Out of the fog of liberalism

Reader Jon G. writes:

Years of fumbling through the toxic fog of liberalism drained me unimaginably in all areas of my life. I thank you for your insights and stark honesty.

I thank the reader, whose wonderful phrase, “fumbling through the toxic fog of liberalism,” captures something of our situation. Modern liberal society is indeed a vast, encompassing, polluted fog, which people don’t even realize is a fog because the fog is all they know. In this fog of liberalism, no object is allowed to stand forth clearly in its own nature, because the real nature of things is that they are particular, distinct, and unequal—characteristics that violate the central tenet of liberalism.

As an illustration of this fog and of how it operates on us, consider what Karl Rove, the president’s top advisor, said yesterday in his treasonous speech to the National Council of La Raza, that “diversity” is the formative principle and the supreme value of America. Once people accept such a notion, they become unable to make any distinctions between, say, “diversity” that strengthens our country and can be safely included in it, and “diversity” that harms our nation and ought to be excluded from it, since “diversity,” the supreme good that cannot be questioned, has supplanted the very idea of national strength. Another dimension of the diversity fog, precluding clear thought, is that we are all somehow equally diverse, with all differences being equal to all other differences. Yet (the fog keeps deepening) some differences are more equal than others: the cult of diversity requires us to worship the diversity of the non-Western Other, but not, of course, our own diversity, even as it prohibits us from paying any attention to the actual content of the Other’s diversity that we are supposed to be worshipping. (See my account of a conversation with a liberal woman about the “diversity” that she said had formed ancient Greece, an idea that, in her handling of it, undermines the uniqueness of Greece because all cultures are equally diverse, except of course those cultures that are more diverse.)

Diversity, like “tolerance,” is a concept without definition, without contours, without inherent limits. It makes it literally impossible for us to think rationally about the most fundamental issues facing our nation, such as what our immigration policy ought to be, or, even more fundamentally, what our nation is (other than “diversity”). It leads us, step by step, to no other outcome than total surrender to the Other, a process we will be able to stop only if we cease to be liberals.

The fog metaphor also reminds me of something I wrote in the preface to The Path to National Suicide:

Increasingly cut off from their cultural roots, many Americans … no longer know who they are, and are easily swayed by ideological currents telling them that their civilization adds up to nothing more than a cloud of “cultural diversity” changing at random from moment to moment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 12, 2006 04:23 PM | Send