The glory of liberal reason

Liberalism proposes to make social life rational and equal. To that end, everything habitual, irregular, particular and opaque to liberal reason must be done away with as bigoted and oppressive. The things to be abolished include family life in any traditional sense, with its associated habits, attitudes and institutions, and ethnic distinctions, with the particular cultural standards that depend on them.

Some particulars:

• All human interchanges must be bureaucratized so that obligations and rights — the right to privacy, for example — can be bureaucratically defined with adequate precision.
• Any informal exertion of power must be subjected to full rational review. For example, in Australia school children who accuse their teacher of verbally or psychologically abusing them must have the right to complain to child protection investigators.
• All institutions must be redefined so that promoting advanced liberalism becomes their fundamental reason for being. Thus, affirmative action has become essential to the core mission of the University of California.
• Competition must be eliminated, because conflict would evidence the imperfection of the system. If a school sports day in England includes an “egg and spoon” race, parents must be banned from it ‘to spare the losers’. Instead, a reformed sports day featuring non-competitive events must be held in private.
• Even sex must be rationalized. In Europe towns should arrange cut-rate hotel rooms for youthful sex, while in America laws against stripping must be done away with, because it’s constitutionally protected “expression.”

Some consequences of the attempt to achieve utopia:

• Any approach to wrongdoing other than therapy becomes impossible, especially in the case of young people. As a result social institutions, especially those devoted to education, become radically degraded.
• Recognition of the need for common culture and other conditions for a free and orderly society becomes impossible, because it would mean that the liberal order depends on something outside itself. To demonstrate the self-contained universality of the liberal order, and to disrupt any competing principle of order, populations must be mixed as much as possible. Any resulting problems — immigrant crime waves, for example — must be denied, blamed on pre-liberal residues, or treated as curable through bureaucratic management.
• The impossibility of carrying on productive activity under conditions of total bureaucratic control means that social and economic life are increasingly carried on illegally.
• In the absence of a principle of personal loyalty, officials have no reason not to feather their own nests and the system becomes radically corrupt.

The net effect: 80+ years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union is still the future. Until the fundamental understanding of the world that gave rise to communism — scientific materialism — is done away with, we will just keep re-inventing the same thing.
Posted by Jim Kalb at May 20, 2003 07:58 AM | Send