Traditionalist Conservatism Forum     > Traditionalist Conservatism         > Comments on Counterrevoluion.net site
	<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>

Author	Comment
guest Unregistered User (4/4/02 4:20 pm) Reply	Comments on Counterrevoluion.net site I discovered your counter revolution website a little over a year ago and appreciate your perspective. I come from the opposite end of the political spectrum as you but my own political understanding has been broadened by reading and considering the essays on your site. There are a couple points that I want to make in defense of liberalism though. I have a lot of problems with the 'politically correct' crowd myself but I don't see what they're trying to do as an extension of liberalism. My view on this is shaped largely by the progressive Political Science professor Adolph Reed Jr., also opposed to this type of thing, who argues that it's the result not of an expanding liberalism but of a regressive pseudo-Stalinist structural conception of society. It's assumed that there is a 'structure' to society and that based on that structure winners and losers can be pointed out, and since 'we' want to include the losers therefore it's 'objectively' correct to pressure people into supporting them etc...To me this seems more like an odd mutation coming out of the sixties and seventies than something which is part of a natural progression of liberalism. Because, I feel, it's not really a philosophy which is justifiable or thought out I think that it's only a matter of time before it breaks down and something more natural and consistant takes it's place. That said I don't percieve it as a pernicious threat; indeed I think that it's starting to run it's course already. Secondly, I disagree with the linking of this pseudo-liberalism with the idea of the Welfare State. I do this because the philosophies which generated the Welfare State in Europe, and to a certain degree here, in my opinion had little to do with the philosophy of the PC crowd. The PC crowd tends to think in ways distantly related to utilitarianism while the Welfare state was built on the concept of social justice. The two philosophies lead to radically different conclusions. Justice and getting what's percieved to be justly your's is different than seeing problems. which might be there for good reason, and saying that they have to be eliminated no matter what. In my opinion a society based on justice would be much more libertarian than a utilitarian one precisely because of one of the ideas that comes out clearly from your site: being fair doesn't mean that a person is endlessly obligated to others for the improvement of their lives. This idea was at the heart of the Welfare State philosophy, even in the U.S.'s: Roosevelt framed the New Deal not as a give away to groups that happened to be doing poorly but as a necessary measure to restore some sense of justice to the economy and to society-without which claims of the country being a meritocracy would be meaningless. I'm aware of problems with meritocracy as well, but social programs to enhance the chance for one to exercise his merit are based on a different philosophy than programs which seek to highlight people and give money to people solely because they've been disefranchised by society by some measure, i.e. gays and lesbians. That said I feel that PC does not equal a creeping welfare state. It might equal some other type of nefarious state. but not the traditional welfare state. It should be noted that countries in Europe which have more social programs have less regulations than us, something which I feel is not a coincidence and which goes back to the utility/justice split. As for the culture wars I feel that their importance has been exagerrated. For one thing, from my observations, there doesn't seem to be this big split between the lives and attitudes of people who are liberal and secular and people who are conservative and religious. I agree with you and with Burke on the idea that taking traditional standards and religion out of culture opens the door for people to race to the bottom regarding conduct, goals, thinking, etc...but it seems to me that although there are definitely many people like that out there that most liberal people deal with the same sorts of issues that conservatives do. I think it's universal for people to grapple with big moral issues because I feel that that's part of the universal human experience. Whats more, I think that liberalism has opened up the space needed to take these issues and deal with them in a refined way not possible within a traditionalist society. Because of all this I don't think that culture wars exist in the conventional way. If anything liberalism today is moving away from false neutrality and towards something more substantial, which if I understand correctly is what conservatives feel is being denied to them. As to the false neutrality issue: you're not alone in thinking this and the right wing certainly isn't the only place that the idea comes up. People on the left have been complaining about it for quite some time. It goes back to the pseudo-Stalinist structuralist model, which comes from French theoreticians like Louis Althusser (who was a member in good standing of the French Communist Party) and his followers and critics, like Michel Foucault. Since your e-mail address is at Yale you've probably had more exposure to these people than is healthy. Anyways. This structuralist model is criticized because, as you've said about neutrality, diversity, inclusion, the forced celebrations of controversial figures, etc.. it's truly a superficial model of society and these things are just tokens that don't mean anything. But neutrality and unspoken liberal presumptions cut both ways: one thing that the structural model doesn't address is social justice-despite all it's give aways and such. Discussing social justice with liberals who've bought the whole thing is probably like discussing particularism: they respond that wanting social justice is making a biased judgement about society-as if they themselves weren't already biased etc... My feeling is that like the structuralist model of society that this unspoken liberal hegemony is a historical accident rather than a natural out come of liberalism and that it's already showing serious signs of cracking up. I think it's important to note that calling for the radical inclusion into society of every group that's been excluded, no matter if it's African Americans or people who practice hardcore S&M, goes way beyond what people like Burke and Maistre were afraid liberalism would lead to. My understanding of them is that they opposed the state because the state could become a replacement for traditional society and therefore both inadequate at preparing people for life and oppressive. Structuralist liberalism assumes the opposite: that the state has been used in tandem with the economic system to oppress people in the past and now people who are anti-statist are aiming to redress that. They aren't claiming to be a new state, that's under the surface rather than up front. In contrast the Jacobins in the French Revolution were very up front about their statism: they were acting definitively on Rousseau's idea that in the absence of traditional authority a new mechanism would have to be constructed with which people could identify. Robespierre was fanatical in declaring that the state was the only thing that mattered and that a crime against the values of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was therefore also a crime against the new French State. One of the reasons that I think this PC thing and the false neutrality has survived is precisely because the leaders of the movement aren't people who stand on the podium like Robespierre and dictate obedience. No one would stand for that for a second. Because they aren't actually part of the state, and because structuralist liberalism isn't the law, there's nothing to keep it in place once a challenge has been made--and I think that that process is taking place right now. So my feeling is that it'll wither away, and that therefore there isn't much need to treat it as though it was destroying all of society. Which brings me to another point: this structuralism doesn't have deep roots. It crystallized in the mid seventies around elite universities and gained prominence in the early nineties--less than twenty years. Almost immediately people began to challenge it. This isn't a way of thinking that's really ingrained into our culture. So I don't believe that there really is much to restore, although there is definitely some, and I don't believe that we're really at this big crisis point, or that radical conservativism is the solution. I can easily concieve of a liberalism that, as I think Isiaih Berlin pictured it, locates itself within the western tradition of thought and instead of dealing with bland abstractions like human nature deals in a liberal way with the real content of life-things which I think both you and Burke would agree are the important things: values, excellence, persomal conduct, the big questions, etc...which seem to me to be the heart of conservativism. I feel that a liberalism like this is not that far off, and that many of the people now feared lost in the liberal malaise will probably turn out instead to be people with a lot of opinions to contribute to this 'liberalsim within the western tradition' idea. Following this I have to say that in light of my dissent about there being this big crisis I don't see Clinton's sexual and legal misconduct as being indicative of some larger social decline. It might of been wrong to do what he did but I really don't think that he stands as a symbol of what's going on in America, or that in the long run that Clinton's errors were really that serious to begin with. Certainly if Bill isn't the monster people have made him out to be Hillary is spotless, no matter what the cottage industry of Clinton critics might say. So I agree with you and I disagree with you. However my prediction as to where this renewed society will go is something that you would surely not agree with: after structuralist liberalism passes my guess is that it'll be followed by a new leftist idea based on social justice. I feel that if one looks at the record societies where the opposition to conservativism was based philosophically on social justice rather than on utilitarianism have been societies more tolerant of tradition and religion. Liberalism in the U.S. form does focus exessively on the individual, to the detriment of philosophies like conservativism which concentrate on the entire society and on the 'whole person', not just on his or her individual-ness. A philosophy based on social justice would move the debate about what sort of society we'd like away from excessive questions of individualism and onto secondary issues, leaving people to pursue whatever individual path they prefer-whether it be a traditionalist and religious one or an egoist one. Civil rights, in my opinion, will be best safeguarded when we don't have to debate about Civil Rights anymore. When liberal values such as these pass into our national tradition and out of the spotlight it'll be a good day for leftists and conservatives both. As you and most other conservative writers point out: there is much more to life than just the individual, and focussing on him/her whatever excessively just drags down the national conversation from one dealing with high ideals to one that can't even get started, because it can't get past the basics. So I forsee a social justice based movement which respects the conent of life, a la Isiaih Berlin, as the solution-with a clarified conservative opposition existing as well. Yes, these things-the Big Issues do need to be put back onto the cultural table. Kids just aren't learning how to deal with the important questions, and that's a tradgedy. However, just as you point out that the core values of liberalism could be applied to any political system, I believe that much of what conservativism is about can be comfortably incorporated into a vigorous new liberalism, and into society in general in a non-partisan way. Maybe what we need, to take the title from your essay, is a more explicit conservativism in America combined with an implicit liberalism. All in all I've found your site very interesting,. I only wish more liberals and leftists would take the time to engage themselves intellectually with conservative ideas. I think it would be a very fruitful trend.
JimKalb Unregistered User (4/4/02 4:34 pm) Reply	Comments on Counterrevoluion.net site Thanks for your comments. My basic theory on liberalism and PC, as you know, is that the former leads to the latter. I go into it in my "PC and the Crisis of Liberalism", www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/feb98/kalb-pc.html, and also in an essay not yet on my website that should come out in Telos. The point of PC is to do away with social attitudes and arrangements that prefer some people and their desires and habits to others. What is behind it, I think, is that liberalism in any form makes freedom the ultimate goal of political organization, and does away with any substantive concept of the good by reference to which the question "freedom for what" can be answered. Once that's done, though, it becomes irrational and wrong to treat one set of habits and goals as substantively better than another. Liberal politics therefore turns into a set of technical questions relating to how actual human desires can be satisfied in the most equal and comprehensive way possible. So liberalism itself leads to a sort of egalitarian utilitarianism in which evaluations of what ways of life are good and bad in themselves become out of place. What PC does is get rid of such evaluations. (Note that all cultures, lifestyles, sexual orientations, gender configurations etc. are collections of habits and goals, and PC is simply the command of advanced liberalism that they all be given equal respect and status.) So it seems to me that egalitarian utilitarianism motivates both the "justice" on which the welfare state is built and the "fairness" on which PC is built. The two seem very closely related to me--it's no accident Western Europe has become at least as PC as we are. Justice can't mean anything but egalitarian utilitarianism unless there's an idea of individual desert, and liberalism--putting self-defined individual autonomy first--is opposed to individual desert because it gives the state the power to judge individuals morally and impose sanctions, contrary to the values behind religious freedom etc. I agree there's lots of discomfort with PC and the more radical consequences of liberalism but I don't see anyone with a good response to them. People grumble, but diversity always wins. It seems to me that political and moral thought has fallen into a pit it can't climb out of. Whatever people try to do they just reinvent liberalism and find themselves back where they started. That's what I think the crisis is. I don't think some Isaiah Berlin-type skeptical moderate liberalism can maintain itself against complaints about discrimination, oppression, etc. What can it argue? I'm sure I haven't replied to everything you said but I hope I've covered the major points. Edited by: JimKalb  at: 4/11/02 10:24:37 am

<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>

Topic Commands Click to receive email notification of replies Click to stop receiving email notification of replies
jump to: Traditionalist Conservatism Sex and Gender Human Rights Other Administration

- Traditionalist Conservatism Forum - Traditionalist Conservatism - On to Restoration! -

Upgrade your account to ezSupporter...

...and never see another ad or pop-up again

Powered By ezboard® Ver. 7.3u
Copyright ©1999-2003 ezboard, Inc.