Finnish article makes VFR-type argument about liberal tolerance

The author of the “Sixteen Volts Per Minute” blog wrote to me:

I have been reading your blog for a while, and like it and mostly agree with its contents. (Myself, I am more in ideological lines of Steve Sailer.)

I recently translated one article by a Finnish writer whose ideas and argumentation style very much resemble yours. I thought that you might find it interesting, since the real motivation of “tolerance” that the author reveals here is very much like the real motivation of liberals that your articles reveal.

My reply:

Yes, very interesting. You’re right. There is an overlap with my idea that, since the sacred core of liberalism is non-discrimination, to practice non-discrimination against people who are basically assimilable doesn’t achieve the real object of liberalism. Liberalism requires the presence of unassimilable and alien and hostile people—the more unassimilable and alien and hostile they are, the more desirable they are from the point of view of liberalism.

My only disagreement is that the author says that liberals embrace such non-assimilable people because they want to appear superior to their less enlightened fellow citizens. While that’s certainly part of their motivation, I would not reduce it to that. What conservatives often don’t understand is that liberals believe in the things they believe in, they’re not just being self-seeking or cynical. Liberals believe in non-discrimination in the same way that Muslims believe in Islam. Unless we understand this, we won’t be able to defeat liberalism, because we will think that what motivates liberals is only self-seeking rather than an actual belief system that we must expose and discredit.

This wrong view of liberalism is analogous to the various current views about Islam. Every scholar and journalist blames the pathologies and threats presented by Islam on some factor extrinsic to Islam itself, such as lack of development, or rage over supposed Israeli oppression of Palestinians, or the cultural dislocations of Muslim immigrants in the West, or the lack of a good father image in Islamic cultures; the list goes on and on. Intellectuals and journalists don’t want to identify the source of the problem as Islam itself, because then they would have to oppose Islam itself, which, given currently prevailing assumptions, seems either horribly wrong or totally impossible. In the same way, conservatives keep identifying the causal element of liberalism as some factor extrinsic to liberalism, such as “hypocrisy” or “the double standard” or “political correctness,” or a “desire to feel superior.” They don’t want to identify the problem as liberalism itself, because then they would have to oppose liberalism itself, which, given currently prevailing assumptions, seems either horribly wrong or totally impossible.

This analysis explains the ultimate impotence of most conservative critiques of liberalism, and of most Western critiques of Islam. You can only effectively oppose something if you identify its nature, show what is wrong with it, and oppose it as such.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 06, 2006 10:00 PM | Send