Liberals for tradition!

Australian traditionalist blogger Mark Richardson discusses a typical liberal phenomenon: a writer waxes eloquent about a lost culture, and thus he seems traditionalist, but then it turns out that the traditional culture he lauds is that of the non-Western Other while he despises his own, Western culture as the racist destroyer of that traditional culture. Furthermore, the writer is utterly unconscious of the double standard he is practicing, because it doesn’t even occur to him that his own culture is a culture and has a tradition worth preserving. His own culture has no intrinstic value for him and can have no intrinsic value. Its value is purely a function of how well it serves and includes non-Western cultures.

The phenomenon proves that even liberals are deeply drawn to traditional culture, but, being liberals, and therefore having no attachment to their own culture, the traditional culture they like can only be someone else’s.

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Thucydides writes:

The liberal Australian writer discussed in this post does not merely praise the aboriginal culture, sanitizing it in the process, he is, as you suggest, engaged in a not so subtle critique not only of his own culture, but of all specific existing culture. In other words, this is the same old “noble savage” theme that leftists have been sounding since Rousseau. The intent is to demonstrate, however poetically, the essential goodness of man, and show that the evil in the world is only due to defective institutions and traditions—in this case capitalism, colonialism, economic development, and so on.

This is the foundation of the eschatological hopes of liberalism—the dream that all particularity is evanescent, that the historical, cultural, and ethnic inheritances that form human identities are only epiphenomenal, and will eventually disappear as we converge on a utopian universal civilization based on a rational morality, a civilization in which human conflict will have disappeared, when we will live in perfect equality and freedom. The liberal does not so much hate his own culture as imagine that he stands above and beyond any culture, though the effect may be much the same. The liberal fails to recognize there is no such universal standpoint, and that liberalism, far from being a view from some Archimedean standpoint outside the world, has become just another a tradition in its own right, and one of rather confined and limited horizons.

It will not do for the liberal to state his utopian vision too clearly; it is too plainly fatuous and risible given the obvious realities of the human situation. Therefore, the liberal author seeks to tell idealized stories that bear tacit witness to his faith. The similarity to heart rending stories of minor saints and martyrs in the popular religious tradition is obvious. Liberals have given up a belief in God, but they have been unable to give up the consolation that was afforded by theodicy. They unwittingly continue the faith tradition in the form of a pidgin pseudo-theology, while imagining the dictates of this faith to be the deliverance of reason.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2007 06:09 AM | Send