The remorseless destroyers

Peter G. writes:

Modern liberals seem to perceive our society like a bag of marbles. We’re just a bunch of autonomous individuals, divorced from history, with imaginary permanent connections that can be shaped and expanded without riving [tearing] our civilization. This crowd believes it has a lock on the future, where general society represents a control study group. Their coolness to potential negative outcomes betrays an irrefutable psychological commitment to liberal autonomy theory.

They blithely assume that all other peoples also view home and community as mere functions of proximity to other humans. It never even enters the liberal mind that people might see social connections to others as more authentic than their own lives. Denial of the social implications related to ethnic kinship remains the hallmark of current liberal values. Liberal Autonomy theory has driven them to deny their own ethnic history, they remain intellectually and emotionally incapable of acknowledging any foreign threat.

How would one call it? A fatal conceit based on a false view that all humans are eagerly pursuing a state of “becoming,” as they believe of themselves?

LA replies:

“Their coolness to potential negative outcomes betrays an irrefutable psychological commitment to liberal autonomy theory.”

This is powerfully stated. It captures the liberal madness, how it cancels out of existence all larger social wholes.

Either the liberals consciously hate their society and wish to see it gone, or they mentally cancel it out of existence simply by not seeing it. In the latter case, they have no consciousness of threatening or destroying anything, because the thing they’re destroying has no existence for them.

That thought first came to me years ago when I saw a documentary about the Bosnian civil war. In one scene, one of the Bosnian Serb leaders—it was either the long-haired psychiatrist or the other one—was standing on the ridge of a hill looking down at some city, maybe Sarajevo, and saying in a low voice to his followers, “See, this is ours.” It was the way he said it, in this flat, expressionless tone, that got to me. The fact that other people (Bosnian Muslims) not of his group lived there did not exist for him. He wasn’t expressing overt animosity or aggression toward them. They simply didn’t exist. “See, this is ours.” He was speaking them out of existence.

Of course, Muslims have the same attitude toward us and our society, because only Islam is real to them.

But it’s also the same with many liberals. The fact that people have living attachments to an actual society and culture and way of life is unreal to the liberals, because only the individual as an autonomous actor is real to them. So even as they pursue policies that dissolve society, they have no consciousness of dissolving anything or of taking anything of value away from anybody, because the society is not real to them, it doesn’t exist.

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Ben W. writes:

In the “Remorseless Destroyers” thread, you write about liberals, “only the individual as an autonomous actor is real to them.”

This individual is so denuded by the liberals that he is a contentless set of atoms. He no longer has a fixed sexual role and nature (male, female, trans-gender, straight, gay, husbands, wives—all are interchangeable). He no longer has a nationality or even race (bio-diversity). In Darwinian terms he cannot even be assigned a specific form as everything is a transitional species. Because his civilization is a historical accident, the specifics of which are to be subsumed under some sort of universalism eventually, therefore his achievements such as literature and music become non-signifying grunts and sounds.

In destroying the larger social and historical blocks, the liberal is destroying the individual. Shorn of the greater metaphysical, civilizational and social frameworks, man qua man as individual dies. No wonder the West has become a vacuum or void to be occupied by the force of the Other…

Christopher Roach writes:

I’ve always found it puzzling that the left recognizes the importance of small changes to the physical environment and urges caution in altering it–lest we face some kind of world-destroying ecological catastrophe–but suggests that our moral and cultural environment can be changed at will, that altering its core institutions (like marriage) will have no negative consequences, and that those who urge restraint about these matters are being alarmist. This is more puzzling when one considers that civilizations, religions, ways of life, and entire peoples have disappeared because of some mistake in policy or moral decline.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 19, 2007 01:45 AM | Send