Liberalism, national preservation, Dylan, and rock
A reader writes:
I’m a professor at a liberal arts college, and a recent fan of your writing.
I’ve been captivated by your site ever since reading your debate with Daniel Pipes over the existence of “moderate” Islam. As a liberally-raised person drawn away from liberalism by reading Ayn Rand in high school, I’m most struck by your exploration of the destructive effects of modern liberalism, defined as an ideology placing inclusiveness and tolerance above all else. Your ideas are also helping me sort out the difference between libertarianism and conservatism. Since 9/11 a gradually deepening understanding of the nature of the enemy and the shocking inability of our society to respond effectively are leading me closer and closer to the idea that not only “freedom,” but nationhood or some other transcendent ideal is needed to save the United States.
Like others I find it interesting and appealing that you like Dylan. I sense that you come from a liberal or secular background, which may be why your explanations of conservatism resonate so well. I was never deep into Dylan, more a Beatles fan, but I have explored him in recent years. I have the sense from reading interviews that he has a conservative side (or at least sensibility), though he’s as unwilling to state that publicly as he was to align himself openly with much of the 60s radicalism. In the Rolling Stone interview of a few years ago, responding to a question which was fishing for a condemnation of recent U.S. military actions, he obscurely referred to Sun Tzu and said that U.S. leaders had better “know their enemy” if they wanted to be victorious. That shows a better understanding of the situation than is shown by most “conservatives”!
While it may be because I’m getting old I find I can’t listen to recent rock/pop music. (I still like U2, but they are hardly new!) My theory is that the 60s generation still was rooted in traditional Western music and culture. Someone like Mick Jagger would have sung Church of England hymns in church and heard classical music and British and American show music and jazz. This gave their music and lyrics a certain richness, even though in most cases the 60s musicians rejected the prevailing Western culture. The bands now are composed of kids who mostly grew up ONLY ON ROCK MUSIC. So all they can do is kind of rehash it. Dylan, for his part, always seemed to base his work on some idea of American nationhood, even if his definition was skewed towards the “proletariat.”
My reply:
Thank you very much. You’ve really captured the main point: what is it that gives a society the ability/will to defend itself, not from an outright military enemy, but from an alien or threatening culture? Whatever that principle is, liberalism/libertarianism does not contain it. Another correspondent has been raising similar issues with me. He quoted the classical-liberal thinker Ludwig von Mises saying that liberal society must be tolerant of everything except intolerance, but must be strickly intolerant of intolerance. I replied that this would allow us to exclude openly jihadist Muslims, since they are intolerant, but would not allow us to exclude unassimilable alien cultures per se. As long as those cultures were not manifestly intolerant, we would have to be completely tolerant of them. At the same time, anyone calling for immigration restrictions would be an intolerant person who could not be tolerated. So the philosophical error that is leading to the death of nationhood and of Western civilization as a whole is not just in modern liberalism. It is in the older liberalism as well.
If 9/11 helped bring you to realizations like this, that backs up my idea that in the wake of 9/11, these fatal weaknesses of liberalism are being fully revealed for the first time.
I agree that there was always a strong sense of nationhood in Dylan’s songs. Also, what you say about more recent rock musicians only drawing on a “culture” of rock music describes a change that took place in the culture as a whole. For example, up through the 1960s, characters in movies would routinely refer to historical figures, events of American history, classic works of literature, the Bible and so on. But starting in the ‘70s, the movies’ frame of reference became simply the pop culture itself. That represented a real cultural loss.
Thanks again for writing.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 28, 2005 12:49 PM | Send