How the belief in liberal progress leads to non-judgmentalism toward the Other

Ken Hechtman, Canadian leftist journalist and VFR reader, has some interesting comments on the blog entry, “To make Iraq seem better, Bush/Rice make America seem worse”:

Save this piece. You’re going to be referring back to it for years.

First, it’s a very fair and accurate statement of the liberal understanding of history. “Our past was a great darkness, full of superstition and barbarism. We have only recently and with great difficulty begun to emerge into the light and we still have a long way to go. That means we need to be less judgmental and more patient and understanding with those nations and cultures still in darkness. We were them not so long ago.”

The classic example of this attitude on the micro scale is in drug rehab. Once an ex-addict is clean and healthy and stable, the drug counsellor will bring in a twitching, unwashed, scab-covered skeleton. The newly-clean junkie, with his newly-restored human sensibilities, will of course recoil in disgust. At this point the drug counsellor says, “That was you 3 months ago. That was me last year. Now the same way I helped you get on your feet, you’re going to help him.”

Second, if anybody had said five years ago that circumstances would force George Bush to fall back on our [i.e., the left’s] view of the world, I’d have thought they were insane. If anybody had said that the Wall Street Journal and various leftist rags would be on the same page, not just about the Iraqi constitution but the *American* one, I’d have thought the same thing.

What a lot of the moderate left is saying about the Iraqi constitution is “Take the time to do it right. Get something everyone can live with. In our experience as Americans, it ain’t worth ducking the hard questions just to get agreement before an arbitrary deadline. We did that with slavery and a century later we paid the price for it.”

My reply:

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Also, I think that’s the first time anyone has pointed out a connection between the liberal belief in progress and the liberal belief in non-judgmentalism toward the Other. If all of history prior to the last five minutes and the emergence of our own glorious liberal selves is a sea of darkness and oppression, then there is really nothing good about our own historical society; the only good thing about our historical society is the extent to which its more enlightened members—us—have left it behind. Our society therefore has no standards within itself by which to judge other societies, since the only true standard is the standard by which all concrete societies—first ours, then the more backward ones like Iraq—are left behind in the general darkness and oppression of history. All darkness and oppression prior to the enlightenment of the last five minutes is equally dark and oppressive. Toqueville’s young American woman of the 1830s, travelling unescorted and unmolested from one end of the United States to the other, yet unable to vote, is suffering from an oppression not fundamentally different from that of a woman living under sharia.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2005 12:53 AM | Send