Guys like Julius Caesar and Hegel got places by dividing things into three parts, so I thought I’d do my own three-part division of liberal tyranny:
- The Tyranny of Caring: We’re all equally responsible for what happens to each other, so the State, the only institution that can claim to represent each to each in an equal, orderly and rational way, is responsible for everything that happens to any of us. The problem, of course, is that responsibility implies control. The health and safety Nazis are one obvious result, but there of course are others.
- The Tyranny of Tolerance: Everything everybody wants and does must be equally favored and furthered. Unfortunately, desires conflict. To avoid the problem, we can only be allowed to want things that can, at least in theory, be supplied to each of us in a rational, reliable and conflict-free way—in other words, consumer goods, positions in a bureaucracy and purely private indulgences. Other goals can’t be administered, and might cause squabbling and bad feelings, so they can’t be allowed. Religion, for example, must become a consumer good or private indulgence, or else a social service integrated with the bureaucratic implementation of the tyranny of caring.
- The Tyranny of Inclusiveness: All groups defined by traditional concepts of identity must participate equally in all significant social functions. It follows that no significant institution can take traditional concepts of identity into account except to counteract any residual effect they may have. All social institutions that characteristically take such things into account, family and historical community for example, or that can’t be adequately supervised to ensure their effects are eradicated, must in effect be done away with. Since traditional concepts of identity are involved in every kind of functional human relationship other than those based wholly on money and force, world markets and universal rational bureaucracies become the only things allowed to play a significant role in social life.
In thinking about these things—caring, tolerance and inclusiveness—it’s important to note that they’re treated as ultimate goods that together constitute a sort of religion, so that it’s illegitimate for anything else to limit them. Their demands can therefore be expected to expand without limit. That is what we are now seeing around us.
Enlightning
Enlightning.
inclusiveness
“Since traditional concepts of identity are involved in every kind of functional human relationship other than those based wholly on money and force, world markets and universal rational bureaucracies become the only things allowed to play a significant role in social life.”
This is a bit tangential to your central point, but I saw a C-span program featuring a Canadian writer, who described “globalism” in much the same terms, claimed “globalism” was and has been a central ideological and political tenet since 1970, that it teaches that all political and social interactions are primarily economic and bureaucratic, and that it is currently in its death throes, if it hasn’t died already.
He cited a major international treaty on culture as evidence that “globalism,” as a ruling ideology, is dying, given that the treaty did not treat economic and market relations as decisive.
It seems obvious that your 3 parts of the Liberal Tyranny create an incoherent world-view, because tolerance and inclusiveness cannot possibly co-exist peacefully, even in one’s head. Tolerance requires the respect for all cultures, for example, (multiculturalism), while inclusiveness demands that all cultures participate in a worldview dominated by tolerance and multiculturalism. What to do with a culture that has contempt for these premises? What to say about the metanarrative, and the people who wrote and enforce it, that demands that all cultures submit to the myths of tolerance and inclusiveness?
Multiculturalism, and the myth of Tolerance, ignore the cultural imperialism inherent in prescribing and imposing a ruling myth of multiculturalism upon all cultures. Just more Western imperialism, in this case couched in the mock-virtuous tones of western liberalism.
These incoherences are pronounced when Islam is considered, for example, or the People’s Republic of China.
Larry Auster would say, for example, that the myths of tolerance and inclusiveness are simply self-righteous slogans manufactured by the Liberal elite to further the ultimate goal of a single, equal, democratic world—The final Millenium in liberalism’s mind, the Eschaton.
Any comment?
There’s more than meets the eye
I find it very unlikely that an international treaty on culture would do anything for culture, which is always particular and not subject to management. More generally, liberalism, globalism, universalism, modernity, the belief in progress and so on are constantly being declared dead but they just keep on spreading. There’s nothing that’s been agreed on to replace them, so when people try to solve actual problems they always reinvent liberalism etc. because they feel compelled to be neutral, nonjudgmental, rational, respectful of expertise, etc., etc. etc.
There’s no real problem reconciling tolerance and inclusion, because when they become supreme values they obviously don’t continue to have their previous meaning. Instead, they take on a positive content that eventually requires all cultures to be tolerant and inclusive—i.e., to abolish themselves. The exceptions prove the rule. Minorities are allowed to be bigoted because fostering and protecting minority bigotry deprives the dominant culture of its authority and ability to function and so advances the real function of multiculturalism, depriving all cultures of authority and thus abolishing them as cultures so that money, force and neutral expertise become the only authorities.
I wouldn’t say that tolerance etc. are just manufactured slogans. They have a definite logic that’s based on the modern way of viewing things, so that intelligent people can believe them and accept them as their religion with a great deal of sincerity and devotion. It’s hard to manufacture something like that. It’s a mistake to underestimate liberalism.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
There’s no real problem reconciling tolerance and inclusion, b
> There’s no real problem reconciling tolerance and inclusion, because when they become supreme values they obviously don’t continue to have their previous meaning. Instead, they take on a positive content that eventually requires all cultures to be tolerant and inclusive — i.e., to abolish themselves. The exceptions prove the rule. Minorities are allowed to be bigoted because fostering and protecting minority bigotry deprives the dominant culture of its authority and ability to function and so advances the real function of multiculturalism, depriving all cultures of authority and thus abolishing them as cultures so that money, force and neutral expertise become the only authorities.
I suppose they’re banking on the ability of the market, the “PC” ethos, etc., to in time do the same to other faiths and worldviews as it has done to the Christian worldview. Whether liberalism will be able to do this to Islam, however, is an open question, IMO… Certainly, if they keep the numbers of immigrants from Islamic cultures relatively low, as in Canada, for example, they stand a better chance of assimilating them into the leftist, PC mold (a la Irshad Manji); whereas in Europe, they’ve let in so many that their proportion of the European population has reached a critical mass, at which assimilation is no longer possible to any great extent.
Anyone see the quote ostensibly by de Gaulle over at VFR? The problem is, of course, that the “yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen” that de Gaulle didn’t mind “on the condition that they remain a small minority”, failed to do so (well, maybe the “yellow” fraction has stayed relatively small, but not the other two); they swelled, and Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints” scenario has come true, more or less…
That’s right, they count
That’s right, they count on the managerial PC consumer welfare society as the universal solvent of all non-market and non-bureaucratic commitments and connections. Everybody becomes part fo the same human aggregate that can be managed however needed. That’s one reason our rulers are so attached to the myth of tolerant Islam, by the way. If there is no such thing that can be counted on then they’re in trouble.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Ah, so it’s a necessary
Ah, so it’s a necessary self-delusion, needed for them to preserve the illusion of the workability of the system they have so carefully constructed…
Inclusiveness
“There’s no real problem reconciling tolerance and inclusion, because when they become supreme values they obviously don’t continue to have their previous meaning. Instead, they take on a positive content that eventually requires all cultures to be tolerant and inclusive — i.e., to abolish themselves.”
Is it “tolerant” to abolish cultures?
Of course not, it’s simply imperialism under the guise of the mythology of tolerance and inclusiveness.
But, I see your point, and it’s exactly right, IMHO.
>Of course not, it’s
>Of course not, it’s simply imperialism under the guise of the mythology of tolerance and inclusiveness.
Kinda like commie countries calling themselves “People’s Free Democratic Republic of”, or neocons loudly trumpeting “freedom” and “liberty” whilst encroaching, ever-increasingly, on the freedom and liberty of their citizens (i.e. “Homeland Security”, “free speech zones”, etc.)
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
(as Orwell said).
It’s important to remember
It’s important to remember though that it’s not just cynicism. If it were just cynicism it wouldn’t be such a problem because it wouldn’t be able to arouse so much devotion.
Liberalism follows a definite logic. It makes equality and freedom supreme principles that trump all others. The result is that there has to be a system for controlling everything because if people were allowed just to do things they’d interfere with each other and that would amount to the oppression of some by others. To make the social world neutral everybody has to be neutered and neutralized. The wider the definition of equal freedom the narrower the controls have to be.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Absolutely… Of course, we
Absolutely… Of course, we still end up with oppression of some by others, but along lines more favourable to the ideology of the ruling class – oppression of those who don’t fit into the new system, by those who rule and those who do fit in… To recall another Orwellism, “Some are more equal than others”…
equality and freedom
I’m sure you’ve written reams on this, but how does one reconcile equality and freedom?
If equality is the supreme principle, freedom must be truncated to a great degree.
Freedom, of course, bears no brief for equality.
My short comment is: Liberalism has extended the concept of political equality into the social and private world, thereby making virtually everything political. This has poisoned and distorted social and commercial relations.
In the end none of it makes sense
Still, it’s not simply unprincipled or stupid in any ordinary way. They try. One maneuver is to say that equal freedom is the goal and then try to soften things with something like Rawls’s maximin principle. You let people be free enough to be unequal as long as the people on the bottom also benefit.
Actually of course it doesn’t really make sense to treat either freedom or equality as a supreme principle. For starters, you need to know what the value is with respect to which freedom or equality are to be judged. But then it makes more sense to view that value as the supreme principle. It’s what people really care about, after all.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
supreme principles
As you know, your last paragraph is just outright heresy in a liberal society.
There is no value that trumps equality, nor is there any value or standard from which an evaluation of equality might be made, because all values and standards are (surprise!) equal.
This is the perfect vacuity of liberalism. In this environment, politics is not only vacuous, it is actually dead, given that politics is a debate about what is good and the way to pursue it. This fundamental political debate cannot take place within liberalism, because no value or interest can be advanced as or determined as “good,” even provisionally, because as a matter of dogma all values and interests are equal. To debate what is good is to admit, at least provisionally, that some values or interests shall not be deemed a good, and may in fact be discriminated against, directly or indirectly.
the political vacuum of liberalism
Just yesterday, I listened on C-span to the tape of the arguments before the Supreme Court in the case brought by a coalition of law schools challenging the Solomon Amendment, an Act of Congress requiring universities to provide parity to military recruiters on pain of loss of federal funding.
The military practices a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with respect to homosexuality. The law schools deem this policy a violation of the supreme principle of Equality; in their language, it’s “discriminatory.” The law schools then impose their typical sanction, which is total exclusion. Congress then acted by enacting the Solomon Amendment. The law schools, led by Yale, brought suit, claiming the Solomon Amendment violates their First Amendment right of free expression.
One would think that an American university, and even more so a law school, would be a fine place to discuss and debate the military’s practice of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” that perhaps the Universities would invite military spokesmen to participate in the discussion and present their reasoning for consideration, that students might be exposed to a variety of positions regarding the policy, and so forth.
At American universities (at least some of them), such open discussion and debate is beyond the pale. It is so beyond the pale that the universities feel compelled to exclude the military from their premises for purposes of recruiting. The law schools call this “a matter of conscience,” cloaking their exclusionary practices in high morality.
Apparently, self-annointed matters of the liberal conscience preclude and preempt politics, discussion, analysis, and debate. Some things just can’t be discussed or even thought about. In this case, the governing principle is “equality,” equality for a specially designated group, i.e., a group identified by a behavior described as homosexuality.
I can report that no Justice seemed particularly sympathetic to the law schools’ arguments. Chief Justice Roberts was openly contemptuous (and humorous). This is, of course, no guarantee as to how they might vote. In any case, I pray Roberts writes an opinion in the case.
and so on
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051208051909990016&ncid=NWS00010000000001 News report
Ann Coulter gave a speech at the Univ of Connecticut, and was jeered and heckled into submission.
A quote from a Tolerance Trainee (i.e., a student) at the University:
“We encourage diverse opinion at UConn, but this is blatant hate speech,” said Eric Knudsen, a 19-year-old sophomore journalism and social welfare major who heads campus group Students Against Hate.”
The term “hate speech” is the liberal trigger for censorship, by force if necessary, of any speech that includes thought or opinion that challenges or disagrees with liberal dogma. The political vacuum of liberalism is a sacred space and must be protected at all costs.
[Note: I put the link in BBCodes because it extremely long and was messing up the formatting of the page—J. Kalb]
They’ve certainly come a
They’ve certainly come a long way from “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death, your right to say it!”, haven’t they?
and so on II
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004689.html
Larry Auster, at View From the Right, challenged Powerline’s celebratory entry on Hannukah at the White House. The response? (taken from Mr. Auster’s website).
“I sent Powerline my item about their celebratory article on the Hanukah dinner at the White House, and got the following reply:
Mr. Auster: Please take us off your email list.
Thanks.
Scott Johnson
I wrote back:
Sure.
It’s too bad, however, that you don’t welcome, and can’t take, thoughtful criticism that goes to the heart of the issue.
But the reality is, I’ve never known a single neoconservative who can.
Larry Auster”
The moral? Question multicult ideology at your own risk; you may be deleted from some e-mail lists.
Liberalism
“I wouldn’t say that tolerance etc. are just manufactured slogans. They have a definite logic that’s based on the modern way of viewing things, so that intelligent people can believe them and accept them as their religion with a great deal of sincerity and devotion. It’s hard to manufacture something like that. It’s a mistake to underestimate liberalism.”
Reinhold Niebuhr claimed that modern liberalism is a secularized version of Protestant perfectionism, mostly sectarian, particularly in its non-sensical belief that individuals, societies, and the world are evolving toward some final Millenium of peace, justice, and harmony, and that human resources are sufficient to realize that goal, if mobilized and applied rationally; in effect, according to Niebuhr, liberalism has developed a secular eschatology (“progress,” etc.) that seeks to find a final fulfillment in history, thereby usurping and upstaging the Second Coming. Niebuhr claims that nearly all the ideology of liberalism is secularized Christianity, albeit a narrow strand of Christianity (sectarian perfectionism, in his view).
As for underestimating liberalism, I certainly don’t underestimate sin and its corrupting influence on “intelligent people,” who will believe anything, so long as it serves and supports their pride. So I don’t underestimate liberalism’s capacity to corrupt (though it doesn’t take much to corrupt human wills and minds, no matter how “intelligent”).
I like and am largely in
I like and am largely in agreement with this assessment of Niebuhr’s, but I’d lay some of this at the feet not only of secularized liberal Protestantism, but also secularized liberal Judaism, esp. “Reform” Judaism, which increasingly looks less to a Messiah than to a coming “messianic kingdom” of “social justice”, which ends up looking a lot like the sort of left-liberal “social justice” program that mainline, liberal Protestants are pursuing, too (along with an unfortunate fair-sized number of Marxist-ish, “social justice”-obsessed clergy and laypeople within the R.C. Church in North America, too, alas… Not to mention the Latin-American “liberation theologians”…)
‘Reform’ Jews
Oh, yes; I recall hearing a ‘reform’ rabbi saying something to the effect that he has more in common with a liberal Protestant minister than with an Orthodox Jew.
reform judaism
I agree with that.