Four manifestations of liberalism

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative continues his steady run of excellent posts on liberalism and traditionalism. Here are the four most recent:

• What are the three things that Swedish women look for in a husband? (Hint: given that Swedes are the ultimate liberals, reducing all values to the autonomous self, see if you can guess the answer before reading the post.)

• How an Australian female journalist despises her own culture, yet loves another culture (Tuscany). Yet, as Richardson points out, the very things that make possible the Tuscany the journalist loves,—that it’s a traditional monoculture—she despises in the case of her own country.

• Roger Scruton on modern versus traditional art. Traditionalists feel at home in the world, and so seek to express its beauty, while “modernists do not feel at home in the world, and therefore aim to desecrate” the deeper experiences of beauty.

• And, finally, reflections on a “postmodern conservative,” Samuel Goldman, an American, whose “conservative” ideal is Lockean selfhood—that same disembodied, culture-less, radically autonomous sense of individuality that leads inevitably to Swedish women who regard their husbands as utilities, to an Australian female journalist who expresses total loathing for her own country and total love for another country, and to modern artists who desecrate beauty.

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OI writes:

I’ve seen this article discussed elsewhere recently.

One thing that these women—and their counterparts in the USA, of whom there are many—do not seem to realize is this: men are not compelled to accept this deal.

There is absolutely no reason why a man, presented with those terms—terms where the woman is backed by the power of the law enforcement system—should not choose instead to go drink beer and play video games.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2009 01:45 AM | Send