Liberalism, technocracy, and the transcendent

Jonathan L. contrasts the liberal way of knowing, which is technocracy, with the traditionalist attempt to know, which is wisdom.

He writes:

In the post, “John Podhoretz does it again,” you wrote:

Also, the neocons’ excessive tendency to predictions is part and parcel of their ideological frame of mind. Neocons, who are a type of rationalist liberal, reduce human and historical reality to a few ideas and slogans, such as “everyone longs for democracy,” the better to control reality and control people’s minds. Given their assumption that reality can be easily understood and controlled with a simple phrase, and also given their “present-moment-ness,” it also stands to reason that they believe they can make sweeping predictions of reality based on what’s happening in this moment.

I have been thinking about this same tendency in the somewhat larger context of the erosion of any real judgment or discernment in our culture, the practical consequences of which are most exposed in our self-defeating foreign policy. We make tremendous sacrifices to stabilize Iraq, involve ourselves in the minutiae of its society in technocratically-obsessive detail, and yet never pause to consider the absurdity of empowering an Arab-Muslim nation that could never be (without ceasing to lose it Arab-Muslim character) anything but disloyal to America or hostile to Israel. Similarly, we push Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians and involve ourselves in the minuscule details of settlement locations, water rights, and refugee compensation, and yet never step back and see the impossibility of Muslims (without losing their character as Muslims) ever accommodating themselves to the existence of a Jewish state in their midst, or that even if a particular Muslim regime were to do so, a vehemently anti-Semitic successor state is just a coup away (cf. Iran, cf. the new, “democratic” Turkey).

This failure to discern the big picture while exhibiting wizardly technique when it comes to all the little details—in short, the dearth of basic wisdom—is, I think, another consequence of the triumph of liberalism in our society. Liberalism, in its mimicry of science, seeks to answer all questions through analytic technique—i.e., by breaking down a problem into its smallest possible constituents, identifying all the rules that apply to those constituents, and then predicting what is possible given these rules and a certain configuration. Thus, I think, the inevitable tendency of people in a liberal society to get lost in technical details, as well as to ascribe total predictive power to a few simple ideas (economism, bio-evolutionary reductionism, millenary global democratism).

While traditionalists do not reject the analytic technique, they also do not ascribe to it total epistemic supremacy. For I think one of traditionalism’s greatest insights is that there are transcendent entities out there, and just because we cannot perceive them through the gross material senses, and often experience them incompletely, does not make them any less real. The fact that such transcendent entities as “man” and “woman” are not tangible objects of experimentation, or that individuals of mixed sex exist, or that one can point to societies in which not all gender roles are obeyed, does not mitigate against their actuality. The reality of transcendent entities is proven everyday—in the desire of every child for its “mother,” in the way women in every society throughout human history women have gravitated toward traditional “femininity,” and men toward traditional “masculinity.” To paraphrase one of Plato’s dialogues, the transcendent may be unseen, yet it draws us constantly to itself, and its very proof is seen in the dance we do around it.

Where the practical and metaphysical insights of traditionalism meet, I think, is here: because these very real transcendental entities can only be dimly experienced by us, and because we cannot apply scientific or analytic techniques to them in order to understand and control them, we must patiently wait for them to reveal themselves, however slowly and incompletely, and seek to understand them by remembering what ages past have known and passed down to us (which implies conservatism), and by situating what little is revealed to us directly against this greater whole of human experience, which itself is but a small area within a largely unrevealed map. Such making-do with limited information based on a synthesis of the entirety of what is already known is, I think, a pretty good working definition of wisdom, which brings us to the point with which I began.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2008 01:51 AM | Send