Must we ally with liberals and approve of liberalism to save the West?

This discussion was originally under “When you gonna wake up?” but, as per Paul K.’s suggestion below, it really belongs in its own entry, so I have reposted it here.

Jeff in England points out:

Liberalism (a broad term to be sure) ain’t exactly about to go away because you want it to. Therefore, in regard to stopping Islamic immigration in particular we have to appeal to liberals on the basis of threats by Islam to their liberalism. That is the only realistic option in regard to appealing to many people. WE’VE got to stop “masturbating” (there’s that term again). You can’t hope that liberals will drop their liberalism in time to stop Islamic immigration taking over. You’ve got to put aside your longterm desires to see the end of modern liberalism; instead you have to concentrate on tactics which emphaisise that modern liberalism is in immediate danger from a common enemy.

LA replies:

For people to realize that Islam as such is the problem and must be excluded, even if only for the purpose of protecting liberalism (or if they realized that excessive Eastern European immigration, brought on by EU membership, was harming Britain and must be stopped), would mean that they had ceased to be liberals, at least in the modern sense. As I’ve said many times, the central plank of modern liberalism is non-discrimination and tolerance, tolerance as the ruling principle, thus tolerance as a principle that does not contain any inherent limit to tolerance. Modern liberalism means tolerance of the intolerant, openness to that which would destroy the tolerant society, such as Islam, including blatantly radical forms of Islam. Look at Britain as the purest example of such unlimited openness. (Of course there is the liberal double standard against conservatism, discrimination against conservatives, but that’s a special case we can leave aside for the moment.)

Now if you had liberals who believed that Muslims as such must be excluded because they threaten liberal tolerance, such liberals would no longer be modern liberals, because tolerance and non-discrimination would no longer be their highest principle. Their highest principle would be the preservation of a distinctive form of society, namely liberal society, which requires discriminating against non-liberals. Not everyone is welcome, but only people who respect others’ rights.

Such reformed liberals would have ceased being, in Allan Bloom’s words, “openness” liberals, i.e., liberals who are open to everything especially that which threatens their own society, and would have reverted to being “natural-rights” liberals, i.e., liberals who believe in the shared recognition of certain unalienable rights. And this would mean a vast revolution, because modern or openness liberalism, the belief that non-discrimination and tolerance are the highest principles, is the ruling ideology of the modern world.

Further, this revolution would not stop at a return of the older liberalism. To recognize that liberalism means the preservation of a particular form of society, also means respect for at least some of the concrete historical particulars of the society, and thus for the cultural attitudes that help preserve those concrete particulars. Thus a return to natural-rights liberalism implies a return to at least some degree of traditionalist conservatism as well. Remember, from the beginning of America, natural-rights liberalism co-existed with elements of traditionalist conservatism, with the natural-rights liberalism progressively banishing the traditionalist conservatism over time. As this banishing of traditionalism became more thorough, the natural-rights liberalism mutated into openness liberalism, an openness to anything that would destroy whatever remained of the historic society. It therefore follows that a rejection of modern liberalism would also mean an at least partial return of traditionalist conservatism.

This scenario so far has focused on the reformed liberals, who have returned from openness liberalism to natural-rights liberalism. I haven’t spoken of the traditionalists, who in the process of defending Western society against both Islam and openness liberalism also recognize that natural-rights liberalism is itself a problem, because when natural-rights liberalism is in the saddle, it begins to ban the society’s cultural particulars and thus tends to mutate into openness liberalism. Such traditionalists would want the society’s cultural and moral tradition to be in the saddle, with natural-rights liberalism subordinate to that, rather than having natural-rights liberalism in the saddle, with the cultural and moral traditions of the society in the secondary role. For traditionalist conservatives, natural rights are not a universalist abstraction but must be understood and practiced within the context of an actually existing society.

Now I hope that Jeff in the future will not say that I have not addressed this question. :-)

Andrew E. writes:

Your response to Jeff from England regarding the need for Britain to step outside liberalism in order to save itself is one of the most penetrating analyses of yours I’ve yet read at VFR. This response got me thinking. Here and in the past you’ve fleshed out several different forms of liberalism, in this instance, openness and natural rights liberalism.

You mention how in America’s past natural rights liberalism mutated into openness liberalism and I asked myself, how? Why? You may have already discussed this previously, but it seems to me that there is only one liberalism, modern, openness liberalism and the other forms of liberalism you speak of are the only parts of the true liberalism which are allowed to manifest under different social orders. Thus when the ruling social order is a form of traditionalist conservatism, the only subset of the true liberalism that is compatible with this social order is natural rights liberalism. So it’s not really a case of one form of liberalism mutating into another but merely the true form of liberalism being able to manifest itself more fully once the constraints of traditional conservatism are removed. Do I have this right?

LA replies:

I’ll have to think about this.

Jim Kalb writes:

I think Andrew E. is basically right, at least if you view liberalism as a continuing overall movement rather than a particular configuration of understandings and institutions. When so viewed, liberalism combines a very simple ultimate principle, equal freedom, with willingness to compromise with existing arrangements while the implications of that principle gradually transform the whole social order. That’s what it means to say that liberalism is reformist, and it’s why liberals have had a perpetual bad conscience with respect to leftists.

Since the 60s, and especially since the collapse of Communism, there’s no longer anything substantial opposing liberalism for it to compromise with or need allies against, so liberalism can be what it most truly is. That’s why it has become more or less identical with leftism. Its ultimate principle of equal freedom, which is the same as “tolerance,” has become explicit as an overriding standard with which all human relations must comply immediately. That’s why we now live in such a radically ideological society.

Paul K. writes:

The “reply to Jeff” struck me as particularly insightful and it stands alone without the original entry. Perhaps you should repost it on its own, explaining that you had to remove the initial post, and in that way make sure it gets the attention it deserves. I appreciate it when you remind readers to check comments at older posts if the discussion has been added to, and also when you post links to older articles that are still timely. I have poked around in the VFR archives but there is a great deal there I haven’t read. I recently came across one from 2 years ago titled “America and the Method of Bush” and found it fascinating. One line from it reads “Second, through gut instinct, he decides that the neocon way is the one true way and commits himself to it.” Have you seen this recent piece in Salon which suggests that, as of August, 2004, President Bush didn’t know what the term neocon meant? Amazing if true, and I’m afraid it seems all to plausible to me. I doubt it’s occurred to the president that there is any other kind of conservative than the kind he is. I don’t think Bush has any capacity for abstract thought. Can you imagine asking him to discuss the difference between two of his favorite terms, “freedom” and “liberty”?

LA replies:

Timothy Noah’s account in Salon of a conversation between Bush père et fils is at least at third remove from the event and is not reliable.

Andrew E. writes:

Continuing along this line of thinking, it would seem like liberalism is similar to Islam in that in both ideologies the default mechanism is expansion without limit. Expansion until there is nothing left to incorporate. The difference being that there are some elements of liberalism (natural rights liberalism) that are compatible with Western life and indeed, improve and enhance it. I think the interesting question is to what extent does Western society need natural rights liberalism to be Western? Is it necessary or merely a luxury? I think to suggest that we don’t need it is where this gets a bit scary. I, for one, certainly don’t know enough history to make that leap.

LA writes:

Rabbi Schiller once addressed that question by asking what is the order of priority of these four components of Western culture. What is indispensable to the West, and what is not?

Christianity
Capitalism
The white race
Democracy (including natural rights liberalism)

On reflection, one would have to say that the white race and Christianity are indispensable; capitalism and democracy (natural-rights liberalism), as valuable as they are, are not. The West existed for a thousand years without capitalism and democracy. But without the white race and Christianity there is no West.

Alan Roebuck writes:

You suggest that classical, natural-rights liberalism had “mutated” into modern, “openness” liberalism, and then a reader suggested that liberalism has not changed at all, but has instead been freed to be fully itself by the lack of opposition.

I think that your two positions are fundamentally the same, for the following reasons.

Philosophers have shown that all change requires there to be something that remains the same. For example, suppose you and I were sitting at a table, I got up and left the room, and then Jim Kalb came into the room and sat down in my chair. Would you say I had changed into Jim? Clearly no. You would only say “Alan changed” if, for example, I suddenly became hostile and confrontational where I had previously been friendly. In that case, the same Alan has changed in a certain respect.

In the same way, liberalism cannot change unless something about it remains the same, which we might identify as a tendency to emphasize equality and freedom, a tendency to defy authority, etc.

Furthermore, Thomas Sowell has written that people are often “carriers” of ideas without having a good idea of just what they are carrying (i.e., promoting.) Thus, for example, we might identify one of the seminal ideas of contemporary liberalism as “tolerance,” which began to be emphasized in the aftermath of the Wars of the Reformation. Originally, the meaning of tolerance was that I have good reasons for believing that you are wrong, and perhaps even a bad person on account of your destructive belief, but I will treat you with respect and cordiality, at least as far as these things do not involve endorsing or promoting your bad ideas.

But the idea of tolerance contains the seed of another idea: If you really are disastrously wrong, why should I tolerate you? It makes much more sense to tolerate you if your ideas are not really false and possibly destructive, but are just opinions. And it makes more sense to say your ideas are just opinions if there is no such thing as objective truth. Thus tolerance contains the seed of the ideas of relativism and nihilism, even if its original proponents didn’t think of it that way.

I think that contemporary liberalism is a continuation of “classical” liberalism in just this way. As the traditional way of thinking that it originally tried to moderate gave way under the philosophical critiques offered by the leading intellects of liberalism, the ideas contained implicitly within liberalism began to come to life. And with liberalism’s emphasis on novelty and originality, intellectuals were encouraged to cultivate the seeds. Thus the seeds of classical liberalism have matured into the forest we are currently surrounded by.

As for the liberal double standard of tolerating everything except conservatism, that simply shows it is literally impossible to be tolerant of everything (unless you’re dead). Everyone must be tolerant up to a certain point, and intolerant past that point. Hitler was tolerant up to a certain point, and intolerant past that point; liberals are tolerant up to a certain point, and intolerant past that point.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 01, 2007 01:11 AM | Send