More on the etiology of modern liberalism

Alan Levine writes:

I greatly admired your comments about formatory thinking. It certainly describes the thinking of professional politicians (if they do think) and many lay persons. My only reservation is that the thinking of many intellectuals is more complexly perverse. Also, I have problems with the idea that modern liberal perversities were simply unthinking reactions to Nazism, since during the Nazi period and for some time thereafter liberals acted differently. By the way doesn’t this also somewhat contradict your own theory that modern liberalism is simply liberalism stripped down to its basics, having discarded other influences and “unprincipled exceptions?”

LA replies:

Mr. Levine’s question about a possibile contradiction in my position is excellent. I don’t know that I can untangle the issue satisfactorily, but I’ll try.

First, consider my discussion of the etiology of radical liberalism out of the older, more moderate liberalism. As I wrote in that entry, classical liberalism says the public square should be neutral as to religious belief, to avoid oppressive authoritative discriminations by one religion against others. Over time the neutrality keeps being applied to more and more of the society, until no traditional beliefs, and thus no discriminations, are tolerated. By this inherent dynamic liberalism steadily becomes more extensive in its reach and more radical in its demands; it has now reached the farthest extent in Britain where Catholic adoption agencies are not allowed to exclude homosexual couples from adoption. The unprincipled exception (which could be defined as men’s vestigial attachment to all non-liberal components of the society) slows this process, but then each EU falls and the process advances further

Now consider what Jim Kalb says in that same discussion. The advance of liberal neutrality into more and more areas of the society occurs step by step with men’s loss of the experience of God as a living part of their life. Mr. Kalb’s analysis provides us with an index of the progress of liberalism seen as a function of a spiritual change (or rather a spiritual decline) proceeding inside man.

The ground is now prepared to address Mr. Levine’s question. He has asked, isn’t there a contradiction between (1) my idea that modern liberalism is a result of a historic, progressive stripping of liberalism down to its basics, shorn of unprincipled exceptions, and (2) my idea that modern liberalism resulted from a discrete historical event, an over-reaction to Nazism in the aftermath of World War II, which made men believe that since Nazism was the ultimate evil, and since this evil consisted of discrimination against a minority, that therefore all discrimination was Nazi-like and had to be eliminated?

My provisional answer is that both elements were needed for the transformation to occur. On one hand, the specific imperative to eliminate all discrimination was unquestionably a reaction to Nazism. But at the same time, Western society could not have conceived or harbored or established such an extreme idea unless its secularization had already progressed to the point where it saw society as a collection of equal human selves with no God above them. People for whom the experience of God is concretely real (as distinct from an abstract universal idea) would never subscribe to the ideology that all discrimination must be eliminated, because they know there is a higher truth which places men and values in a natural hierarchical relation to that truth. It is only the men who have stripped the effective transcendent away completely, leaving a world that consists of equal human persons with nothing above them, a world in which the human person is the highest reality (except perhaps for the idea of universal human rights itself), it is only such men who insist that any discrimination against any human person for any reason is morally wicked.

So, Nazism and the reaction to it provided the immediate impetus toward modern, anti-discrimination liberalism. But this change within liberalism was also conditioned on the general progress of liberalism over time toward greater neutralism and secularism, both within the souls of men and in the external society.

Jim Kalb replies:

Contemporary liberalism results from absolutely fundamental features of the modern outlook. That’s why it’s so powerful, and it means particular explanations like Nazism miss the point.

From a subjective point of view today everybody’s feelings are sacred and have to be protected against all slights.From an objective point of view fundamental standards of public rationality demand an industrial organization of all existence that treats everything as a resource for the maximum equal satisfaction of desire. What possible place do traditional discriminations have from either point of view?

So if it weren’t the Nazis it would have been something else, for example decolonization and mass immigration or the need for the Left to have something to do with its religious passion to transform existence after the failure of socialism or the endlessly more comprehensive and intrusive measures needed to make the situation of blacks and women the same overall as that of white men. The timing might have been a bit different but the result would have been the same.

LA repies:

I note that Mr. Kalb concedes that as a matter of historical fact it was the reaction to Nazism that triggered this change in liberalism, even though, as he argues, if it hadn’t been the reaction to Nazism that brought this change about, it would have been something else.

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

I’m just finishing a lovely week on vacation, where my family met and interacted extensively with a lovely English family—lovely as only the English can be.

I haven’t processed my thoughts about their description of life in England now, but a brief comment seems in order in this thread. They ARE aware that their country is being taken over. There are large concentrations of Muslims nearby their village. There are floods of Eastern European illegal workers and welfare recipients bankrupting the budget.

What is strange is the notion that, in effect, there’s nothing that anyone can do about it, that it’s more like a natural disaster that a calculated political act.

The reason for this, of course, is that doing anything, or rather THINKING about doing anything, violates the prime directive (a Starfleet term)—and the prime directive is nondiscrimination. If one violates the prime directive, in the thinking of our friends, the next stop is Auschwitz. AND, on top of that (who wants another Auschwitz), you are coming out as a bad person.

So, unless that form of thinking changes, nothing will be done and England will fall.

LA replies:

Remember—this was what set off my first statement a few weeks ago that Britain is dead. I had never said that before. I said it in response to the fact that they had the power to stop the unexpected flood of Eastern Europeans, but that the government’s view was that ANY limit on the number of people coming in was racist. And no one—including the people most decrying the unexpected influx—challenged that premise.

Tom S. writes:

I respect Mr. Kalb’s work and point of view, but I think that he may be a bit too dismissive of the role that Nazism has played in the triumph of modern liberalism. Yes, the tendencies of liberalism may have been inherent in modernity, but it was very largely the example of Nazism that ensured liberalism’s total victory. No one who lived through the ’60s or ’70s can forget how Auschwitz was used as a sort of moral battering ram to smash down any suggestion that there might be any good reason for any sort of discrimination, and the end is not yet; even on a topic as far from Nazism as gay marriage, the pink triangles were recently trotted out, in an attempt to pump a little more life into the Nazi menace, defeated over sixty years ago.

Also, it should be noted that the triumph of liberalism did not automatically follow on World War II—in the ten or so years after the War, Nazism was not seen as an example of a fatal flaw in Western Civilization—it was rather seen as the vindication of that civilization, which rose up and defeated an alien growth in its midst. That’s certainly the way my father, a World War II veteran, saw it. The equation of Western Civilization and discrimination with Nazism really started in the late 1950s, when the Civil Rights struggle started to heat up, and it was, I believe, a tactic pioneered by the CPUSA. Basically, the Left “reinterpreted” the war to the American people, recasting it as a struggle not against aggression and genocide, but discrimination, coupled with a belief that Nazism was not an aberration, but an extreme example of a trait inherent in the West. Many Americans who had actually experienced the war never bought into it, and I can remember my Dad loudly complaining that the “damned hippies were trying to re-write history,” but many people did, and it was this transformation that made Nazism into a liberal talking point and propaganda weapon.

Would liberalism exist without Nazism? Almost certainly. Would it have triumphed the way it did without Nazism? Probably not, at least not as completely.

Just another one of Hitler’s little gifts to humanity. The SOB may end up destroying Western Civilization yet.

LA replies:

I have not said that anti-discriminatory liberalism with its program of the total destruction of Western society triumphed in the late 1940s, but rather that the basic idea was put in place then, namely in the fatal definition of Nazism as “intolerance,” and in the formation of the UN and the passage of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which made the elimination of every kind of discrimination the core concept and paramount objective of a new world order. Notice its totalistic language:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind [italics added], shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance…

The concepts were put in place in the 1940s, and gained increasing power over society in the following decades. Thus there was the 1963 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and other Declarations calling for the “elimination” of other kinds of discrimination as well. And that, I believe, is the keynote concept of modern liberalism. I remember in the 1990s hearing a liberal Democratic politician say that it would be totally unacceptable if a single instance of discrimination occurred anywhere in the U.S. against a Hispanic person because of excessive enforcement of laws against illegal aliens. In saying that a single instance of discrimination would be a moral blot on America—which meant that it was impossible for America not to have a moral blot on itself, which meant that it was impossible for America to be a morally legitimate society—he was harking back to the language of the various UN Declarations that made the “elimination” of “all forms” of discrimination the paramount moral objective of the world.

Tom S. writes:

Good point about the 1948 U.N. Declaration on Human Rights. I agree with you, it’s not enough simply to say, “Well, if it hadn’t been Nazism, it would have been something else.” Certainly there were many forces pushing in a liberal/collectivist direction prior to WWII, but there were also a lot of countervailing forces, especially in the United States. The Nazis, repackaged by the Left as representatives of Western Civ’s darker side, tipped the balance.

By the way, I can vouch for the effect that this repackaging had on some people who had lived through the events in question. I can remember, as a kid in the mid-1960’s, watching an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” or one of its imitators, in which an American man communicates with the ghost of Hitler, and obtains a mass following in the U.S. My Mom, who was a classic “Cold War Liberal,” angrily turned off the TV, saying “That’s propaganda! There were all sorts of nuts like Hitler in the U.S. in the 1930’s, and no one followed them! They’re trying to say that Americans are no better than Nazis!” My Dad said that the producer was probably a Communist, and that was the end of it. Looking back on it, he was probably right…

LA writes:

I want to amend my above comment about what a Democratic congressman said about discrimination. He said that if some law against illegal aliens, I think it was the employer sanctions law, caused even a single instance of discrimination against a Hispanic person anywhere, then the law would be immoral and unacceptable. Since it would be impossible to eliminate any possible discriminatory acts against Hispanic persons under this law or any law, what the congressman was really saying was that America could have no laws against illegal aliens working in the United States, period. The demand for the elimination of discrimination is a demand for the liquidation of human society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2007 10:03 AM | Send