Classical liberalism and modern liberalism, cont.

Here is a continuation of the discussion, “From classical liberalism to the anti-national mega-state.”

A reader writes:

My thinking is that as individual rights are emphasized, the State steps in as the defender of individual rights. Other institutions constrain people, so they become the State’s adversary. So as individual rights expand, the State must expand concurrently, to protect more rights for more people. Other institutions are hollowed out and beaten down, because they stand in the way of indivdual rights; in doing all that, the State grows.

Thus Libertarians witlessly work hard for what they loathe: the monster State.

Sam Karnick, a classical liberal, or Whig, writes:

It’s an interesting and important argument. I agree with Ilana, but with another key point as my central critique: The claim that classical liberals believe that “the state is a mere voluntary association” is false. Burke, Smith, etc., the original classical liberals, all agreed that there must be government, and they believed that its authority came from God. So, too, did America’s Founders. Where things went fundamentally wrong in America can be traced to the Transcendentalist movement and other such anti-Christian forces. These removed the sacred foundation of government, and its mission. As a result, its mission expanded along the lines outlined in the discussion here.

The key is that the loss of Christian (or Judeo-Christian) faith is what led to modern liberalism, along with a lot of other wretched things it has done. Mark D. is correct to say that “a Kantian model of the human self cannot help but degenerate into nihilism,” but wrong to say that classical liberalism applies such a model. It does not. The classical liberals of the English Whig era were Christians. The notion that classical liberalism swallows all of Locke is incorrect. They took from Locke what accorded with a Christian worldview, and left the rest where it belongs, on the ash heap.

You are quite correct to say, “the American Founding was not based on pure social contract theory; it mixed social contract theory with Christian and Republican traditions. So it’s incorrect to call the American Founding purely Lockean.” Where you go wrong is in claiming that classical liberalism was different from the ideas of the American founding. What you are describing as the American Founding is exactly what English Whig liberalism was. Remember that Burke, who strenuously and correctly opposed the French Revolution, approved of the American secession. Where the confusion seems to arise is in the fact that many people who have called themselves classical liberals since the early twentieth century are indeed purely Lockean. But classical liberalism was not.

It is not true that “the primary focus [of classical liberalism] was on the individual and his freedoms.” No, it was on what is the just role of the sovereign, and on what policies were best for the welfare of the people as a whole. The process you describe in the paragraph containing the above-cited quote is not a matter of classical liberalism’s faulty assumptions leading to an inevitable decline. It is a situation in which classical liberalism, a Christian worldview, is attacked and replaced by an atheistic modern liberalism. The reason it was replaced was not because of an inherent flaw in classical liberalism but because of large historical forces of which both classical liberalism and comprehensive statism (a more accurate term for “modern liberalism”) were consequences. For more on the entirely different foundations of classical liberalism and modern liberalism, see my article in The National Interest on the origins of modernity. The real conflict, as you will see in the article, is between Christianity and atheism. Classical liberalism is Christian (although non-Christians too can adhere to it, its foundations are Christian), and modern “liberalism,” which began with the French, is atheistic. The latter is by no means an outgrowth of the former; it is a furiously hostile reaction to it.

LA replies:

You wrote:

“Where the confusion seems to arise is in the fact that many people who have called themselves classical liberals since the early twentieth century are indeed purely Lockean. But classical liberalism was not.”

If Locke is not a classical liberal, who is? In order to save a “cultural” classical liberalism, you are expelling the most important classical liberal from the ranks of classical liberals.

Mr. Particular Swede writes:

What you have been writing about Locke recently is very interesting from so many points of view. The nation is seen as empty, without substance, and we can fill it with anything we wish. But Locke and the liberals/empirists see the human mind in the same way, as a tabula rasa—empty, without substance—that can be filled with just about anything. And when I saw this connection, suddenly I think I saw the last half a millenium of Western history much clearer. I see how this approach is highly effective, given that, contrary to its proposition, the minds and nation are indeed not (yet) empty, but filled with cultural substance. Liberalism has been the ideology behind the major kinds of progress in the West, that has made the West unique compared to any other civilization in the history of mankind: science, capitalism, free societies, etc. But its a technocratic approach and is at odds with the traditional cultural substance, and it “spends” this substance quite as it spends the world’s oil reserves, and quite as when the oil reserves are spent, when the cultural substance has been spent, this approach is out of fuel….

Another feature of liberalism/empirism is the openness to external impressions. Empirical sciences is an example here, but also openness to social experiments and to other cultures. The traditionalist/rationalist approach is in comparison a closed one, conserving our cultural substance, consolidating the knowledge in our minds, but not eager to take in new impressions. If we had had a traditionalist/rationalist approach the last few hundred years, instead of the previaling liberalist/empirist one, the West would have looked very differently, and a lot of the good things that we take for granted would not have been here.

The perspective of seeing liberalism as a blank sheet, technocratic, progress-oriented ideology, makes us see more clearly its similarity to communism, fascism and libertarianism, that all have these features in common; they are all the same kind of utopian radicalists that “spend” cultural substance. The main difference being that Anglo-Saxon classic liberalism actually made something good out of the cultural capital that was spent, such as capitalism and science.

So while this approach is clearly highly effective and has the potential to create a lot of good—a progress that was unimaginable beforehand—it is just as clear that it can only be applied a limited amount of time (300 years is a limited amount of time). And we have passed the breaking point: liberalism/empirism is no longer working for the common good, it’s working against it. We need no more progress at this point, we need to defend the progress that has been made. Quite as we shouldn’t waste the remaining oil reserves in an irresponsible way, it is highly irresponsible to view the last remaining core of Western cultural substance as a blank sheet, that utopian radicals could replace with ideology. If we kill that last core, we kill ourselves. The current approach needs to be completely reversed, and we need to close our nations, even close our minds, and consolidate our winnings so far. If we do not defend it now, we will lose it.

The advantage with seeing all cultural entities as blank sheets (nations, minds, etc.) is the preparedness for changing anything that needs to be changed, given a certain goal, e.g. maximizing sales, maximizing production, maximizing personal freedom, etc. But the problem with this kind of radicalism is that it easily degenerates from a rational approach to reach a certain goal, to an emotional feel-good fashion of permanent radicalism, which wants to forever tear down current social values and replace them with new ones, no longer having a certain goal in mind, but just senselessly going on and on.

Permanent radicalism is like one of those inventions of Gyro Gearloose. A wonderful automatic lawn mower machine that cuts all the grass perfectly even, and trims all the bushes. But once that is done it just goes on and cuts down the bushes, making everything even. It goes on like crazy, destroying your house, flattening it to the ground. Not even the lawn is left, it was not flat enough, so all the grass is dug out, leaving only a garden of flat soil. The machine just goes on and on; once everything is flat soil, so it starts digging deep holes in it. Gyro Gearloose forgot to implement a resonable halting criteria. It’s the same with permanent radicalism. Radical parents expect their children to be more radical then themselves, otherwise they are kind of disappointed. The radicalism we live under is indeed permanent.

Once I saw the connection between the liberal/empirist idea of the emptiness of the nation and the emptiness of the mind, I saw how this idea is nor merely a political idea, but a philosophical idea at the most fundamental level. We are seing the end not only of an epoch of political thinking, but I believe that we will also see science and our concept of rational reasoning being revolutionized during this century. This is not only the end of the post-WWII paradigm of non-discriminatory centralism, not only the end of post- WWI paradigm of a Wilsonian world order, I start believing that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of an epoch going back as far as to John Locke.

Thanks Lawrence, for inspiring me to be inspired!

LA replies:

I don’t remember anyone ever drawing a connection between the Lockean empty “idea-nation,” and the Lockean tabula rasa mind. Also, your description of Gyro Gearloose reducing the world to nothing reminds me of something I wrote in my 1994 article in National Review about neoconservatives and the immigration issue:

Like the magical creature in the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine that sucks up every object in the vicinity until it swallows itself and disappears, conservative proponents of the “American Idea” fail to recognize the suicidal nature of their project: once our notions of political order are completely abstracted from the ethnic and cultural matrix that gave them birth, the notions themselves begin to dissolve under the onslaught of rival particularisms, which rush in to fill the cultural vacuum left by the act of abstraction. Thus our universalist immigration policy, by bringing in cultures and peoples too diverse to be incorporated within a single national and civilizational identity, has inadvertently helped release the very forces of cultural separatism and group rights that the conservatives dread. The attempt to reconstitute the American identity solely in terms of a civic bond defined by universal ideas is therefore doomed; as America’s current fragmentation indicates, a civic bond cannot long endure in the absence of an experienced cultural bond.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 31, 2006 06:47 PM | Send