Why liberalism prohibits conceptual thought

My previous discussion with Jim Kalb about conservatism led to a consideration of what is conceptual thought and why is there so little of it in public life today.

LA to JK:

You wrote:

“There are people though who aren’t interested in conservatism in that sense, which after all is a purely relative conception that inevitably becomes dominant as liberalism becomes crazier and crazier.”

Then I wrote:

“It’s often been said at VFR that as liberalism becomes more and more leftist, conservatism keeps following it to the left. Mr. Kalb has added a new twist to that analysis: as liberalism becomes crazier and crazier, conservatism, in addition to moving to the left itself, becomes dominant, since anything even marginally less crazy than the crazy left is seen as the better alternative.”

Of course, it’s not a new idea to say that liberal craziness helps conservatism or at least the Republican party win: “Please nominate Dean!” National Review pleaded with the Democrats in a cover article back in 2003. It’s been said ten thousand times in the last few years that Democratic craziness strengthens the Republicans. But you made a larger concept out of it, and therefore it struck me as a new idea.

This is a big part of what thought is about: turning familiar, non-conceptual understandings into concepts, general principles. When that is done, though the content of the idea is familiar, it’s also something new.

Continuing this idea, it strikes me that 99.9 percent of political speech today is non-conceptual, including conservative statements we agree with, for example, “Gosh, those Muslims say they’re a religion of peace, but they never oppose the Muslim terrorists, some religion of peace.” Turning that into a concept is saying, for example (like radio announcer Michael Graham who got fired for saying it though his argument was reasoned and logical), “Islam is a terrorist organization.”

A reader said to me recently that I “make the obvious clearly obvious.” What I think she meant is, I take common understandings and turn them into general concepts.

If you compare political speech today with political speech in the 19th or 18th century, it’s much more non-conceptual today. Part of this is the dumbing down of everything. But part of it is the advance of liberalism. What is liberalism? The institutionalization of simple procedures as the guiding principles of society, in order to create a supposedly neutral public space where substantive beliefs are avoided, because substantive beliefs lead to social conflict. Religion must be avoided because it leads to conflict. But the avoidance doesn’t stop with religion. Ultimately, conceptual thought itself must be avoided as well, because clear concepts, e.g., that jihad is central to Islam, or that illegitimacy is harmful individuals and society, or that racial diversity makes a society less governable, or that A is A, lead to conflict. People can get away with making non-liberal observations, so long as they don’t turn them into general concepts. To do the latter is to threaten the liberal social order.

This is in keeping with my old idea that common sense is the only permitted form of conservatism (i.e., the only permitted unprincipled exception) in liberal society.

JK to LA:

Good discussion. It seems to me that accepted concepts are the basic principles of social cooperation, in a sense the basic laws of society. They determine how situations are analyzed, how one thing relates to another, what claims are legitimate, and so on. To say liberalism makes political discussion nonconceptual is to say it obfuscates the governing principles of society, so that (as you point out) objections, other possibilities, and disputes can never come up.

One reason it does that is that it believes that once a dispute comes up it can never be resolved, because there are no objective values and any dispute is therefore just an absolute opposition of two wills. So to think conceptually leads immediately to a Hobbesian war of all against all.

LA to JK:

Once again, as we’ve seen from so many different angles, everything returns to the denial of the transcendent. The denial of the transcendent makes language impossible, as you’ve said, because language points beyond itself. But on a more immediately apprehended level, the denial of the transcendent makes disagreement dangerous because there is no objective truth or objective standard by which disagreements can be resolved.

Therefore the denial of the transcendent makes freedom impossible, not, as in the usual American understanding, because our rights come from the God who created us, but because without the transcendent, reasoned speech and reasoned disagreement must be outlawed for the sake of social peace. Instead, discourse must be conceived of as a multicultural collection of diverse voices, or as an EU-type managed search for consensus, or simply as a shapeless hodgepodge of one-liners in which clear concepts are prohibited.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2005 02:44 PM | Send