writes,
“We conservatives have the disadvantage in modern society of not having the same power as liberals to shape the course of developments. But we do, at least, have one advantage. We aren’t forced by faulty[*] intellectual principles to go against what we feel, in conscience, to be right. True conservatives don’t believe in the liberal idea that we become fully human only when we create ourselves entirely from our own will and reason. This means that conservatives don’t have to, as a matter of principle, overthrow the influence on us of our inherited manhood and womanhood. Conservatives are therefore free to act, as we think is right, as men and women. We are not forced to reject important distinctions between the sexes, including the different responsibilities that men and women have in times of war.” (Emphasis added.)
Compare to this the following passage from the log entry:
“But then our integrity […] demands that we debunk and throw off transcendent and therefore vague and external and false conceptions of what we should do. The consequence is that moral degradation, defiance of all evolved and inherited understandings of what’s good, becomes a sort of discipline […].” (Emphasis added.)
In actuality, for all their constant blather about “freedom” and shaking off constraints, it is liberals who labor under constraints and we who are free! We are free because we are giving free rein to our true natures, which they are constantly obliged to deny by a sort of “self-discipline of denial of the obvious.” It was obvious the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. The adults in that crowd who were cheering him as he passed can only have felt uncomfortable in continuing to deny the obvious; to deny that he was without a stitch of clothing on. Once the little boy, too young to sense the need for political correctness, innocently shouted out what was the obvious truth, the adults in the crowd must have felt instantly better, as if a weight had been lifted from their chests.
This is the sort of thing that will knock liberalism off its perch in the end. Liberals are slaves.
[* Notice that whether we read this word correctly as “faulty,” or misread it—as I did at first—as “faculty,” this passage comes out exactly the same, with the same meaning.]