Liberalism: medievalism without God?

Madmax, the Randian commenter, is still scared of me, because I represent the “core contingent” of conservatism which aims at ending today’s radical personal freedom. He writes in a discussion at New Clarion:

Here is the way Larry Auster has described the feudal era:

Now I’ve always been deeply attracted to the Middle Ages. But the communal order of medieval society was a divine order, organized around God and the Church. The stability of medieval society achieved its true meaning by pointing at a truth beyond the merely human. While medieval man could not readily change his earthly station in life, his life, his ordinary life, opened up to the divine at every point. By contrast, the stable order liberals seek is godless, centered around the guaranteed satisfaction of prosaic human desires.

That is the viewpoint of a true 19th century conservative and its scary. I don’t think a Rush Limbaugh or a Thomas Sowell could ever say something like that. You’re right that the core contingent of Conservatism will drive the future direction of that movement but most of today’s conservatives are so far removed from this type of medieval worship that I wonder if we need a new term to describe today’s conservatives. I have been using the term “hybrids” but that really isn’t very descriptive.

While I have no problem with Madmax’s quotation of me, he has removed it from its context, which was, “What elite liberals think about life.” In that 2008 entry, I discussed how liberals, in their terror of uncertainty, seek a kind of return to the secure order of medievalism, which I then contrasted with true medievalism:

As suggested by the [Dan] Balz remark, liberals object to the very fact of uncertainty in human affairs. To liberals, uncertainty of outcome is tantamount to injustice. So they demand that everything be certain, secure, settled. This explains their desire for guaranteed wage, guaranteed job, guaranteed life. It explains the administered, unfree societies of Europe, where people can’t even be fired from jobs once they’re hired, and popular referenda are ignored if their results are not what the elite expected.

Liberals, in short, secretly desire a return to something like the medieval order. Now I’ve always been deeply attracted to the Middle Ages. But the communal order of medieval society was a divine order, organized around God and the Church. The stability of medieval society achieved its true meaning by pointing at a truth beyond the merely human. While medieval man could not readily change his earthly station in life, his life, his ordinary life, opened up to the divine at every point. By contrast, the stable order liberals seek is godless, centered around the guaranteed satisfaction of prosaic human desires.

Furthermore, liberals’ demand for security would seem to be radically contradicted by their unquestioning support for the transformation of their society via mass non-Western immigration and the importation of alien cultures. If they wanted the continuation of their present, pleasant way of life, would they be permitting the Islamization of Europe? Maybe they inchoately recognize that their godless liberal order is inherently unstable, and so they welcome the absolute stability and certainty of Islamic rule.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 22, 2011 10:39 AM | Send