Liberalism, not postmodernism, is the problem

From 2006, a concise statement of why I think the destruction of the West is not driven by Nietzschean thought or the postmodern attack on all meaning, but by plain old ordinary liberalism:

I wrote:

Further I don’t think the main current of modern Western liberalism came out of Nietzsche. I think it came out of liberalism itself, as a natural development of the denial of transcendence, which leads to the idea of the equality of wills. Now Mark D. may disagree and say that we only got to the definition of society as a collection of equal wills as a result of Nietzsche’s attack on reason, which was then adopted by liberals. Maybe that’s true, but I don’t see it.

Here’s how I see it. First the transcendent is denied, leaving only one little abstract sliver of the transcendent in place, namely the universal idea of equal rights. This is “right-liberalism.” Right-liberalism believes in equal rights and equal procedures under the law. But because right-liberalism has already denied so much of the substantial and transcendent structure of existence, while making the idea of equality the highest idea, the idea of equality, facing no countervailing understandings and values, metastasizes into an all encompassing paradigm. Bush and Rice and the neocons, with their credo that all people in the world are the same and are ready for democracy because they have the same human desires, are not Nietzscheans. The church groups that seek open borders are not Nietzscheans. John Paul II with his demand for the Christ-like sacrifice of Western cultures to Third-World immigrants was not a Nietzschean. So the destruction of the West is not driven by the postmodern attack on all meaning, though of course the postmodernism greatly worsens the situation. The destruction of the West is caused by the extreme belief in equality, which is a natural outgrowth of the older liberalism, and which would arguably have appeared even if Nietzsche had never lived.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 07, 2009 08:45 AM | Send