If no one wants our culture to die, why is it dying?

A reader said:

Why do you think the forces of our cultural suicide are so powerful? Nobody I know wants for our culture to die, but the progress (regress?) of events seems inexorable.

I wrote in response:

Your question goes to the heart of the problem. Liberalism, as liberalism, is suicide and death. For example, liberalism insists on an inclusion of and accommodation to the cultural Other that means the complete abnegation of one’s own culture. That’s the liberal belief. At the same time, liberals as human beings, as you point out, do not want their culture to be literally destroyed. Yet the logic of their liberalism leads them inexorably in that direction. So they make lots of situational exceptions to their liberalism in order to go on functioning and surviving, both as individuals and as a society. I call this the unprincipled exception. For example, Netherlanders are now leaving the Netherlands to escape the Muslim presence, but without renouncing the liberalism that brought the Muslims into the Netherlands. Or liberals will go along with some military or prosecutorial steps against the most extreme Muslims, while allowing to Islam overall to continue gaining strength in the West. These slight exceptions to liberalism do not oppose or stop the suicidal logic of liberalism. Therefore the only way to stop the cultural suicide is to have non-liberal, anti-liberal principles.

That is what I mean by traditionalism as distinct from conservatism. Most conservatism is really just a form of liberalism with some pronounced exception to liberalism added on to it. Since is it liberal at bottom, this conservatism cannot stop liberalism. By contrast, I define traditionalism as a devotion to higher truths and cultural particularities that are non-liberal. Or to put it another way, traditionalism means that while liberal values (protection of individual rights under the law, freedom of inquiry, and so on) have an important place in our society, they must not be seen as the primary value and pursuit in our society. Society must, at its core, be devoted to non-liberal essences. When that happens, the liberal-led cultural suicide can be stopped.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 25, 2005 12:45 AM | Send