The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Experiments in Living

Matthew McManus:

From the beginning opponents have criticized liberalism for being amoral at best, and nihilistic at worst. Typically, there are two prongs to this attack, one metaphysical and the other moral or aesthetic, though the two are often combined and blended in curious ways.

The first prong holds that liberalism is committed to a materialist and individualistic metaphysics which lacks any account of transcendent or “higher” values. An emblematic account can be found in the writings of arch-Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre. He famously denounced liberal thought (“what is ignorantly called philosophy”) as “fundamentally a destructive force. This is because its skeptical and critical disposition, wherein liberals seek to question everything, undermine the sublime quality of authority.” For de Maistre, one of the virtues of antiquarian and Medieval thinking was their insistence that the metaphysical order of the universe was inherently just, and consequently that the socio-political order which had emerged on Earth was both natural and theologically vindicated. 

By contrast liberalism’s Luciferian pride in assuming that the existent order can and should be questioned stripped that order of its allure, compelling political authorities to justify themselves to those they sought to govern. For de Maistre this generated the intractable conditions for endless debate and disorder, as each person came to see themselves as an independent legislator who advanced their independent interests without any concern for a shared (and hierarchical) moral order where all knew and understood their place. This led to a kind of cultural nihilism, as there could be no shared consensus on anything.

Many critics argue that liberalism’s morality and politics are prima facie empty. Sometimes the objection to this is moral, sometimes aesthetic. The moral objection often made by religious authors (like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue) is that by allowing all individuals to concern themselves merely with the means to pursue their self-selected ends, liberalism has gutted our capacity to consider what ends are actually right and virtuous to pursue. Over a long enough period of time, the grandiose rhetoric of liberal authors leads to mere emotivism: the bizarre belief that our choice about moral ends is a mere matter of preference, much like one’s taste in ice cream flavors. From an allegedly “neutral” liberal standpoint, there is no sense in trying to arbitrate whether an addict who happened to reach a ripe old age led a less intrinsically good life than Martin Luther King, Jr. At best we could assess who gained more utilitarian pleasure from their pursuits and make a calculation that way. 

The aesthetic argument is more common to authors such as Nietzsche, Allan Bloom, or Roger Scruton. Here the fundamental problem with the levelling impulse of egalitarian liberalism is its destruction of standards of excellence and beauty in our culture. The conviction that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder leaves it up to the mass of individuals to decide what the highest aesthetic values should be. The weight of their numbers, coupled with resentment at their mediocrity, means that the truly great and inspired are either silenced or compelled to cater to the masses in order to make a living. This leads to a deadened and weak culture where people are neither exposed to sublimated aesthetic values nor have the will to produce them. What we get instead is the pleasant, the unchallenging, and, ultimately, the life-denying. 

Most contemporary arguments about liberalism’s nihilism have become notably more superficial and even shrill. Ironically a lot of them reflect the kind of superficiality they read into liberal society. We get post-liberals who assert that because they feel liberalism’s morality is bad so too must be its metaphysics, without making any effort to actually make metaphysical arguments. Or we get an endless series of essays on how our society must be failing if liberal morality has flourished so thoroughly, with scarcely any moral analysis. Many of these seem like caricatures of what they profess to attack, merely asserting loudly and often that they disdain liberalism.

In the pre-Modern era, teleological and theological conceptions of matter defined reality in terms of the high ends to which it aspired. Often linked to this were deep value judgments about the intrinsic worth of existence which could be gleaned through an analysis of the physical world, which revealed the deeper teleological or divine order beneath mere matter in motion. The world of physical time became the mere moving image of eternity.

The emerging Scientific Revolution became increasingly critical of this outlook, holding that by interpreting matter in terms of ends we were effectively ascribing moral and aesthetic values to our metaphysical descriptions of the natural world. Instead, matter should be understood deterministically, driven by laws which were comprehensible to reason, but whose ultimate source and purpose were forever concealed to us. Immanuel Kant made a compelling case that any telos or beauty that we apprehended in the natural world or in the nature of human existence was put there by us. Human reason ascribed teleological ends and beauty to the natural world, but we had no way of knowing for sure whether there was any intrinsic telos or beauty in the play of existence.

The broad contours of Kant’s argument remain plausible. As Hamlet would say, “There is nothing good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” Yet the lingering doubt remains that even if this is true, where does it leave us in terms of comprehending the good life? Don’t these kinds of arguments, if anything, lead exactly to the belief that mere opinion is all that props up the conceit that life has value and can be affirmed? 

The answer to this is that liberals needn’t deny that there may well be some intrinsic value to human life that pre-exists human thought, but we are incapable of knowing what that is for certain. Given the limitations of reason this is precluded to us. But this doesn’t mean we can’t take steps toward deciding what the best kinds of human life are. John Stuart Mill suggested that, absent the possibility of any kind of certainty on the matter, the best solution is an experimental one. We give individuals as much liberty as possible to engage in different “experiments in living” and then individually and collectively draw on the reservoir of experiences to ascertain what is conducive to human flourishing and what is not. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nihilism and the Liberal Vision of the Good (liberalcurrents.com) (2021)

“Matt McManus is the author of ‘The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism’ amongst other books and a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan.”

John Stuart Mill: Still Experimenting After All These Years

Saturday Lecture: Strong Gods

{R.R. Reno (who is known, I am told, as ‘Rusty’ to his friends) is a former Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He has been the editor of ‘First Things’ for the past decade; he drew attention in 2020 for a series of articles and tweets in which he said that people wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID were ‘cowards.’ He added that our society was obsessed with human longevity and had an unnatural aversion to death. I should add that Mr. Reno, like everyone associated with ‘First Things,’ is fiercely ‘pro-life.’} 

R.R. Reno (from Return of the Strong Gods):

Social convulsions and mass mobilizations dominated the lives of those born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World War I mustered millions of young men into armies of unprecedented size and marched them into inconclusive battles producing casualties on a shocking scale. No European country emerged from the conflict unchanged.

[In the years that followed], the streets rang with declarations: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Triumph of the Will, Blood and Soil. In those years, fierce gods trampled the benign managerial habits of commerce and the liberal norms of free consent and democratic deliberation. Strong and dark gods stormed through Europe, eventually setting aflame most of the world and bringing death to millions.

The years from 1914 through 1945 were dark with calamity. Almost all our intuitions about how to promote justice and serve the common good have been formed by this civilizational Shoah. We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the “postwar consensus.” Although there has been political contention between the left and the right, it has been a sibling rivalry. The postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons.

As the long twentieth century ends, this unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment Left and Right are closing ranks to denounce populism. The postwar consensus is more than political. Its powerful cultural influence is evident in the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders. Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods.

Anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society. That theory has many forms, some explicit, others tacit. But it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong—strong loves and strong truths—leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths. In the shadow of Auschwitz, this general theory has encouraged the development of a variety of anti-metaphysical philosophies and critical therapies. The postwar era saw a shift in our metaphysical dreams to openness and a lightness of being in response to the decades of catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century.

In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries—opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center. Denigrating populist challenges to the political establishment as spasms of a “tribal mind” is a reductive critique that disenchants.

We must stop acting as if it were 1945. The postwar consensus, however fitting in its earlier stages, is decadent. It is high time that we recognize our intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom from the traumas that so affected our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth. This will not be easy. Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the ‘res’ in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Skyhorse Publishing)

R. Reno - Wikipedia

R.R. Reno: Self-Portrait

Friday Fragment: One Is the Loneliest Number

{I will not attempt to characterize or to categorize Alexander Dugin, a controversial Russian political philosopher and activist. Instead, I will present here a brief excerpt from his book, ‘The Fourth Political Theory’ (to which I have alluded in the past), along with my equally brief observations.}

Alexander Dugin is one of Russia’s best-known advocates for a “postliberal” order:

Liberalism rests on the individual as its most basic component. It is individuals, collectively but in isolation from one another, that are taken as the whole. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the ‘hermeneutic circle’ of liberalism turned out to be the most durable: it has the smallest orbit and rotates around its subject — the individual. To shatter this circle, we must strike the individual, abolish him, and cast him into the periphery of political considerations.

Dugin (or his translator) is being less than precise, even misleading, in the above formulation. His fury is directed not at the “individual” per se (the very idea of which he rejects) but at Individualism: the isolated and autonomous individual of the modern West, shorn of traditional ties and of community, and forced to navigate the world alone. Whether that is an accurate description of the individual’s status under liberal modernity is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Dugin, however, proceeds with his logic:  

Liberalism is well aware of this danger, and therefore undertakes one battle after another with all other ideologies and theories — social, philosophical, and political — that encroach on the individual, inscribing his identity into a more general context. By undermining the individual as the constitutive figure of the entire political and social system, we can put an end to liberalism.

Putting an end to liberalism would be a feat akin to winning a war on terror, which is to say, it seems unlikely if not impossible. Liberal ideas, ideals, and sentiments will survive even if liberal regimes are removed from power.

Still, one of the fundamental dichotomies of human existence has always been that of the One and the Many, and Dugin takes his stand firmly on the side of the latter:

The neuroses and fears located at the pathogenic core of liberal philosophy are clearly seen in The Open Society and its Enemies, a classic of neoliberalism by Karl Popper. He compared fascism and Communism based precisely on the fact that both ideologies integrate the individual into a supra-individual community, into a whole, into a totality, which Popper immediately qualified as ‘totalitarianism’. It is obvious that the weakest (and the strongest) aspect of liberalism comes from its direct appeal to the individual, pleading that he remain himself, by himself in his own autonomous individuality, uniqueness, particularity, and partiality. We propose instead the theory that every human identity is acceptable and justified, except for that of the individual. Man is anything but an individual.

Dugin wants to eliminate the One, in the sense of individuals standing apart from and disconnected from larger social and political entities, i.e., the Many. The ancient Greeks thought along the same lines; they used the term “idiotes” (“private person”) in reference to individuals who were cut off from the body politic. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.” Such views fly in the face of modernity’s notions of personal identity and 'authenticity'; they challenge existentialists’ brooding concern with the Self; and they recall (without the mystical element) early Christianity’s insistence that all believers in Christ collectively constituted and belonged to a single “body of Christ”. It is one of the great ironies of history that a religion which began by emphasizing collective identity eventually engendered the Individual as we now know it.

Dugin’s views would be more persuasive were it not for the Russian history from which they emerge; that history does not bode well for a humanistic challenge to liberalism. I wish it were otherwise, but in centuries of trying, Russia has yet to find a way to balance the One and the Many—other than wholesale murdering of the former in the name of the latter. I would rather give liberalism more time to work on its flaws than pledge my allegiance to Dugin's new world order.    

-------------------------------------------------------------

For anyone interested in Dugin’s thought but not in the mood for tackling “The Fourth Political Theory,” Michael Millerman (at First Things) offers his analysis:             Alexander Dugin Explained by Michael Millerman | Articles | First Things

Painting by June Nissinen: "The One in the Many"

Sunday Sermon: "Bilge Water in a Ship's Hold"

{Before there was Woke, there was Political Correctness; before there was Postmodernism, there was Modernism; and before that, Protestantism. At the same time, there have been brave souls (e.g., Pope Gregory XVI, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Jordan Peterson) willing to stand up against such intolerable developments as Indifferentism, Liberalism, “liberty of conscience,” and “freedom to publish”. For at least five hundred years, we have been beset by the powers of darkness. It is nothing short of a miracle that we are still standing in the light—or are we?}

Pope Gregory XVI, from “Mirari Vos: On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism” (1832):  

We know that you are concerned for the faith in these difficult times. Now is truly the time in which the powers of darkness winnow the elect like wheat. We speak of the things which you see with your own eyes, which we all bemoan. Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men but defiled and held up to ridicule. Sound doctrine is perverted, and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline — none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil.

Academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack [Christian] faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted; a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. The restraints of religion are thrown off; we see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. This great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship’s hold, a congealed mass of all filth.

You must labor and diligently take care that the faith may be preserved amidst this great conspiracy of impious men who attempt to tear it down and destroy it. May all remember the judgment concerning sound doctrine with which the people are to be instructed. Consider another abundant source of the evils with which we are afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained, and that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever.  

Indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? The Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books. This was true even in apostolic times for we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books.

We condemn the detestable insolence and improbity of those who, consumed with the unbridled lust for freedom, are entirely devoted to impairing and destroying all rights of dominion while bringing servitude to the people under the slogan of liberty. Certain societies and assemblages seem to draw up a battle line together with the followers of every false religion and cult. They feign piety for religion; but they are driven by a passion for promoting novelties and sedition everywhere. They preach liberty of every sort; they stir up disturbances in sacred and civil affairs, and pluck authority to pieces. Proud, or rather foolish, men examine the mysteries of faith (which surpass all understanding) with the faculties of the human mind, and rely on human reason which, by the condition of man’s nature, is weak and infirm.

Against all these, take up the shield of faith and fight the battles of the Lord vigorously. You must stand as a wall against every height which raises itself against the knowledge of God. Unsheath the sword of the spirit…

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mirari Vos - Papal Encyclicals

(Bold emphases in the original)

Saturday Lecture: Are There Limits to Tolerance?

It has been said that “One man’s right to swing his fists ends where another man’s nose begins.” Does it then follow that “One man’s right to speak freely ends where another man’s ears begin”? Freedom, it turns out, is just another word for people to squabble over. How far do our freedoms extend, and who decides the boundaries?

Writing in 1945 and defending what he called ‘the open society,’ Karl Popper contrasted it with tribalism, primitivism, collectivism, superstition, and magic, all of which (he said) were characteristics of ‘closed’ societies. Popper wanted--in theory--maximal tolerance. The following excerpt (from his The Open Society and Its Enemies) illustrates his belief in Enlightenment values:

The strain of civilization is the strain of the demand that we should be rational, look after ourselves, and take immense responsibilities. It is the price we have to pay for being human.

We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of our tribal past. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal authority.

For those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature.

If we dream of a return to our childhood, if we are tempted to rely on others and so be happy, if we turn back from the task of carrying our cross, the cross of humaneness, of reason, of responsibility, if we lose courage and flinch from the strain, then we must try to fortify ourselves with a clear understanding of the simple decision before us. If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, courageously, using what reason we have, to plan for security and freedom.

But Popper also recognized, and highlighted, a critical paradox:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them, if necessary, even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Taking Popper's caveat to heart, America decided, in the 1950s, against extending tolerance to its ideological enemies. Our country banned the Communist Party and rooted out Communists from government, labor unions, and academia. ¹ In the Sixties, however, the shoe of intolerance was on the other ideological foot, as the New Left harkened to anti-liberal Herbert Marcuse’s call for ‘repressive tolerance,’ by which he meant ‘selective intolerance,’ a notion which (although denounced by liberals) did not differ substantially from Popper's program. 

This is from Marcuse's essay, "Repressive Tolerance":

Tolerance is being extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested. 

Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs--the mature delinquency of a whole civilization.

Tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the' possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Who would have predicted the ideological marriage, or at least the cohabitation, of Sir Karl Popper and Herbert Marcuse? Did their union, legitimized or not, produce the monstrous twins, Political Correctness and Cancel Culture? 

--------------------------------------------------------------

Karl Popper - Wikipedia

Repressive Tolerance (full text) - Herbert Marcuse Official Website

¹ "Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 (CCA) as an amendment to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 “to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.”  Communist Control Act of 1954 (1954) - The Free Speech Center (mtsu.edu) Also see: McCarthyism - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Origins of Liberalism

Pierre Manent, from An Intellectual History of Liberalism:

What did our modern written “constitutions” and the “declarations of rights” proclaimed to establish their “freedom” suggest, if not an emancipation of the “idea,” a rise in the political power of the “theory”? The American Founding Fathers were as concerned about interpreting Montesquieu’s thought and benefiting from his authority as socialists later were about understanding what Marx “really said.” As Hamilton wrote in the first of The Federalist papers in 1787, Americans have the responsibility of deciding before the world if it is possible to found a good government “from reflection and choice,” or if humanity is forever condemned to be the plaything of “accident and force.” In a word, there is in liberal politics something essentially deliberate and experimental, that implies a conscious and “constructed” plan.

One of the principal “ideas” of liberalism, as we know, is that of the “individual.” The individual is that being who, because he is human, is naturally entitled to “rights” that can be enumerated, rights that are attributed to him independently of his function or place in society and that make him the equal of any other man. As familiar as this idea may seem, it really ought to strike us as strange. How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of a right presupposes an already instituted community or society? How can political legitimacy be founded on the rights of the individual, if he never exists as such, if he is always necessarily linked to other individuals, to a family, class, profession, or nation? However, it is on this idea, so obviously “asocial” and “apolitical,” that the liberal body politic was progressively constructed. What is an election with universal suffrage, if not that moment when each person strips himself of his social or natural characteristics—income, profession, even sex— to become a “simple individual”? It is that moment when the body politic peacefully breaks up, becoming a “state of nature,” only to reconstruct itself immediately afterward. Nor is there any doubt that this individual, so obviously “imaginary,” has tended more and more to become reality. The inhabitants of Western democracies have become ever more autonomous, ever more equal, and have felt themselves progressively less defined by the family or social class to which they belong.

Our present political regime remains determined, in its generating principle, by this [idea]. Its singularity still dwells in us because we continue to feel the consequences of the solemn decisions taken three centuries ago. It is widely believed that the originality of European political history stems from Christianity, and that the development of modern politics can be described as a process of “secularization.” What are liberty and equality, after all, if not “biblical values” shaping civic life? The thesis was born and acquired its credence just after the French Revolution. It had the merit of reconciling proponents and opponents of the “new freedom”: there were those who thought that the hour of human maturity had arrived and those who remained attached to the old religion. The former saw in Christianity the first expression of human liberty and equality, hidden under the veils of grace or hampered by the swaddling clothes of alienation. The latter celebrated modern freedom as the last conquest of the Gospel.

We must remember, however, that this reconciliation (which in France took more than a century to be achieved) came about just after the Christian religion had been totally stripped of all political power for the first time, power that it would never regain. Perhaps the lassitude of battle had weakened the conquerors as much as the conquered. In any case the principles of the new politics—the rights of man and citizen, freedom of conscience, sovereignty of the people—had been forged during the two previous centuries in a bitter fight against Christianity, and particularly against the Catholic Church. The decisive question then is the following: must the Enlightenment’s war against Christianity be seen as the expression of an immense misunderstanding, for which we must seek to grasp the “historical reasons”? Or does this period give us the meaning of the modern political venture, and thus of liberalism, much more clearly than the subsequent period of reconciliation?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (New French Thought Series, 1), Princeton University Press

Pierre Manent - Wikipedia

Enlightenment, Class of 1750

Friday Fuss

In case anyone thought that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat was alone in believing that the term "conservatism" is utterly inappropriate for the American political Right, the following is from Nathan Robinson (Current Affairs), who begins by quoting Noam Chomsky:

"There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future."

Nathan Robinson, in his own words:

It is a mistake to think that right-wing politics is about conserving much of anything. In fact, because the right is committed to the rule of the market, right-wing policies will unleash much more destruction than preservation. 

Right-wing populism has always been a fraud because it speaks the language of tradition, community, family, etc. but then supports policies that separate families, atomize communities, and obliterate traditional cultures. Understanding the fraudulence of the word “conservatism” is critical to seeing what the real consequences of the right-wing agenda will be, namely a very different and much worse world.  

“Conservatism” Conserves Nothing ❧ Current Affairs

===============================================

In his 2008 Book of Absolutes, William Gairdner set out to refute modern relativism, a task he undertook by constructing a strawman, and an exceptionally flimsy one at that:

The three key myths of modernity all have to do with repudiating controls. We accept as dogma the idea that our minds begin as blank slates (have no innate character-determining properties), that we are all inherently good people to start with (and if bad, are made so by poorly engineered societies that can be fixed up), and, finally, that we exist as freely choosing selves unencumbered by any constraints of temperament, biology, or pre-existing moral obligations or standards. We accept at face value the modern conceit that our minds, instincts, and societies start off clean and empty, to be filled with whatever meanings we choose.

The problem with Gairdner’s thesis is that it might have been accurate, and relevant, in the 18^th-century, but it is a mere caricature today.

Are “we” in the thrall of John Locke and his “blank slate” theory, and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in mankind’s “natural goodness”? No, we are not, nor were we ever. Those theories were contested even as they were promulgated, and they have long since been debunked, discredited, and discarded. Today, we debate “nature vs. nurture,” we argue about genetic determinism and about the influence of external factors on individual development; our understanding of ourselves has been both challenged and deepened by the work of Darwin and Freud, not to mention by the catastrophes of modern history.  Are there really such things, we ask, as “unencumbered” and “freely choosing” selves? Modern thought is more likely to say that “free will” is an illusion. Post-Locke and post-Rousseau, subsequent thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, have made mincemeat of the simplified ideas that arose in the early modern era only to be complicated and confounded by experience (and, later, by neuroscience).

Despite which, Gairdner proclaimed that “we” are all in agreement on the prevailing “modern conceit,” to which one might respond as Tonto did to the Lone Ranger: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

----------------------------------------------------

William Gairdner, The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals (McGill—Queen’s University Press, 2008)

============================

“Kierkegaard worried that his age was going to swallow itself up in reflection; our age is closer to settling the planet Mars than it has ever come to the experience of reflection.” (D.C. Schindler)

Finally, at The Imaginative Conservative, in what is either a lengthy essay or a short book (complete with seventy footnotes!), theologian D.C. Schindler asks, “What Is Liberalism?” He insists that the question “is an essential one” and he goes on to explain:

In the present moment, the question of the “value” of liberalism—that is, modern political philosophy founded on “natural rights” and some version of the “social contract” theory—has emerged with an urgency it may never have had before. While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Can we not entertain the notion that there were good features in some of the older political forms that liberalism replaced? 

For Schindler, this is not mere academic chatter; it has existential significance. “How,” he asks, “ought we to live in the world we now occupy and respond to the reality of liberalism, which has established its place in the modern West over the course of five hundred years and increasingly around the globe?” In trying to come to terms with what Liberalism has wrought, Schindler provides a list (I know) of “twenty-five features of contemporary life that we take to be evident to anyone who cares to look around thoughtfully.” Taken as a whole, claims Schindler, “liberalism represents a transformation of human nature from the ground up; it is an extraction of human nature, root and branch, from the actual tradition in which it is embedded, so as to enable a truly radical re-interpretation of every dimension of human existence. Such a comprehensive re-interpretation is possible only in reaction to a comprehensive claim on human nature, which is just what Christianity makes by virtue of its universal ontological and historical scope, its mission into the depths of being and through the whole of human culture, all the way up to the world’s eschatological destiny.”

For those interested in pursuing the topic further, Schindler incorporates insights from Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, with whom he agrees that the historical origins of liberalism stemmed from “the rejection of Christianity, specifically in the form of the Catholic Church, at least in its actual historical condition in the Middle Ages.” The ghost of Bill Occam cannot be far away!

What Is Liberalism? ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Friday Frights

{You may not have noticed, but America is beset by tyranny and totalitarianism. Fortunately, astute observers like Glenn Ellmers and Walter Kirn are here to enlighten us. Wake up, sheeple!}

Despite the promise inherent in its title, Glenn Ellmers’ “You Got a License for that Tyranny?” does not discuss tyranny at all. Instead, the brief essay is a lesson in how to substitute invective for argument--which is not to say that Ellmers is incapable of presenting substantive anti-Left arguments, only that in this case he eschews them.  When you’re preaching to the converted, I suppose, there is no need for apologetics; you can safely assume that the congregants (in this case, readers of The American Mind) will be satisfied if you simply invoke the familiar epithets.

Which is precisely what Ellmers does (and all that he does), making the case against our Liberal overlords with nothing but a barrage of pejorative language, unleavened by even the slightest hint of respect or charity. Ellmers captures the flavor—not to say, the essence—of Liberal tyranny with a string of well-chosen words and phrases:  

Leftist ruling class, dysfunctional, sanctimonious, deranged, urban hipsters, moral superiority, social parasites, ruthless self-interest, ideological purity, insane, urban barbarism, bureaucratic oligarchy, anti-rational postmodernism, genteel Mafiosi, self-conscious managerial class, elite education and training, expertocracy, misplaced arrogance, unserious leadership, hostile incompetence, ideological posturing, absurd academic dogmas, propaganda, self-contradictory, incoherent, nihilistic.

That, it seems, is all we know about Liberalism and all we need to know.

I give Glenn Ellmers enormous credit for not having used the words “woke” or “Wokeism”. I also give him credit for noting, more or less as an aside, that “The United States is still relatively peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” That is something for which we should all be grateful, especially given all the unlicensed tyranny to which we are being subjected.  

____________________________________________

You Got a License for that Tyranny? - The American Mind

======================

In an interview worth quoting at some length, Montana-based author Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) bemoans the fact that “America has lost the plot”:

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things? ¹

The final lesson wasn’t that any of this was inevitable, but that by growing up and being good citizens and standing with the right kind of people, it could all be averted. It was portrayed as navigable. It wasn’t portrayed as catastrophic but merely as a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome. Even the Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb were construed as something that would probably not occur because we were so strong, so influential, so virtuous.

Kirn, who was born in 1962, is perplexed that his seventh-grade understanding of America (“so strong, so influential, so virtuous) and of the world (“a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome”) has to be either amended or defended. If only his rural Minnesota public education had included lessons on America’s unresolved racial conflicts, its political, social, and cultural turmoil, its foreign interventions and entanglements—really, if only Kearn had been exposed to anything that would have complicated, in the best sense of the word, his Midwest naivete.   

_______________________________

Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot (palladiummag.com)

¹ Analogously: as a child, I was taught to be afraid of lions and tigers. Now that I’m seventy-five, you’re telling me that it’s neurotic for a grown man to be afraid of kittens?  

 

Wednesday with Pascal: What a Godawful Mess

{Caveat lector: in the wake of another of Kevin Slack's online lectures, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is in a mood today.}

In his memorable 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s appalling album Self-Portrait, Greil Marcus began by asking: “What is this shit?”

More politely, we could recall the exasperated cries of tennis great John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious!”

Either of those quotes captures my reaction to Professor Kevin Slack’s appalling online lecture on “Civil Rights and Black Power,” a lecture that is a farrago of one-sided interpretations, tendentious readings, and oversimplifications, along with discreet omissions of anything that might contradict or even complicate Slack’s preferred narrative.  

In fact, one could compose a litany of Slack’s omissions, and I will. To wit, he omits any mention of:

• Slavery
• Jim Crow
• lynchings
• the Ku Klux Klan
• Truman’s desegregation of the military
• the Dixiecrat Party
• Southern white resistance to school integration
• the emergence of “Christian academies” and “White Citizens Councils”
• Orval Faubus
• Little Rock
• George Wallace
• Alabama
• Lester Maddox
• Ross Barnett
• Mississippi
• Selma
• Montgomery
• bombing of Southern black churches
• the murder of Emmett Till
• the murder of Malcolm X
• the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
• Nixon’s policy of “benign neglect” of black communities
• “No one’s ever gonna out-n----- me again” (George Wallace)
• “We’ve just lost the South for a generation.” (Lyndon Johnson)
• “The white community, for the time being, is the advanced race” (National Review)

That, I would suggest, is a lot of contextual detail to have left out.

What, then, does Professor Slack cover in “Civil Rights and Black Power”? The following constitutes a reasonable precis, which I will call The Gospel of the Civil Rights Movement According to Professor Kevin Slack:

In the beginning, American Liberals supported keeping whites and blacks apart to avoid fighting between them. Liberals created restrictive housing covenants and the practice of “red lining” by banks to achieve de facto segregation. However, Liberals were caught between the rock of professing to be ‘color blind’ when it came to race, and the hard place of pushing for race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”). Basically, Liberals wanted to help people of color while pretending there was no such thing as color—silly Liberals! In the “New Deal,” FDR created the Fair Employment Practices Commission as a publicity stunt; the FEPC was a kind of Potemkin village of an agency that had no powers but symbolized Liberal opposition to discrimination in hiring. Then, in the Fifties, a liberal Supreme Court ruled that public schools had to be desegregated, but it said they could take their time getting it done, which everyone, North and South, agreed was reasonable. Americans wholeheartedly supported reasonable accommodations and equal rights for Negroes.

In the Forties and Fifties, Black Americans had made great progress, but then Liberals became radicalized, and the good times came to an end. In the Sixties, there were three Black factions in America: the “Black bourgeoisie,” the “beloved community,” and “Negroes with guns”. It was a full-time job for guilt-ridden white Liberals to pander to all three elements of the Black community; how their heads did spin!

The “Black bourgeoisie,” like bourgeoisie everywhere, imitated the (white) social and economic class above them. They tried to be white, to talk white, to act white; they straightened their hair, they minded their manners, and they favored gradual integration and incremental legal change over unruly civil disobedience and violence. At the same time, they postured as revolutionaries while combing their genealogies to see if they could qualify for membership in the DAR.

The “beloved community” was the brainchild of the notorious philanderer Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned a world where neither race nor marital fidelity mattered. ¹ It began as a church- and community-based movement, emphasizing legal parity and economic self-sufficiency; but King, afraid of being eclipsed by Black radicals, turned to the Left, denounced the war in Vietnam, and demanded affirmative action and a domestic Marshall Plan. He provoked violence, paradoxically, through his diabolical tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, which forced law enforcement to beat the living hell out of protestors. Many leaders in Black communities opposed Martin Luther King, Jr. (even before they learned of his sordid sexual shenanigans). Joseph H. Jackson, for instance, a good Negro and President of the United Baptist Convention, USA, tried to keep the Civil Rights movement from tacking Left; he advised King to keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes. King, of course, with the morals of an alley cat, refused to listen.

“Negroes with guns” was the brainchild of Robert Williams (author of a book by that title). He was soon joined by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton (and the News), and Stokely Carmichael. They jointly invented Black Power, SNCC, and Identity Politics; later, they kidnapped Patty Hearst and bombed the Mexico City Olympics.

Other agitators included James Cone, a Black preacher whose message was “Jesus hates Whitey”; Malcolm X, who brainwashed Cassius Clay, accused Reverend King of being an Uncle Tom, and consorted with Muslims, Communists, and Third World radicals; Stokely Carmichael, who embraced the revolutionary politics of Frantz Fanon; Eldridge Cleaver, who flew to Cuba and presented Fidel Castro with a box of exploding cigars; and the Commie terrorist Angela Davis, who was awarded tenure at the University of California.

The Sixties were a very troubled, and troubling, decade. So much went wrong!  Conservatives in postwar America tried to stand athwart History yelling “Stop the desegregation!” Alas, they were only crying in the American wilderness. Voices of reason like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater were drowned out by demagogues like Dwight Eisenhower—a RINO who sent federal troops into Arkansas.

Did Liberals at least have good intentions on the issue of race? No, they did not, according to Professor Kevin Slack. From FDR’s sham FEPC in the Thirties to the vague “with all deliberate speed” of Brown v. Board of Education and to welfare policies designed to keep Blacks mired in dependency, Liberals have always been virtue-signalers: white hypocrites who waved banners of tolerance while forcing blue-collar white neighborhoods and schools to desegregate but who simultaneously protected their own gated communities and sent their own children to private schools.

In closing, I take back every good thing I said last week about Kevin Slack. “Civil Rights and Black Power” is almost certainly the worst lecture I have had the misfortune to encounter; to paraphrase a man much more generous than I can bring myself to be, "Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he's talking about." If it weren’t for the fact that the Hillsdale College online course is free, I would demand my money back. As it is, I have several more lectures to endure.

_______________________________________

¹ Reading directly from FBI transcripts, Professor Slack is shocked to learn that Martin Luther King, Jr. had over forty extramarital affairs and that he participated in orgies that included rapes which he watched and cheered on. Professor Slack does not suggest that the FBI reports are in any way suspect or that they ought to be taken with a grain of salt; unlike today’s nefarious “Deep State” agencies, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was apparently on the right side of history.

1963: the aftermath of the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Score One for Hillsdale

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat seems almost disappointed that the latest online Hillsdale College lecture was, all in all, pretty darned reasonable. Neither Professor Kevin Slack’s delivery (nary a sneer to be found!) nor the lecture content itself afforded Pascal the opportunity to do what he enjoys the most: hissing, that is, scratching, and clawing at objectionable rhetoric and risible logic. Instead, he’s forced to concede that Hillsdale students could learn something from this lecture.}

You may color me surprised.

Aside from his dispassionate tone and given the time limit (34 minutes) imposed upon him, Kevin Slack delivers a fair and balanced account of the “Origins of the Radical Left”. I would have preferred that Professor Slack supplement his presentation with a good deal more newsreel footage—of marches, demonstrations, riots, protests, etc.—that would have evoked the temper of the times. The “New Left,” however abstruse and academic its origins, was fueled more by passions (outrage, indignation, resentment, anger, fear, guilt, etc.) evoked by contemporary events (wars, assassinations, racist policies, nuclear threats, etc.) than it was by ideology; in fact, one of the main charges hurled by conservatives against modern Leftists is that they are driven by emotion rather than by logical thought. Professor Slack, for whatever reasons, allows no emotion to intrude upon his otherwise admirable lecture. ¹

That aside, Slack gives his audience a brief survey of postwar Leftist thinking. He touches on (or at least mentions) Existentialism, Critical Thinking, and post-Freudian psychology; he cites authors such as Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and C. Wright Mills. Slack’s even-handed approach to the radical Left’s criticism of Liberalism likely stems from the fact that postwar conservatives lobbed similar charges against Liberalism; for instance, when Slack notes that C. Wright Mills asserted that America’s two political parties were indistinguishable (“not a dime’s worth of difference”), one thinks of the slogan “A choice, not an echo” associated with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign (a slogan which has been condensed over time to the epithet “RINO,” “Republican In Name Only”). The New Left and the American Right had little in common, but they shared a contempt for the Liberal establishment and for the “Liberal consensus” that reigned in Washington after World War II.    

I also commend Kevin Slack for not disparaging the motives of the left-wing thinkers whose ideas gave rise to the Sixties’ counterculture and to the radical New Left. Slack’s narrative indicates that their ideas were a reaction to the failures (perceived or otherwise) of the liberal order and to the horrors of the twentieth century—Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism, the Holocaust, and the atom bomb. Rather than demonize the Frankfurt School thinkers, Slack rightly points out that they were “self-critical Marxists” who opposed Bolshevism and Stalinism. At no point does Slack suggest or even hint that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse hated and wanted to destroy Western civilization (the usual charge against them from the Right); instead, he acknowledges that they were trying to formulate a vision of a more just and more humane society.  

One may quarrel, then, with Professor Slack’s choice of representative thinkers, or with his interpretations of their thought or his assessments of their influence; but one should express appreciation for his refusal to condescend, to hurl invectives, or to portray the likes of Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills as wanting, openly or secretly, to destroy America. To grant the good intentions of one’s ideological opponents is an important part of civil discourse, and one we are all in danger these days of forgetting. 

_______________________________________________

¹ I will allow myself one quibble. At one point, Professor Slack says that Liberalism was labeled “the god that failed”. I believe he is incorrect. It was Communism that was so labeled and which was the subject of a book of essays (The God that Failed) by six ex-Communists: Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and Louis Fischer. Since Kevin Slack knows that Liberalism is not at all the same thing as Communism, I assume this was an unintended misstatement on his part.

Hillsdale College: A light unto the nations, a shining campus on a hill