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Why the concepts of liberals are more important than their motivations
It becomes increasingly apparent that many of the people pushing the belief in equality simply hate America and want to destroy it. So why not just talk about hate of America instead of about equality and liberalism? I said to Jim Kalb: it’s because you can’t argue against an irrational thing like hatred, but you can argue against the arguments used by hatred, and thus reach the people in the middle who are not motivated by hatred but who do believe those arguments. Then Jim said something very interesting and here is my restatement of it: Hatred and other emotions may float around in a person’s mind, but they don’t become socially operative unless there is a conceptual framework to make them coherent and publicly acceptable. Therefore it’s important to focus on the concepts of liberals, not on their feelings and motivations. Today, the invalid emotion of anti-American hatred has an ideology—liberalism—that backs it up, so it has become socially operative. Meanwhile, valid impulses, such as moral judgment, have been denied—by liberalism—any supporting conceptual framework. The result is what Ann Hendershott calls “moral panics,” the hysterical substitute for the (banished) activity of ordinary moral judgment and correction, as seen in certain well-publicized witch hunts against non-existent child molesters, in the phenomenon of “zero-tolerance,” and so on.
So, to invalidate the irrational phenomenon of anti-American (or anti-white) hatred, one must critique the concepts that it uses. After all, the people who hate America don’t go around saying “we hate America and want to destroy it.” They use ideas. If those ideas were invalidated, the hatred would cease to be socially operative. By the same token, in order to free people from the irrational phenomenon of “moral panics,” the false ideas that have made ordinary moral judgment seem illegitimate must be refuted. Comments
As a parasite liberalism will always eat its parents and children. It doesn’t seem right to me to say that hatred of America is _a priori_ and liberalism is a trumped up justification for that _a priori_ hatred. That certainly may be the case for some or even many contemporaries, but it doesn’t cohere well with liberalism’s steady takeover of all of politics everywhere over the last several centuries. I agree with the last paragraph, but I don’t think it is generally true that people become liberals because they hate America. I think that people hate America because they are liberals. Liberals hate every actual concrete human authority and view all such authorities as oppressive. I did not mean that hatred of America is necessarily first and equality dresses that up. My own recent thinking has been that the belief in equality comes first, and the hatred is the result of that. But so often other people will say to me, “the liberals just want to destroy America; it’s not necessary to analyze their thinking.” So I was taking that point of view seriously, and saying, let’s say that in some cases the hatred is the primary motive. Or let’s say that in some cases it starts with equality, which leads to hatred, which then becomes the primary motive, which then finds more and more extreme ideas of equality to justify the hatred. However the hatred arises, it could not become broadly operative in society without the ideology of equality to give it its public language. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on August 31, 2002 1:00 AMYeah, I think it is a good thing to talk about on the one hand and I certainly don’t disagree as a matter of fact. On the other hand, talking about politics in psychological terms makes it very personal and in some ways undermines its transcendent aspects, or makes them more difficult to see. I won’t say the n-word; but it seems true that a phenomenological approach to politics (starting with the perceptions and motiviations of individuals and working outward toward transcendent truth) has its dangers. The fundamental problem is how to take the point of view of moderns seriously and still facilitate a thought process that actually gets to what is transcendentally true. It is not an easy problem to solve, but I have reservations about the phenomenological approach. Leadership normally entails an articulation of the vision out there (however seen through a glass darkly), followed by an assessment of where we are and the development of reasonable steps necessary to get to the “out there.” When the first step is put second you end up with something like the theology of Pope John Paul II. It isn’t so much that there is falsity in the model as it is that starting with some sort of personalism implies to many that mission is not necessary. The initial focus on me-here-now doesn’t create the proper yearning for and motivation toward the transcendental “out there.” Rather it anchors us in the me-here-now and makes the transcendental out-there more difficult to see as true and take seriously. So I don’t disagree with anything Mr. Auster posted as a question of facticity. I simply have questions about how a good leader (such as a writer on traditionalist conservatism in our modern circumstances, or a Pope) can on the one hand take the me-here-now seriously and on the other not by so doing make our vision of the transcendent more obscure. The response of “the liberals just want to destroy America; it’s not necessary to analyze their thinking” is a reflection of this psychological/phenomenological approach, in case that was not clear. Liberalism itself is something transcendent that exists independent of any actual liberals, and to which various people pledge varying degrees of alliegance. The personalist approach implies that all that matters about liberalism is what particular liberals happen to think. This is obviously not the case: actual liberals live and die, pledge and become apostates, do a shift-shuffle-shim-sham amongst their various alliegences and apologetics, etc; yet liberalism itself lives on across the centuries. A personalist approach makes it difficult to see this otherwise quite obvious truth, and indeed hides the fundamental nature of the enemy we face. Posted by: Matt on August 31, 2002 8:35 PM |