Why liberalism, having banished the transcendent, must prohibit disagreement

Alan Roebuck draws my attention to a VFR post from 2005 in which I was exchanging thoughts with Jim Kalb on “Why liberalism prohibits conceptual thought.” This is serendipitous, since I was just pointing out earlier today the irony that certain Ayn Rand followers—strict atheists who supposedly believe in reason—are in alliance with the PC left in seeking to suppress reasoned speech that violates liberal taboos. Once God and the transcendent are banished, a goal on which leftists and Objectivists agree, reasoned speech must also be banished. `

The first part of the 2005 exchange is a lead-in. The main part of it is below:

LA to JK:

If you compare political speech today with political speech in the 19th or 18th century, it’s much more non-conceptual today. Part of this is the dumbing down of everything. But part of it is the advance of liberalism. What is liberalism? The institutionalization of simple procedures as the guiding principles of society, in order to create a supposedly neutral public space where substantive beliefs are avoided, because substantive beliefs lead to social conflict. Religion must be avoided because it leads to conflict. But the avoidance doesn’t stop with religion. Ultimately, conceptual thought itself must be avoided as well, because clear concepts, e.g., that jihad is central to Islam, or that illegitimacy is harmful individuals and society, or that racial diversity makes a society less governable, or that A is A, lead to conflict. People can get away with making non-liberal observations, so long as they don’t turn them into general concepts. To do the latter is to threaten the liberal social order…

JK replies:

…To say liberalism makes political discussion nonconceptual is to say it obfuscates the governing principles of society, so that (as you point out) objections, other possibilities, and disputes can never come up.

One reason it does that is that it believes that once a dispute comes up it can never be resolved, because there are no objective values and any dispute is therefore just an absolute opposition of two wills. So to think conceptually leads immediately to a Hobbesian war of all against all.

LA replies:

Once again, as we’ve seen from so many different angles, everything returns to the denial of the transcendent. The denial of the transcendent makes language impossible, as you’ve said, because language points beyond itself. But on a more immediately apprehended level, the denial of the transcendent makes disagreement dangerous because there is no objective truth or objective standard by which disagreements can be resolved.

Therefore the denial of the transcendent makes freedom impossible, not, as in the usual American understanding, because our rights come from the God who created us, but because without the transcendent, reasoned speech and reasoned disagreement must be outlawed for the sake of social peace. Instead, discourse must be conceived of as a multicultural collection of diverse voices, or as an EU-type managed search for consensus, or simply as a shapeless hodgepodge of one-liners in which clear concepts are prohibited.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2008 05:13 PM | Send