Advantages of shortsightedness to liberals

More thoughts on liberalism! (Sorry for devoting so much space to the topic, but it’s better than pederasty and prison rape.)

Liberalism wins arguments each step of the way, because it is concerned only with the articulate. It refers to the inarticulate as prejudice, stereotype, obscurantism, and so on. It therefore has no interest in the whole, because the whole cannot be stated.

Since liberalism ignores the whole, it is shortsighted. That turns out to be an advantage: it deprives it of the perspective needed to see its own weaknesses and the strengths of other views. The nagging feeling there is something wrong with liberalism can never find articulate statement and so comes to seem only a temptation.

Ignoring the whole makes it easier for liberals to ignore the essential inconsistency of their views. They can claim to be dealing with real problems of real people in practical ways, while their opponents are just presenting their ideology. It deprives liberals of a standpoint from which their system can be viewed from the outside, as one system among others that must be compared on equal terms with other ways of understanding human life. Instead, it can be viewed as a uniquely neutral and universal framework to which all else must be subordinated.

When viewed from outside, however, it becomes clear that liberalism has all the qualities it denounces in others. Psychologists find that quality in narcissists, and the denial by liberalism of objective moral reality independent of the self and its desires makes it a sort of narcissism writ large. It therefore demonizes, marginalizes and dehumanizes its opponents, while accusing them of bigotry. It suppresses free discussion, because the outcome of the discussion is fixed, while claiming the mantle of freedom. It stands for rule by a small elite responsible to no one but itself, although it denies vehemently that any such elite exists.
Posted by Jim Kalb at May 20, 2002 03:22 PM | Send