The glory of liberal reason

Liberalism proposes to make social life rational and equal. To that end, everything habitual, irregular, particular and opaque to liberal reason must be done away with as bigoted and oppressive. The things to be abolished include family life in any traditional sense, with its associated habits, attitudes and institutions, and ethnic distinctions, with the particular cultural standards that depend on them.

Some particulars:

Some consequences of the attempt to achieve utopia:
  • Any approach to wrongdoing other than therapy becomes impossible, especially in the case of young people. As a result social institutions, especially those devoted to education, become radically degraded.
  • Recognition of the need for common culture and other conditions for a free and orderly society becomes impossible, because it would mean that the liberal order depends on something outside itself. To demonstrate the self-contained universality of the liberal order, and to disrupt any competing principle of order, populations must be mixed as much as possible. Any resulting problems — immigrant crime waves, for example — must be denied, blamed on pre-liberal residues, or treated as curable through bureaucratic management.
  • The impossibility of carrying on productive activity under conditions of total bureaucratic control means that social and economic life are increasingly carried on illegally.
  • In the absence of a principle of personal loyalty, officials have no reason not to feather their own nests and the system becomes radically corrupt.
The net effect: 80+ years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union is still the future. Until the fundamental understanding of the world that gave rise to communism — scientific materialism — is done away with, we will just keep re-inventing the same thing.
Posted by Jim Kalb at May 20, 2003 07:58 AM | Send
    
Comments

“Recognition of the need for common culture and other conditions for a free and orderly society becomes impossible, because it would mean that the liberal order depends on something outside itself.”

Precisely. And what the liberal order (or any society) depends on is the transcendent and universal, which is above us, and the concrete and particular, which is around us. It is not possible to have social order and authority without shared loyalties to some particular. But liberalism, rejecting any such dependency on the particular, must prove that it does not need, for example, ethnic cohesion. Thus the openness to mass diverse immigration is more than (as it initially appears to be) a pursuit of diversity for its own sake; it is also the liberal order’s way of demonstrating its own sovereign self-sufficiency and omnipotence. This project is doomed in the long run because as the concrete society and its ethos is destroyed, so will be the social and moral basis of the liberal order itself.

As I wrote in my article, “Liberalism: The Real Cause of Today’s Anti-Semitism”: “What the older America understood was that liberalism, if it is not to destroy itself, needs to operate within a cultural and moral system that is not itself liberal.” http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001070.html

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 20, 2003 10:28 AM
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