Hegelian-sounding aphorism of the day:
Leftism asserts the negation; liberalism negates the assertion.
Thus, the Left wants to destroy the heritage of the past, and so assert that the past must be negated. Liberals, on the other hand, simply deny that the heritage of the past should be asserted. (If you want an example, liberal anti-anti-communism is an obvious one.)
So far as I can tell, liberals and the Left act that way because they basically don’t like existence. When something exists it excludes things, and can’t be made into something else, and that seems intolerant, obstinate and even aggressive. The Left therefore wants to destroy whatever exists, because existence means limits, while liberals hope whatever exists will go away if they just stop supporting it.
All of which sounds a bit on the bizarre side, but it does make sense. After all, we distinguish reality from fantasy because reality resists our will, so on the face of it reality seems like a bad thing. To reconcile ourselves to it we need to believe that what we want and how things seem to us isn’t the whole story, that there is more to things than meets the eye, and that to understand the world you need to go beyond what you want and how to get it. What defines liberalism, the Left and modernity, though, is rejection of that view.
Canadian writer Farley Mowat
Canadian writer Farley Mowat was exposed a few years back as having lied and fabricated extensively in many of his books; journalist John Goddard said that Mowat once told him, “I never let the facts get in the way of the truth.”, and Goddard further related how, in a catalogue of Mowat’s papers, he found the sentence, “On occasions when the facts have particularly infuriated me, F— the Facts!”
So, Mowat somehow believes that there can be a “truth” that doesn’t correlate with the facts, and so, “f— the facts!” when that’s the case…
Truth, facts, existence, and reality, are offensive to liberals. Their championing of abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, flows from their deathwish. (Which is interesting, because it’s also the outworking of God’s judgment on them, as well – they won’t “bear fruit”, will they, ultimately…)
Facts
“So, Mowat somehow believes that there can be a “truth†that doesn’t correlate with the facts, and so, “f—- the facts!†when that’s the case…”
This suggests that a Christian civilization, which is founded on a realist ontology, is much more likely to be faithful to science than a liberal or leftist civilization, which is founded on an idealist ontology.
Of course, postmodernists have already abandoned western science, either as a linguistic fantasy, as a delusional and oppressive epistemology, or as a rationalist power play.
> This suggests that a
> This suggests that a Christian civilization, which is founded on a realist ontology, is much more likely to be faithful to science than a liberal or leftist civilization, which is founded on an idealist ontology.
Absolutely, insofar as science is interested in empirical observation, and formulating reasonable explanations to account for what is discovered, in an effort to ascertain the truth, to explain how things work, according to the natural laws. In such a case, we would certainly expect that a Christian civilization will be an environment within which scientific inquiry and investigation will thrive, far more than within a liberal or leftist civilization – recall some of the crackpot, unscientific race theories of the Nazis (not that there may not be good scientific reasons to reject egalitarianism, but there were certainly some bad ones done in the name of National Socialism) or the Soviet biologists bent on applying “socialist principles” to increasing plant yields…
Of course, a difficulty has arisen, due to the fact that a lot of scientists have an (IMO, unnecessary and erroneous) ideological commitment to materialism as, at the very least, an operating principle, regardless of any particular scientist’s “personal beliefs” (itself a highly loaded phrase); and thus, in the current battle over the teaching of “Intelligent Design”, we are now witnessing a fracture within the scientific community, between those committed to ideological materialism as the guiding principle of science, and those who refuse to, a priori, rule out non-materialist explanations, within the framework of doing science.
It is a relatively minor fracture at present, but if it becomes larger, who knows what the impact on science could be?
existence
You describe liberalism here as a gnostic sect: existence is a bad, bad thing, and some special gnosis will liberate us, or you, or me, from our horrid fate of existing in this bad, bad world.
Eric Voegelin described most modern political ideologies and fanaticisms, like liberalism, as gnostic at their core (he did not approve of this position, to put it mildly).
Reinhold Niebuhr has an interesting take on the Bible: it is a history of the Hebrews discovering the limits of individual and communal existence, the ways in which they had transgressed those limits, and the divine answer to their predicament. Notions such as “limits” are of course anathema to liberals.
Postmodernism takes the liberal position to its logical, absurd conclusion. There is no reality; there are no facts. It’s all made up, and we make it up. Postmodernist ontology usually claims that language does not describe reality, it IS reality. Therefore, our language can create any reality we want. Judith Butler, a postmodernist feminist “philosopher,” claims the female body is a construction of language, and doesn’t really exist as a concrete object. Until now, according to the postmodernists, language has been used by the powerful and the elites to create a reality of advantage, oppression, and exploitation.
In this formulation, “reality” is infinitely malleable and subject to our will. As an adult, I find this formulation laughable and adolescent. As a Christian, I find it idolatrous. But it permeates liberal ideology.
Monism
“So far as I can tell, liberals and the Left act that way because they basically don’t like existence. When something exists it excludes things, and can’t be made into something else, and that seems intolerant, obstinate and even aggressive.”
On the spiritual side, I wonder if this instinct leads to the emergence of monism, both within liberal Christianity and New Age movements. John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of Newark and amateur theologian, is a monist. New Age mantras are monist: “All is one, One is all, I am One, I am All, All is me, etc.”
One sees a compulsion to extinguish all distinctions, material and spiritual, as if the speaker cannot bear to exist in the world (or before God) as an individual. The very concept of the “individual” becomes discriminatory, exclusionary, and offensive, and therefore must be extinguished (by fiat or illusion, if necessary).
Western modernists (i.e., western psychological establishment) describe the flight from self as “neurotic” at best, psychotic at worst. The typical analysis describes this internal movement as a response to unbearable anxiety.
Perhaps the unattached, atomistic society created and promoted by modern liberalism has established a permanent state of communal and individual anxiety, which continually gives rise to thought and movements that are (for lack of a better word) neurotic. Kierkegaard, Kafka, Nietzsche, Sartre, Tillich, etc., and their attention to this phenomenon, all come to mind. Tillich even claimed that the rise of Nazism in Germany was essentially a pathological communal response to overwhelming social and individual anxiety, for which modern society and modern ideologies had no antidote.
Consider also that traditional societies, and traditional arrangements, do not foster anxiety, but in fact create and promote social arrangements that are more harmonious with basic human needs for security, predictability, belonging, participation, and identity. Mr. Kalb has described these characteristics of traditional ways of living.
Thought I’d pass on …
a couple more comments on the entry, one at another blog, and one that I received by email:
It’s interesting that both are from 20-somethings and both say they’d been thinking about the same thing recently. It seems that the entry touched on a basic feature of the world they’ve grown up in. The Nietzsche quote in the blog entry is to the point but I think goes too far when it says
but then he was a hyper-modernist and only objected to the liberals because they didn’t carry things through far enough. I did like the email’s emphasis on futility and the relationship of past, present and future.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.