How to oppose liberalism, cont.

Alan Roebuck sent me a reply he had directed at several commenters including John Derbyshire in an exchange at the New English Review. The first sentence of his comment is:

I notice that few of the comments here have directly responded to the central point of my earlier post: the West is in mortal danger because of specific beliefs which can be opposed in the arena of intellectual combat.

I wrote to Mr. Roebuck:

Alan, I repeat that you have made explicit what has been a central premise in my writings all along: liberalism consists of ideas that people believe. But these ideas are not explicit, they are “compressed” within various slogans and sentiments, and so the ideas themselves do not become the object of thought and discussion and are not challenged. The work of traditionalism is to identify the unspoken concept or trend or telos contained within this or that liberal statement and to oppose it.

For example, in my first article on multiculturalism back in 1989, I said that multiculturalism means that the nation must come to an end. The multiculturalists and liberals don’t say that, they just say, “Diversity enriches us.” But in fact if you believe diversity is a good thing, you must have more and more diversity, and at every step the historic nation must yield.

In other words, there is a liberal thing and there is a conservative thing, and they are mutually incompatible. If you want to go on having the conservative thing, you must oppose the liberal thing. This is what real conservative politics is about.

Unfortunately, the number of conservatives who identify issues on the conceptual level like this is one out of a million. I don’t know why. It does not take that much intelligence to understand this. It seems to be part of the working of liberalism that it destroys people’s desire and capacity for conceptual thought. Indeed it is natural that it should be so. Since liberalism denies that there is objective and higher truth, why should people want to think? What is there to think about?

It’s the same with the loss of interest in history. If our nation and civilization don’t matter, if all that matters is individual desires and diversity, why should we care about the history of our country and our civilization?

Liberalism is the destroyer of civilization. It is the destroyer of all real values. And that is the ultimate “hidden liberal idea” that we must identify and oppose.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 17, 2007 01:45 AM | Send