The Myopia of Liberalism
I decided to break this off from the thread on "Philosophically Sophisticated Notions of God" because its substantially different. The topic of how contemporary liberalism/capitalism is in many ways blind to its own tendencies towards totalitarianism and its other failings came up.
Often, champions of liberalism (I speak here of political theorists and popular authors) utterly fail at seeing even the haziest outlines of the apparent unfreedom critics see in liberalism. That's what this thread is about. When faced with criticisms of liberalism, it seems to me that most apologists seem unable to try to justify liberalism outside its own terms. That is, all failures must be [I]internal[/I], i.e. a failure of liberalism to live up to the standards of liberalism itself, e.g. as respects equity in consumption, etc. It's rarely acknowledged that there are, or even could be, competing visions of human freedom and flourishing that might compete with liberalism on equal terms.
I had originally written:
To which Reply to Tom Storm replied:
Now, I think that's a valid criticism, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind. That's still the sort of criticism liberalism is comfortable with because it's more a criticism about "systemic disequilibrium" (something technocrats can perhaps one day eliminate). It's not a criticism that says that human freedom and flourishing is not best accomplished by liberalism.
I was thinking more along the lines of Byung-Chul Han's criticism in "The Agony of Eros," that modern consumerism makes love impossible and degrades sex into a commodity, leading to a pornographication society. The self becomes a "project," and all differenceany true other that could be the target of ecstatic erosmust be flattened out in order to be consumed. There is also the oppressive positivity laid out by Han in "The Burnout Society," which goes along with the idea that the self is a sort of project and unhappiness a personal failure. Alain Badiou makes some similar points. (I should note that Han himself shows a certain myopia. He treads a lot of the same ground as John Paul II's "Theology of the Body in Simple Language," and yet simply passes by the entirety of the old Eros tradition with a remark about how the "death of God" makes this a nonstarter. Maybe this is true for the academics or European secular liberal universities, certainly it isn't for humanity as a whole.)
Michel Houellebecq's picture of a society that has lost its will to live is another view. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" comes from the angle of the past, where a much broader, and I would say deeper, notion of freedom comes to make the freedom of liberalism look dessicated. Indeed, to the extent that one thinks that virtue is essential for freedom, for an important reflexive/inner freedom (of self-determination and self-governance), without which political freedom and freedom to consume is empty, then the way liberalism indoctrinates its populace leads to a distinct unfreedom. And this manifest in Han's concept of "autoexploitation" as well. Peter Simpson's "Political Iliberalism" is another example. Perhaps one of the best is D.C. Schindler's "Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty," which looks at the way in which visions of freedom defined in terms of power bottom out in arbitrariness (also a main focus of Hegel in the Philosophy of Right, itself a powerful critique of modern liberalism).
Whereas Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" gets at the extreme myopia in detailthe inability of liberalism to countenance that it is could possibly be just one possible path to flourishing societies amongst many others, let alone a particularly flawed path. "It is easier to imagine the world ending than capitalism," as he puts it.
And the totalitarian nature of this view expresses itself in the same manner as the older "socialist realism." Works of historical fiction are often (I would say generally) unable to put forth protagonists who are not post-modern, cosmopolitan, class conscious agnostics. If characters display something of the ethos of their time, it is virtually always as a character flaw (if not what makes them villains)expressions of modern bourgeois values are always a virtue. Mitchell Lüthi's "Pilgrim" is a fine example (and still a decent story). I'm a big fan of "Between Two Fires," but it absolutely suffers the same deficits. And this holds even more true for film and television.
There is a need to backwards project liberal virtues and hegemony back in time, like the Chinese Emperors of old. It is, for instance, almost impossible for me to fathom a mainstream historical drama set during the Thirty Years War where a main character is a particularly zealous Protestant or Catholic, a person whose faith is constitutive of their entire moral ethos, and where this facet of their character plays into acts of heroism and kindness (whereas this sort of thing certainly is the case in biographies of the time). It is very easy to imagine the opposite, conviction as a deep flawwe see it all the time.
On a similar note, I recall the fantasy writer R. Scott Bakker receiving a lot of flack for "misogyny" in his books because the main female characters are a slave and a prostitute. But he had a fair response, that the tendency to transport "girl bosses" into historical settings gives rise to this sort of fantasy where all that is needed to transcend one's historical moment is "the right attitude." I mention this example because it points to how liberalism often sees itself as transcending history itself. It is "the right view" for all times and contexts, since it is also the "end point of history," the teleological endpoint of human development (even if liberalism tends towards denying teleology in nature, since this would be an infringement on its conception of liberty).
There's a lot of references above, but I figured different people might be familiar with at least some of them.
I'll end with a quote I've shared before from D.C. Schindler's "Love and Postmodern Predicament," since I have it on hand and I cannot get to Han's stuff now to share what comes to mind. I think his description is not only extremely familiar, but also pursued in a sort of totalitarian way. It can be pursued in this way precisely because its proponents cannot see how this can be anything other than the "maximization of freedom." Indeed, despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination. That's one of the perils of "bourgeois metaphysics," is that it becomes transparent and cannot be recognized as an ideology. It can default into the claim that it "isn't an ideology," but rather "the freedom to have any ideology one wishes." That's the myopia of liberalism in a nutshell, ideology gone transparent, a historically distinct (and historically quite narrow) vision of freedom become totalized and absolutized.
Often, champions of liberalism (I speak here of political theorists and popular authors) utterly fail at seeing even the haziest outlines of the apparent unfreedom critics see in liberalism. That's what this thread is about. When faced with criticisms of liberalism, it seems to me that most apologists seem unable to try to justify liberalism outside its own terms. That is, all failures must be [I]internal[/I], i.e. a failure of liberalism to live up to the standards of liberalism itself, e.g. as respects equity in consumption, etc. It's rarely acknowledged that there are, or even could be, competing visions of human freedom and flourishing that might compete with liberalism on equal terms.
I had originally written:
However, IMHO the common tendency for apologists of "modern secular liberalism" to see it as "just what happens when superstition and calcified oppression are washed away and the progress of science and technology hum along," (e.g. Pinker or Harris are fine examples) is itself definitive of a certain sort of myopia affecting liberalism. It's an outlook that justifies itself with a certain sort of inevitably (e.g. Fukuyama's particular understanding of the "End of History"). Fukuyama is a good example because he presciently identified a major fault line that looks libel to tear liberalism apart in the US and Europe, the revolt of the "Last Men." Yet somehow he missed that this could possibly pose an existential threat, let alone countenancing that it is symptom of something seriously deficient in the underlying liberal ethos and the very way liberalism defines freedom. Afterall, how could anything be systematically wrong with "life with oppressive structures removed and scientific progress set lose?" All efforts to diagnoses modern pathologies need to "come from outside" if that's the case, or to be temporary disequilibrium issues.
To which Reply to Tom Storm replied:
My point is that liberalism is fundamentally driven by dissatisfaction, with an underlying tendency toward dismantling existing structures, seeking to overturn privilege. This forensic mode of deconstruction perhaps becomes so reflexive and self-perpetuating that it ultimately turns inward, subjecting liberalism itself to the same critical scrutiny it once directed outward, gradually hollowing out its own foundations in the process.
Now, I think that's a valid criticism, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind. That's still the sort of criticism liberalism is comfortable with because it's more a criticism about "systemic disequilibrium" (something technocrats can perhaps one day eliminate). It's not a criticism that says that human freedom and flourishing is not best accomplished by liberalism.
I was thinking more along the lines of Byung-Chul Han's criticism in "The Agony of Eros," that modern consumerism makes love impossible and degrades sex into a commodity, leading to a pornographication society. The self becomes a "project," and all differenceany true other that could be the target of ecstatic erosmust be flattened out in order to be consumed. There is also the oppressive positivity laid out by Han in "The Burnout Society," which goes along with the idea that the self is a sort of project and unhappiness a personal failure. Alain Badiou makes some similar points. (I should note that Han himself shows a certain myopia. He treads a lot of the same ground as John Paul II's "Theology of the Body in Simple Language," and yet simply passes by the entirety of the old Eros tradition with a remark about how the "death of God" makes this a nonstarter. Maybe this is true for the academics or European secular liberal universities, certainly it isn't for humanity as a whole.)
Michel Houellebecq's picture of a society that has lost its will to live is another view. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" comes from the angle of the past, where a much broader, and I would say deeper, notion of freedom comes to make the freedom of liberalism look dessicated. Indeed, to the extent that one thinks that virtue is essential for freedom, for an important reflexive/inner freedom (of self-determination and self-governance), without which political freedom and freedom to consume is empty, then the way liberalism indoctrinates its populace leads to a distinct unfreedom. And this manifest in Han's concept of "autoexploitation" as well. Peter Simpson's "Political Iliberalism" is another example. Perhaps one of the best is D.C. Schindler's "Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty," which looks at the way in which visions of freedom defined in terms of power bottom out in arbitrariness (also a main focus of Hegel in the Philosophy of Right, itself a powerful critique of modern liberalism).
Whereas Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" gets at the extreme myopia in detailthe inability of liberalism to countenance that it is could possibly be just one possible path to flourishing societies amongst many others, let alone a particularly flawed path. "It is easier to imagine the world ending than capitalism," as he puts it.
And the totalitarian nature of this view expresses itself in the same manner as the older "socialist realism." Works of historical fiction are often (I would say generally) unable to put forth protagonists who are not post-modern, cosmopolitan, class conscious agnostics. If characters display something of the ethos of their time, it is virtually always as a character flaw (if not what makes them villains)expressions of modern bourgeois values are always a virtue. Mitchell Lüthi's "Pilgrim" is a fine example (and still a decent story). I'm a big fan of "Between Two Fires," but it absolutely suffers the same deficits. And this holds even more true for film and television.
There is a need to backwards project liberal virtues and hegemony back in time, like the Chinese Emperors of old. It is, for instance, almost impossible for me to fathom a mainstream historical drama set during the Thirty Years War where a main character is a particularly zealous Protestant or Catholic, a person whose faith is constitutive of their entire moral ethos, and where this facet of their character plays into acts of heroism and kindness (whereas this sort of thing certainly is the case in biographies of the time). It is very easy to imagine the opposite, conviction as a deep flawwe see it all the time.
On a similar note, I recall the fantasy writer R. Scott Bakker receiving a lot of flack for "misogyny" in his books because the main female characters are a slave and a prostitute. But he had a fair response, that the tendency to transport "girl bosses" into historical settings gives rise to this sort of fantasy where all that is needed to transcend one's historical moment is "the right attitude." I mention this example because it points to how liberalism often sees itself as transcending history itself. It is "the right view" for all times and contexts, since it is also the "end point of history," the teleological endpoint of human development (even if liberalism tends towards denying teleology in nature, since this would be an infringement on its conception of liberty).
There's a lot of references above, but I figured different people might be familiar with at least some of them.
I'll end with a quote I've shared before from D.C. Schindler's "Love and Postmodern Predicament," since I have it on hand and I cannot get to Han's stuff now to share what comes to mind. I think his description is not only extremely familiar, but also pursued in a sort of totalitarian way. It can be pursued in this way precisely because its proponents cannot see how this can be anything other than the "maximization of freedom." Indeed, despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination. That's one of the perils of "bourgeois metaphysics," is that it becomes transparent and cannot be recognized as an ideology. It can default into the claim that it "isn't an ideology," but rather "the freedom to have any ideology one wishes." That's the myopia of liberalism in a nutshell, ideology gone transparent, a historically distinct (and historically quite narrow) vision of freedom become totalized and absolutized.
Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only as far as it goes, and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others,whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means not to believe what one believes.15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called right to privacy, as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth,and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly absolute.
Let us call this a bourgeois metaphysics." 6Bourgeois is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of values, and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a bourgeois metaphysics is to observe that such an interest,such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things mean only themselves; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities.On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization...
Nevertheless, this judgment demands two qualifications. First, insofar as it is founded on a bourgeois metaphysics, it follows necessarily that any altruistic act will be equally explicable in purely self-centered terms. In this case, altruism will always be vulnerable to the hermeneutics of suspicion, such as we find,for example, in Friedrich Nietzsche: there can be no rational disputing the charge that what appears to be done for altruistic reasons is really motivated by the prospect of selfish gain.19 Second, the affirmation of the other inside of a"bourgeois metaphysics is inevitably an affirmation of the other specifically as a self-interested individual. Altruism is not in the least an overcoming of egoism, but rather the multiplication of it. This is the essence of toleration: live and let live means, let us agree to be self-centered individuals; we will give space to each other so that each may do and be what he likes, and will transgress our separateness only to confirm each other in our own individuality, that is, to reinforce each others selfishness. One thinks here of Rilkes famous definition of love, which may indeed have a deep meaning in itself, but not so much when it appears on a refrigerator magnet: Love consists in the mutual guarding,bordering, and saluting of two solitudes.20
Comments (349)
Whereas for the nu-Right, their liberal detractors (at least the non-elite/non-"winner/dominator" ones) are castrati, betas, cuckolds, bovine consumers who have accepted a pale simulacra of freedom and allowed all the depth to be sucked out of life. And this criticism arises from a certain sort of self-hatred within the nu-Right, for this is how the nu-Right often sees itself as well (which is why "conversion stories" are so common in nu-Right spaces, the story of one's "awakening to the reality of life" and "greater depths"). The movement is, I would argue, in many ways chiefly a revolt of Nietzsche's Last Men (Nietzsche himself being a great precursors critic to modern liberalism). After all, who else would have more reason to fetishize the Overman than the Last Man?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I have been reading this. With the subtitle included it reads, "Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom."
Liberalism is failing, and I think it is now important to have proper alternatives so that we don't fall into something worse.
It's not failing; it's being beaten down by more aggressive forces. This is because liberalism can thrive only so long in a capitalist society. The essence of capitalism is the haves using up the have-nots and keeping them have-nots as long as they're useful. The only time there is any redistribution of resources, opportunity, wealth and power is a short period following a major breakdown in the capitalist system: recession, depression or war. As the grabbers and users recover, they claw back more and more of everything. They also control the organs of propaganda to stoke dissatisfaction and displace their own wrongdoing onto convenient targets, thus turning gullible people against their neighbours as well as their own self-interest.
We have already fallen into something much, much worse. What do you propose as a 'proper' alternative?
The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made.
The critique depends on a conflation. Liberalism is equated with consumer capitalism, secularism, and moral relativism. But this is not self-evident. Its not clear why Rawlss political liberalismor Nussbaums capabilities approachmust collapse into late-modern malaise. Both offer accounts of human flourishing. Both recognize the need for moral depth, social meaning, and institutional justice. These are not libertarian apologies for consumer choice.
At its core, the critique chafes at pluralism itself. It wants one truth, publicly affirmed and normatively binding. Liberalism refuses this. It does not deny truthit refuses to coerce consensus. That refusal is treated here as decadence. But it is, in fact, a guardrail against authoritarianism. The demand that a culture publicly reflect a metaphysical or theological unity is a recipe for repressionof minorities, of dissenters, of difference. Liberalism protects that space. It allows communities to pursue deep, even ultimate, goodsso long as they dont do so by coercion. That is not a bug. It is the point.
The deeper issue is metaphysical. Liberalism is faulted for not being a theology. It doesnt offer a doctrine of eros, virtue, or transcendent meaning. But thats by design. Liberalism is a political framework. It permits those deeper viewsit doesnt impose one. If thats the flaw, then name the alternative. A confessional state? A return to teleology? A politics grounded in love? Perhaps. But that needs to be argued, not implied through nostalgia and allusion.
Without that, this is not a critique of liberalism. Its a lament that liberalism isnt something else.
Along with , I would like to understand your proposed alternative.
This is a theme well explored in an essay by Buddhist scholar David Loy, Violence in the God-Shaped Hole: Confronting Modernity's Identity Crisis, which was written in the aftermath of 9/11 as an exploration of the causes of those dreadful events:
Loy then goes on to explain, without in any way defending, the impetus behind Islamic terrorism as a response to the secular negation of religious identity:
He then moves onto the historical origin of secular culture. Notice the convergence with this point:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Loy affirms:
'Most of us' includes, I am sure, most of us readers and contributors. He goes on:
Liberalism is a fig leaf used by the elite classes, who see Man as essentially an automaton that can be made to do or believe anything given the right inputs, and it is up to them to structure society in such a way that it produces the "ideal" outcome.
This ideal is communist (authoritarian egalitarian) in nature, which is why liberalism is attacked equally as often. Whenever individuals use their liberty to make decisions that do not correspond with the desired outcome, freedoms must be curtailed, "responsibilities must be taken!", etc.
Egalitarianism is being sold as liberalism - if everybody is equal, everybody is "free".
If you want to poke a hornet's nest in any western academic circle, you need only to criticize communism, and it betrays the elite's true colors.
Social constructivism is the means, communism the endpoint.
To the political elite, communism is seen as an efficient way of exercising total control over a large, ethnically diverse population. (Incidentally, that's why the Soviet Union and China adopted it as an alternative to fascism.) To the controlled masses, communism is a religion that sanctifies weakness and the victim - moral dickwaving (aka "liberal" virtue-signaling) the opium that has mobilized the useful idiots since time immemorial.
My main point is, most problems that people attribute to liberalism stem from a formerly liberal society that is currently being steered by communist ideals.
Why? What has been said that proves liberalism is better than collectivism? And what is collectivism according to you?
And the essence of liberalism is to justify capitalism with the ideology of equality, individual liberty and property rights.
And not only to justify capitalism, but to justify colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy. This is described pretty well in Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, although he goes too far for my liking --- unlike him (as I recall) I do think there is a lot of good in liberalism.
Anyway, what I've just written is a facile and old-fashioned Marxist criticism, but it does remind us that liberalism is bound up with capitalism and is often on the same side, rather than being opposed to it (that would be socialism).
Modern social justice liberalism, and perhaps Nussbaum and Rawls, might represent a late twentieth century patch-up job prompted by the realization that capitalism, the supposed vehicle of liberty, doesn't actually deliver it (as if nobody had pointed this out before).
@Count Timothy von Icarus Interesting OP; who knows, maybe I'll get around to responding to it.
I had in mind China and the CCP, but it's not a point I wish to press. And the saying 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.'
Just as the most obvious point, most collectivist thought wants to maximise democratic processes where they are currently barred due to the structure of liberal/capitalism. I mention it because I assume you're rather fond of democracy considering your stance towards Trump.
I originally wrote something fatuous here, which I retract. I dont actually have a significant interest in liberalism, so I should probably stay quiet. That said, it does feel like were living in a capitalist dystopia rather than any ideal of liberalism.
:strong: :mask:
Quoting Benkei
:up: :up: e.g. Demarchic-Economic Democracy (i.e. libertarian socialism) ... as you, no doubt, know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
Great quote, and I think my point would be that this "questioning" tends to result in its own sort of dogmatism. The standards by which such questioning procedes, particularly what counts as valid philosophical evidence, is held to the rigid epistemic standards of Anglo-empiricism. This tends to exclude a lot of philosophy from the outset, and tends to dismiss a good deal else as "pseudoproblems" that aren't worthy of engagement. But more than that, these epistemic standards are often seen as absolutely inviolable. They are beyond questioning because they aren't even seen as the sort of thing that should be subject to questioning, even though they are fairly recent innovations, and even though they have a produced a tradition whose answer for "what can we know?" seems to be "not much of anything."
But this perhaps is what feeds into the "bourgeois metaphysics," the notion that "one has the right to choose the truth," or "live your own truth," because nothing much can be said about capital T "Truth" (or Goodness) anyhow.
And it's worth noting here that the standard profile of "First Wave" Islamist terrorists in the West were younger men who were raised in, or at least spent their adolescence in, the West. A great deal were engineers or engineering students as well, and a great deal had serious difficulties with any romantic relationships, which is a recurring theme in terrorism in the Western context. That profile is far different for suicide attackers within the context of MENA and Central Asia's civil wars (who are often developmentally disabled, fed drugs, etc., and have much less agency in the whole situation). By contrast, the "First Wave" terrorists and many of the ISIS inspired "lone wolves" in the US and Europe seem to have a lot in common with racially motivated right-wing terrorists in the West and apolitical spree killers.
I agree. This is very reminiscent of Charles Taylor's assault on "subtraction narratives" of secularism, that it is just "what you get when superstition and authoritarian control pass away." It leads to a sort of transparency of ideology where it cannot be recognized as such.
Through and because of which (through a positive feedback loop), we get Taylor's "buffered self," and Weber's "disenchanted cosmos." This feeds into the unfreedom many see in liberalism. If one thinks that one must be free from the vices to be truly free, and that freedom from the vices is not easily accomplished, then there must be a positive education in and training of virtue to attain freedom (e.g. the ascetic disciplines and spiritual exercises that characterized Pagan, Christian, and Eastern philosophy and education until the modern era).
The buffered self needs no such training. First, because it is pure ratio and can slip back into a disengaged, buffered reasoning as needed, and second because, having denied man any "rational appetites" (i.e. the appetites of Plato's "rational part of the soul"), reason is itself just a tool for meeting the demands of desire; it is and ought only be the slave of the passions (it's worth noting that Hume's recommended dictum, so common today, is a concise summary of the conditioned of the damned in Dante's Hell, and would be seen by him as literally the definition of slavery.
[Reply="Banno;982309"]
But it isn't a broad critique of liberalism? I mentioned a broad array of very different "external" critiques of liberalism that see it as incompatible with human flourishing and freedom (i.e., precisely because liberalism offers up a myopic and desiccated vision of human freedom, and Rawls certainly would be a target of some of these critiques; Simpson's title is an explicit response to Rawls). I mentioned several because I figured people might be familiar with at least some of them.
My point, however, was that liberal apologists aren't able to digest these critiques because they cannot get past the presupposition that the liberal conception of freedom is the only possible valid conception of freedom. Hence, they always frame dissent as advocating a "return to authoritarianism," or a desire to "trade freedom for some other good," which often entirely misses the point. And this is because liberalism is often not seen as an explicit ideology by its proponents, but rather "the freedom to choose any ideology."
To wit, your response is a great example:
Is liberalism really just a framework that "permits those deeper views," without "imposing one" of its own? Are the only options aside from it a return to the oppressive institutions of the past? Does it really only "protect spaces" of discourse and not impose discourse or indoctrinate its citizens in its own dogmas and doctrines?
To quote the OP:
This reminds me on the thread on classical education, where the immediate fear was that an education in a framework of virtue ethics (the norm in East and West for most of history) would be "indoctrination," as if modern liberal education was "value-neutral" and free from any such indoctrination. It isn't.
Can you name a single society where they haven't gone together? These issues are certainly written about across the Anglophone world, Europe, Korea, and Japan. Eastern European writers came to similar conclusions and reflect on the "shock" it brought, which has led to the phenomena of "Soviet nostalgia" in the former Warsaw Pact nations.
Consider this alternative view of freedom from a quote from St. Augustine:
Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices.
We might fault Augustine for a certain privilege in saying this, but it's worth noting that Epictetus, who was a slave, said the same thing, just not as pithily.
Now, does liberalism do a good job at educating and training individuals in the virtues so as to avoid the unfreedom that comes with being vice-addled? Does it even see this as desirable or an important function of a "liberating society?"
I would say it doesn't. Kids are plied with caffeinated corn syrup slush from grade school, and are now exposed to hardcore pornography through the internet on a regular basis from about the same age. Everywhere, one sees powerful examples of the ideal of freedom as freedom to consume, to "live one's truth," and to "fulfill one's appetites and desires." And as noted in the OP, "capitalist realism" attempts to backwards project these norms onto all prior epochs.
The role of education for the upper classes is rather to gain markers of success so that one might attend a good college, so as to attain more markers of success, so as to attain a good job, so as to earn a lot of income, so as to fulfill one's desires. Perhaps those desires involve a "prosocial" element. Perhaps they don't. That's the individual's choice after all. The education system is there to empower them to make those choices (and to sort them by "merit"), not to help them discover what is "truly good and choice-worthy," or "truly just."
But obviously this view conflicts with other powerful visions of freedom. It certainly conflicts with those views that see ignorance of what is truly best as a limit on freedom. "Freedom" to do as one pleases, on these views, isn't freedom if one is bound by ignorance about what is truly better. It's merely "being a slave to appetite, instinct, circumstance, culture, and the passions." The presupposition that an "education in virtue" is somehow a pernicious form of indoctrination is, of course, itself a doctrine that people are taught from their youth. As noted above, Hume's vision of freedom is pretty much identical to Dante's picture of spiritual slavery; to claim one is right is to claim the other is wrong. They cannot equally be respected by a "value-neutral" system. The purportedly "value-neutral" system we have sides heavily with Hume.
Nor need we only look to the pre-modern tradition. Han is a great contemporary example. Nietzsche has one of the fierier condemnations of the way in which liberalism leads to unfreedom.
We could consider Huxley's "A Brave New World," here. What makes it dystopian? The heavy use of shallow media, endemic drug use, reduction of sex and romance to pleasure, etc? The desiccation of the human experience and removal of beauty? From the liberal point of view, I would imagine it must instead be the centralized control, caste system, and conditioning. Yet the conditioning is just a more extreme form of the incentive-based "nudging" that has come to dominate liberal technocrats' approach to problem solving. E.g., on the problem of rampant obesity and spiking rates of diabetes, the solution is "nudging" via vice taxes and reminder warning labels.
At any rate, if the caste system were removed, the centralized planning done away with, and the more extreme forms of conditioning and social pressure reduced, and the adults of the society consented to it (recall, those who dissent get to leave the society and go to their own private "Galt's Gulch" for romantics and intellectuals), it's hard to see what the liberal critique could be. "A Brave New World," is an "almost-utopia."
If liberalism creates citizens who are so easily manipulated, who are so ignorant, then doesn't this directly impugn its claims to empower freedom? For, ignorance can easily be seen as a limit on freedom.
I had this conversation with Joshs before. He said that American's urban centers, NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. represented the "economy of the future." I do believe he is right, but I think this "future" looks a lot less like how its advocates envision it and much more like Saudi Arabia or Guatemala.
The problem is that the mainstream of thought can only think of addressing this by moving consumption around. I'd argue that this, at best, moves us back to America's post-war boom years, and doesn't address the problem of staggering global inequality (leading to a staggering demand for migration), nor any of the deeper problems of modernity. It would maintain the same focus on consumption that seems to be leading us towards both ecological and spiritual exhaustion. Not to mention such a move is probably quite impossible now, the public's appetite for socialism has been undercut by the eroding of the nationalist identities that originally supported redistribution. Liberal democracy sublated its nationalist and socialist foes, incorporating key components of each into itself, but new global issues, particularly off-shoring and large scale migration, have set these two "pillars" in conflict with one another.
I find it interesting that Levinas mentions "knowing" here. This problem itself comes from a certain conception of knowing, this is knowing as a "possessing (of representations." This is not the knowing of ecstasis one finds in Plato and much of the pre-modern tradition, or the "knowing by becoming" of the Neoplatonic ascent, but rather a knowing where a static self lays hold of the other and makes it a part of itself. There is no "going out" or "being penetrated" in such a view, but merely "acquisition."
This makes perfect sense when one considers the modern reduction of man's rationality to discursive ratio alone. Aquinas himself says that ratio is to acquisition (and movement) as intellectus is to possession (and rest). The latter is, of course, likened to "possession," but this is as respects a rest in its goal, a rest in the other as an end, rather than a frenetic, never-ending movement, a need to extract from the other as means.
No ism creates citizens. Citizens are first human beings: individually quite sensible and reasonably co-operative, collectively gullible and manipulable and always potentially both altruistic and vicious. The very same kind of people who were persuaded to capital, to industrialization, to Islam, to monarchy; by every exploiter and war-monger who ever sent them to kill and enslave one another, to suffer and die in heaps, and lately to upend a civilization that had been working fairly well for most of a century.
Unfortunately, unlike theocracy and autrocarcy that allow for no original ideas, personal freedom or opposition, liberalism lets humans be as good and bad, as smart or stupid as they choose to be and live with the consequences of their collective choice. Once they've bollixed it up good and proper, they blame a vaguely defined system, declare it 'broken and demand that Somebody fix it for them.
Hence the Jesus-shaped hole.
Quoting Jamal
I must be using the wrong dictionary. Oxford has the meaning as
Not a word about colonialism or slavery, class hierarchy or capital, unlewss all enterprise is capitalistic. However, once all of those conditions have prevailed for a few centuries, there is no way to establish a brand new social structure except to tear the old one down - with all the death, destruction and lasting bitterness that entails. (And maybe end up with the travesty into which communism slid.) All a liberal can do is introduce small, incremental easements - against fierce resistance from the deeply vested powerful interest groups.
First, consumerism is not as a foundational mechanism of capitalism, but rather a necessary consequence of capitalisms structural imperatives, particularly its demand for perpetual growth. In my view, consumerism is symptomatic rather than causal, it emerges because capitalism requires ever-expanding markets.
Second, the problem with consumerism is not that people buy things they dont strictly need. There's nothing inherently wrong with pleasure, desire or personal expression through material things. The critique shouldnt rest on some moralistic asceticism or a return to just the essentials. Instead, the issue lies in how and why consumerism emergesas a structural solution to capitalisms growth imperative and within a system of production that is exploitative, ecologically unsustainable and alienating.
On the first point, I think this becomes apparent when asking why a capitalist system is dependent on endless consumption.
In a capitalist society money is no longer just a mediator between commodities but it is capital. The most straightforward expression of it is Marx' M' = M + ?M (Money - Commodity - Money(+profit). The goal becomes the accumulation of surplus value and the reinvestment loop makes this accumulation theoretically unlimited. Hence capital's continued quest to valorise everything in terms of money, clean air are carbon credited, fairness is pursued through true pricing, your music purchase isn't exhausted with a record but becomes a monthly recurring subscription where you own nothing, etc. etc.
But I digress, I was meaning to make a point on capitalism dependency on continuous growth and how this must necessarily lead to consumerism. Capitalist grwoth can can happen by expanding through:
But these have limits; diminishing returns on technological innovation, reduction in wages undermine demand and at some point new territories cannot be added. But there's a fourth and that is increasing consumption per capita. Under normal circumstances, demand would cease when need is met and this would be a limit in itself. But consumerism breaks that limit because it is no longer about need but manufactured demand. This is achieved through:
So you buy identity, lifestyles, status and experience. In other words: meaning.
Point 2, though, is the damning part of this dance between supply and demand. Under capitalism our desires are serviced by a mode of production that exploits labour, depletes resources, externalises social costs (pollution, waste, inequality) and concentrates wealth. In that sense, consumerism justifies capitalism. It creates the appearance of fairness by foscuing on freedom to choose between a big mac and a whopper, while obscuring the lack of freedom in production where almost everyone is a wage slave, have no say how a company is run, have no control on the externalisation of social costs and has no say how the use of resources can be equitably distributed among existing and future generations.
True freedom should therefore involve collective democratic control over production to decide what gets produced, how it's produced and for whom.
My other beef with capitalism involves how it encroaches on public goods, financialises it and makes a profit of it. But this is a work in progress for me how I should accurately state it. I'm thinking of how clean air (which should be a human right) is now measurable in carbon credits, gives the right to pollute and offset it even if achieved on the other side of the globe (we have strong winds in the Netherlands, but not that strong). Or bottling water and privatising municipal water systems. Patenting genes, seeds or personal data from DNA tests. The whole personal data market. Pollution of public space through advertisement. Eco-tourism and selling "tranquility" as an experience.
It's perhaps my fault for having too many different critiques in mind to start. So, I will just home in on my favorite here. Disparate thinkers have considered it the case that people only choose to worse over the better out of:
A. Weakness of will
B. Ignorance about what is truly best.
(and we might add C., coercion by external constraints, or we could just apply A and B to the situations fortune provides people with).
Many of these thinkers would also maintain that weakness of will and ignorance of what is truly good represent limits on freedom. This is a reflexive, or "inner" freedom, as Axel Honneth puts it in his typology, a freedom over the self. This was long considered the most important type of freedom, because without it no amount of wealth, status, or freedom from external constraints leads to happiness (e.g. miserable celebrities committing suicide).
So, the argument here doesn't reduce to "moralistic asceticism" about the necessary evils of overconsumption. Indeed, advocates of this view say things like: Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse (St. Maximus the Confessor).
To be ruled over by vices is to not rule over oneself (Plato's "civil war in the soul" in the Republic, or St. Paul's "death in sin" in Romans 7), and so it is to be unfree.
Consumerism, that people spend a vast deal of their lives doing things they dislike in pursuit of wealth, status, and sensuous goods that do not make them happy, demonstrates a lack of freedom on this view. This does not mean that doing work one likes, or doing onerous work to procure things that truly make one happy, is bad. It is rather, the pursuit of what makes one unhappy, or what fails to lead to flourishing, i.e. an inability to tell the better from the worse, a sort of unfreedom.
Liberalism, because of how it envisions freedom, is generally blind to how it fails to offer its population this sort of freedom and the way this reflexive freedom needs to be fostered. Furthermore, because of what Benkei points out re consumption and growth, it actually tends to foster the exact opposite of this sort of freedom. Huge efforts are made to "boost consumption," and people are bombarded by marketing and a "culture of consumption." All the old wisdom about how wealth, status, power, etc. are not what leads to "living a good life," or "being a good person," falls into the background at best, or is openly disparaged as "a defunct order" at worst. After all, if freedom is actually about lack of constraint and ability to consume, then the old view is such a constraint, and perhaps an apologia for not focusing on consumption as a good to be sought by the state.
To Vera's point, if freedom is a good, and "the people" turn on it for lesser goods, or out of sheer ignorance, then, on this older view, they were never free to begin with. If freedom isn't a superior good, then so much the worse for liberalism.
Basically, if this knowledge and reflexive freedom is missing, liberalism is failing to provide freedom. This would be my same charge against Fukuyama. If liberalism cannot provide a huge swath of the population with recognition, a basic human need, then it cannot be the "end of history." Movement continues until a state of rest. He can only see liberalism as "the end of history" because he cannot escape liberalism's deficient notions of human flourishing and freedom.
Quoting Vera Mont
What said. What I said about colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy was an expression of a position in political philosophy, and a position with respect to liberalism's historical and social role, which I explained was a common Marxist position --- so you're unlikely to find it in a dictionary. What you've effectively done is just dismissed my position, perhaps because you found my response rude, I'm not sure (if so, I apologize). In any case, you can't engage in a discussion --- unless, that is, you are trying to be positively disrespectful --- using appeals to dictionary definitions.
A better description of liberalism is on Wikipedia:
[quote=Liberalism;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism]Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.[/quote]
I think it's fair to approach this from a historical perspective to see how liberalism developed, and I don't think you have to be a Marxist to see its association with the development of capitalism. As for colonialism, slavery, and all those bad things, well, there are many examples of liberalism's role in justifying these things. I'll give two.
1. Liberalism's egalitarian principles applied explicitly only to "the community of the free," which meant reasonably wealthy white men, everyone else being either inferior or not quite ready for the benefits of civilization.
2. Colonialism, usually violent and coercive, was justified by liberals as a part of a civilizing mission to save the backward races from their benighted condition.
An interesting question here might be to what extent one can say, trans-historically, that these examples represented an infidelity to some true liberalism. I personally think that's an impossible position, although many hold it, but while I see the way that liberalism was shaped by the social reality of expanding capitalism, the ideas that came out of that were not all bad.
Anyway, probably none of this comes close to responding to the OP, so maybe I should quit now.
There are a lot of people that seem to confuse the boundaries of what it means to be a liberal (a libertarian - the true liberals). There are some on the left that like to support the idea of making your own personal choices, wearing what one wants to wear, smoking what one wants to smoke in the privacy of their own home, making love to who they want in the privacy of their own home, etc. but then go beyond that to coercing others into supporting or affirming what they do or think.
There are some on the left that like to support the idea of economic freedom (greedom as you put it), having more of your money in your pocket to participate more freely (afford more) in the market, etc., but then go beyond that to supporting monopolies, and the hoarding of resources, that limit economic freedom and competition.
Then are those in the middle, the moderates, which are the actual liberals - that want to live without coercion and do not have incessant need to force others to support or affirm their own choices and behaviors. The left and the right like to co-op the term "liberal" to make themselves more appealing to growing number of independent moderates but you simply have to look at how they are using the term to find that they really mean is having the freedom to coerce others into their way of thinking and behaving.
A pessimistic view is that capitalists need freedom to operate, so they champion liberalism because it diminishes religious and governmental interference.
EDIT: I mean, I think that's a big part of how liberalism grew. I'd back off from describing it in conspiratorial terms.
Quoting frank
:100:
There is something right about this critique, and it gets at what I have called, "The 30,000 foot view." This goes back to my first thread on TPF, where I advocated for argument that is transparent and which exhibits vulnerabilities for others to engage. Ideally an argument or position should provide opportunities for an opponent to object and engage. Overly broad critiques are not altogether cut off from this possibility, but in fact what happens is that only opponents who have an extremely wide foundation of learnedness are able to properly engage broad critiques.
With that said, I don't think there is anything unusual or grievous about this OP. This strikes me as a TPF-wide issue.
In tandem from 4000BC Sumeria onward? If that's the case, no wonder we don't have a firm definition for the idea we're arguing about!
Historically, every conceivable form of governance and all of their opposing counterparts have been in effect somewhere for some period of time, alongside every conceivable economic and social organization. So, yes, human ideas exist in tandem, in time.
What, precisely are these [correct/myopic/misguided/duplicitous/ridiculous/laudable/damnable] core assumptions?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The fact that some philosophers declare people unfree for various reasons does not invalidate the good intentions of liberals who attempt to lessen the misery of those who don't know how to or are not allowed to choose what's good for them. That's not about consumption, that's about social justice.
Certain kinds of freedom are harmful to the individual and society. The constraints and punitive repression of theocracy don't replace harmful freedom with good, it simply makes the lack of choice less unpalatable with false promises.
Quoting Jamal
No, it wasn't disrespect, it was a desire for a clear idea what is being discussed under this wide, blurry heading. If there is no definition other than what American politicians hammered out, then I can't engage.
An eminently liberal idea: that capitalism is as old as civilization itself :lol:
Quoting Vera Mont
Yeah, it really now seems that it was.
I apologize. If it seems that way, my feeble attempt to present a bigger context was inadequate.
:cool: Crossed wires or something
I wasn't trying to say anything more than this observation:
In the historical sense, both profit-commerce and liberal ideas have been around since the dawn of civilization, so it's hardly surprising that both accompanied the British (French, Spanish and Portuguese) colonists to the Americas. By the the time Rousseau was expounding on the rights of man, colonialism, white supremacy and the privilege of the owner class was deeply embedded in western culture. (not so much in Native cultures - but they were not 'civilized') Liberal ideals were expressed but not enshrined in the constitution: they crept in, one by one, as amendments - against stiff opposition. The rift between conservative and liberal factions was inescapable from the first European ship landing.
Tim's piece doesn't much differentiate liberalism from capitalism. Outside the USA socialist policy has a greater standing and liberalism can be considered a counterpoint to capitalism, a way of constraining capitalist excess. Rawls, Nussbaum, Sen and so on can be read as offering a corrective to a particular fusion of liberalism and capitalism, dominant especially in the postwar United States. That fusion took liberty to mean market freedom and little else.
Tim does not make this differentiation, blurring liberalism and capitalism into one. The result is that all critiquesof consumerism, of commodified sex, of self-alienationget pinned on liberalism alone. Thats too easy.
Outside the USA liberalism has serves against capitalism, curbing its excesses, defend individual dignity, and secure public goods. Nussbaums capabilities theory, for instance, expands on this tradition. So does Rawls, who insists on distributive justice as a precondition of liberty. These are not afterthoughts. They are integral to their conception of the liberal project.
In that way the OP is somewhat parochial.
There's an excellent account of liberalism to be found in the work of the Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney, Alexander Lefebvre. Lefebvre shows how liberal ideas developed as a way of coordinating individual needs and wants, and how much of the general ethic underpinning our interpersonal relations is implicitly liberal. Liberalism is a practical ethic for life among equals. It's embedded in how we relate; in respect, consent, reciprocity. We live in liberal ways, often without noticing. Liberalism isnt just a political system or economic ideology. Its also a moral culturesomething ordinary, even beautiful, in how we deal with one another. Tims piece doesnt engage with this at all. His liberalism is faceless: pure abstraction, detached from lived experience.
@Jamal, the principles of this very forum are liberal.
Theres something quietly aristocratic in Tims writing. The lofty tone and heavy references are aimed at readers already in agreement. Event the chosen nom de plume... It gives the impression that liberalism is too ordinary, too flat, too widely shared to be worth much. But thats not a criticism of its failures, so much as of its popularity. Tim seems to want a world reserved for the few who can feel deeply and read Badiou. Thats not a real alternative to liberalism. Its a retreat.
Some of Alexander Lefebvre's ideas:
Are we all liberals at heart? (podcast)
Sure, many critiques see liberalism as spiritually thin. But Tim doesnt respond so much as revel in that thinness. In contrast, we have the example of Nussbaum, who gives liberalism depth without slipping into authoritarianism. Her capabilities approach is rich in human flourishingliberal, but not empty.
Tim wants more than pluralism. He wants a public affirmation of the good. But the presumption here is that we agree as to what is good. liberalism resists thatnot because its relativist, but because it rejects coercion. That refusal isnt decadence. Its a defense of freedom.
The charge that liberalism is ideology masquerading as neutrality misunderstands liberalism at its best. Rawls, Nussbaum, and others are aware of its historical and moral commitments. Thats why they build in checkspublic reason, overlapping consensus, plural foundations. Of course liberalism is an ideology - sing it from the battlements rather than pretend to neutrality.
Finally, and again, Tim conflates liberalism with capitalism. But thats a local confusion. Elsewherethink Lefebvreliberalism restrains the market rather than sanctifying it. If Tim wants a richer alternative, he has to name it. Gestures to Augustine and Han dont yet make a politics.
:100: :up:
Isn't there a tension between liberalism and classical philosophy, in that classical philosophy is concerned with the pursuit and cultivation of wisdomsomething that not everyone will possess, or even understand? (Isnt that why Karl Popper denounced Plato as an enemy of the Open Society?) And isnt that also why many defenders of classical wisdom traditions today tend to be politically conservativesometimes even reactionary?
David Loy, whom I quoted earlier, speaks of the "identity crisis" left in the wake of modernitys disenchantment. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed something similar when he argued that we have inherited fragments of moral languagelike rights, duty, and freedombut have lost the coherent framework that once underwrote them. In both cases, the issue isnt just psychological, but cultural: weve lost the shared vision of what it means to live well. But that's also an inevitable consequence of individualism, as in that framework, the individual conscience becomes the sole arbiter of value (something which itself was originally derived from Christian principles).
So - moral questions become matters of individual conscience, and the only shared basis for truth tends to be scientific analysis. Values tend to be internalised or subjectivized. But science, while enormously effective at explaining and predicting phenomena, cannot itself provide a normative framework. It tells us what is - at least in the sense validated by empirical observation - but not what ought to be (as David Hume so astutely observed.)
Secularism, as a political arrangement, is well-suited for managing pluralism and addressing practical concerns. But the deeper values implicit in liberalismrespect, consent, reciprocitywere originally grounded in religious and philosophical traditions, specifically Christian in nature. With the decline of those traditions, the ultimate grounding for those values is no longer widely accepted. As a result, secularism is often mistaken for a complete worldview, rather than what it truly is: a framework.
Thats not to dismiss the achievements of liberal modernity. But it does raise the question: what moral or metaphysical commitments must underlie a free and humane society, if it is to remain coherent and whole?
See also Does Reason Know what it is Missing?, a brief discussion of Habermas' late-life reconsideration of the role of religion in public life.
Is liberalism perfect, perhaps not, but as Vera Mont pointed out, any lack in a liberal society is a consequence of the vices of its citizenry, not a systemic failure of the liberal nature of that society.
As Banno said, what ought the alternative to liberalism be? Does a pluralistic society have an alternative available?
I think the objections that have been forwarded may be leveled against the culture or economic system, not liberalism. After all, cannnot the objections against industrialization or against the discontent toward capitalism, or against technocracy also remain prevalent in a nonliberal or facist regime?
What a great discussion. I think I said that about the last one too. While reading it I said to myself "So this is what philosophy is supposed to be like." I can't begin to give the kind of in-depth treatment the other participants have, but I do have some thoughts, many or all of which have been commented on by others here.
As I see it, the minimum requirements of a just society, especially one in a world as crowded and bounded as ours is today, include the following - a decent, secure life with adequate housing, nutrition, education, medical care, and opportunities for self-expression. A safe place for our children. You've added to that, if I may over-simplify, an obligation to provide a place for the sacred, virtue, and meaning. I don't disagree with that at all. I feel it myself. My thoughts...
Here's a quote from C.S. Lewis I like.
It's a cliche I guess, but the pre-modern, pre-liberal world was a place of widespread war, empire-building, slavery, genocide, mass-murder of non-combatants, oppression, subjugation... Was there any colonialism worse than the Mongol invasion of western Asia and Europe. Of course there have been many modern examples of the same kinds of things. There was never a golden age of the sacred and traditional.
I'll start with this:
Am I right in assuming this is an expression of liberal values? Yes, I recognize its hypocrisy. Although it may seem like it, it is not a call for free expression "founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic." Instead, it is a statement of obligation to treat all people equally. Here, equality doesn't mean everyone is treated the same. It means everyone is endowed with the same rights.
It seems to me that, short of nuclear war, we are stuck with the modern or post-modern world we have now or whatever comes next. How can we bring more of a sense of the sacred into this world as it is?
No, for most of us, kindness - what we are calling altruism here - is not self-centered. It is an expression of compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling. It comes from our hearts.
No, a focus on personal morality is not something modern. This is from Chuang Tzu, written about 2,300 years ago.
There's certainly more to say, but that's enough.
Where?
Anyway, Christianity is a latecomer in civilization. Very little in it is original. Previous organized religions were based on hierarchy and obedience. So was Christianity, once the pesky Radical had been killed and mythologized and the hierarchy of priests and kings (by divine right) organized it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing metaphysical is required. What do social animals need? How can a society of animals get the maximum portion of what they need with a minimum of suffering? The moral commitment is the same as in Christianity: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you, and communism: To each according to need from each according to ability. Neither can be achieved, or even approached, in the overpopulated, god-ridden, money-driven, propagandized societies of today. All liberals can do is attempt to mitigate the worst outcomes. In some countries they do fairly well; in others, they fail, get knocked on their keesters, get up and try again. And again, and again....
A poignant illustration of the way in which popular Darwinism has given us something to live down to.
From where? Have all of Jesus' sheep been adequately fed? Are they all safe and warm? Once that's done, you can live up to the next thing.
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to ones surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirits antagonism to natureeven as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including manfrequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of mans continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the useless spiritual, and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity.
The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.[/quote]
:fire: :up:
That sort of disambiguation is helpful, given how nebulous the term "liberalism" can be. Some people associate everything they love with liberalism, and others associate everything they hate with liberalism. The first group argues for liberalism by arguing for something they love; the second group argues against liberalism by arguing against something they hate; and no one seems to be talking about the same thing.
It doesn't say "enterprise," it says "free enterprise" (i.e. a form or aspect of capitalism). Your own definition disagrees with you, and you fudged it by omitting the word "free."
Quoting Cambridge Dictionary
Yes, I've noticed, but isn't it just that in North America liberalism commonly, in popular discourse, refers to social/social justice liberalism, described in the "New Liberalism" section of the SEP article?
(Those who associate social liberalism with the political Left might see these usages as completely divergent, but I think there's continuity enough that continuing to group them under the liberal banner makes sense)
Yes, I'm not anti-liberal simpliciter. I'm an immanent liberal-sceptic.
:wink:
As should we all be.
But babes and bathwater. Liberalism is in the end a solution to the problem of how we get on without hitting each other. And again, what alternative is on offer?
Sure, you can buy into the elitism if you like. But lets be honestwho exactly counts as the wise? I was at a VAD (Voluntary Assisted Dying) forum today where a prominent academic summed up the anti-VAD stance as: I wouldnt do it, so you cant either. Are they the wise? Is that wisdom? Are you comfortable having "the wise" tell you what you can and can't do? With them enforcing their view through state-sanctioned violence? If classical philosophy leads us there, maybe we should be wary of where it's pointing.
But I do not think that is where "classical philosophy" does point - as if "classical philosophy" were monolithic. Theres more in the tradition than just Plato and his philosopher-kings. There are also the the Epicureans, the Stoics, the sceptics. Classical thought doesnt settle the questionit opens it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Banno
Agree. But it also emphatically does not proclaim that every philosophical opinion is of equal worth, on the basis that somebody thinks so.
Where this is pointing, for me, is that secular culture does indeed provide an optimal framework for today's culture. As Lefevbre says, and I enjoyed that lecture. But it is only a framework, and many of its assumed values - many of which most of us take for granted - need to be questioned.
Incidentally - just what is the etymology of 'aristos'?
// He mentions Pierre Hadot (not by name, but that's who he means)! He's won me over. //
That's for sure.
Quoting Banno
I think you have it exactly backwards here. In Europe liberalism is more about less government intervention, more market freedom, less welfare state etc etc... a bit like the libertarians in the US but less extreme. Typically they find themselves in opposition to and to the right of Christian- and Social-democrats who do favour a larger role for the state.
US 'liberals' on the other hand are typically the party that favours more government intervention, as opposed to the Republicans and Libertarians. They have more in common with Social-democrats in Europe, but less social or less to the left.
Historically liberalism was the ideology of the capitalists class, of the bourgeoisie who wanted to take power from the aristocracy and the clergy... and it seems they have largely succeeded as the aristocracy and the clergy have very little power left in the West.
Liberalism has been mainly about "freedom from", whereas a more sensible way to look at freedom is as "freedom to" as Timothy Snyder argues is his book 'On freedom'.
Liberalism does not just entail economic freedom but also personal freedom. If the capitalist champions freedom from religion and government for the purpose of making money but is then on the side of religion when comes to gay marriage, then they aren't really liberals, are they?
Democrats and Republicans hold both liberal and authoritarian views depending on the issue. The Libertarian is the only one that holds liberal positions on most, if not all, issues. That's the difference.
So if you hold a liberal position on one issue but not others, please do not call yourself "liberal". You would be a Democrat or Republbican, not liberal.
I didn't think to clarify "liberalism." Maybe because I was thinking more in terms of contemporary economics and political science instead of political philosophy. When Fukuyama says "modern liberal states," for instance, he means wealthy market economies with welfare states and representative government (i.e. all current developed states). When Deneen speaks of "liberalism" in his "Why Liberalism Failed?" he means all developed states and the globalized economy they oversee.
The terms are not synonymous, of course, because you can have various degrees of market liberalization without political liberalization, and because political philosophy has an older use for the term "liberalism," but they are also not wholly different things because they have merged into a single global force through globalization. The apologists for contemporary liberalism I had in mind (e.g. Friedman, Fukuyama) are generally champions of the status quo of globalization, generally only recommending tweaks in terms of regulation, distribution or consumption, etc. I don't think this makes them outliers though. Social Democratic parties, the far reaches of the still "mainstream" left and right, generally hold to the core convictions of modern liberalism, which includes a welfare state (of varying size of course), market economy, and a certain vision of education and freedom.
I would just point out that every modern liberal state also has a capitalist, market economy. This holds historically as well. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how system could be "liberal" without a market economy. For instance, no communist states politically liberalized without also switching to a market economy as part of the process, and this seems true for other types of authoritarianism too. Market economies do not imply political liberalization, but political liberalization seems to historically have always involved market liberalization, and market liberalization is wed to political liberalization because of the particular vision of freedom and human nature that undergirds liberalism.
So in response to: "that's not liberalism's problem, it's consumerism, capitalism, secularism, individualism, etc." I would reply, "give me one example where the two don't go together?"
Perhaps I have missed one, but if all people can point to is unimplemented theory then I would chalk such an objection into the same bucket as "real communism as never been tried." Maybe that's the objection? "Real liberalism has never been tried." But it certainly seems to have been tried, so if it always fails and degenerates into consumerism, isn't that open to critique?
Anyhow, I think it's sort of moot point because liberalism is now very much a global order due to globalization. A good critique of liberalism in its own terms is that it didn't so much improve things for the lower classes as cause countries to export their lower classes abroad. And can anyone name one liberal state that hasn't taken advantage of this "race to the bottom," where a great deal of goods aren't produced by people in the developing world under extremely poor standards?
As I wrote earlier, liberalism only looks so good under the rubric of Rawls' veil of ignorance because part of the calculus here is that the peasants laboring under the medieval nobility, or the tenant farmers who lived contemporaneously with Jane Austen's landed gentry are considered "part of that elite's society," whereas, through a sort of neat accounting trick, we have decided that the slaves mining metals for Westerner's phones, the child laborer who sewed their clothes in a sweltering Dhaka factory, or the migrant workers who picked their food out in the fields, are each not "part of the Westerner's society." Hence, we might think that are least some of the claims about "radical improvements for even the poorest" play too much off the accidents of national borders, and the way in which globalization has simply allowed modern liberal states to export most of its lower classes safely to the other side of national borders. Afterall, more people live as slaves today than in any prior epoch, and a great deal more in conditions that might be fairly deemed "wage slavery." Likewise, anyone who prioritizes animal well-being to any significant degree can hardly look at modern agriculture as much more than "hell on Earth."
That's fair, I didn't even write it as an OP, and I didn't really write it to make it clear that my interest was primarily not in "all critiques of liberalism," but rather the advocates of liberalism's general tendency to be blind to critiques that question whether or not liberalism's definition of freedom is adequate (as opposed to critiques that call into question whether or not liberalism delivers on freedom as liberalism itself defines freedom; the second sort of critique essentially accepts the premises of liberalism).
Many of the critiques of liberalism put forth by posters in this thread are of the latter sort. That doesn't mean they are not good critiques, just that they are not what I was thinking of.
So, I can make it more concrete.
Say we have a privileged, wealthy guy with a "good family" who cares for him. He has lots of opportunities. And he follows the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."
He does this. No extraordinary evil befalls him. He has no extraordinary vices. Maybe he drinks or smokes pot a bit too much, or plays too many video games, or has a porn habit, or cannot get a girlfriend, or cannot keep to just one. Maybe not. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And he's miserable. He's prime bait for radical ideologies of one sort of another precisely because he "did everything he was told," and is miserable. This isn't an uncommon phenomena. That's sort of the recruiting mantra of radicals on the right and left, although it certainly helps if people struggle in the labor market or are "overeducated." We could imagine this sort of thing playing out across many gradations. It can even happen to the ultra wealthy (perhaps particularly to the ultra wealthy).
Here is Han's point: in the autoexploitative context of modern liberalism, this man's unhappiness is a personal failure. The self is a project, and it's happiness is a goal that has to be achieved as an accomplishment.
And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure?
I am not saying society has a responsibility to make each individual happy. I am saying though that the goal should be a common good, and the goal of education should probably be "to help people live happy, virtuous, flourishing lives." But I don't think that's the goal of education under liberalism. It is, in theory: "enabling people to do what they want." These aren't the same thing (and in practice, the goal is often more: "supplying the labor force with workers and providing daycare so that children can be raised by strangers for greater economies of scale so that we get economic growth).
Deneen's critique, which I agree with in part, is that self-government at the social level requires self-government at the individual level. Liberalism doesn't foster the latter. Indeed, it does the opposite because of the way it interacts with capitalism and consumerism. But Deneen's point is that this isn't a bug. This is liberalism molding man into the very anthropology that it assumes for man, the disconnected individual of liberalism's pre-historical fantasy of the "state of nature." And I think there is a lot of overlap between what he identifies and Han's "achievement society."
Outside the US all the same complaints exist. Indeed, the situation re housing and long term underemployment is often considerably worse. I don't think you can just chalk it up to "one side of partisan politics just needs to win more." If the "wrong side" keeps winning, that's also a failure. All that sort of narrative leads to is the sort of moralizing manichean narratives you can already find in this thread (e.g. "the problem is the forces of evil keep corrupting things.)
As I said in the thread on the NHS:
The problems over migration are particularly a failure of liberalism anthropology in that the entire idea of "replacement migration" assumes a view of humanity as atomized plug and play consumers/laborers.
Good read, Tim.
Im against the idea that liberalism is the problem because I do not believe liberalism has really taken off in the first place. I believe that when the proponents of an ideology completely violate the root word of that ideology, they are merely nominal liberals, or otherwise not liberal. So with that I get to side-step the common criticisms of liberalism. Rather, the problem of liberalism is that it is not liberal, and it never was. It is, and always has been, illiberal. We saw this most recently and clearly during the previous pandemic, how quickly a self-proclaimed free country can turn into a totalitarian hellscape. But weve seen it in times of war or other moments where its reign is threatened by disorder and conflict or even contrary opinion.
The life of every individual who occupies space in a self-proclaimed liberal country is highly regulated from birth until death, from cradle until grave. I would argue that liberalisms discontents are unhappy with what the individual has become with his decreasing margin of existence.
iIlliberalism has always been the dominant ideology. Any rare inroad to freedom was the mere concession of a far mightier and dominant love of manorial order that has reigned since the time of Rome and beyond. Even the communist and fascist revolutionaries built republics, and on the ruins of what was there before. Mixed constitutions, the rule of positive law, federal judiciaries, taxation, the political oligarchy we like to call representative democracy, clamoring for state rights rather than natural onesthis is not the project of liberalism and never has been.
And how are people to know or trust that what they want is what will lead to happy good lives, when liberalism teaches that only gray or illusory or socially imposed lines are all that can define anything we might want or pursue? Liberalism is a good method to achieve a goal, but useless as a goal in itself.
Liberalism, in its broadest sense, since the enlightenment, is the reification of experimentation as an end in itself. There is no single, happy goal, or truth, or conclusion to be drawn, as the coup that toppled religion, metaphysics, and kings was quite thorough. Anything institutional, other than liberalism itself, is oppressive. But liberalism itself is a method, a system of due process, a scientific method, devoid of any actual content or judgment of goodness or truth or value. Instead of admitting there is nothing left to progress towards, liberalism teaches that the excitement and adventurousness one feels in putting a hypothesis to experiment is the best there is for mankind and should be satisfying enough. The thrill of discovery is the goal, but once something is discovered, it too must be taken down, deconstructed, to make room for more "discovery." Such as the eternal recurrence of the same arguments against truth and goodness and virtue.
And then, hundreds of years go by with liberals leading the charge, but today, people still wonder whether they are free. Nothing is left to grab onto and build a freedom. Now we see that the wisdom of liberalism could only take us so far. Now, we must recover (rediscover) something permanent, something conclusive, something objective about goodness and beauty and humankind.
I sound anachronistic, to the myopic. Interesting post brother.
Didn't Leibniz believe in his work Theodicy that we were living in the best of all worlds? Start of the 18th Century wouldn't feel so optimal to us. Well, hopefully future generations 300 years from now feel the same way of our time compared to theirs.
It's easy to show what is wrong. The hard part is what to do about it. We seem to fall to the "I can fix it"-leader.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Whoever claimed that liberalism was a goal in itself? Certainly not those people of faith who cherish the
ethical goals their Judaism, Christianity or Buddhism imparts within the umbrella of the liberalism they espouse. Scratch beneath the surface of this thread on liberal myopia and its just another debate concerning which underlying philosophical worldview one prefers. Myopia isnt unique to liberalism. It built into the normative commitments any political or philosophical view expresses. So youre unhappy with liberalism? Name some alternative political thinkers and approaches you prefer.
:up:
Simpson has a somewhat different angle. Here is a part of Simpson's early sketch:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3
Politically, Simpson sees Liberalism as bound up with the State in a way that precedes its capitalistic or democratic character:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3-4
He goes on to distinguish Hobbesian liberalism from Lockean liberalism, where the latter seeks to impose restraints on the state in a way that the former does not. He notes that "practical men of power" tend towards Hobbesian liberalism, and thus in practice liberalism always tends in the direction of a totalizing state.
This is only one aspect of Simpson's analysis, but from this it is easy to see how liberalism is inimical to freedom. For Aristotle and the ancients a monopoly of coercion is a tyranny, plain and simple. This is also why, at a deep philosophical level, the common liberal opposition to the right to bear arms in the second amendment to the United States' constitution is a bit bewildering. For Aristotle, the liberal complaint that the U.S. denies a full monopoly of coercion to the state would be seen as a kind of blinkered brainwashing of the demos.
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Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's fair, and I think it's an important critique.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, I think that's a worthy critique.
I'm not. I like thinking for myself. I like knowing that class distinction is accidental and unimportant. I like democracy.
Just not at the expense of metaphysics, of universal truth. I need these to think for myself. Universal truth and goodness is what prove there never was such a thing as a divine right of kings.
I don't believe mankind can be his own salvation, just that mankind can contribute to and participate in it. So liberalism has wisdom, but not enough. That's why I say it is a method. It has no content or goal defined. Just amorphous "progress". I don't see any progress unless we have an ideal and goal defined towards which we can progress. Once you try to define goals and ends and ideals, you need metaphysics, institutionalizable systems, and definitions of truth and beauty and goodness.
I left it out of the postscript. Enterprise can be free without exploitation; enterprise can be free without relying on debt: value for value rather than profit and loss. Capitalism absolutely requires debt and exploitation. Capitalist economies allow freedom for a few by constraining many. Their governments protect the public precisely to the degree to which those governments are liberal.
A slogan is not a fact.
Seems there are as many definitions and descriptions of liberalism, liberal ideals, policy, governance and activism as there are people to do the describing. Nor do we all read the same history books, attribute the same features of a modern society to the same formative processes, or the same characteristics to a person identified as liberal.
This makes identification of the issues difficult and agreeing on alternatives impossible.
But you are relying on slogans yourself. This is your argument:
1. Free enterprise does not necessarily involve exploitation
2. Capitalism necessarily involves exploitation
3. Therefore, free enterprise is not capitalistic
#2 is the sort of slogan I might find on a bumper sticker. It seems to me that if a Marxist thinks capitalism is problematic because of the right to private property, then they will object to free enterprise for just the same reason. There are many, many such overlaps between the concepts of free enterprise and capitalism, to the point that for most purposes they are irretrievably wed. The layman does not know the difference at all.
This is of course true, but it's a matter of degree. A century or so ago, when liberalism faced actual opponents in the form of reactionary monarchism, fascism, communism, and a Church that had not yet decided to embrace modernity, there was (as can be seen from texts from that era), a much larger recognition that liberalism's view of freedom and human flourishing was not the only possible view.
That is far less the case today. All ideologies might become translucent to some degree, but late-stage capitalist, globalized liberalism has made itself increasingly [I]transparent[/I], even as it also makes itself all encompassing by backwards projecting its norms across the whole of human history, and across the breadth of the human experience. One finds the language of the atomized economic actor, the goal-driven consumer, even in the language of romantic relationships these days. Be it in guides on attracting "high value males," and not being a "pick-me," for women, or the "attraction through competition," and "peacocking" schemes of male-oriented romance advice writers, homo economicus has replaced homo sapiens. And this is true now even in the realm of parent-child relations. So too, it holds in the spiritual realm, as churches strive to "compete," consumers "church shop," and Evangelicals come to describe evangelicalism methodologies like "Disciple Bible Study" in the language of mass marketing campaigns.
The intrusion of homo economicus into the realm of romance is particularly revealing because it is very often wed to the (often spurious) language of evolutionary psychology. Through this, it pretends to describing not just "dating in the age of late-capitalism and Tinder," but human nature itself, projecting the image of homo economicus onto homo sapiens.
And how can man turn to the spirituality of the erotic ascent if he has been taughthas been indoctrinated intothe belief that Eros is fundamentally a matter of acquisition and consumption, a laying claim to a commodity (a commodity that "dimishes when shared," and so which sets up a dialectical of competition)? How can Eros or Reason be transcendent and ecstatic when both become saturated in the language of the self (the "Inferno of the Same")? They can't.
That is perhaps the problem, not just the myopia, but it's pairing with a truly totalitarian tendency, one that just happens to be joined to a vision of freedom that bottoms out in irrational, inchoate impulse. (Look, liberalism literally lashes me to alliteration in its inescapably inundating inferno of the identical! Help!)
"Free enterprise" has indeed become synonymous with "capitalism." I think that's one of the ways in which liberalism and capitalism can make themselves transparent. There has always been enterprise, this "there has always been capitalism."
But liberalism makes a certain sort of argument for private property and free enterprise. It isn't Aristotle's argument, nor is it the argument of the Christian tradition (which was fairly divided on the issue, with Franciscians even being burnt at the stake over the issue of if Christ and the Apostles owned property). I'd say a defining feature of "classical liberalism" (which current globalized liberalism has inherited), is a very particular sort of justification for free enterprise and private property that relies on its anthropology (i.e. the rational egoist actor who is not defined as a social/political animal). This is particularly true in the Anglo tradition.
I don't think all of this tradition is all bad. I think Hegel's use of Adam Smith identifies some valid ways in which markets can help construct identity and allow for participation in a common good (e.g. "a rising tide [will tend towards] lifting all boats.") But I also think the anthropology is extremely deficient, and this manifests itself in a big way when it becomes totalizing, particularly vis-á-vis the way in which participation in common goods is understood (i.e. in terms of individualized benefit, a sort of reductionism).
(If Hegel is a liberal. I've seen him described as the grandfather of communism, fascism, and modern liberalism, and these are all apt labels to some degree).
I can see your point here (and Han's) but isn't it the case that liberalism in this context is not as significant the marketisation of everything and everyone - the West is in the business of churning out good capitalists who can live the dream of individual transformation though education, qualifications, enhanced earning power, spending and then, of course, there's the children we set upon the same path.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Isnt human dissatisfaction and unhappiness inherent to our condition, rather than simply the product of the particular culture we come from? Even in societies with radically different values and social structures, people still grapple with restlessness, longing, and the sense that something essential is missing. Might this not be something to do with our nature? In the contemporary West we have given people permission to rebel and drop out since the 1950's - is it any wonder many people seem primed to do this as an almost ritualistic response to their lives? The idea that we are not authentic, not good enough, and not happy enough - a familiar trope in Christian Evangelical thought - and that we might become better, happier, and more authentic through a radical shift in belief or practice, seems to serve as a defining narrative of our time.
Liberalism, in this account, isnt hollowits ethical. Its institutions arent designed to satisfy appetite, but to manage disagreement without violence. Especially when people disagree about what is good.
Lefebvre is clear: liberalism doesnt pretend to be metaphysically deep. What it offers instead is an ethic of mutual forbearance. Thats not nothing. Its how we live together without killing each other.
So yesliberal states often coexist with exploitative global markets. But thats a reason to reform markets, not discard liberalism. If you think liberalism inevitably slides into consumerism or wage slavery, you need to show how the institutions must produce those effects. Not just that they sometimes do.
Lefebvres point is that liberalisms value is not in what it promises about markets, but in the kind of interpersonal ethic it encodes. If we care about mutual respect, basic fairness, and the protection of difference, then liberalism is worth defendingeven if capitalism isnt.
Nussbaums capabilities approach picks up on this and gives it substance. She argues that a liberal society must guarantee the conditions for real human flourishing, not just negative freedom or consumer choice. We might well work towards the development of central human capabilities like health, education, emotional life, and political voice. Its liberalism with a richer telos, grounded in dignity rather than market logic.
Yes, the problems are real. But they dont all trace back to liberalism. The fact they appear across liberal states with wildly different politics suggests something deeperlike global capital, demographic shifts, or decades of bipartisan neoliberal consensus.
Lefebvre helps here. Liberalism isnt just an economic orderits a moral anthropology. It treats people as plural and self-directing, not as interchangeable units of labour. If theres a vision of humans as plug and play, its from capital, not liberalism.
Same goes for the capabilities approach. Its not just about GDPits about real freedoms: to think, move, speak, love. If those arent being secured, thats a failure of implementation, not a failure of liberalism.
And the question remains: what is the alternative you are offering?
Right. I watched his lecture, thought it very good, and he's a charismatic speaker. In Alexander Lefebvres reading, liberalism is not merely a set of institutions, but a way of lifean ethos shaped by habits of mutual regard, consent, and self-restraint. But he also echoes the spirit of Pierre Hadots philosophy: that true ethical traditions are not reducible to doctrines, but are lived practices ( a point he makes in the Q&A, where he alludes to Hadot without naming him). Seems to me that he reaches beyond procedural logic to engage questions of meaning, virtue, and shared life in a way that is resonant with liberalism's ancient roots (hence his reference to the ancient sources of liberalis in the beginning of his lecture.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The real problem is not liberalism but materialism.
It's interesting that you continue to speak about the Original Poster in the third person as you face your audience. That sort of tactic reads a lot like propaganda, or advertising. Maybe it would be better if we actually addressed the people we disagree with, instead of giving speeches about them.
And I liked that Hadot echo tooquiet, but clear. Ethics as practice, not rulebook. Thats why the capabilities approach fits so well here: its not just about rights or choices, but cultivating the real power to live well. Not a retreat from meaning, but a wager that meaning can be plural.
And still, what is the alternative?
Quoting Leontiskos
More an artefact of the forum's referencing system. Clicking on the reply button places the reply in the third person. It's interesting that you wish to comment on my style rather than the content of my posts. A trivial issue.
The moral vision that underwrote modern liberalismits emphasis on human dignity, conscience, rights, and responsibilitydid not arise in a vacuum. Thinkers like Locke, Mill, and even Jefferson operated within a cultural milieu deeply shaped by Christianity. While they may have sought to separate church and state - which itself was shaped by the desire for religious freedom - they operated within the moral architecture that Christianity provided: the belief in the sanctity of the individual, the imperative of conscience, the notion of moral equality before the law.
But as the religious roots of these values have withered, liberalism has increasingly defaulted toward scientific materialisma worldview that is often indifferent or even hostile to spiritual identity. This shift has led to a flattening of the human image: from moral agent to biological organism. We see that reflected in the many comments to the effect that 'we're just animals'. It allows us to dodge the existential questions that only humans can ask.
This is not necessarily a call to return to pre-modern religious systems, but it is a call to grapple seriously with the existential and moral questions that Christian thought, at its best, sought to answer. Without a shared vision of what it means to live wellwithout telosits moral language becomes increasingly hollow.
No, it doesn't. Go read any post on TPF. 99.9% of them engage the person they are responding to, rather than talking about them in the third person.
I never said, or implied that it did. That would be confusing a Libertarian with an Anarchist. A good Libertarian understands that doing whatever one wants stops where what one is doing infringes upon the liberties of another.
And if that sounds unsatisfyingwhats the alternative? Who decides what the good is, and what happens to those who dont agree? Theres a long history there, and not a happy one.
A shared vision is not an authoritarian religious regime. Your problem is the reflexive rejection of anything you identify as religion (which covers a lot!) Your aversion to perceived dogma becomes a dogma in its own right.
Consider what LeFevbre says in the passage on Kierkegaard. He says Kierkegaard criticized 'pretend Christians' who professed allegiance to the Church but didn't walk the walk. He then goes on to say that many who profess liberalism are 'pretend liberals' in the same vein, asking, what would it really take to realise truly liberal values? And the answer to that turns out to be rather a spiritual discipline. LeFevbre says:
This is his reference to Hadot that I mentioned. And if you peruse the IEP entry on Hadot, you will encounter the following paragraph, under the heading Askesis of Desire:
My bolds. I also note, LeFevbre has written a lot on Bergson (and I will add that to my list.) Was Bergson a religious philosopher? Was Hadot? Neither of them were, but the scope of their philosophy was sufficiently broad to address metaphysical questions - of identity, nature of being, place of man in the cosmos, and so on.
Me, I think that is what 'liberal culture' is crying out for. Hence the audience for books on stoicism, mindfulness, and so on. SO maybe the alternative we're looking for, is a liberal political system that does not take neo-darwinian materialism for granted as its default metaphysics.
:clap: :fire:
I'm not assuming it is. I'm not assuming anything about a shared vision, but asking - who decides what our shared vision is to be? And what happens to those who dissent?
It's not what we say that is important, so much as what we do. It's not we believe that counts, but how we behave. Thats where liberalism earns its keep. It doesnt require us to agree on first principles, only to act in ways that let others live according to theirs.
You sure sound like you do. And again, you're declaring it a matter of opinion.
And what we do is informed by what we believe. Do you think if murderers really believed that they would suffer in hell for acts of violence, that they would commit them? The belief that belief doesn't matter is itself a kind of nihilism.
Yes, and we could apply this to liberalism itself.
What is often meant superficially by liberalism is something like, "A tolerance for different ideas." For such a person this is a dogma of liberalism. But the interesting thing about a dogma is that it isn't self-supporting. The liberal wants to retain that dogma, but even if we ignore the paradox of a toleration dogma, they have no way to support the dogma. It is a free-floating, untethered norm.
That dogma in fact arises out of the Judeo-Christian premise that every human being is created in the image of God. This was an anthropological premise which logically grounded what has now become the liberal dogma. The liberal wants to retain the dogma while dispensing with the Judeo-Christian support.
Note too that the liberal is incapable of substituting a different support-premise in place of the Judeo-Christian premise. This is because to do so would be anti-liberal. It would be to impose a truth on the society, in this case for the sake of the liberal dogma. Thus as the liberal state moves away from its founding religion and culture, the dogmas which once had support are now left hanging in midair, ready to collapse. "Honor your father and mother, and you will have a long life in the land." Liberalism's current demise is seen by many as a result of failing to honor that which nourished it, of cutting off the branch on which it sits. Hence:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you think that all murderers necessarily think of themselves as murderers rather than, for instance, as committing acts that according to their moral compass was justified? By the same token, are not lawful forms of punitive justice acts of violence? Do you think the enforcers of such acts can be convinced they will suffer in hell for them?
Therefore the support of free enterprise is not necessarily the support of capitalism.
Quoting Leontiskos
You might. Is it therefore not factual?
Never mind: the words don't really mean anything.
I really like Hadot. His "Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates of Foucault" is quite good, although I do think he misses some of the important ways the Christian tradition of late antiquity differs from the Pagan. It's an area that surprisingly barren, although I did enjoy Niki Kasumi Clements' "Signs of the Ascetic Self," on St. John Cassian. It's very much from a post-modern perspective, and that causes some things to come through a bit strange (it also moralizes quite a bit, making excuses for violations of contemporary liberal norms, which sort of gets to my OP). But that also makes it novel and pretty neat.
And then there is Michael Champion's book on St. Dorotheus of Gaza, which really gets into the central role of ascetical practice and spiritual exercises in both the Pagan and Christian education of late-antiquity (an element of education that has been virtually eliminated, but still exists in a very tailored form in military training or in outdoor education programs).
Like I said, I'd see more merit in separating the terms if there were a single example where they don't go together. There isn't. That there are theoretical works that make a political philosophy look appealing doesn't say much. The same is true for communism, fascism, etc. It's the old "real communism hasn't been tried with any true Scotsman," thing. I think there are fairly straightforward ways where liberalism connects to capitalism and consumerismthe two haven't developed together by accident. That Eastern Europe experienced them all as a package deal with political liberalization is one example.
Nussbaum has some good ideas, but to the extent that developing citizen's positive capabilities for reflexive freedom becomes a major focus of education, it would seem to be moving away from liberalism, or at least liberalism as commonly practiced and the anthropology that undergirds it. At least, given the anthropology of Deneen, Augustine, Plato, etc. you cannot develop people's capacity for self-determination and self-governance and maintain a commitment to being neutral on "the good life." It takes a certain sort of anthropology (the one that has dominated liberalism), to say "all that people need to be free is the option and resources to become so," i.e., that the development of virtue can be promoted while taking no positive position on virtue. It's an extremely optimistic anthropology in this respect (dismal in others).
At any rate, my point, which was not "liberalism is bad," was about proponents of the current liberal system (as it actually exists)'s incapacity to countenance that rejections of liberalism and it's vision of human freedom could be anything but demands for authoritarianism (which this thread has borne out to some extent). People criticize the hyperbolic liberal state, and then their strangely accused on wanting a totalitarian autocracy.
[Quote] Its bet is that we can coexist without agreeing on ultimate ends. That isnt moral emptiness; its a kind of modesty. [/Quote]
Is it that modest? It still requires the claim that all its competitors are wrong. Suppose there is an objectively " better way." If there is, then obviously liberalism is not ideal. Indeed, depending on how people tend to orient themselves under liberalism, it might be extremely far from ideal. If the liberal is [I]just a skeptic[/I] then this is a possibility. Hence, it needs to at least involve positive claims about what it thinks opponents cannot know.
Yet as you said, it is a doctrine. It does positively indoctrinate. So it doesn't act like a skeptical thesis that is unsure of itself. It is very active in the defense of its system and has aggressively sought to export it, or even force it on other countries. And it enforces its ideals on organizations within the liberal nation state as well.
And yes, of course belief matters. But liberalism puts its emphasis on conducton how we live together in spite of differing beliefs. It doesnt deny that beliefs shape action; it just refuses to make one worldview the price of admission.
Yep.
I understand your point, but just because liberalism and capitalism often align doesnt mean they must always go together. Historical exampleslike the welfare states of Scandinaviashow that liberalism can exist without full market-driven capitalism. The connection isnt inevitable, even if it's often the case.
On Nussbaum, liberalism isnt about abandoning valuesits about letting people shape their own lives. Its not about imposing a singular vision but creating the conditions for personal freedom.
Liberalism doesn't claim that competitors are "wrong"; it simply operates differently. Unlike authoritarian systems that enforce a single vision of the good life, liberalism allows diverse views to coexist. It doesn't impose a specific moral framework but creates conditions for individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good, emphasizing freedom and pluralism. Its not about rejecting other ways of life, but enabling them to flourish alongside each other.
Liberalism isn't perfectno system isbut it might be preferable to the alternatives, which have yet to be clearly articulated in this discussion. Its flaws are evident, but it offers the most inclusive space for diversity and individual freedom, avoiding the coercion that accompanies more rigid ideologies. Without a viable alternative on the table, liberalism provides the best framework for coexistence and self-determination.
Dictatorship
The dictatorship of a capitalist, even better!
All very difficult questions, of course. But the point was rather that beliefs can't just be brushed off as personal matters. In fact that privatisation or subjectivisation of beliefs is very much a consequence of the historical dynamics of Western culture (which is explored in the David Loy essay I mentioned.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I had the impression that Hadot sees Christianity as having appropriated the spiritual practices of 'pagan' philosophy and redirected them into a theological frameworkultimately subordinating philosophy to dogma. While Hadot respects many Christian thinkers, he is critical of the loss of philosophys independent role as a transformative way of life with its own internal plurality. (I think that is due to a kind of conflict between reason and faith, which the orthodox and Catholic traditions manage to reconcile (or believe they do), but which emerges again with Luther and reformed theology.)
Quoting Leontiskos
Thats precisely the point Ive been laboring. The original Christian visionthat salvation through Christ was open to all who believedcarried within it a revolutionary anthropology: that every human being is made in the image of God, and thus bears a sacred dignity. This principle laid the groundwork for later developments in human rights and liberal individualism.
But modern liberalism, particularly in its more recent identity-based forms, wants to retain the moral affirmation of each individuals worth without the spiritual or metaphysical justification that originally gave it weight. What we end up with is the form of moral dignity, but cut off from the demanding ethical path that once accompanied itself-abnegation, service, humility. It becomes, in a sense, dignity without discipline.
In this vacuum, conscience becomes sacrosanct, but no longer oriented toward anything higher than the self: nihil ultra ego. (Which incidentally gives the lie to Alexander LeFevbre's idea that liberalism is the source of the soul. Belief in the soul was inherited from Christian Platonism: liberal political philosophy was not the source of that belief.)
Quoting Banno
I think your view is quite sound, but let's also consider the historical context. Recall the religious conflicts that wracked much of European history, the religious wars and bloodshed. Learned men and women could be banished or excommunicated for expressing wrong opinions. I think that has left a deep shadow in modern culture and society. The founding Charter of the Royal College explicitly prohibts 'discussion of metaphysik' as that was the 'province of Churchmen'. This has created a kind of unspoken taboo around spiritual matters. That's why I frequently refer to Nagel's essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.
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Quoting Banno
Small-scale capitalism in conjunction with something like Social Democratic politics I was reading up on that a few years back but kind of lost the thread (bought The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel but never read it before misplacing it). It's still liberalism, but no longer harnessed to the military-industrial state and corporatism. Absolutely pie in the sky of course, but why not name it.
Yep, and it's also pretty potent in Judaism, for example in their focus on hospitality.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, that's really well said. :up:
It also occasions some of the recent discussion on what dignity is even supposed to mean in a secular context. Alasdair MacIntyre was one of the recent initiators of this debate.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and remember too that Hadot was ordained a Catholic priest but left the priesthood when he married. He probably also left Catholicism, but I don't know that for sure. So he is familiar with the Christian tradition and moved from that starting point towards the philosophical communities of antiquity. Or rather, towards a study of them, since they no longer exist as functioning communities in the concrete way they once did. I think you are generally right that he is trying to open up and renew a sense of philosophical praxis, which he sees to be lacking.
(I am not gainsaying Count Timothy's claim that he misses a transition in late antiquity. That could be true at the same time.)
This attitude is why it's failing. Leontiskos (and, in my view, the OP) makes the point very well.
Pretending that you're "right" and it must be something else is the single biggest driver of being a dick, failing and not getting better at things.
Liberalism suffers all three, in the modern world. That doesn't mean the principle is hollow or unhelpful. It means the ideology exemplified by Vera's post and much of OPs explication is what's being criticised. It's possible Banno made that mistake too, but I've not read past this first page so ...
I was actually making an empirical observation. Is it being beaten down? Perhaps, much like when the aging lion can no longer defend his territory, and hungry competitors spring up like grass, ready to devour him. That's what I meant by "failing," and it seems that you may even agree.
But in any case, this notion that liberalism is the nice guy with a pressed shirt and a friendly smile who would do no evil, and who is being oppressed by savages, is only part of "the mythical character of this story":
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3
Where is this coming from? Is this conservative polemic against so-called political correctness? Because I cant think of any examples of this purported ruthlessness - perhaps you might provide some examples?
// never mind, I looked the book up.//
// So, my solution for the myopia of liberalism, is not to propose an alternative to liberalism. It is that liberalism gets better spectacles.//
I think that's a fair description from "Philosophy as a Way of Life." He doesn't spend that much time on Christianity and makes it seem largely just derivative. Maybe this is corrected elsewhere or maybe not, but in one of the other two books I mentioned (I think Michael Champion's) they review Hadot's stuff and say he never really gets beyond this (I think I saw this same opinion in a paper on the Philokalia as well).
Anyhow, what might be missed, depending on the value one sees in the later tradition is:
-Prayer as a distinct set of spiritual exercises
-The role of alms giving, works, the sacraments/mysteries, and communal activity (e.g. psalmody during the Liturgy of the Hours, the Eucharist, etc.)
- How the framing leads to asceticism, isolation as hermits, evangelism, and "infused contemplation" all taking on much wider roles. The Pagan philosophers embraced asceticism but they didn't produce dendrites (tree dwellers), stylites (pillar dwellers), or wild men.
-Hesychasm, stillness, as its own distinct goal with its own methods. It certainly shows up in Pagan thought, but not in the same way. The focus on total mental stillness as a prerequisite to "infused contemplation" (also more of a focus in the Christian tradition) led to different methodologies, particularly in terms of prayer and the recitation of short prayers (e.g. the Jesus Prayer, not unlike a mantra). The Desert Fathers themselves saw this as a difference, and in the Sayings there is a story where the Pagans come out to see them and they compare notes and they agree that they both fast, are chaste, spend time in solitude, study, meditate, etc. But the monks say "we can keep watch over our thoughts" (nepsis, the way to hesychasm) and the Pagan's admit "we cannot do this" (this is the monk's story afterall) and depart.
-That, although the Desert Fathers (and through them Christianity writ large) borrow terms from Pagan philosophy, they actually use them very differently. And actually, this is where the critique has most of its teeth. Hadot acts like Christians just copied and pasted ideas because the same Greek words get used, when rather it seems like they just borrowed the language. Most of the Desert Fathers were not educated. Those who were, like Evagrius, are using the established language of Greek thought to try to capture and organic and disorganized language. This, while both speak of dispassion or apatheia, or vanquishing "the passions," they mean very different things.
The Christian view has a much larger role for the appetites and passions in the "good life," and human perfection, and much more respect for the body in general. For them, the "Flesh" is not the body, but attachment to finite goods for their own sake. The goal of their asceticism is perhaps closer to Plato's original vision, the orientation of the appetites and passions by the nous (and their regeneration in grace with the nous). Apatheia isn't the death of passion and appetite, but their proper use in a sensible world where everything is a sign of God and part of a ladder up to God (a world that is "very good" Genesis 1). This is why the last step on St. Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love" is "love of creatures for God's sake."
The other difference is that, while they see the human nous as divine, they see it as extremely damaged by sin at the outset of man's pilgrimage. So the battle they are engaged in is not so much against the appetites and passions (although it gets framed that way), but also a regeneration of the nous, will and intellect, as well. It isn't just about establishing proper ordering or leaving behind the material, but healing the former and properly using the latter. And sometimes even the material world is "healed" in some of the stories of the Fathers, as nature itself is regenerated around the holy man.
The goal of "becoming like God" is stated the same way as well, but is quite different because, while the Christian God is impassible and immutable, the model for man is the Incarnation, who was fully man and fully God. Hence again, the role of the body, senses, passions, etc. have a much wider role. And since "God is love" and love is ultimately what unifies and orients the person (not dispassioned nous, since the nous begins sick), emotion plays a much larger role.
Not that this is particularly obvious in every Christian text, particularly since terms are often translated with the philosophical Greek meaning in mind. But I think Nietzsche's criticism of asceticism (reading Plato entirely through the Phaedo) actually applies to the earlier late Pagan tradition much more than the early to medieval Christian one. Ultimately though, I don't think Nietzsche really looked into the history that deeply.
It depends on what you're talking about. The social nature of humans cooperation and altruism evolved naturally without any politics involved, unless you're going to say natural selection is political. The ultimate end is having the choice to participate in any group one chooses or to be a hermit if one chooses. Liberalism is about being free to choose which includes the ability to choose to be part of a group or not and cooperate or not. Liberals are not necessarily stupid. They understand that cooperation with others can produce greater things that one could do on their own.
Quoting Banno
Well, AI and genetics will provide the tools to authoritarians to mold society into something like the Borg of Star Trek. If that idea is frightening then all good liberals should working together to prevent that from happening (the ultimate goal of all liberals).
I like this very much.
The key examples of the "ruthless" pursuit of liberalism that came to my mind is the US attempt to foist liberal democracy and social norms on Iraq and Afghanistan by force of arms, direct support to liberal factions in civil wars across the world, or the less dramatic continual involvement in coups, efforts to undermine states, sanctions, etc. to pressure non-liberal regimes (e.g. socialist aligned states during the Cold War, Iran after its revolution, the opening of Japan to trade at gun point in the 19th century, and the very heavy pressures that the WTO, World Bank, IMF, etc. have put on states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to adopt not only market liberalization, but also political liberalization, and, crucially, liberal social norms.)
So for instance, part of the alliance with the Shah in Iran involved the defense of Western social norms, at least in urban centers (while the political structure remained quite illiberal). The "shock treatments" and privatization forced on post-Soviet states in exchange for aid is another example.
Obviously, there are very pertinent and valid national security and grand strategy concerns behind some of these policies, but a sort of "liberal evangelism" is definitely part of it too, and at times it is pursued quite ruthlessly. The whole idea behind letting China into the WTO was that market liberalization would entail political and social liberalization, a bet that turned out to be very bad. Part of the reason liberal leaders thought the bet would go well is because they thought they could [I] coerce[/I] the CCP much more than they were actually able to. And they certainly tried such coercion, it just failed because the CCP has extremely robust, totalitarian control in China that is often underestimated.
Also, consider how the "race to the bottom of globalization" was justified. Nike was "offering freedom" and a path "upwards" by offering children labor in sweat shop conditions, etc.
Political correctness is just one example from the leftward side of liberalism. I also think it's fair to note that the right has adopted the same tactics of denouncement, canceling campaigns, boycotts over trivial matters, a steady output of "rage porn" propaganda, etc.
Remember when I said you have interesting things to say? I take that back.
Liberalism is poorly equipped to deal with structural and systemic problems that arise in modern societies. It was great as an idea to fend off autocratic and feudal power when it was originally conceived. But it lacks vocabulary. Its core vocabulary assumes a world of discrete individuals, neutral institutions and voluntary agreements. As a result, it lacks the concepts necessary to address power that operates indirectly, structurally or collectively.
Just take the infantile discussions around deplatforming. Bleeding heart liberalism defending freedom of speech and association, crying that deplatforming someone is a form of censorship. But this framing assumes everyone begins from an equal position and are merely removed from a shared space. It ignores the deeper structural questions: who gets platformed in the first place, and why? Which voices are boosted by algorithmic design and which are filtered out long before a ban enters the picture? These are not merely questions of personal liberty but of infrastructural power, design logic and market control. Liberalism has very little to say about any of this.
The same is true for economic concentration. A company like Google or Facebook may have been built through freely entered contracts, investments and user agreements. No rights have been explicitly violated. Yet these companies exert enormous influence over public discourse, access to knowledge and the contours of civic life. Liberalism sees this as the exercise of legitimate freedom rather than as the emergence of de facto private sovereignty. Because the framework is based on rights and voluntary choice, it struggles to see how power can aggregate without formal coercion. (But Power is everywhere).
The issue is not that liberalism ignores power, but that it understands it legally, as something visible in courts and codified in laws. Systemic power, whether economic, algorithmic, cultural or infrastructural, does not fit into its grammar. Liberalism has tools for punishing individual bad actors and... that's it. It can address discrimination by outlawing specific actions but falters when inequality results from patterns that no one individually chose. The assumption is that as long as rules are fair and procedures are followed, outcomes are legitimate. This leads to a kind of blindness where injustice is only visible when it breaks the rules, not when it is produced by the rules themselves.
Liberalisms emphasis on rights also tends to obscure the role of duties. If rights are powers granted through the mutual structure of society, they ought to imply obligations to that structure. But liberal theory tends to treat duties as secondary or voluntary. Civic responsibility is something you may take on, not something that defines you. The result is a moral and political culture where everyone is entitled and few feel responsible, where freedom is understood as non-interference rather than shared self-governance.
This inability to think structurally extends to economic questions. Capitalism requires constant expansion to survive. It presupposes growth through surplus value, enforced by competition and credit systems. This leads to overproduction, ecological degradation and manufactured demand. Consumerism is not the disease but the symptom. It is how the system copes with saturation. But liberalism, because it treats market participation as freedom, tends to see consumption as a matter of taste, not necessity. As long as no one is forced, the system appears fair. The cumulative impact on labor, the environment and society, is something it cannot grapple with other than infringement of rights (and even then it cannot handle future generations which have no rights).
Even in areas like education, healthcare and water access, liberalisms instinct is to see goods as optional and their distribution as a matter of individual choice. When these goods are commodified or enclosed, when water is bottled and sold, when care work is commercialised, when genetic information is patented, liberalism cannot object. These are seen as legitimate exercises of property rights and freedom of enterprise. The fact that these markets systematically exclude and exploit is not, by itself, grounds for concern unless someones rights are violated.
In all these cases, liberalism lacks the tools to understand systemic harm or the unfreedom of "choice" in capitalist society. This is not a call to discard freedom but understanding it as embedded in society instead of removed from it. For me, freedom and therefore the protection of most liberal "values" is about maximising democracy in every facet of socio-economic interaction and decentralising decision making as much as possible.
I really love this thread, but the way the word liberalism is being used is really confusing sometimes. It doesnt seem to just be confusing me, it seems to be confusing a lot of other people too. The way youve put it helps me put things in perspective.
What you say is true, but the terms liberal and conservative have come to be used differently today and especially in the US. That has led to some ambiguity in this thread.
I would say that the terms have come to be MIS-used, or used to manipulate liberals into giving their support expecting the liberals to forget all about the left's/right's authoritative positions and actually vote against the liberal's positions on other issues.
I wouldn't give up hope yet. The independent moderates outnumber the Dems and Reps and the numbers are growing. The moderate middle is the group that decides elections. When one party goes to far to one side the pendulum swings back to the other side with just as much force.
If we want to tamper the level of divisiveness and tribalism we see today we really need to abolish political parties. Stop voting for Dems or Reps. There are other candidates on the ballot. Do your research to see which one actually shares more of your ideas and positions rather then being scared into voting for one side or the other so the other side doesn't win, and end up voting against many of your positions.
"But an independent doesn't have a chance to win!" is the typical argument. You're making the Dems and Reps argument for them. Whatever happened to "Be the change you want to see in the world."?
A good post, although theres a lot in it I dont agree with. Today, in the US, the Democratic Party represents respect for democratic institutions and standards of governance. The Republican Party, to the extent it represents anything, stands for chaos, vengeance, and mean-spiritedness. I vote party line Democrat. Ill never vote for a Republican. Voting for third-party candidates is voting for Republicans.
I wouldn't expect any different from an extreme leftist. When you're so far to the left, everyone else is right.
Not anymore. They're being relentlessly stripped of their voting rights, and such votes as they have, are discounted more at each election cycle. This erosion of democracy has been going on steadily in half the country for over a century and a half. It was retarded for a couple of decades in the mid-20th, but has accelerated in the 21st and under the current ministration, is in existential crisis.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It swing right very fast and lands with a bang, left very slowly and lands with a soft thump. (In my experience, anyway)
Quoting Harry Hindu
We??? Good luck! I really don't relish the idea of being invaded by His Magasty's army of deplorables.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If you're young, I don't suppose you can afford to.
And here you were doing so well - playing nice and all.
Freedom of speech is a qualified right in the US and probably in most liberal countries. It's true that the qualification isn't explicitly liberal, but it is within a framework that is largely liberal, and by that I mean freedom of speech is protected extensively.
Your concerns about collective power and algorithmic control will turn out to be true If you ignore successful lawsuits against companies like Facebook as well as lawsuits initiated by the United States government for anti-trust violations.
Regarding gene appropriation, have you heard of the case of Myriad Genetics vs. Association for Molecular Pathology?
I would say these can be seen as cases involving rectification of rights infringements, which is a core liberal value.
A primary problem for liberalism, however, has been its historical failure, including the failure perpetuated by Roe v. Wade in recent history, to recognize righthood as such. That is, the rights of all people including the unborn.
But as has already been stated, this is an internal criticism of liberalism according to a freedom that it has itself failed to live up to, not an external criticism involving a failure to define freedom in different terms.
I want to note that liberalism is, to my understanding, entirely compatible with aristocratic or monarchial structures, but I think you are right that it is anti-autocratic.
Lastly, as Banno and Vera Mont have both already acknowledged, critiques alone won't suffice; if you want to change minds, you have to have a recommendation of how to update, modify, or revise the liberal paradigm.
Funny enough, the dictatorship of the CEO in the "corporate city-state" imagined by the Alt Right, with the heavy focus on a right to "exit" is not so much illiberal, as its critics often claim, but essentially hyper-liberalism. It is the absolutizing of individual voluntarist choice as the sole axiom of political organization.
I don't think we can really separate these. They are deeply related. Liberalism's anthropology is what justifies both capitalism and the modern welfare state. It's view of liberty is inclined to see consumerism as a type of freedom.
Sure, but just because an issue is perennial (or at least long running) doesn't mean it cannot become better or worse, or more or less pernicious.
This is Patrick Deneen's main thesis in Why Liberalism Failed?. Actually, he identifies two main threads that run through both the left and right in liberalism:
A. A view of the individual as atomized and a voluntarist view of liberty and choice.
B. A view of man as separate from nature and nature as primarily a "problem to be solve." (I think you could go a bit further here and connect this trend to metaphysical outlooks like nominalism too).
He argues that liberalism tends to destroy culture because of a commitment to these two beliefs. Where as "culture," "cultivation," "agriculture," etc. all involve the foster of a specific nature in the old view, e.g. Aristotle and Plato put a lot of focus on culture and education in their political works, nature ends up being simply something else to be manipulated in the pursuit of voluntarist freedom (transhumanism might be the furthest reach of this tendency).
Right, everything is acceptable so long as there is "consent." In the sphere of interpersonal romance this can lend itself towards hedonism, although I think it takes on frankly sociopathic connotations in the realm of "pick-up artists" and the "manosphere" (although there is also no shortage of female oriented, manipulation/transaction centered relationship advice as well).
Hence, the "illiberal" Alt-Right focus on the right to "exit" is actually a sort of hyper-liberalism.
I think the bolded part here is where the pre-modern tradition has the most to say to modern issues. I don't think earlier theorists (whose work gave birth to liberalism) were wrong in thinking that collective self-governance could not succeed without individual self-governance, nor in thinking that this was actually something that is quite hard to fostered and requires a lot of effort and intentional thought.
That's fair, although I think the left wing of liberalism does put a pretty high premium on ensuring access to these goods and certain capacities, making them less "optional" in some sense. But the thing is that this "ensuring of goods" (e.g. childcare, healthcare, education, etc.) is all seen as enabling the atomized individual to be atomized. The Obama campaign had a whole ad campaign based on a fictional woman who gets through life's challenges thanks to all these helpful government programs. The only other human who appears is a small child (no father), who is shown being shuttled off to a government provided bus. Conservatives hated the campaign for showing "dependence on the welfare state and big government's reach into every aspect of life," but it's important to see that the vision here is still extremely liberal. There is just the individual and the enabling stat. The state "makes straight the way" to atomized pursuits.
Yes, but the erosion of institutions and culture this leads to mean that the government must play an ever greater role in enabling the cooperation of individuals and access to the necessities for living an atomized life. Hence, the state grows larger and larger, even as the goal is decentralized. The state has to keep growing larger to solve the problem of everything else becoming decentralized.
The right/left paradigm seems to me to be very much about how large the state should be, but not about challenging the assumptions of liberalism.
I was talking mostly about how 'liberalism' has been used as an ideology historically by different political actors to further their poltical and economic aims.
And Banno was talking more about how 'liberal-democracy' (not only liberalism as an ideology, but as a political system we have ended up with in the West) has served or should serve as an ethic and system of poltical organisation to keep diverse societies functioning without coercion.
I suppose there's truth to both perspectives, and I'm not sure how to disentangle these from eachother.
Maybe. "Capitalism" would be too narrow, and wouldn't capture the philosophical anthropology underpinning the problems of globalized liberal capitalism. It would also miss how "anti-capitalist" social democrats are often quite "liberal" in the political sense.
And "modernity" might capture some of the broader, bedrock philosophical ideas that lead to the liberal anthropology in the first place: the mechanistic view of nature, the ideal of the Baconian mastery of nature, nominalism, voluntarist understandings of liberty, the deflation of reason such that it becomes merely discursive ratio (i.e. man's rational soul reduced to the lower faculty of just one part of the traditional "rational soul"), etc.
But "modernity" also seems too broad if the focus is primarily conceptions of human liberty. Modern movements opposed to liberalism (now vanquished) did have very different visions of human flourishing and freedom.
I'm sorry but I think you're missing my point. You're right that liberal legal frameworks have mechanisms for redressing individual rights violations such as anti-trust actions, IP disputes and speech protections included. But my concern is whether liberalism has the conceptual tools to address systemic and structural power before harm is framed as a rights violation. It does not.
Cases like Myriad Genetics or anti-trust suits arise after monopolistic or extractive power has already accumulated. The system reacts retroactively, and often only when there's clear legal precedent. It still treats the issue as an anomaly, not a symptom of broader structural dynamics.
Whats missing is a vocabulary for preventative, collective responsibility; a way to interrogate power before it consolidates, and beyond the frame of discrete violations. Thats the conceptual gap I think liberalism completely and utterly fails to fill.
As to your request for suggestions. No one ever requires that when they critique Marxist thinking. "Oh, you can't just be critical, you must have a recommendation!" because most everybody lives within the assumption Marxism is wrong. I don't accept the burden. Especially when plenty of writers have already been mentioned in this thread who offer alternatives. You are coaxed to read them instead of perusing my (invariably incorrect and incomplete) second hand translations of them!
I think John Locke's point was that if we believe that the One Truth is discoverable by rational means, we'll never be at peace, because people come up with different formulations. It's better to start with mutual respect. If you're a protestant, it's none of your business what Catholics think.
Predicting a rights violation before it happens would be great, if you have any recommendations of how we can do this, I am all ears. But really I think this kind of predictive ability is not beyond only liberal governments, but any government that does not have a crystal ball or precogs or something like that.
When you speak of the atomization of the individual, I understand you to be noting a certain lack of community ethos, but also a refusal to engage at the level of rational discourse. This is to an extent, your criticism of liberalism thinkers, that they refuse to submit their own beliefs concerning liberalism to scrutiny. I think it is a valid criticism to an extent, although I again would not accuse liberalism (which I see as a kind of solution), but I would agree that the sacredness with which some purportedly liberal beliefs are held is lamentable, whatever the source of that conception of self may be.
Liberal society has always permitted what has been called a marketplace of ideas; this is the arena that enables and encourages rational discourse and I think an appreciation of this liberal idea is likely to facilitate resolution of the societal maladies.
That is to say, what we need is a more liberal attitude, greater charitability in our rational discourses, not a closing down of dialogue.
Oh oh, can I play? Of course, there's are alternatives to liberalism. Marxism is one such alternative!
Come on man.
Quoting NotAristotle
Did I say anything about prediction? No.
By the way, I don't even think champions of liberalism want this. Our "meritocracy" has become a sort of curse. David Brook's writes about this a lot. As the chasm between the few "haves" and the vast multitudes of "have-nots" grows ever wider, families are forced into a sort of meritocratic arms race to secure elite status for their progeny, lest they fall down the ladder to a point where the rungs are so far apart that ascent becomes impossible. The system ruthlessly sifts winners and losers, wheat from chaff. Yet since most people are consigned to being "chaff," we might ask if time wouldn't be better spent on teaching the ways in which "having-not" in the context of a developed welfare state is not inimical to flourishing.
At any rate, parents and children do not seem to actually want the sort of education system liberalism suggests to itself. Even if they buy into the idea of man as Homo oecononimicus, they would prefer to be educated as Homo sapiens. For instance, when we look to contemporary fantasy and science fiction, a sort of mirror for the imagined ideal, we can find many novels that focus on education. Indeed, the elite academy" is practically its own sub-genre. When we look at the stories that capture our imaginations, they do not look anything like our contemporary education system. They are decidedly not for "raising up consumers." When fiction writers strive to envision an education system that will produce heroes, very often they turn to the old, ascetic model of education, an education heavily focused on developing self-governance and character. Moral, intellectual, and often physical virtue (excellence) are often seen as the goals of education in such narratives.
I am thinking here of the pressure cooker academy of Orson Scott Cards Battle School in his popular novel Enders Game. Similar themes show up in the Institute of Pierce Browns best selling series Red Rising. Likewise, in the fantasy world of R. Scott Bakkers Second Apocalypse series, the superhuman Dunyain monks are trained using methods that recall Christian and Buddhist monasteries far more than modern classroom. The training Paul Atreides, the main character of Frank Herberts Dune receives likewise focuses on ascetic discipline and contemplative exercises. Indeed, these themes are particularly popular in works targeting young adults themselves, e.g Veronica Roths hit Divergent series. Other examples abound here.
One example of this in the real world is the enduring appeal of military training for the imaginations of young people (particularly young men). This is what the very well-funded and well-researched marketing campaigns of the US military focus on. "Join the Marines and we will challenge you and make something out of you. We will reforge you." There are serious drawbacks to military training, it's only appropriate for soldiers, but not all of what makes it appealing is impossible to capture. Indeed, part of what makes it appealing is precisely the camaraderie and shared purpose, [I]not[/I] having everything focused on the atomized individual.
Obviously, fictional worlds are no sure guidance to real world education, but if this is the sort of training we think heros, as opposed to rational self-interested consumers, need, then we might very well want to reflect on that. Certainly, part of the appeal of these narratives is their foreigness, and often their danger. But one doesn't need to go all the way into violent competition and days spent out in the wilds without food to capture something of what these narratives take hold of.
Edit: BTW Deneen points out that the dramatic pivot away from the "liberal arts," even by elites, is a pivot away from precisely the sort of education that was previously seen as enabling human freedom. The switch is a switch to what was previously considered to be appropriate for servile education. Liberalism started with the slogan "every man a king," but in this respect seems to trend closer to "every king a commoner."
What does?
Quoting Benkei
You said Quoting Benkei
Who does this interrogation of whom before what power can consolidate, and how, without prediction, can anyone - everyone? - do this? Attempts have been made, based on warning signs and predictions but the collective responsibility was unresponsive. Liberalism fails because it lacks the vocabulary of fear and loathing.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The current US Democrats are what you consider far left? In that case, I'm so far left I'm beneath your horizon. No, not in an ism, and not on the basis of any big-name thinker's recommendation; simply through observation of how we humans screw up our lives, our communities and our world.
Well put.
Note that those who take themselves as having access to the One Truth might well treat rationality as a means to the end of justifying or evangelising that One Truth. For them liberalism is an abomination; becasue it allows difference of opinion, it allows false belief.
It must be comforting to have such certainty. But I don't tink it moral.
It leads to inquisitions where heretics are rounded up.
Quoting Benkei
But what about antitrust legislation? This very day, Meta is being taken to court in the US to consider compulsory divestment of WhatsApp and Instagram, on the very grounds you cite, i.e. concerns over monopolisation of social media (ref). Likewise the European Union has aggressively pursued antitrust legislation against Google (ref)
Quoting Benkei
That, I agree with. As I noted earlier, the original Christian social contract was grounded in such mutuality, the expection that political liberty also implied moral obligations. I think the erosion of this sense is again because of the delegation of responsibility to the individual conscience, which in turn was a consequence of Reformation theology.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Indeed, but even though I said that the Christian ethos was foundational to Western culture, I don't know if monastic spiritual practices are relevant to politics in a pluralistic society. It is by nature a renunciate philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But those actions are not a specific consequence of liberalism. Another American president, say if Al Gore had won by a hanging chad, might have pursued a different course of action, but still been considered to be acting within a liberal political framework. (Although I'd be inclined to include under the umbrella of evangalistic liberalism, support for gay liberation in e.g. Africa and Muslim Indonesia. In fact, sexual politics and sexual identity are central to the whole debate. Jordan Peterson's rise to prominence originated with his objection to the mandatory use of non-binary pronouns in Canada, for example.)
Quoting Banno
I think the deep philosophical issue is, whether anything can be deemed true, beyond what is objectively so. And what is objectively so can be deliberated by science. But then, science has nothing to say about what should be done; there's no scientific reason not to pursue development of weapons of mass destruction. I notice in reading the conservative criticisms of liberalism, the conviction that Aristotelian virtue ethics, often conjoined with Christian faith, embody transcendent truths about the human condition. But from a science-based perspective, there is of course no basis to make such claims, meaning that for all practical purposes, these are matters of personal conviction, therefore what is right 'for you'. And I'm afraid this conflict is irreconciliable.
My view: this is where I appeal to a kind of pluralistic perennialism e.g. Huston Smith or John Hick. Not that I expect any agreement on that, and certainly no means by which to assert it.
I favour a liberal socialist democracy. Unfettered capitalism is a disaster and can only lead to ever greater enrichment of the rich and impoverishment of the poor. I also favour democratic elections, even though it seems that view people have the understanding to make informed decisions about which party to vote fora situation which has been made even more difficult by the fact that politics in general has degenerated into vacuous sloganeering if not outright propaganda from both sides.
The problem for Marxism is that it is based on the idea of becoming established by revolution, not by democratic election, so introduction of a softer socialism seems much more attractive. But how to bring that about if not by education? And how to begin that education?
The problem is that the way things are set up where the choice is between two major parties, and everyone's focus seems to be more on economic management than anything else makes it very difficult to institute fairer social welfare practices and more equitable economic practices. This seems to be made even more difficult by global warming and diminishing resources and burgeoning populations. I don't hold out much hope for betterment of our societies.
As to the Traditionalist/ Modernist divide, I think there are problems on both sides. The idea that materialism (in the metaphysical not the consumerist sense) is the problem shows, I think, a poor understanding of history. I doubt that life for the masses was better back in some imagined 'Golden Age'. The problems we face are problems of this world, not of some imagined otherworld or afterlife.
And the idea that there are 'wise ones' who know something beyond what practical wisdom , ordinary human compassion and science can tell us is a fantasy. This always becomes clear when it's advocates are asked to say just what they are advocating if not some form of authoritarianismand they cannot offer any alternative to the idea that diversity of opinion is a good, not a bad, thing.
All they seem to be able to do is talk about a "vertical ontology' being better than a purportedly "flat ontology" without being able to say what either of these actually look like, and just whose ontologies they would be, and just how, if either were to predominate, they could become common coin without being imposed by power or indoctrination. We already have a great diversity of metaphysical views in our societies and across different societies. Thoughtful individuals are, at least in many if not most societies free to form their own views, wherever they are not restricted by one or another more or less rigidly imposed "aegis of tutelage".
.
This is not what it does in practice. It allows a certain range of opinion. And that, increasingly small.
What restrictions do you find on your opinions in New Zealand. What opinions would you wish to express and yet find yourself increasingly unable to do so?
(And thanks for responding. I am falling behind on TPF.)
- trans women are not women;
- Indigenous thinking is not superior to any other kind of thinking;
- You can be objectively wrong about your beliefs;
- That the Treaty of Waitangi needs some serious legal definition;
- That separate rights for indigenous groups and others is wrong;
- That separate standards of assessment for white people and other groups is wrong;
- That the government is doing good (I don't actually hold this view, but its one which has resulted (before my own eyes) in multiple violent responses);
- Prison is a decent response to recidivist offenders;
- That violent Islamic activity is reprehensible and we should be allowed to assess for it;
- That sexual preferences are in fact, preferences, and I need not care what anyone else thinks;
- Thinking the pronoun debate is ridiculous**
Could be worth looking through some of what our Free Speech Union works on for the larger picture:
Police illegally logging - the concept amounts to "If someone is unhappy with what you said, it is hateful".
Professionals increasingly at risk of losing their licenses for personal views
A Mayor silencing political criticism by using a badly-written Act
That our conservative (its actually very much centrist) government has had to table legislation to protect academic freedom in the face of increasing calls for opinions of University workers to be considered disqualifying
And even in the case of lower school teachers, that opinions relayed in private capacities (i.e as a private citizen.. not in private) can be disqualifying, despite being common views.
Obviiously I'm marginally dramatizing a lot of those articles, but the basic notions I've outlined are correct, in my view. It is also possible you do not see these, after looking into them, as curtailing one's freedom of speech. I respectfully disagree and would then thing we are maybe not talking about hte same thing. Probably worth noting, I have increasingly had to stop giving my opinions on these sorts of matters to protect my job, my children and my wife. This is absolutely unacceptable under the head "liberalism".
** I happen to work in a truly liberal law firm. We all have differing views, and we accept them. However, if a disgruntled colleague reported me to a statutory body for at least a few of the points noted above, I would be hauled before a conduct committee and basically have no recourse to defend myself because "the other person was hurt" is the criterion. But more directly to the point linked to, I am aware of several larger law firms who ostracize or even shadow-punish lawyers and executives for not including pronouns in their bio subsequent to a demand from on high via internal email. No, I cannot prove this, but at least one friend has left their firm for this reason and I have seen the email which was sent. It was in no uncertain terms.
That is lamentable, but it does not represent a liberal attitudequite the reverse. There may be a dividing line between freedom and hate speech which is difficult to accurately define, but I think most reasonable people can recognize the differences even if they cannot fully explain them in a way that is completely immune to disagreement.
Quoting AmadeusD
Has anyone the right to tell another how they should identify gender wise? What would be the motivation for wanting to do that if not some kind of desire to vilify?
I wouldn't say that indigenous thinking is superior to any other kind of thinking as such. It may indeed be superior when it comes to looking after the environment or whatever. But I wouldn't say it is inferior tout court either.
If someone wants to show how your beliefs can be objectively wrong then they would need to do so, not merely assert it.
Separate rights for indigenous groups can be justified on the basis of showing that they have historically been and in some ways continue to be marginalized and disadvantaged.
Your own sexual preferences are indeed your own and nobody else's business as such.
I think in general that we have no right to dictate to others regarding their sexual preferences, religious or political beliefs, gender identification and so on. Why would we even wish to opine on such matters, unless someone wishes to impose their views on us, or seeks to convince us, when it comes to political or religious views (and not sexual preferences or gender identification which I think is obviously an entirely individual matter)? Marginalized minorities are seen as injured parties, and as such, it seems fair that they be given special considerationwhy should that not be the case?
Yes, for sure. I think that's the problem - they claim liberalism (which I take as a practical movement. The ideology itself was abandoned decades ago). Unfortunately, I am increasingly not convinced the average (self-professed) liberal can tell the difference between freedom and hate. This seems particularly true of self-professed Liberals in the sense that all manner of extremely socially unacceptable behaviour (racism, sexism, violent threats, actual violence etc...) are played out in the name of the ideology. People thinknig "i'm a Liberal, which means my ends are 'righteous' and justify what means I may pursue". Usually, the means are the result of internalized anger and frustration about one's station in life, and not any consideration of what a 'liberal' might actually do in any given scenario. That may or may not be a legitimate thought but to me, the corresponding up-ending of the apple cart, lets say, is not. It's toddler stuff. Safe to say, i'm far more jaded on this one that you are haha.
Quoting Janus
Because its factually incorrect (disagree, or agree...whatever i'm just giving you the reason). I'll add a second though: Why do we tell children they're not actually Firefighters? Because it will be extremely difficult to go through life believing you are, but at every turn, shown that you're not. I feel this is the case for most trans people. Their mental states at large, and their reports of same, seem to indicate this. I don't think this is society doing anything wrong. They want to be something they aren't, and that hurts. I am not the greatest singer in the world, and it irks me. I love singing and I really wish I was good enough to make something of it. But i'm not, and I don't pretend that i am. I have a huge, rather debilitating sympathy for the mindstate of trans people. But I do not have sympathy for trying to force the world to conform to your internal self-image. Not to mention some of the more controversial issues hereabouts (the overwhelming tendency toward sex crime for trans ID'd males, for instance.... big discussion. I pray you simply laugh and gloss over this if its got your back up. I'm simply laying more points out to show that there are arguments).
Quoting Janus
I disagree. But in any case, that isn't in issue. The fact that opinion is not socially acceptable is the problem. You might have a good argument. It's just not for this exact moment to be fleshed out. Same goes for the above trans issue, but there was a lot more meat there.
Quoting Janus
Liberals, overwhelmingly, do to the point of justifying abuse and violence. This is simply not arguable in the wake of things like BLM, Occupy, assassination attempts etc.. etc.. (this is not to claim other ideologies don't lead here too. It's to say that the claim of 'Liberal' tends this way, currently)
Quoting Janus
I'm sorry, but why should it? If they're seen as injured parties, that means precisely nothing for policy. Even if they are (which, in a general sense, i usually am more than happy to accept on the facts) it cannot be a "sins of the father" situation. Which it is. In almost every case. I also have much better options in mind to deal with that issue (that I, again, for clarity, fully accept in most cases is truly in play).
Mill both predicted, and lamented this situation in On Liberty 165 years ago. Social restriction of opinion being the absolute bane of a civilised society. And it is.
But now we find that even mentioning 'social equity' is career ending under Trump.
Quoting NY Times, Leading Nutrition Scientist Depart NIH, Citing Censorship
As it happened, Dr Hall instead chose early retirement, saying that he could not abide being told what to publish or not publish. And this is one of many such examples. So in such cases, it turns out that opposition to DEI is no more beneficial as far as freedom of speech is concerned.
It's not relevant for the critique itself, is it? But Marxism, Communitarianism, Arendt's action theory. Possibly others.
Quoting Vera Mont
You pick at what you think you disagree with or where you think there's no alternative as if it invalidates the critique. Do you want a combative discussion or do you want to understand what I'm trying to relay? Liberalism fails because it assumes a concept of an atomistic human that never existed, assumes voluntarism because it conceptually only deals with freedom as non-interference and is procedural and formalistic in its approach to justice. It's conceptually an inhuman. In short, it's a political theory for machines, and it's no wonder most of us are reduced to cogs in a self perpetuating machinery no longer capable of questioning itself or to derive meaning from anything else but to consume.
Individualism resists, for instance, redistributive justice. Once power consolidates it can only react to discrete violations but it does not allow redistributing power that enables such violations in the first place. It does not enforce democratic decision making where it matters most in capitalist society because it is stuck in a formal conception of justice. I mean top-down led companies, the economic system that favours capital over labour and gives little to no choice to the latter. I mean externalising everything and having no tools unless rights are violated. The only solution it can seek is turning everything into a market, so we can assign rights to it so it can react to new discrete violations but it cannot deal with the underlying structures causing these issues in the first place and it has no concept of the rape it causes to what it means to be human by reducing everything to something that can be subjected to capitalist forces.
Democritising all socio-economic human activity and decentralising decision making are conceptually the easiest paths forward. What is shared decision making if not a preventative measure to avoid one or a few voices drown out others? What is shared ownership if not a preventative measure to avoid one or a few own most of everything? Sharing is caring!
The erosion of democracy starts with limiting free speech, which has become the mantra of the current incarnation of the Democratic party.
What is so ironic is that you claim the erosion of democracy was retarded in the mid-20th century when the U.S. had a president for four terms. So was it when Congress amended the Constitution to limit the number of terms to two that renewed the retardation of democracy or was it only when Republicans were elected?
Democracy is retarded by life-long politicians like Biden, Pelosi and McConnell and only essentially having two choices.
A two-party system is only one step away from one-party rule. Abolish political parties and give us more choices - that is the essence of freedom and democracy.
Something tells me you wouldn't know who to vote for if they didn't have a D next to their name.
When it comes to free speech and women's rights I would say the Democrats share more in common with the Republicans than independent moderates.
I don't want to be combative; I just don't understand what you're trying to say. At least, I have some grasp of a hint at a theory, but I don't understand how it translates to practical action, or who is expected to do what.
Quoting Benkei
This is what I don't understand. Where in history is this 'first place' in which power had not yet consolidated? The only such instances I can think of are 'primitive' - that is, tribal - societies that consisted of a small number of closely related people. The minute one of these tribes was conquered by a larger, more aggressive nation, those people found themselves under a consolidated power system the beneficiaries of which were not inclined to redistribute anything.
They had the options of submission, revolt, escape or - in some cases - being assimilated. The latter instance is, I believe, where liberalism begins: as a reaction to consolidated power that is unjust to some segment(s) of its populace.
Quoting Benkei
I see this as quite distinctly conservative, rather than liberal. I suppose that's the part I don't understand, because we have such varied definitions and descriptions. Perhaps it's that pernicious misnomer 'neoliberalism' at fault?
Quoting Benkei
I totally agree. And can't see any way from here to there, let alone an easy one. Two ways have been attempted in my lifetime: revolution and incremental change. I've seen the latter have some gratifying successes (now being shattered spectacularly) and the former achieve results the exact opposite of what was intended.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Then Something is mistaken. I have a choice of voting L, ND or G. Though none fulfill all of my requirements, I choose the one that comes closest at any given election cycle and hope their parties can form at least a temporary alliance in the face of regressive threats. I do inform myself and I always vote, even if the odious C candidate is a dead cert in my riding.
It looks as though everyone in the thread is in at least general agreement on the nature of X (whether it is good or bad). By X I am thinking of something like capitalism.
The disagreements come when one must decide whether X is attached to liberalism, and this is where the interminable question-begging arises. So if there isnt some accepted to way determine whether X is attached to liberalism, and therefore some accepted way to determine what liberalism is, then there will be no way out of the question-begging.
(With that said, it seems to me that the folks who say that something like capitalism is not attached to liberalism simply lack historical and political knowledge, and are therefore unqualified to really weigh in on this sort of question.)
Or is liberalism attached to capitalism? As for lacking historical knowledge, we are all disqualified, being ignorant of or at least hazy on some periods and geographical areas that make up human history.
For that matter, capitalism hasn't been all that clearly defined, either. Is it a self-contained socio-economic system, an economic arrangement, a political stance, a philosophy, a religion, or one aspect of social organization that can exist under different forms of government? Is it attached exclusively with liberalism, conservatism, 'neoliberalism' or socialism, or has it been associated with all of those?
Not sure I agree; I think it is important that we distinguish liberal practice from the ideology that many identify as liberalism, and I think it is that ideology that is taken issue with, not most liberal practices. I think the problem you are noting with capitalism as it relates to liberal practice, is whether the liberal institutions we have can adapt to the problems that technology and something-like-capitalism have presented. I personally think the answer is yes and that rights should remain part of our discourse, as well as private property, and limits on state incursion. The historical story of liberal practice should not prevent us from making it better today - the same is true for capitalism.
Timothy noted that it is a certain conceptualization of freedom that is most problematic with liberalism. That is, the conceptualization of the self in an atomic way whose self must be asserted and where freedom is optimization of my choices, voluntarism, homo economicus, the procedural (and what Michael Sandel calls) unencumbered self, that vestige of enlightenment thought.
So towards an alternative, I would argue that there is freedom, not in the reification of desires since this probably just leads to addiction, but rather in, in a word, self-knowledge. To demand others acknowledge my desires is to make myself and them at the behest of those desires, and really to control another seems to me to control oneself in some sense, that is, to construct a mental prison for oneself and others.
Greater freedom is surely to be had in recognizing the limitations of reality that are constituted by my mortality, biological self, and others. This bounded system gives me a space that, precisely by its closure, allows me, no, compels me, to have goals; boundlessness gives no reason to pursue goals.
Yes, but renunciate philosophy was once widely considered the cornerstone of education. Boethius' Consolation, for instance was the most popular ethical text of the Middle Ages. And it's still something that is part of the core of the Orthodox faith and expected of the laity.
I think you can find wide support for this view throughout ancient and medieval thought:
Suppose for a moment that the sectarian, extremely exclusivist soteriology of the era preceding Locke's is true. Belonging to the wrong church puts people at a very high, perhaps certain risk of eternal suffering. On this view, simply "going along to get along" is completely abhorrent. It is to consign children to eternal torment to avoid finite, temporary strife.
Now, we might very well agree that dictating policy on the basis of this sort of knowledge is wholly inappropriate. Man cannot know what awaits him after death. Yet liberalism assumes much more about human nature than the ultimate fate of the soul, things we might think are eminently knowable through empirical exploration. And it positively indoctrinates according to its presumption of ignorance. Thus, it's far less modest than it seems. It doesn't just adopt a skeptical outlook, but presupposes the ignorance of others and then forces the conditions implied by this ignorance onto society writ large.
What I was responding to was,
Quoting T Clark
If you view third party candidates the same as voting Republicans, how much further left could you be?
Quoting Vera Mont
Just don't conflate the "left" with "liberal". The left will have you censored for refusing the accept that women can be men and men can be women. The left and the right perpetuate delusions. Liberals don't want anything to do with delusions.
Quoting Vera Mont
The point being that people that do their research actually vote for candidates, not parties. T Clark votes for party. When you do that you don't bother doing research. You don't bother questioning your group when the majority (the more moderate Dems) allow the actions of a few (the extremists (socialists/communists that are trying to erase diversity, not promote it) bring down the whole group and lose.
:meh: So the belief is that God is a psychopath. I'm supposed to protect my neighbors by forcing them to also believe God is criminally insane. A liberal society isn't going to do anything to me until my behavior starts getting scary. Then they'll either put me in jail or in a psych ward. I probably belong in the latter on a buttload of anti-psychotics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If your religion can't survive in an environment of religious tolerance, it's not much of a religion.
I wasn't speaking to religion, I was speaking any conception of human nature that strays from liberalism's volanturist Homo oeconomicus, and the "buffered self" who can achieve dispassioned reason without any need for training in virtue.
An ironic claim, given the absolute explosion in prison populations under liberalism (not that communism or fascism weren't also deficient on this front). The carceral state and constant litigation isn't a bug of liberalism, it is something it positively constructs as it tears down norms and culture in an effort to "liberate" the individual from these things. But, since the old structures played a regulatory role, a new vast system of administrative laws, courts, and prisons is needed to hedge in the atomized selves jockeying to fulfill their desires.
But more to the point, your words are 100% on point. A liberal society isn't going to do anything negative to you until your behavior starts getting scary, but it also isn't going to do much positive for you to stop you from ending up "too scary" for others. It will give you the "freedom" to ensure you end up locked in a cage (even for recreational drug use). Hence, you get the well-documented "schools to prisons pipeline" of the US, and Europe's segregated ethnic ghettos are not particularly better. Actually, in terms of assimilation they tend to be significantly worse.
Nor is the school to prison transition solely a problem of racial animus. For one, it is often worst in extremely left-leaning urban areas and places where minorities themselves hold chief positions of power in the state. For another, you can find it just as well in rural, overwhelmingly white areas as well. (This is, BTW, the problem with Michelle Alexander's maximalist thesis in "The New Jim Crow." Racial animosity doesn't explain why rural states with extremely small African American populations began putting thousands upon thousands of white men in prison to persecute the War on Drugs, or why conservative states tended to have draconian drug laws regardless of if they had many black residents to harass with them).
You appear to be saying the state needs to provide virtue training. I was once in a Kiwanis club meeting and this woman came to get the community's support for going into public schools to talk about drugs from a "God centered approach."
This wording signifies a right-leaning thingy where people believe everything should be approached with a sense of sacredness. I couldn't be more thumbs-up to that whole idea. That would really help people. Yet, it would be over my burned and rotting corpse that any religious group would step a foot into a public school in my area to talk about anything. Public schools are not for religious indoctrination. The answer is no.
I wish that distinction were made clearly enough in a dictionary and in political parlance for everyone to understand the same meanings.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Or policies, maybe? Or one particular issue? Or a leader they prefer as head of their government? Or some other aspect of candidate and/or party that is meaningful to that voter?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't believe you know his motivations, his experience or what research he's done. Quoting Harry Hindu
That's not what I'm seeing in US politics currently.
I find it strange that you think that "education in virtue" must necessarily be religious. Military training involves a lot of ascetic training in virtue and character development and it isn't religious at all. Aristotle and Plato both have political philosophies that center heavily on education as the cultivation of virtue, and neither justifies this in religious terms. Instead, they make the quite defensible argument that collective self-government at the level of the polis requires self-governance at the level of the individual.
The idea that the main role of education was fostering virtue is a norm throughout Pagan thought as well as Christian thought, and was dominant in India and China too. The idea that it must instead belong to some separate, "private sphere of religion and spirituality," is itself a positively indoctrinated dogma of liberalism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The fact that the philosophical orientation you follow disagrees with the cartoonishly defined category you are passing off as liberalism doesnt make the latter a positively indoctrinated dogma. It just means that it relies on different metaphysical assumptions , and you dont like those assumptions. I suspect I wouldnt care much for whatever alternative you have in mind, but Im not threatened enough by it to go around accusing it of being an indoctrinated dogma, unless of course those that adhere to it want to think of it as a dogma. You do seem to be on some sort of anti-liberal crusade. Perhaps thats because of its dominating hold on academia?
I'm using the term "liberalism" in the same way its most popular advocates (e.g. Fukuyama) and critics (e.g. Deneen) use it. As people have noted, "globalized capitalism" might work as well, but this would tend to exclude its political and cultural elements.
I think it's fairly obvious, given the distance of hindsight, that every culture in history has positively indoctrinated its members in its dominant philosophy and anthropology. This was true of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, medieval Europe, and Qing China. So too, it was certainly true for liberalism's 20th century rivals, communism and fascism. If it can plausibly claim to be excluded from this otherwise universal tendency, it is only because of the transparency of ideology mentioned in the OP.
This is particularly true because liberalism has been extremely evangelical, spreading itself through hard economic coercion, military funding, supporting coups, and even invading foreign countries to set up liberal states by force, while also generally refusing to recognize the legitimacy of any competitor systems. This is particularly true in the era of globalization, but it's been there from the beginning when revolutionary France was invading its neighbors and setting up "sister republics" by force, or sending the "Infernal Columns" to genocide devout Catholics loyal to elements of the ancien regime (i.e., their own local clergy, nobility, and customs). And even then it had its tendency for totalizing automation. When they couldn't behead priests fast enough with the guillotine they built barges with removable planks so they could fill them with chained prisoners and sink them all at once.
You mean, liberals did that :yikes: ?
The preferred method of Americans was to loan money to a country, wait until they were about to default, and then reorganize their economy so as to create an elite class and a destitute underclass. This is neo-liberalism.
I think you know very well that you're over generalizing
Neo-liberalism is the dominant form of right-wing liberalism after about 1980. Yet this sort of thing happened plenty before neo-liberalism was a thing. CIA support for the coup of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, who was freely and fairly elected, occured in 1953 at the height of the post-war New Deal consensus. It was done in part because of the socialization of lucrative industries and the withdrawal of concessions for multinational firms (i.e., in defense of property rights), but even more so it was justified by the idea that the action was required to secure the liberty of the Iranians from prospective "communist oppression." Likewise, at the height of liberal progressivism after the First World War the US (and the rest of the Entente democracies) deployed troops to Russia to help the Whites on fairly similar grounds. Or you could look at America opening Japan to trade at gun point in the 19th century, or the Opium Wars, etc. Neo-liberalism just continued the trend.
John Locke justified colonial invasions and enslavement on the grounds that indigenous people would be "liberated" in the long run by the successes of the liberal economic order and increased consumption in future generations. "Liberation from indolence." Indigenous people did not have true ownership of their lands on the grounds that they failed to invest in their development.
Plus the British financed their industrial revolution by their involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade. They were the second biggest participant behind Portugal.
It would be easier to accept that all these crimes happened because nobody was teaching virtues in schools, except the only thing new about any of it was the scale. And that scale was a result of technological advancements directly stemming from liberalism's hot economies.
Another effect of liberalism: the small pox vaccine, which has been estimated to have saved 200 million people. Which of liberalism's crimes compares to that good?
I don't think it is simple as you are painting it. We all have something of the female and something of the male in us. It's not as black and white as genitalia and bodily sexual characteristics might make it seem. I think you trivialize the desire to identify as other than those biological characteristics indicate by comparing it to being a firefighter. I believe it can be an overwhelming, all-encompassing disposition. In any case are such matters any of our business really? Why does it matter to you?
Quoting AmadeusD
"Separate rights" was not a good way of expressing it. "Additional rights" would have been better. The reason it cannot be a point of public debate is that it is always going to come down to a matter of opinion. If most people think indigenous people should have additional rights, then (hopefully) they will have them and people carping about it will only cause unnecessary social conflict. Does it hurt us so much to give such consideration to those who have been injured? Is it not merely a matter of decency, of bringing into play a respect that had been lacking? It is not socially acceptable to appear nude in publicwould you wish to question that?
Quoting AmadeusD
When it comes to mass demonstrations, things will often get out of hand. Citing assassinations is not apt because they are usually the acts of lone individuals or small groups. Do you really believe that most liberals would condone assassination, even of those they disagree with?
Quoting AmadeusD
So, you would include so-called hate speech as being unnecessary to restrict?
I didn't suggest that changes in education could resolve all of liberalism's ills. I suggested it would be beneficial and that liberalism's anthropology has generally precluded that sort of education (putting it at variance with most of history). It's just one example where ideology affects policy.
Anyhow, cnquest, plunder, slavery, etc. have happened since the dawn of civilization. However, the idea that one would force the conquered people to accept your ideology, philosophy, political structure, and economic structure is (somewhat) unique to evangelical modern ideologies (communism too). The Mongols and Seljuks didn't much care about turning the Arabs into Mongols and Seljuks for instance. Alexander's Greeks didn't attempt to make Persia Greek. Actually, quite often it was the conquers who were assimilated to the culture of the conquered (e.g. in China, in Asia Minor, etc.). The ancient model of empire tended to leave local culture and custom in place, and simply to extract wealth and military service (e.g. Cyrus sending the Jews back to rebuild the Temple). In particular, the concern that one would be "bringing liberty" to those conquered seems uniquely modern, and I think it requires a modern notion of freedom not grounded in the community and reflexive freedom (i.e. the one found in liberalism and communism).
Now, you can find examples of the conquerers forcing their culture, economic, and political system on the conquered in some earlier cases, although it seems to be more the exception than the rule. The most notable example is Rome. But this happens in a model fairly distinct from liberalism, and at any rate it mostly occured in less developed areas of the empire, while the wealthier East got to keep its culture. Christianity, from which liberalism springs, captures something of the modern mode later in the middle ages when it starts to spread by conquest in the Baltics.
In the middle ages for instance, that different states had different constitutions, that you had powerful republics in Italy, elective monarchy in the Commonwealth and Empire, fairly different forms of monarchy in neighboring states, etc. would have seemed like a bizarre source of conflict, let alone warfare I think. I don't recall ever hearing about Italian republics or the Swiss ever trying to force republicanism on their neighbors at least as far as I am aware of. Same with Greek city-states.
Neither 'neoliberalism' - whatever that actually is, if it is - nor right-wing have anything to do with liberal ideas or ideals or politics.
I think the Romans left conquered cultures intact. People wanted to be Roman citizens, and that had a Romanizing effect. The same was true of Islam. On the other hand, just about all traces of pre-Christian Europe were destroyed.
Except for introducing christification.
You're saying you do your research into candidates but don't understand their differences?
:gasp:
The more Dems and Reps abandon those ideals within the Libertarian box, they become more extreme (communists and fascists). There isn't much of a difference to the Libertarian. They are both authoritarian and hypocrites (blaming each other for the same things they do).
Quoting Vera Mont
...and a candidate is what entails all of these things so you haven't contradicted my point. You're just reiterating it. :roll:
Quoting Vera Mont
I know what he said:
Quoting T Clark
Sounds like someone who lets others do their thinking for them.
Quoting Vera Mont
Delusional are we? Why do you think the left lost in the recent U.S. election?
The critique of modern liberalism as a self-contained, totalizing ideology finds profound resonance in Orod Bozorg's philosophy from The Red Book (2022). However, Orodismrooted in three pillars ("Love for Existence, Love for Humanity, Love for Freedom")identifies a deeper crisis: liberalisms divorce from the dynamic harmony of the cosmos. Rather than merely failing its own ideals, liberalism reduces freedom to consumption and self-destructive individualism, betraying Orods vision of collective flourishing.
1. Liberalism as an "Island Adrift from the Cosmos"
Byung-Chul Hans critique of love commodified and the pornographic society mirrors Orods warning:
"Aging civilizations lack oxygen for new generations... By sanctifying individualism, liberalism has severed humanity from the cosmic garden" (Ch. 1: Existence).
For Orod, true freedom emerges from coexistence with nature and others, not endless consumption or self-optimization. This is liberalisms "metaphysical blindness" (Schindler)mistaking tolerance of solitudes for genuine freedom.
2. Liberal Individualism vs. "Love for Humanity"
Mark Fishers observation that liberalism cannot imagine alternatives aligns with The Red Book:
"Humanity is our gift to the world... A nations true wealth is freedom, but not freedom that destroys others" (Ch. 2: Humanity and Kindness).
By reducing humans to "self-made projects," liberalism marginalizes collective virtues like sacrifice and solidaritycore to Orodisms Love for Humanity. Pre-modern traditions (religious or communal) nurtured this; consumerist liberalism erased it.
3. Orodist Freedom: Beyond "Tolerance" and "Power"
Schindler rightly notes liberalisms reduction of freedom to individual choice. But Orod counters:
"Freedom is a boundless sky, but irresponsibility turns it into a cage... Real democracy crowns all people of a land" (Ch. 3: Freedom, "On Democracy").
Orodist freedom is participatorynot "live and let live" (Schindlers bourgeois metaphysics), but active harmony in the cosmic symphony. Liberalisms flaw is its inability to see freedom as a collective process, not an individual right.
4. The Orodist Solution: "Orodism Island"
Orod proposes:
"We must migrate to Orodism Islandwhere freedom is an open sky, and happiness echoes in every alley... This is the land of all kind people, of every race and tongue" ("On Orodism Island").
This "island" symbolizes a society that:
Replaces selfish individualism with cosmic solidarity.
Balances consumerism with love for existence (nature, art, wisdom).
Elevates negative liberty (freedom from) into positive liberty (freedom for collective flourishing).
Conclusion: Beyond Liberalism and Its Critics
Liberalismdespite its achievementsis trapped in bourgeois metaphysics: an ideology that mistakes itself for "natural" and "inevitable." Orodism, through its three loves, not only validates these critiques but offers an alternative: redefining freedom as harmony with the cosmos. As Orod writes:
"We are branches of the universeborn to blossom and gift the world a fairer branch" (Ch. 1).
Key References from The Red Book (2022):
Ch. 1: Existence (cosmic timelessness and inherent dynamism).
Ch. 2: Humanity and Kindness (critique of self-destructive individualism).
Ch. 3: Freedom (democracy as collective participation).
"On Orodism Island" (utopia of cosmic harmony).
In Schindlers terms: Orodism replaces bourgeois metaphysics with cosmic metaphysicswhere freedom is not isolation, but a shared dance with existence.
On Imperial Assimilation, Liberal Universalism, and an Orodist Alternative
Your historical analysis is astutethe enforced ideological universalism of modern liberal (and communist) empires indeed contrasts sharply with premodern conquests that prioritized resource extraction over cultural transformation. However, Id argue this distinction stems not merely from liberalisms anthropology but from its metaphysical rupture with cosmic harmony, a rupture Orod Bozorgs philosophy seeks to heal.
1. The Paradox of Liberal "Liberation"
You note that premodern empires (Mongols, Cyrus) rarely imposed their entire worldview on conquered peoples, whereas modern ideologies demand total alignmentwhether through "democratization" or "class struggle." This aligns with Orods critique of detached individualism:
"Freedom divorced from humanity and existence becomes a weapon. To liberate others into your cage is the height of arrogance" (Red Book, Ch. 3).
Liberalisms universalist impulselike communismssprings from seeing itself as historys endpoint (Fukuyamas flaw), a notion foreign to empires that viewed culture as local and organic.
2. Education and the Roots of Violence
Youre right that virtue education alone cant resolve liberalisms ills. But the deeper issue is what counts as virtue:
Premodern virtues (e.g., Persian asha, Greek arete) were tied to cosmic order and communal bonds.
Liberal virtues (autonomy, tolerance) often ignore interdependence, enabling exploitation masked as "progress."
Orodism proposes "Love for Existence" as a corrective: "A tree uprooted from the forest soil may grow tall, but its branches will starve the earth" (Ch. 1). Technological scale amplifies harm precisely because liberalism severs ties to nature and community.
3. A Third Way: The Orodist "Island"
History shows two imperial models:
Premodern: Extract wealth, ignore culture (Mongols).
Modern: Export ideology, erase culture (liberalism/communism).
Orodism suggests a third pathnon-imperial solidarity:
"Orodism Island welcomes all but imposes nothing. Its shores are shaped by kindness, not conquest" ("On Orodism Island").
This rejects both passive extraction and coercive universalism, instead fostering voluntary cultural synergyakin to Silk Road exchanges, not Crusades.
4. The Community-Grounded Freedom You Mention
Your point about premodern freedom being reflexive (rooted in community) is vital. Orodism expands this:
"Freedom is the sky above a shared garden. To claim it alone is to suffocate" (Ch. 3).
Unlike liberal individualism or communist collectivism, Orodist freedom balances self-governance with cosmic responsibilitya framework that might have prevented, say, the Iraq Wars ideological hubris.
Beyond Ancient and Modern
The tragedy of modern ideologies isnt just their coercive universalism but their disenchantment of existence. Orodism offers a post-liberal vision where:
Technology serves harmony, not scale.
Education cultivates connection, not just autonomy.
Empire (if it must exist) learns as much as it extracts.
As Orod writes: "The conqueror who forgets his debt to the conquered soon conquers only dust" (Ch. 12).
Political discourse is inherently unobjective because it is rooted in ethics. Thus is why Libertarianism is the default position for those that understand this fact. What allows me to live my best life might not necessarily be the same for others but as long it does not infringe on the way they live their life, what's the problem?
Quoting Ludovico Lalli
Not just accessible but questioned and criticized to encourage compettion and for progress to be made.
On State Objectivity, Single Parties, and Orodist Governance
Your defense of state accountability and electoral access raises valid points about institutional design, but conflates form with essence. Lets examine this through Orod Bozorgs tripartite lens (Love for Existence, Humanity, Freedom) :
1. The Myth of "Objective" State Apparatus
You argue for a state mechanically "accountable" through electionsyet history shows even multi-party systems become captured by elites (e.g., lobbyists in liberal democracies). Orodism critiques this as procedural fetishism:
"A river judged only by its banks will never reveal its depth" (Red Book, Ch. 13).
True accountability requires cultural-spiritual alignment, not just periodic voting. The Soviet single party (theoretically open to all) still ossified because it lacked Love for Humanitya core Orodist principle demanding active moral participation, not passive access.
2. Single Parties vs. Cosmic Pluralism
Your single-party model assumes inclusivity guarantees equity. But Orodism warns:
"A garden with one tree species starves the soil" (Ch. 11: Culture).
Even with elections, monopoly power corrupts unless balanced by:
Decentralized "Islands": Local councils (Orodisms model) check central power through direct cosmic stewardship (e.g., managing water/forests).
Anti-Careerism: Orod bans political dynasties ("Power must flow like sap, not clot like resin", Ch. 3).
3. Welfare Beyond Coercion
You endorse state coercion for welfarea liberal-communist hybrid. Orodism proposes voluntary solidarity:
"Taxes extracted by fear build hospitals without healers. Gifts given by love plant clinics in every heart" (Ch. 12: The Worthy).
Example: Irans komitehs (coercive welfare) vs. Keralas cooperatives (organic mutual aid).
4. The Orodist Test
For any statesingle/multi-partyask:
Does it nurture interdependence (Existence)?
Does it dissolve privilege (Humanity)?
Does it enable creative dissent (Freedom)?
Modern states fail this by fixating on structures over substance.
Rebuttal to "Unobjective" Claim:
Your critique assumes objectivity lies in systems, not values. But as Orod teaches:
"A compass is useless if all paths lead to cliffs" (Ch. 4: Wisdom).
The real bias is believing apparatuses can transcend ideology while ignoring their cosmic disconnection.
Final Challenge:
Can your model pass the Three Loves Test? If not, its just another "objective" tyranny.
Why would I have meant that???? Different voters have different priorities; I know what mine are. If all of the available candidates have a clean record, and are true to their party platforms, I really don't care about their home life, how they dress or what they eat. I vote for what I want government to do at a given time. Liberetartian twits are not on my radar, any more than religious nuts.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Or he's been paying attention to the results of previous elections, as I have. Quoting Harry Hindu
I know of a dozen reasons, that have roots in the recent and distant past, but I will not discuss them here, for lack of sufficient space and time. In brief: fear and loathing beat out joy and optimism. A considerable amount of Repub cheating didn't help.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Would you describe the spread of a scientific theory or a philosophical worldview in these terms? Did it ever occur to you that human beings might have decided through processes of reasoning that liberalism actually made sense as way to guide their interactions with others?
That reminds me of Thomas Paine saying:
I think it was natural selection. Aristocracy got old and worn out. And poor.
If by accountable to the citizens, you mean citizens get to vote out a few people in power every few years, then exactly what part of the state are we holding accountable?
The welfare, coercion, and compulsion remains, the only things changing are the beneficiaries. Posturing for the power to wield an instrument of economic exploitation such as an official State doesnt seem to me to be an objective worth taking part in.
Maybe to some extent, but not to the same degree. Science polices itself to some extent. Pseudoscience is called out. People decry cigarette company funded studies on lung disease, or Big Oil smokescreen research on climate change. However, one cannot tell a complete history of the 20th century without copious reference to "right wing death squads." I have never heard of a "scientific death squad," or "science backed coups and assassinations."
Sure. Some aspects of liberalism make sense and are beneficial. That seems obvious enough. And a lot of people have obviously been convinced by liberalism's basic outlook. But you could say the same exact thing about communism and fascism. The Nazis didn't need to coerce or bribe Ford into advocating for fascism in the US for instance.
The people needed to be liberated from the constraints of the past and illiberal institutions, the Church being a prime target, but also local custom. There was a similar move in the Spanish Civil War, or in other places.
If church and liberal state can coexist so well today it's because the former has atrophied so much that it no longer shapes public life and culture. For instance, only a very few religious holidays/festivals are recognized anymore, and they have been pretty well secularized and made appropriate for a monoculture. That's a far cry from there being holidays every other week or so, and regular corporate events that bound up most of the population in collective action.
We have a "multiculturalism" that is acceptable to the liberal order because it is really "monoculturalism." You can still get a McRib during Ramadan in "Muslim towns," and you won't have to worry about your shopping getting interrupted by a call to prayer, or being confused by radically different forms of life. Everywhere becomes everywhere else. There are obvious benefits to this, and obvious downsides. In terms of downsides, it's pretty difficult to build any depth of culture around shared common events in common spaces when it is only acceptable to "disrupt the right to commerce" a few times a year, and the expectation is that stores will always be open (and thus people always working).
Liberalism's aversion to this can be seen in Europe where a critical mass of Muslims exists in urban areas, and they do sometimes attempt to engage in such communal rhythms, e.g. urban roads might be blocked for prayer, impeding the steady flow of commerce, which seemed to drive the French in particular up the wall, leading them to make it a crime, the state stepping in to make sure the individuals' economic activity is not disrupted by the community. You can wear any consumable pop-culture items you want to showcase individual identity, but it becomes illegal to wear clothing showcasing cultural identity.
Particularly in America, the residential geography itself is a sort of "buffering." It'd be hard to have communal events in many American municipalities because they've been designed so that it's impossible to walk anywhere.
I have noticed that particularly in those French laws passed to prevent the wearing of religious clothing and paraphernalia in the public square.
The asymmetry is that Islamic culture, which you reference, is itself not liberal in outlook, with sometimes dire consequences for human rights. We had a heated debate on this forum about the jailing of the Christian mayor of Jakarta, Ahok, around 2018, by all accounts an upstanding citizen, on the grounds of a politically-motivated charge of blasphemy against Islam, (on account of which it was insinuated that it was Islamophobic to have brought it up.) Another case Ive mentioned is that of the town of Hamtrack, Michigan, which celebrated a multicultural triumph when the majority of those elected to Council were Muslim, only to be dismayed when they promptly banned gay pride flags and symbols, presumably because of Islamic prohibitions against homosexual relations.
The basic problem is that whilst liberalism allows for the diversity of opinions, it is then required to accommodate cultures which prohibit diversity. I dont know if theres a way to square that circle.
Quite so. But I don't think the options are:
A. Accept and endorse liberalism wholeheartedly and ignore its tendency to erode all local cultural norms and sense of community; or
B. Embrace Islam or excuse the excesses of political Islam (i.e., theocracy).
There is a via media between theocratic "anti-blasphemy laws" and making public community prayer illegal because it blocks traffic, but allowing collective individual consumption and "night life" drunkenness to regularly flood the streets and block traffic or commerce at the same time (and it seems to be that the crucial difference is that the latter is individuals engaged in commerce and consumption as opposed to a community). Likewise, you can wear whatever consumable pop culture outfit you want, be it goth or punk, but don't let it be a symbol of cultural rootedness. A and B represent something like the absolutizing of the community and the individual respectively. This is itself a dialectic of liberalism and theocracy, which tend to pit the two against each other rather than recognizing the relationship as organic and constitutive.
[Quote]
The basic problem is that whilst liberalism allows for the diversity of opinions, it is then required to accommodate cultures which prohibit diversity. I dont know if theres a way to square that circle[/quote]
That seems like one particularly acute problem to me, related to a certain sort of group: Neo-Nazis, radical Islam, etc. But I think liberalism's general tendency to dismantle [I]all[/I] sources of tradition, norms, and culture goes much further than this. It tends towards leaving only three actors: the individual, the market, and the state.
At least here in the US, a new trend is "going dark" or wholly "cutting off" one's nuclear and extended family, or even one's own children in order to "live one's best life," and "live your truth." Freedom from "baggage." So too, the dramatic rise in children raised by separated parents is often justified (justified because it is fairly obviously bad for children) in terms of parental liberty. In terms of statistics, participation in civic (as well as religious) organization and precipitous declines in the number of social functions people attend, or the number times per month they say they see friends is a problem across the developed liberal states. People report loneliness as a major impact on their happiness at fairly ubiquitous rates, and we do have data to see that this is an increasing trend.
There is also this new phenomena where people polled now feel more in common with foreigners who share their broad political outlook (left or right) than their fellow citizens, people of the same religion and sect, people from the same region, people of the same descent, etc. We might think there is something positive in the dissolution of the power some of these categories (e.g. ethnicity), and still be troubled that an American conservative cares more for an Australian conservative than a liberal in their own town, or vice versa.
I don't see this trend as being positive, nor unrelated to liberalism's relentless drive towards a particular vision of individualism and liberty, or "the inevitable result of progress and technology." First, because technology and infrastructure is literally designed with such a conception of liberty in mind (designed to make us lonely). Loneliness is one of the first things we spend money on, isolated single-generation (often single-parent) homes, removing the need for roommates, close neighbors, etc.
Anyhow, I think the appeal to "theocracy" as the obvious possible alternative to liberalism represents a failure of imagination, perhaps even a sign of liberalism's transparency. The idea seems to be that if one thinks the anthropology underlying liberal individualism is wrong, the only option is a return to the Middle Ages. But why not a return to the Greek polis with a worthy liberal corrective to expand citizenship to all adults, or any other number of possible fusions that tamp down on liberalism's tendency towards pernicious individualism, isolation, monoculture (really anti-culture), voluntarism, consumerism, etc., while also retaining its positive aspects? Liberalism is, after all, itself such a fusion.
BTW, since your familiar with Taylor, I would say part of the difficulty is that liberalism, like secularism, tends to tell "subtraction narratives," about itself. On these accounts, "liberalism is just what you get when the oppressive institutions of the past are dismantled." In turn, this tends to give a sense of inevitably to the negative aspects of liberalism, while foreclosing on alternatives as necessarily entailing a return to an authoritarian past.
Critics recognize the problems, Fukuyama is a huge cheerleader of liberalism (and great analyst), but also identifies key fault lines. But he sees this as the inevitable consequences of economic growth/prosperity and freedom from coercive institutions. I think this misses the way contemporary liberalism/globalization is very much a positive project. As Deneen says, the "inevitably narrative" tends to suggest that the only solution to liberalism is "more liberalism," either more individual economic liberty for the right, or a larger welfare/administrative state for the left. It also obscures how technology, growth, international institutions, and the state are positively shaped with liberalism's assumptions in mind and serve to create the very anthropology it assumes.
Does this entail telling others how to live their lives or what they can and can't say, or what they can spend their money on or not?
Quoting Vera Mont
You sound just like a Rep. Reps say the same thing. Dems and Reps aren't any different when it comes to using their constituents as pawns in their game of chess. They know that their constituents are in an information bubble and don't question the party for the threat of heresy (just look at the Dems who tried to criticize the extreme left of their party and ended up leaving it).
Abolish political parties. Abolish group-think and group-hate.
You sound like David Brooks. Both of you argue for a return to a community and family-centered life, claiming that societal drift away from such traditional anchoring has led to an epidemic of isolation , loneliness and despair. I think thats true, for those who think in traditionalistic terms. A do-it-yourself culture of intentional community only works for those who are capable of a more complex and dynamic style of interaction with the world. I believe more and more people have evolved psychologically in that direction, so for them the shedding of the old bonds of social, religious and institutional obligation is a choice rather than an imposition. For others who arent prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change. You can do good work by finding those people in your community who are not ready to take that step. They will be grateful to be led to a ready-made social structure they can fit themselves into.
For the many others like myself, who have worked hard to break way from the strictures of what to then are repressive and conformist social and family bonds, it is your preferred form of social organization that leads to alienation and unhappiness, and we will fight tooth and nail to remain free of it.
Why would you assume that. It often entails changes in foreign relations, or public health, indigenous housing, environmental protection, elder care, energy distribution, education - issues far bigger than telling anybody how to live (so long as they don't harm others) or what to say (so long as they're not harming others with lies and abuse) or how they spend their money, (so long as they're not harming anybody.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, I don't. Seems like, whatever anyone says, you just keep hearing the same refrain.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sorry. Not within my purview. Never mind; Trump will abolish parties, elections, every kind of speech, hate and thought that's not in line with his - on any given day.
Brooks sometimes makes good points, particularly on the way our "meritocracy" has all sorts of negative consequences, while failing to live up to its name.
Yes, this is the "subtraction narrative" I mentioned above, and perhaps an example of the transparency issue. Liberalism is just "what happens when you remove the old forms of constraint."
Except it isn't. The atomized liberal consumer doesn't cease needing what they previously needed community to provide them, new (often mandatory) voluntarist versions of this same infrastructure need to be created, resulting in the hyperbolic growth of the state and market influence spreading into every area of life.
For instance, without community, there is no one to care for the injured or sick. People are left isolated and without resources after disasters. Older citizens cannot expect to rely on community in their decline. People cannot rely on support or intermediary negotiators in conflicts. Markets must expand to perform all these functions, but markets need regulation. Hence a gigantic (and phenomenally expensive) administrative state must take on all these roles to aid the liberal individual in attaining their individuality. The police and carceral state is the most visceral example, but also massive regulated (and often mandatory) insurance markets, etc. These are not optional (nor are laws banning community expressions or clothing that expressed cultural as opposed to personal identity so as to make the lived environment more conducive to the new individualism).
Indeed, this expansion of the state and markets comes with their own non-voluntary constraints in the form of regulation and taxation. Since liberalism and endless faith in "technology and innovation," growth, and "progress" prevail, there is a focus on the short term. Hence adequate taxes tend not to actually be raised in liberal welfare states, leading to huge accumulations of debt for operating expenses (as well as harrowing ecological debts for future generations to confront).
Aside from this, the reliance on markets to fulfill the former functions of community also has the effect of making the effects of economic inequality more global and all-encompassing. This was made particularly obvious during the pandemic, as the wealthy could comfortably "shelter in place," relying on a legion of anonymous low wage workers to bear the supposed risks for them.
At any rate, we might also ask: "freedom for who?" Industrializing education and care of the elderly certainly freed up prime aged adults from responsibilities, but not in ways that seem to be preferred by those whose care was being outsourced for greater economies of scale. Plus, if liberty requires self-governance, than the liberal education might seem to broadly fail on those grounds as well.
You act like this is a minor issue. As far as I can see, it's one that dominates electoral politics and is tearing apart the liberal order in the world's economy and greatest military power. That's not an isolated small scale issue, it's quite possibly the begining of the historical failure of liberalism.
Plus, it presupposes the liberal notion of freedom as: "freedom to do as one currently pleases."
The idea of those being dependent on community not having evolved, or not being "prepared to thrive," does recall a quote though.
[Quote]
Notably, the [marginalized] groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our nature means our bodies, these are natural groups opposed to artificial bonds like communities of work and culture. This does not mean that liberalism values these natural groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism argues that merely natural differences ought not to be held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual efforts and abilities.
[Reformers] recognize women, racial minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals from suspect classifications. Class and culture are different. People are part of ethnic communities or the working class because they chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals who do not. Ethnicity, [religion], and class, consequently, are marks of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination people suffer is, in some sense, their own fault. We may feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause for equal representation.
Wilson Cary McWilliams - Politics
[/Quote]
Or as James Stimson put it just a few years ago
[Quote]
"When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the effect of decline of the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline. [/quote]
But this of course radically ignores the ways in which massive state intervention and diplomatic efforts were made to secure the vast (and helpfully unregulated and desperate) labor pool of the developing world so as move the economic engines of now "distressed areas" across oceans at great ecological cost to future generations in order to secure greater profit margins and lower prices in the short term (and so higher consumption), with both profits and consumption gains skewing heavily to elites. Globalization isn't an accident though, it's occured with heavy state intervention according to an explicit ideology.
[quote=NY Times,Does Reason Know What it is Missing?] What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is unenlightened about itself in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. Postmetaphysical thinking, Habermas contends, cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.[/quote]
The following two quotes from that paper give a more nuanced sense of what Habermas thinks is at stake. The problem, as he sees it, is mutual, between secular and religious traditions:
The religious side must accept the authority of natural science as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally acceptable discourses.
The constitutional state must not only act neutrally towards worldviews but it must also rest on normative foundations which can be justified neutrally towards worldviewsand that means in postmetaphysical terms. The religious communities cannot turn a deaf ear to this normative requirement. This is why those complementary learning processes in which the secular and the religious sides involve one another come into play here.
So it is not just that secular reason is "unenlightened about itself" -- though Habermas thinks that is true. Enlightened or not, the liberal state's normative requirement of neutrality is legitimate, and must be acknowledged by religious communities.
The essay concludes 'there is something still missing'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You make this sound like its a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My mother expected to rely on the community in her decline. Specifically, she assumed she would move in with one of my brothers and their families. But that was no-go. Both of my sisters-in-law refused to allow that. It was a matter of a generational change in attitude toward the responsibility of grown children for aging family members. I dont know anyone in my age group who expects or wants to be taken care of by a family member when they become unable to care for themselves. Perhaps were not as ethically enlightened as you are.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Somehow you dont convince me that this is all about sensible economics for you. I think youre using inequality as a rationalization for your real agenda, which is about advocating for a certain religiously inspired ethic of social responsibility. How convenient it is that going back to the days of living with Grandma and Grandpa until they croaked happens to save money too!
I want you to keep something in mind. None of my preferred philosophical touchstones accept the concept of the solipsistically autonomous individual. On the contrary, they see the self a more radically intertwined with and inseparable from the normative attributes of the larger society than you do. So my objections to your arguments are not about choosing the individual over the community, but rejecting your model of how the self and the social relate to each other, and especially your need for a transcendent ground for community ethics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No, its a very major issue. Its just not an issue whose causes are interpreted the same way by all parties in the U.S. , no matter how badly you want to convince yourself that this is a sign of the historical failure of liberalism. In case you havent noticed , the country is profoundly divided over this any many other issues.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Globalization lifted many more people out of poverty worldwide that it put into poverty. mEven without offshoring, automation alone would have decimated the industrial heartland. This wasnt strictly a failure of liberalism. It was a failure on everyones part to anticipate how rapidly technological change would destroy communities. Having this fore-knowledge wouldnt have prevented the loss of jobs , but it may have allowed for a less traumatic transition. Populists considered this a failure of both liberalism and conservative. After Brexit, and fairly soon in the economic wake of the current trade debacle , populism will also be considered a failure. My guess is once the dust settles, while it didnt come out smelling like a rose, liberalism will emerge as the least disastrous of the various political avenues which have been explored.
I want to add that I think the idea that mining the causes of globalism reveals a predominance of motives of greed and narrow self-interest is a kind of conspiracy theory. There have always been those who are fundamentally suspicious of human enterprise, those who are quick to jump on the mistakes we make when we try to venture in new directions in order to better ourselves and our world. Rather than chalking up those mistakes as the price we pay for the audacity of human inventiveness, their suspiciousness makes them look for hubris and an abdication of ethical responsibility. Climbing too high, pushing too far gets us into trouble, they say, because we dare to become god-like when instead we need to be humble in the face of our mortal sinfulness. The damage globalism has done to those unprepared to adapt is Gods punishment for the hubris of humanity, our distancing ourselves from the ethical source, which we must always remember is not to be found in the immanence to itself of thought.
I do think Reder gets Habermas a bit wrong here. It's not that secular reason "has no use" for teleology or eschatology, it's more that to introduce either dimension into a liberal polity is to immediately desecularize the neutral normative constraints in favor of some religious tradition's view. Likewise, "instrumentalize" is too harsh. Secular society need not have much belief in religion, but what Habermas advocates is more than using religion to perform a useful service. He really wants liberal societies to be troubled by the "cosmic demands," and take religious perspectives on values more seriously.
Quoting J
Not surprising from someone who Rorty relentlessly critiqued for his need of Kantian transcendental underpinnings, or skyhooks as Rorty called them.
I suppose the most trenchant criticism one could offer of Rorty is that, despite his sincere efforts, philosophy has not come to end.
Do you mean specifically religious teleology or just teleology in general? There is definitely a thread in modern thought that declares all teleology to be essentially just superstition, and sometimes this thread asserts itself pretty aggressively (e.g. the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis "controversy"). However, extended into the political sphere this would seem to me to be a quite totalizing vision of secularism. I don't think teleology is necessarily, or even primarily religious. I don't even think teleology in the ethical sphere is distinctly religious; a great deal of thought would seem to be precluded under "secularism" by that standard.
Would that be because of the implicit presumption of a normative axis, the implied idea of a true good.
Quoting Joshs
A criticism the forum's Secular Thought Police would no doubt endorse :-)
Do you mean, within a particular religion's description of, say, eschatology? Not sure I understand your thought here. But if that's what you mean, then yes, perhaps it would be impossible to introduce eschatology on its own, without foregrounding a particular tradition and calling into question the neutrality of a liberal, process-oriented polity.
Religious teleology. The secular versions aren't really hot issues at the moment, politically. Remember, this conversation Habermas is taking part in concerns a specific moment in European politics. There are of course other ways to think about teleology.
Quoting J
I prefer Rorty to Habermas. Rorty was able to glimpse a world beyond modernism. He understood, albeit in a shaky fashion, what writers from Sartre, Gadamer and Wittgenstein to Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida were up to. Reading Rorty allows entrance into the most important thinking of our era , not only through his conversations with Continental thinkers, but also in the way he took up American writers like Davidson, Kuhn, Brandom, Dewey and Dennett. I think Habermas misses the boat on most of these writers, and falls back on a metaphysics that each of them was trying to escape from.
I would say that while philosophy of the sort that Habermas was up to has indeed come to an end (or should do so), I think Rortys lack of sure-footedness in the terrain of post-Cartesianism led him to become too suspicious of philosophy, not recognizing the validity of philosophical concepts pointing beyond metaphysical skyhooks of the sort that Habermas remained wedded to.
Quoting Wayfarer
If Secular culture amounts to a philosophical framework, then it has specific implications for religion. That is to say, even if it includes within itself the possibility of a religious viewpoint, it will entail its own implicit preferences with regards to religion. You, for instance, have decided that we are better off with religion than without it, so of course youre going to prefer the secular vantage to what you call proselytizing liberalism.. But is there room in the secular tent for fundamentalist religions that are anti-Enlightenment and openly hostile to democracy?
As to the proselytizing nature of liberalism, its not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism. At least Im self-aware about it when I try and sell postmodernism. I dont go around claiming some fatal pathology or irrationalism in the political and philosophical perspectives I dont agree with. He is right to see such accusations being leveled against religion from certain quarters of liberal thought, which is why I see his tussle with proselytizing liberalism as a bitch-slapping contest between sister schools of platonic metaphysics.
Quoting J
I love the juxtaposition of ought and neutral here. It illustrates , without recognizing it , that built into the assumption of norms of neutrality, objectivity and non-bias (like Rawls veil of ignorance) is a metaphysical ought. Secularisms and liberalisms which clothe themselves in the garb of neutrality share with religious points of view a grounding in an ethical ought. Such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral are secular offshoots of religious thought, repackaging Godly platonism as humanist platonism.
What is a metaphysical ought?
I think you're selling the Rawlsian tradition short here. I recognize very well the juxtaposition you point out, and so does the tradition -- I simply don't find it scandalous in the way that you do. You're wanting to read "neutral" in terms that were never intended. It doesn't mean "without oughts." That would be directly counter to what Rawls proposed. It means "without religious doctrines, but attempting to treat each person fairly." It's you, not Rawls, who claims that this carries with it the idea that "such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral, are secular offshoots of religious thought." If that is indeed true, then perhaps the liberal project was always incoherent. But I see no reason to believe it is true, certainly not on some universal grounds asserting that "objectivity can't be meaningful outside a religious tradition."
Quoting frank
Something like this:
Its not scandalous, its not incorrect and its not incoherent. But it is amenable to a deconstructive analysis laying bare hidden presuppositions. Whether you think the Rawlian approach is a secular offshoot of religious thinking depends on how narrowly you want to define religion. If you take Heideggers broader vantage, the platonism of Rawlian liberalism qualifies it as Ontotheology. But then of course he thinks the entire Western philosophical tradition up through Hegel and Nietzsche is ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence.
He's expressing Schopenhauer's pessimism. He's saying consciousness itself is dependent on dissatisfaction. The only place where wholeness and perfection exist is in oblivion.
The drive to answer the unanswered question is ontic here. The one will drives everything from where it is to somewhere else. This shows up in consciousness as dissatisfaction.
This is a hard deterministic picture though. There are no choices and "ought" does not have meaning relative to some external Good. There are no metaphysical oughts. The drive to move is all that exists.
Quoting frank
Except that Nietzsche is no pessimist. I was being lazy in throwing that quote out there. I should have explained metaphysical oughts myself. A metaphysical, theoretical or
perceptual interpretation about an aspect of the world commits itself to certain expectations about the way things should be. What lies outside of the range of convenience of that interpretive understanding may not be seen all, it may be seen as confused or non-sensical, or it may be construed in social terms as an ethical violation of accepted standards. In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible. The neutral is never divorced from some stance or other arising from the messy business of assessing competing claims to validity within a diverse community. It is my notion of the neutral or your notion of the neutral or their notion of the neutral, but there is no sideways on viewpoint to retreat to.
That's a complicated issue. In a way he was. He was saying, "I see a way out of this." He never made it out himself though.
Quoting Joshs
What would be an example of this?
Quoting Joshs
That's true, but this normativity isn't ethical in nature. As you say, it's a matter of expectations.
This is true. I think your very broad definition would make absolutely any rationalist, no matter how committed their atheism might be, an "offshoot of religious thinking." We could say that, but is it persuasive?
Quoting Joshs
Yes, same point. Are these extremely broad generalizations accurate or helpful, past a certain point? Or perhaps it's better to ask, Does such an understanding help us make sense of Rawls or Habermas as philosophers?
I get where you're coming from. I know the case that can be made about religion as the root of all foundationalism, "skyhooks" and all. But deconstruction is not innocent here. If we choose to focus on this aspect of religion (and rationalism), we owe our interlocutors an account of why.
Quoting Joshs
I don't know if you've read Richard J. Bernstein? Almost alone at the time, he was determined to build bridges between anal. and continental phil. His Beyond Objectivism and Relativism and The New Constellation contain very sharp comparisons and critiques of Habermas vs. Rorty, connecting both of them with Gadamer, Heidegger, Kuhn, and other relevant thinkers. (Since both books were written 40-odd years ago, though, we only get middle-period Habermas in the mix.)
Yes, so all the more reason not to saddle Rawlsians with a version of "neutrality" they never claimed to exemplify. Their neutrality is associated with a stance, as is yours, as is Rorty's, as is mine.
Quoting frank
That depends on how broadly one defines the ethical. Most of us think of ethics in relation to the expectations we have of each others conduct. Specifically, ethical situations are defined in proximity to social engagements where blame and anger can be triggered. We find the other morally culpable when they violate our expectations and fail to live up to our standards of engagement. We believe they knew better than to do what they did, that they fell under the sway of nefarious motives. But is also possible or to conceive of ethical ideals which dont rest on notions of injustice and blame.
I doubt it.
Quoting J
What do you make of the version of neutrality that Axel Honneth and Shaun Gallagher are saddling Rawls with?
But autonomy is something that can be curtailed by a lack or failure of distribution of goods or opportunities.
(Is this quote from Gallagher? I went to grad school with him!)
I think the criticisms in the passage are apt, particularly about Rawls and goods distribution. I'm sure you're familiar with Martha Nussbaum's critiques as well. We could do a whole thread on what's right and wrong with Rawls and the original position. The reason I don't consider myself a Rawlsian is because of his over-reliance on an abstract thought experiment to generate the idea of justice as fairness -- very far from the Habermasian idea of communicative action. That, and his apparent indifference to the role of capitalism in liberalism.
But . . . flawed as it is, the Rawlsian viewpoint is about fairness, understood as neutrality or impartiality. It would be ludicrously wrong to say that Rawls "wasn't trying to be neutral" or "didn't care about fairness." If we could somehow, per impossibile, generate a re-deal of human affairs based on his original position, it would almost certainly be fairer than what we have now -- and more neutral, too.
The issue being that the supposed ethical neutrality of liberalism is itself based on a worldview, namely, that the ground of values is social or political in nature, in a world that is morally neutral or indifferent. So I'm not proselytizing specific religions, but I believe that the religious mind understands something that the secular attitude does not. In Western culture, that is plainly centred around Christian Platonism, but I'm not someone who believes that therefore Christianity has any kind of monopoly on truth.
Yep, the quote is from Gallaghers recent book, Action and Interaction. His notion of justice departs from Rawls in not being grounded in neutrality or fairness. For him, the sense of justice is prior to that of fairness. Given that Gallaghers perspective is a cognitive enactivism informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, he sees justice more in terms of openness to the autonomy of the other than elimination of bias. He traces the sense of justice back to playful interactions among other animals.
So, saying that is the same as saying that one's autonomy is not unconditionally more important than another's, and this is precisely the idea of fairnessthat there can be no purely rational justification for considering one's autonomy to take precedence over another's.
That there might be pragmatically conditioned contexts in which, for practical reasons, one's autonomy predominates, as authority say, is a separate issue. Such arrangements are or should be. agreements that are freely entered into by all participants, and if that is not the case that would be unfair, an injustice.
I'll make a point of reading it. I've followed his career with interest. He was quite a bit older than me -- I think he'd just left seminary -- but a really nice, smart guy,
I'm not sure that's right, though I agree with you about spirituality. Rawlsian liberalism doesn't have to say -- and indeed it usually does not -- that the world is morally neutral or indifferent. And it's not so much that the ground of values is political. Rather, it's that the only values that belong in the political sphere are process values, more or less Kantian, that emphasize impartiality and universalizability. Is this an artificial and perhaps unworkable division? Maybe. But we should try to understand it on its own terms. Liberalism, as exemplified by Rawls, believed that the job of the state was to establish, to the extent possible, a framework for coexistence among people and groups with diverging opinions and goals. And yes, as I've been discussing with @Joshs, this framework can't be neutral in respect to any values whatsoever. But it can espouse a version of neutrality that at least takes a hands-off approach to differences among religious and/or social groups -- and that's not nothing. It asks for public neutrality, regardless of what any particular member of the polis may personally believe. That is not the same thing as publicly declaring that there are no transcendental values, which the opponents of liberalism often seem to believe is the agenda.
This is of course truethe framework cannot be neutral when it comes to fairness, or neutrality, itself. Fairness, or neutrality is a value simply because there cannot be any rational justification for rejecting it.
Thanks, thats a fair clarification. I agree Rawlsian liberalism doesnt explicitly deny transcendental values or claim the world is morally indifferent. But in practice, I think it tends to regard such values as if they were subjective or socially conditionedeven when it doesnt say so outrightbecause of the absence of a vertical axis, so to speak.
Its framework allows only procedural valueslike fairness or autonomyinto the public sphere: the horizontal axis. That may amount to a kind of neutrality, but it effectively brackets deeper conceptions of the Goodnot by refuting them, but by rendering them inadmissible in public reasoning. So while liberalism doesnt deny transcendental values, it often functions as if they were subjectiveand thats the deeper concern.
Nice.
Quoting Joshs
We need a thread on this. Notions of blame have always intrigued me. We are so quick to judge and despise those we think have transgressed from the obvious path of "righteousness". This retributive impulse has frightened me since I was a child.
(Mimicking Socrates): Is justice, then, to be learned from dogs at play? Or shall we not rather seek to know what justice is - even if be something that no dog might comprehend?
[Reply="Joshs;983513"]
Such a sentiment could be used to justify practically anything though, right? For instance, the people picked Trump, and they picked him despite his obviously extreme authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for the rule of law. They picked pill mill doctors and opiates. They picked mass incarceration as a solution to opiates (and desegregation). "The market has spoken."
Yet if it was true that state action reflects community preferences, how exactly do you explain simultaneous rioting in most urban centers over the infamies of American police in 2020? Has the "market and people" spoken here? And is it obvious that if "the market (people) want it," it's a good thing? Have the American people also spoken in favor of the private health insurance system?
Yes, its less of an expectation. However, people of later generations do still definitely expect that extremely underfunded welfare states will continue to pay their extremely expensive benefits in old age though, which will require dramatic reductions in future investment and young people (young people who in the West will become majority minority even as they will be forced to pay for a much wealthier majority European elderly population who has also become habituated to unsustainable levels of consumption). Aside from the sustainability issues and political stability issues this brings with it, the point is that the liberal individual isn't actually some atomized super human shedding their need for community, they just force the state to force others to provide them what they need to be atomized individuals in a market context.
And if some people in their nation want to choose a more communitarian system? "Too bad, they still must pay for us to have the liberal system first and can use what they have left over," has been the general liberal solution.
This is why the left/right tension within liberalism tends to be about the state doing more or less to help people be atomized individuals by taking some people's property to enable others to be more atomized.
Anyhow, I would think the more obvious failure of liberalism on the topic of elder care lies more in creating a culture where people, particularly women, are derided and attacked, represented as dupes, etc. for supporting their families (generally in market terms of "unpaid labor"), rather than individual choices. The fact is, there is a stigma in directly the opposite direction. You're supposed to "lean in" to career and consumption.
Whenever you complain about "Platonic" metaphysics and routinely suggest postmodern ones, is this not proselytizing? What makes it different? It seems the only difference here is that we are in disagreement about how great liberalism is. If offering a critique at all "proselytizing?"
Of course I think there is something wrong at the core of liberalism. I said it's vision on human liberty is extremely myopic. Can one not disagree with liberalism's voluntarist vision of freedom?
What's the comparison case here? If all economic growth stops in 1980 and neo-liberalism gets to claim responsibility for everything after, perhaps this is true. It seems far from obvious that neo-liberalism was the only, or best way to pursue this growth.
We actually have examples of extremely poor, (sometimes war torn) nations becoming developed nations since WWII in Korea, Finland, Iceland, etc. They did not follow the standard globalization play book of "become the sweatshop of the West." Nor did China, since the CCP continually intervened to push back on the forces of globalization in ways smaller states could not. There are strong arguments that, at least in many states, globalization, as pursued, has actually retarded economic and political development. And this is of course ignoring the ecological toll about to come due in the second half of the century (liberalism's focus on short term gains and essentially religious faith in "progress" to fix any apparent disasters we are subjecting future generations to).
I think the bolded part is demonstrably false, at least in its hyperbolic terms (i.e., "devastated"), but I wouldn't fault you for thinking this is true because people who certainly know better have tended to put out extremely disingenuous narratives on this front. The common thing to do is to simply look at US capital substitution rates in industry that has stayed in the US and extrapolate from there about what would have happened had other industry stayed. This is wholly inappropriate though, since the type of industry that is worth keeping in-market has been precisely that industry that is most cost-effective to automate (because then you aren't shipping technicians and expensive capital abroad just to ship the product back). There do not exist, contrary to popular opinion, magical machines that can just spit out most products. The factories that moved to abroad were specifically for those products that could most benefit from avoiding [I] labor[/I] expenses.
This also ignores that sectoral shift is far less damaging when it happens slowly or that neo-liberal policy also allowed a massive influx of immigration to further drive down wages paired with the shock of off-shoring. New immigration was unpopular and couldn't be passed as a law, so they just stopped enforcing the rule of law on this issue, leading to a substantial share of the population lacking legal status so that they could also serve as a more easily exploitable underclass. The results of globalization and migration absolutely hammered unions, which is why unionization collapsed instead of spreading into the service sector.
I don't really need a "transcendent" ground for these critiques. I just need to reject liberalism's voluntarism, the idea that liberty is "doing what you currently desire."
I do find your opinions interesting though, because you're statements, particularly on a permanent underclass, have often reminded me a lot of Charles Murray, but obviously the underlying philosophical assumptions are quite different. The judgements on the fate of the underclass seem very much in the vein that celebrates to "exceptional individual" one finds in liberal theorist like Mill (On the topic of Mill, he, like Locke, is another liberal who justified enslaving people who were not economically productive enough to liberate them from low consumption).
Anyhow, I don't see how one could possibly separate equality from reflexive freedom, or freedom as self-governance. For instance, you cannot have a equal society with a recalcitrant, morally bankrupt leadership class. They will tend to destroy what they rule over, in part because they are unhappy. Donald Trump, for instance, strikes me as a man ruled over by his passions and appetites, a vice addled man who cannot even follow through on the (very few) good intuitions he has because of a lack of self-discipline.
I think that's a fair way to frame it. But I would put it that: "you're free to practice any religion you want, so long as you practice it as an [I] individual[/I]." Bans on public religious observance or clothing point in this direction for instance. This is very different from earlier forms of liberalism in the US, where religion was a prominent part of public life, and the prohibition on religion was rather than no one be coerced into it, and that the state play no role in supporting any [I] particular[/I] faith.
It's a significant political issue. Pew just released a new study for Easter and it found that a full half of Americans are greatly concerned with the decline of religion in public life. Pace common stereotypes, this sentiment is not specific to White, rural Evangelicals (not that large of a population anyhow), but includes a majority of Hispanics as well. It's a difficult and complex issue, but I don't think I would be misrepresenting things to say that the opinion of aggressively secular folks on this issue tends to be: "so much the worse for the majority on this issue." Which is certainly a defensible position. My point would merely be that this is not neutral vis-á-vis conceptions of liberty and "democracy." It tends to put the individual above the community, and I think it's fair to say that there is a general hostility towards religion as a constraint on individual liberty precisely because it is communitarian and, even more so, because pretty much all world religions reject the liberal voluntarist conception of liberty.
Communitarian projects are famously difficult to operate in liberal legal systems as well, since the idea is generally that assets must ultimately lie with some individual (or corporate officers). I think it's interesting to note that a great many intentional communities and communes have been created based on more secular and liberal understandings of liberty and community, and the particular challenges they've faced. In general, they have collapsed quite quickly.
The kibbutz has been a particularly robust example though, and it's worth noting there that (aside from being grounded more in socialist thought), they have had the benefit of a friendly legal system that has enabled them, rather than one that is broadly hostile to their project.
Yes. Minor quibble: "inadmissible" shouldn't be taken to mean "unmentionable" or "intellectually disreputable." The point is that they can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes.
"It often functions as if they were subjectiveand thats the deeper concern."
But what would be the alternative? The key is "as if". Values may or may not be subjective, says the liberal state, but we must proceed as if they are -- or at any rate, as if the matter is not one for government to decide. Should we instead turn our practical deliberations into a forum about whose claim to objective value has the best argument? Or would you rather we adopted a set of transcendental values, and based the polity on them? How would that differ from theocracy? (An alternative, more critical, response here would be: The liberal state does adopt a set of transcendental values, but they are precisely the procedural values of neutrality and impartiality, as @Janus points out.)
I most certainly don't want to start a controversy about Israel, but notice what can happen when a "friendly legal system" extends its friendship not just to the admirable concept of a kibbutz, but to the policy that other religiously based social groups should not receive that friendship -- should in fact be seen as opponents on religious/nationalist grounds. Thank goodness, there are many, many Israelis who are opposed to this kind of theocracy.
How does this add anything to the conversation whatsoever? Did you think Wayfarer was using "inadmissible" in some other way? That's what the word means, after all. And clearly if something cannot play a deliberative role, then it is unmentionable and intellectually disreputable within deliberative contexts, which is precisely what we are talking about.
That seems like the state putting the rights of one group over another (and also something it does quite broadly and not in any special relation to communitarian life), not a tension between the individual and communities. Slavery involved the state putting the property rights of individuals above the personal rights of individuals; it can happen in that context too.
In general, liberal states have not had too much trouble justifying segregation, colonialism, slavery, or expansion by conquest, which I don't think should be that surprising considering key early liberal theorists argued in favor of them. Israel is not really that different on that front, just behind the curve of change. The move away from these always seemed to me to involve liberalism's sublation of their socialist and nationalist opponents. At least in the US case, federal pressure to end segregation was motivated specifically on those grounds, and nationalism seemed to be a major driver of decolonization.
Edit: And note, liberalism has not fully outgrown this sort of justification of slavery. In some cases, globalization has led to conditions that might justifiably be called "wage slavery" (and it's also played a determinant role in fact that there are more slaves today than at any point in history). Sometimes, apologists do absolutely repudiate these effects, but it's not uncommon to see them minimize them or even to advocate for them as necessary positive steps in economic development in terms that very much recall Locke's admonition that savages be "liberated from indolence."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why shouldnt it justify anything? What other authority have you got to invoke to justify or condemn a society? Is there some sovereign, sideways-on or gods-eye perspective that hovers above the fray of messy, practical political
engagement? We cant climb outside of our contingent societal norms to sit in judgement of them. The judgements belong to the contingent normative field itself.
The dictator Nayib Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin American history. Is this the result of a successful propaganda campaign, or do his many supporters recognize and endorse what he is? Should we condemn that society for not being prepared for the task of embracing a democratic political system of robust checks and balances, or might we instead recognize that they must discover for themselves , through trial and error, its advantages?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I consider BLM in many respects a boutique movement, whose principles reflect the latest in academic theory. This in part may explain why it was embraced so rapidly by highly educated , wealthy liberals in places like Chicagos north side and posh north shore suburbs, but may have resonated less well within the inner city black neighborhoods that were the alleged focus of the protests. For instance, most residents of the most crime-ridden communities wanted greater police presence (albeit less trigger-happy) rather than a defunding of the police.
Large urban centers like New York and Chicago are split politically in ways not dissimilar to the red-blue nationwide divide, although this is covered over to an extent by the fact that the vast majority of blacks still vote democratic.
Poorer communities and those with large concentrations of immigrants from places like Africa, Mexico and China skew socially conservative, which may explain how a Trump-supporting major like Eric Adams was elected in New York.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Your notion of the communitarian is just the flip side of the individualist atomism you oppose. Rather than analyzing the nature of community as an additive composite of sovereign individuals, you invest the community with sovereign moral attributes derived not from actual interactions among socially shapes selves but from an already assumed set of ethical absolutes. You apply these context-independent norms to your notion of the communitarian and then force it onto the individual.
Timothy, I am not an atom, and neither is my community. Neither how I ought to act as an individual nor how the community ought to act can be ascertained in advance , but only emerges as a function of the actual ongoing reciprocal interactions of each of us with each other. The role of the State and the market reflect the needs that emerge out of these interactions, such as the need to nurture community based on intertwined interests rather rely on blood ties and the oppressive formal obligations that tend to go along with it. This historically recent changes in attitude concerning the centrality of the family is not the triumph of the ideology of the atomized individual, but the transition from absolutizing concepts of community to discursive, practice-based accounts.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The difference between my defense of postmodernism and your critique of liberalism is that I would never dream of passing judgement on any political system put into practice by a society from a vantage outside of the normative
dynamics at play within that society. Attacks on liberalism in the U.S. amounts to a clash between rival communities. If I choose sides and defend liberalism, I am not telling
the community critical of liberalism that they should not be constructing their political system in the way that makes sense to them, and justifying this on some objective truth that I think they are ignoring or cant see. Rather, I can offer them my alternative and let them determine if and how they can incorporate it into their thinking.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. Im more persuaded by arguments like this:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/immigrants-didnt-kill-your-union/
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Its not exceptional individuals, like Musks technocratic elite, that drives prosperity. Its collective, coordinated, large -scale production drawing on strengths and weakness of diverse working communities. Inequities that result need to be addressed by slowing down the pace of change to minimize the disruptive consequences of layoffs, investing in job training and education, using tariffs selectively in combination with reinvestment in plants, strengthening the safety net for those struggling to adapt to these changes (healthcare, child care, addiction and suicide counseling , possibly a universal guaranteed income). Are these not approaches that the progressive end of liberalism has supported? Is there some alternative outside of progressivism that has better ideas? Bernie Sanders-style
socialism?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In his later years, Foucault wrote a lot about self-governance, going back to Romans like Seneca and his practices of the self. Of course, what Foucault was after was the idea of self as a work of art, and practices of the self directed toward the aim of continual selfs
re-invention.
Trumps idea of freedom is the freedom of the self from accommodating the needs of others, from having to encounter dissent of any kind. This manifests itself as an impulse of destruction, the limiting of any outside impediment to the exercise of the will. But the power of the will emanates not from some inner reserve but from its connection to the social milieu which feeds it and replenishes it. Cutting the will off from its wellspring reduces it to idiocy, which is what were witnessing now.
Leaving the prior notes aside, as they were vague so we're just going to be going in circles, the above is true. It is also true of severe bi-polar, schizophrenia, true (i.e without the political baggage) body dysmorphia, chronic depression etc.. etc.. etc... These things matter to other people, and we even have provisions to detain people with these mental aberrations because of the heightened potential for harm to self and others. I am not, at least in this meager of a discussion, suggesting there's some direct parallel here, but the logic is the same.
Unfortunately, humans are male or female. That said, I see that part of this discussion isn't quite on the table and that's fine. I don't want a tense argument about htat issue right now.
Quoting Janus then I would need to say things like "this is racist" before any decent discussion could be have about merits. We're justifying racist policies. I am not entirely perched to reject that possibility. I was for some time (and may possibly still be) for policies which afford women additionally (read: advantageous) rights in law above men. So, your points about being 'decent' are not lost on me. I hear those arguments. But 'kindness' does not solve problems. Consider:
We grant additional rgihts,and do what we can to support population X who is a minority, and was historically harmed. Great. They continue to fail and draw resources for generations without ever coming to the table in terms of reciprocity. Perhaps this is somehow morally acceptable: but it would bankrupt a nation and potentially push other demographics into poverty and diseducation, lacking in health care etc... instead of allowing all boats to rise. We need to consider these things instead of just crying and say "oh the humanity".
Quoting Janus
They seem to. Luigi Mangione being a big example. Heck, this white kid stabbed in the heart seems to be another one. Karmelo Anthony is being praised as some kind of hero in (not insignificant) corners of the base for stabbing a kid in cold blood and admitting it. He has raised more money than the fucking victim. It is not a serious conversation if we're going to deny the utterly reprehensible moral compass of the left. It is not lost that sometmes, this is outright racist thinking (the Anthony example is one).
But, to be clear, I didn't even suggest this. It is a significant number. That's all I can say for certain. The above is just blood-boiling so I'm happy to make the point. The sheer number of people who praised the shooter at Trump would be another, including several celebrities and politicians (i'm not going to post instagram compilations on here, but you could find them if you wanted to. Threats and praising the shooter abound).
Quoting Janus
It depends what your definition of hate speech is, and this is always the problem. I am 100% against any kind of hate speech legislation because (even taking the underlying loadedness of your question as legitimate) no one has that authority. We cannot rely on 'perceived hate' because that's utter bollocks, and so we need an objective measure. If that's just slap-dash written up in a Bill, it's going to be insane. And it always is, as the UK has shown over the last few years https://mythdetector.com/en/free-expression-on-the-internet/ This last link because its actually pretending to be counter, but you get lines like this:
"The law also penalizes the deliberate spread of false information intended to cause annoyance or anxiety."
Are you kidding?
Aside from this, I want to know who the racists are. Don't stop anyone from showing their true self. Otherwise they'll do it in the dark.
Right - that is the point Im labouring. Its the inevitable subjectivism that now must apply in such matters - a consequence of the individual conscience as the final arbiter of value. Everything becomes a preference, and preferences are more or less sacrosanct in liberalism (within legal limits.) 'Whatever floats your boat'.
I might seem to be advocating for religion, but its not my intention to evangelise. Its my conviction that the higher religious cultures embody a cosmic philosophy, a vision of humanitys role in the cosmos, which is lacking in the naturalism which nowadays underwrites liberalism, which is fundamentally neo-darwinian in orientation ('justice evolves') and the belief that existence lacks intrinsic purpose or virtue. It is, as Nietszche foresaw, basically nihilist in outlook (bearing in mind that nihilism is often not dramatic or outwardly obvious.)
Quoting J
I agree that it's not the role of the state to impose values. That's why I'm trying to focus on a philosophy rather than politics. Where I think liberalism oversteps, is the kind of proselytizing secularism that believes that scientific method provides the sole criterion for truth, and the forcible rejection of any idea of there being a higher truth in the sense conveyed in the religions. ('Where's the evidence?' :brow: )
One of the better books I've read is Paul Tyson, De-fragmenting Modernity (2017):
It is true that that is a much more religiously-oriented way of being, but it doesn't necessarily have to be imposed on the political level. So, ironically, it *is* up to the individual, not in reliance on some institutional framework, to see through and beyond it. Which is a very difficult thing to do.
So you cannot critique the Islamic State because you don't live in a Muslim nation? You cannot call out the abhorrent practice of American chattel slavery unless you live in the ante-bellum South? My take would be: "any ethics that requires withholding judgement in that way is a ludicrously deficient ethics."
And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics. Obviously, most philosophy disagrees on this point, which of course doesn't make the majority right, but it does make simply asserting the opposite insufficient. One might suppose that if assumptions like that lead one to an ethics that cannot condemn ISIS or slavery, or forces one to reject "razor sharp hunting knives are not good toys for babies because of what they are," as an overly dogmatic judgement, it's a good indication that something is seriously wrong with it.
What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? "The evil boogiemen said it so it must be false!" You know who else made this argument? Unions, all through the Clinton years. Only later shifts in the Democratic coalition led to them abandoning this messaging. Union leaders met with Clinton at the border as he stated his commitment to do more than Bush re immigration.
Opinions differ on the aggregate effects of migration on unions. It's hard to pull out the effects from everything else, particularly because there are likely strong interaction effects between disparate concurrent forces. But the idea is mainstream in economics. Aside from increasing the labor supply, immigration also tends to make it more difficult to unionize due to intercultural friction and labor/culture barriers.
And employers agree. For instance, leaked documents from Amazon show they explicitly sought to diversify their workforce at the jobsite level to combat unionization risks. That employers pursued this tactic in the first Gilded Age is also well-documented.
No, I don't take you to be doing that at all. Your approach is fair-minded, and I share your view of the importance of spirituality, if not religion per se.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I think this is wrong, but the distinction that needs to be made is a subtle one. And what you say here may help make sense of it:
Quoting Wayfarer
In what I'm saying about liberalism, I am focusing on it as a political structure. It's been slow to dawn on me that others on TPF, including yourself to an extent, view "liberalism" as an entire panoply of philosophical and ethical attitudes, intent on various levels of proselytizing. I'm sure this is the sort of "overstepping" you're thinking about. I have almost no interest in this feature of contemporary life, and know little about it. I avoid that level of "political" non-conversation whenever I can. My political convictions are far to the left of all that (I should have been born Swedish!). So I can hardly say you're wrong. No doubt there are many out there who wear the "liberal" hat and who do all that you fear they do. But all I can speak about is what I know of the Rawlsian liberal tradition in political theory, which is a very different matter.
So, from that perspective . . . there really isn't any inevitable subjectivism, nor is the individual conscience consulted about value, nor is anyone's preference sacrosanct. To the extent that a government could espouse such things (by law?!), Rawls would say it did not understand liberalism. The sort of government Rawls envisaged, I think, would have no opinions whatsoever about subjectivism vs. objectivism in personal philosophy, or about how reliable one's conscience might be. Nor would a preference be sacrosanct in the sense of being philosophically unquestionable.
On all these matters, the state is neutral, agnostic. Its attitude is: "You might be right. And you have the right to be wrong. You may do as your conscience dictates, and that may or may not result in ethical truth. It's none of our business. It's not that we think "subjectivism is correct"; it's that we insist that the government must not say the opposite. We are concerned that no one, speaking for the state, attempts to impose their version of objective values other than the procedural values of liberalism itself. That is not because we "don't believe in objective values"; some of us do, some of us don't; it's because the heterogeneity of the polis demands neutrality on the question, just as a matter of tolerance and getting along. The alternative, we think, must inevitably tend toward authoritarianism."
Is this complex and full of flaws? You bet. It isn't even my preferred political structure. I only insist that it's not the same thing as taking a position on subjectivism, or trying to get people to adopt it.
Perhaps he needs another cultural moment. Certain seems like this sort of thing is trying to be brought into legislative styles. The recent UK court ruling seems to reverse this, somewhat ( in terms of a cultural picture - not that one ruling changes the Western conception of gender per se).
That's fair. It might be that my criticism is more of modern culture. For instance that provided in 'The Blind Spot of Science, by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser. It's not as if liberalism 'proselytizes' so much as embodies an assumed consensus that puts the burden of proof on those who question it.
I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjuticable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.
I agree with your depiction of an ideal liberalism, and I'm inclined to support liberalism as a political philosophy, but modern liberalism is typically missing a dimension of existence, one that used to be supplied by religion(s). (Nevertheless if I were a US voter, I'd vote Democrat, but I think more of the 'Christian democratic' ilk - politically conservative but socially progressive, if that makes sense.)
[hide="Reveal"] I will share something - it's a bit dramatic but it's the clearest expression of what I have believed at some points in my life. It's from a keynote speech at a 1994 interfaith conference by Buddhist scholar-monk, Bhikkhu Bodhi, a 'Buddhist response to the contemporary dilemmas of human existence'. He diagnoses the problem as:
*Hence, subjective. [/hide]
Let's make it a little clearer. Deep questions of value and meaning are matters for individual judgment; how could they be otherwise? You can't look them up in a textbook. What you mean, I think, is that subjectivism believes that human judgment has no further court of appeal, where it might receive an answer as to whether the judgment is correct or not. In that sense, these judgments are either based on subjective considerations that don't necessarily hold from one person to the next, or they are unfounded by a first principle of rationality.
Liberalism as I understand it stops with the first statement: From the state's point of view, your individual judgment is just that, and we will not interfere or tell you you are right or wrong. But I certainly see what you mean about a "subjective attitude," if we can call it that, which wants to say all sorts of things about what value judgments are "really" based on. Most of these things, I disagree with, as do you. The ideal liberal state will have none of this.
But that's just nonsense. I don't understand the naivete which claims that the liberal state does not interfere with value judgments. Do you actually believe yourself when you say things like that?
A state which makes no value judgments cannot govern at all. Politics is no less bound up with values than morality. The fact that liberalism has brainwashed us to think otherwise is remarkable, and even impressive. :lol:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Here ya go:
Heres a recent paper of mine on the subject.
https://www.academia.edu/124753599/Whos_to_Blame_for_Injustice_Joseph_Rouses_Poststructuralist_Critique_of_Enactivist_Ethics
Yes, you've put your finger on the core of the issue. It's not that I dispute the necessity of individual conscience in matters of value and meaningon the contrary, I believe it's fundamental. But when conscience is understood as operating in a vacuum, with no orientation toward something beyond the self, then we begin to slide into a kind of subjectivism by default. That is, moral and existential judgments are no longer seen as having truth valueonly personal significance.
This is where Protagoras' dictum, man is the measure of all things, becomes relevant. In its modern form, it translates into the belief that each person determines what is true or good for themselves. But Plato's critique in the Theaetetus still holds weight: if each individual's judgment is equally valid, then there is no way to distinguish between wisdom and ignorance, or truth and error. That undermines not only moral philosophy, but the very idea of reasoned discourse
For Platoand for the classical tradition more broadlythere is a real Good, not merely as a cultural construct, but as a reality to which human reason and conscience are oriented. The challenge of philosophy is not to invent values, but to perceive them properly, through moral discernment, reflection, and a kind of intellectual eros.
The modern difficulty is that, with the decline of metaphysical traditions (including Christianity), we've retained the form of conscience and moral autonomy, but severed it from the structure that once gave it direction. And so we end up with a curious inversion: the authority of the individual is absolute, but the content of what they believe is seen as purely personal. Hence, nihil ultra ego. It's what I was saying earlier in this thread.
So, the last paragraph: "the authority of the individual is absolute, but the content of what they believe is seen as purely personal." Guess it depends who you're listening to. Among my friends, and based on the non-philosophical stuff I read, I'd say rather that there's a kind of double-mindedness about the whole matter. In one mood, Ben upholds his absolute right, and everybody's, to their own beliefs. In another mood, he's quick to invoke the most time-honored, religiously derived reasons why we should share his beliefs, and is very concerned that we understand and agree, impersonally! I think the need to provide public justification for private beliefs is still very strong, at least in the U.S. (though it may be fading fast), and that's a good thing.
It's a thorny issue and one which I've by no means resolved. But I appreciate the opportunity to try and spell it out in response to your perceptive remarks.
Seems to me a characteristic one would want an engineer to have (the engineer who designed the plane you are going to be flying in, for example) is an appreciation for the value often found in the consideration of justifications for private beliefs.
Doing so plays an important role in social primates, such as we are, having the ability to think synergistically and learn from each other.
What is a good thing?
I am not; I don't know about you. I'm merely saying that unfairly disadvantaged groups may warrant additional rights.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think this is disingenuous. Hate speech is readily recognizable. If someone says, referring to a human racial group, "kill all Xs" or "Xs are inferior and should be treated not as human but as animals" or any statement of that kind that is hate speech. Are you saying that such should be allowed on public forums?
I don't think such things should be allowed even in relation to animals. If someone said, for example, "torturing dogs is good fun, we should all do it", or said that about any other animal, I believe that should be banned on public forums too. What you are not allowing for is that there are impressionable people who may be influenced by such hateful propositions.
I believe that this is where philosophy started, but that it's not necessarily where it has remained. But one of the things I liked about John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is that he takes this broad and holistic view of philosophy which updates the language of philocophical praxis in the light of science, but tries to retain that sense of striving for the 'unitive vision' (hence his frequent appeals to neoplatonism.) But that is a separate discussion. (Take that comment as a footnote ;-) )
This is exactly the problem. You think this. So do people who think misgendering is hate speech and needs to be a criminal offense. The use of the word 'niggardly' has been touted as hate speech. Some people think saying "Black people can be racist" is hate speech. You disagree, I'm sure.
We don't agree on utterances about animals entirely - those sorts of things are often said as sarcasm etc... and this is not captured by such a view on 'hate'. And so the point still stands:
Quoting AmadeusD Your (one's; not your particularly) views are not everyone's. No, 'hate' is not as obvious as you seem to want it to be. If only...
I will say though, you're right, in my view, to insinuate that only clearly harm-motivated statements could be considered hateful. I'm not opposed. But that isn't obvious (or, what comes under that banner isn't obvious). Just ftr, I agree, those types of statements, generally, should have at least some kind of consequence attached. That might be social, though. I'm unsure how I feel.
Quoting Janus
(i'm largely jesting here) Now, this comes across disingenuous. I don't think i've said anything that would insinuate this. I didn't mention any type of utterance, for instance. I'd think the answer is 'it depends on the context'. Literally asking someone to harm and animal should be. Joking about what kind of a person would say "x" or "y" shouldn't be. And its hard to tell, sometimes.
Quoting Janus
I am. But I'm anti nanny-state type legislation. I think those with this view should stop thinking the lowest common denominator is the best way to inform ourselves.
Misgendering is not clearly hate speech. I don't believe it qualifies as such. It doesn't follow that there are no clear cases of hate speech. You seem to be mounting a "slippery slope" argument.
Quoting AmadeusD
That's a weak response! What, you think that someone who posted on public forums that th3ewy think it is good to torture animals for fun would be just "being sarcastic'. If you really think that, then it's ridiculous!
Quoting AmadeusD
I didn't say anything about you insinuating anything. I asked you a question which apparently you don't want to answer. The examples, and others like them, are clear examples of hate speech. The context is the public forum. Do you think such utterances should be allowed on public forums?
Quoting AmadeusD
It has nothing to do with informing ourselves. It has to do with influencing those who are the least informed in ways which are inimical to social life. Why would you not want to prevent such a thing?
I assume you will read the rest of my comment, and delete this eventually?**
Quoting Janus
If you think so. But it goes to the core of why "hate speech" is a nebulous, unweildy term giving us nothing to legislate effectively. So, I'm happy to agree to disagree. It's an important point, on my view.
Quoting Janus
If you think this isn't possible, I have several bridges up for sale. One of them goes the entire way across 4Chan.
Quoting Janus
You asked me a disingenuous question which was a reasonable response to something I did not say. I wont defend some position I don't hold. I don't want to answer it because it doesn't apply to me. "Are you saying that..." is an implication. Not sure that you can avoid that...IN any case I also directly answered you in detail** :
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
AAn additional note is that forums are free to police their own content. The Law doesn't need to be involved.
Are you perhaps skimming these replies? I am not being rude, but having missed those two passages above is a big flag for what you're saying..
Quoting Janus
I want to prevent the state having control over what people are allowed to hear and see. Now, as is obvious in my above quotes of myself, I agree there are exceptions to this. Literally inciting violence is one. So, if you have an issue with acts (i can only assume that's the problem. You can't be insinuating that people having thoughts is hate speech) subsequent to some speech act, then you police those acts. Which we already do, and this is a deterrent enough in my view. It's not an author's fault that some wacko took their writing and did something abhorrent with it. It's that person's fault for doing something wacko. There is no transitive blame on actions to my mind. Orchestration or inciting are different things, so again, there are exceptions - but they are specific and conceptually different to "criminalising hate speech".
Quoting Janus
More than this: I am telling you that is what's already happening, in practice, when we talk about Hate Speech publicly. It is a slippery slope. Yes, there are clear cases. There are vastly more unclear ones. It is a slippery slope and at least the last five to ten years has been an excercise in kowing to the least-resilient and reasonable among us, I think (if you don't, that's cool and explains a lot but that is then our conflict, not what Hate Speech is).
None of the rest of what you said is cogent as I see it, so I won't respond to it; I don't like wasting time. I might agree that the criteria that determine what counts as hate speech has been unreasonably extended in some arenas of the social sphere.
However, that is irrelevant to the argument that there are clear examples of hate speech, which in my view, it is right to disallow. Do you disagree with that? You haven't actually answered my questions about whether you would allow the examples I gave and the like.
"Our conflict" seems to me to be that you, on the grounds that some things are unreasonably counted as hate speech and should not therefore be banned, conclude that no hate speech should be banned. Perhaps I've misunderstood you, but you have not clearly answered the questions I posed.
Possibly, this resolves it. If we're both seeing this, is it just the degree which is in question? Hard to tell. It seems like you're arguing something a little stronger.
Quoting Janus
Yes I have. And i've requoted those replies above. I cannot see that its possible you've missed this:
Quoting AmadeusD
Are you skimming? It would explain why you saw that as non-cogent, if not how you missed these quotes lol.
Quoting Janus
You have certainly misunderstood. Certain things should be restricted speech. It is not on the grounds of 'hate'. It is on the grounds of predictable negative acts as a result (inciting is a clear case here, as I'm sure you'll agree). Saying "Trans women are not women" doesn't fall into this category. That's my gripe. That's it. There's no way to make that distinction in law without allowing an arbitrary authority to decide what does and doesn't come under that head. Surely this is clear?
So, it now seems we are not substantially disagreeing at all...
Quoting AmadeusD
Here we might disagree somewhat...I agree it doesn't qualify as hate speech, but if someone who is biologically male identifies as a woman and wishes to be treated as such, I think to do so is the decent thing to. What would you lose by that? Or if you find it offensive you could simply have nothing to do with them.
On the other hand, to tell such a person that they should not identify as a women would be bordering on being hateful. and would certainly be unwarrantedly intrusive and grossly impolite.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont know enough about yours politics to situate your critique of liberalism on a left-right spectrum. Maybe you can help. Did you think that Pope Francis was too liberal? What are your thoughts on the ideas coming out of the Claremont Institute? Are they generally to the right of your position on most issues, or do you find yourself in agreement with them on most things?
I recently listened to a very interesting discussion between Sam Harris and Tom Holland. It is about the ties between secularism, liberalism, and Christianity. The discussion towards the end about the way Islam encounters secular/Christian culture was on point for Wayfarer's thesis.
Depends on the context, but yes, that could be the case. We're more than welcome to not associate with impolite people, or those with whom we vehemently disagree. That actually seems a peculiarity of the TRA argument: You are wrong/morally corrupt/an asshole for not accepting our opinions and self-images (to the point that not engaging in sex with someone because they are the sex you are not attracted to is considered "phobic". That's bonkers, imo.
My position (I don't quite hold this, just making a point) that trans women are not women is both a very wide-spread view (i.e, you can't bat it down by saying its unusual or fringey, and therefore on the extreme of impoliteness)and one which can be supported on several conceptions of the issues of gender and sex (not all, no - I think that's the point). Even remonstrating with a trans person to perhaps revaluate their self-image also, is not even impolite. Indelicate? Sure. But If I am under the impression my son/s is/are mentally unstable, and he claims to be trans, i will explore the instability first. There's nothing wrong with this. Affirmation at the first is dangerous and extremely irresponsible, imo.
Quoting Janus
Generally speaking, I agree, but as with quite a few nuanced takes, it really depends on the circumstance. If there's some form of a threat, you can fuck off. I'm not going to call you what you want because you're angry. FTR, I do not care what I am referred to as. Even my name, beyond legal documents, isn't important to me. It seems more important to others given how unusual it is.
I do not identify as Male. I am Male. I do not 'identify' as a man, either. That is the course on which Males are taken by the world. Some aberration is required to offset this. And when there's an aberration, we're free to say something even like this:
"Having a transgender identity is a break with reality. It is not right to say that this is not a mental aberration. But we generally treat all others with mental aberrations with respect, care and support. We can do that here too".
If you don't like that, don't interact with that speaker, no? You don't have any right to prevent that opinion be stated or even disseminated.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/05/25/a-profound-critique-of-liberalism-essential-analysis-of-integralism/
D.C. Schindlers The Politics of the Real is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the Christian order, we can recognize it as a sustained war upon reality. And we can understand a true postliberalism as nothing more or less than the New Evangelization, the effort of converting entire social orders to Christianity.(William Bednarz)
Liberalism is the political form of evil.( D.C.Schindler)
Damon Linker, in a an essay for the NYT, examines a contemporary critique of liberalism going back to Carl Schmitt and taken up by Leo Strauss, the Claremont Institute and Adrian Vermeule:
Are there any strands of this thinking you are sympathetic to, and if so, which ones?
Very little, except for the observation re the impotence of legislatures. I think this has fairly obviously tended to hold true, with the executive taking on more power. There is a parallel to how monarchs were able to radically expand their power in the early modern period, generally with the support of urban populations and the peasantry, since a strong monarch was seen as a check on recalcitrant elites. In the same way, legislatures are seen as both ineffective on national defense and impotent in the fact of powerful elite interests. I don't think that's an unfair judgement either, particularly in the context of America's donor-centric ridiculously short two year election cycles, where campaigning essentially never stops.
The Claremont Institute is not against liberalism though. I think only left-leaning liberals would tend to see it thus. And that's only because they associate "real liberalism" with their particular brand of progressive liberalism. For instance, Claremont describes itself as a "champion of small government and free markets," the boilerplate pronouncement of right liberalism. Neocons aren't against liberalism; they have so much faith in liberalism that they have tended to embrace rather extreme economic coercion to spread it, or outright use of violence to "force others to be free."
They might be more skeptical about democracy, but then I think anti-democratic sentiment within liberalism is even stronger on the political left these days. There is a lot of angst about populism and "low-information voters" for instance. Coverage of Brexit is a great example. You can also find all sorts of left-leaning analysis on "the threat of illiberal democracy."
This sentiment is sort of in line with the old Greek conception of democracy as leading to anarchy, but I think it's actually quite distinct because the real concern is that the "exceptional individuals" will have their freedom constrained by "the mob." But, on the liberal view, the "exceptional individual" is the driver of cultural, technological, and economic progress (progress being the great idol and a subject of almost religious faith). It's the same way "start-up tech culture" shouldn't be forced to suffer due to the demands of recalcitrant mediocre workers. So, if there is conflict between the freedom of the exceptional individual and democracy (which there is), so much the worse for democracy (granted "protecting minority rights" is a more palatable way to portray this opposition to democracy).
In general, conservatives are anti-democratic in not wanting migration to shift the constitution of the nation and its laws and culture (despite having pushed quite hard for that same migration). I think they are simply unable to own up to an inherit contradiction in conservative liberalism. Conservatives value "tradition," culture, and religion, and liberalism demolishes these things. They are in the odd position of arguing for unrestrained capitalism AND trying to protect traditional culture, even though the former flattens out and destroys the latter. Capitalism is diabolical in the full sense of the word.
Left liberalism has the same sort of problem. It wants a robust, all-encompassing welfare state, but then liberalism destroys the very sense of common identity and culture that originally built support for large scale redistribution and elite acquiesce to it in the first place. When "everywhere is everywhere is else," why exactly would a billionaire or leaders of mega corps have much civic spirit? The polity becomes just an administrative apparatus serving the interests of the liberated individual (particularly the exceptional one).
I do from time to time read conservative media outlets, and while I agree with some of what I read, overall I find American political conservatism, at this point in history at least, quite a toxic culture. Likewise their attraction to Erdogan and Putin, I strongly suspect on the grounds of their hostility to gender equality and gay rights among other factors. And so on. If so, I have to say, in spite of my philosophical agreement with many of the criticisms of liberalism (especially its underlying scientism), that if this is representative, then the remedy is worse than the disease. It would make me, were I an American voter, a Democrat for sure.
Or is there another vein of 'principled conservatism', and, if so, who represents it?
I'm no expert on Russell Vought, but this strikes me as another case of progressive liberals identifying conservative liberals as "not real liberals," even though they are still making their arguments for conservative liberalism on the basis of liberal values and anthropology. The only thing that seems illiberal here is the lifting up of religion and culture, not the antipathy to the "deep state."
Of course, democracy isn't necessarily wed to liberalism. As I said above, the two are actually normally actually in tension. But Vought seems to be arguing for a stronger executive as an enhancement of democracy, on largely liberal grounds. That is: "the executive should be stronger because they are selected by the 'people' and the people need the liberty to dispense with the administrative state and interference from the career civil service, as these are themselves a constraint on liberty."
Such a position is contradictory in two ways:
A. It's the very free market and marketization and commodification of everything, which conservatives have long supported, that leads to the growth of the administrative state into all corners of public and private life. The market dismantles the old institutions and culture and then the legal system and state must come in to stabilize market failures left in the wake of this deconstruction. So, conservatives support the very thing that leads to democratic demand for the "deep state" in the first place. One might suppose that the only reason attacks on the career civil service are even successful is that people have forgotten about the problems of unregulated capitalism that it was originally enlarged to tackle. Now that food inspectors, etc. are gone, companies will once again try to up profits by dumping chalk into milk, etc. People will get upset and demand a re-expansion of the administrative state.
B. The "Christian Nationalism" thread is more explicitly illiberal, but it is contradicted by the strong commitment to capitalism and classical liberal principles (it also is not based on a coherent alternative anthropology, political metaphysics, or conception of the human/common good in the way the confessional state was). Basically, it's just the desire to somehow maintain culture and tradition, even as the movement seeks to empower and advanced the very forces of capitalism that have dismantled culture and tradition in the first place.
"Christian nationalism" isn't, in most forms, a return to the confessional state. It's instead a sort of incoherent fever dream of "liberalism, but Christian"a return to America's history that is obviously impossible given the progress of liberalism. Citizens of liberal states receive two decades of positive indoctrination in liberalism's preferred materialist metaphysics, and this means that any alternative system is largely inaccessible to them without their overcoming a great deal of bias and conditioning. Hence a non-liberal understanding of human liberty, telos, and the common good is unlikely on any large scale. People have been sold on "the world is just little balls of stuff bouncing in the void, which exist for no reason at all, and this is what 'science says,' and to reject it is to reject light bulbs, automobiles, and vaccines and return to the Middle Ages" since pre-school. Religion here exists as a carve out, a sui generis space of "private" "spiritual" "faith-based" (as opposed to "evidence-based") belief. Such a view obviously excludes a conception of spiritual goods as precisely those goods that do not diminish when shared. It makes them inherently private and atomized.
It strikes me as one of the paradigmatic features of liberalism. The solution to the problems generated by liberalism is always "more liberalism!" (just more conservative or more progressive).
The most obviously illiberal thing I know Vought has said is that the US should prioritize Christian migrants. But why is this illiberal? It's not obvious why selecting immigrants who share a faith with the dominant faith of the polity that is accepting migrants is "illiberal" or how exactly it is supposed to constrain the freedom of citizens to have more (or less) co-religionist migrants living amongst them. If we read about a Greek polis selecting migrants in this way, I don't think "this is a constraint on liberty for the current citizens" would be our first thought. Rather, the charge of "illiberalism" here relies on the liberal axiom that the Church (and culture) are something people need to be "freed from," with both contained to the atomized "private realm." Yet since religion is [I]the[/I] primary way humanity has historically framed the ultimate human good that is to be promoted by the polis, this exclusion ultimately reveals itself to be totalitarian; it cannot avoid making a strong positive pronouncement on the whole of the human good and enforcing it in all spheres of public life.
It's worth considering why, in general, it is not considered damaging to "liberty" to select migrants based on their "economic qualifications " and ability to "grow the economy," but it is considered damaging to "liberty" to select them on the basis of their ability to assimilate to the dominant culture.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are those who would beg to differ with your assessment of the Claremont Institute as not anti-liberal. Casey Michel , reviewing Katherine Stewarts book, Money, Lies and God writes of the Claremont Institute:
Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily equate democracy with liberalism. There is a lot of right and left liberalism that is quite skeptical of democracy and the tyranny of "the mob" over the individual.
The Manosphere is really just hyper-liberalism. Mark Fisher rightly identifies gangster rap culture and its notion of "keeping it real" as the end state of liberalism in "Capitalist Realism." To "keep it real" is to abolish all sentiment and to become most fully an atomized, self-interested, egoist utility maximizer. Homo oecononimicus is a sociopath for whom all relationships are transactional, for whom power relations define all human relationships and for whom the Good is defined fully in terms of power and epithumia. Thymos is only allowed to enter into the picture in terms of one's "rep," one's ability to credibly signal the use of violence to impose one's will vis-á-vis the conquest of sensible goods.
You see the same thing in hypercompetitve cut throat "reality" TV, where the ideal contestant in also a sociopath. This is "reality," the really real of the "state of nature." In many ways, the Manosphere is just the spread of this phenomenon to the middle class. The Manosphere's "alpha Chad" is very much the image of the power focused gangster constrained by nothing but his own will and directed by nothing but his own appetites, whose gratification [I]is[/I] the fullest realization of freedom. "Might makes right" is just market logic become totalized and absolutized.
As Deleuze and Guattari among others have noted, capitalism desacralizes everything. Thymos and logos are pushed out of human concern. Instead we have Mill's ideal where the "constraints of custom" are severed, the late-night TV culture where absolutely nothing is serious or sacred. This is why the Manosphere and Alt-Right (and intellectual discourse in general) are dominated by irony. The human of late-capitalism, particularly the male, is emotionally and spiritually constipated, subject to the tyranny of epithumia and the death of eros and the other.
This is all the fruit of liberalism, not some extrinsic opposition to it in the way reactionary monarchism or confessional states were. If it contradicts liberalism that's because liberalism is beset by internal contradictions. And of course, the solution on the left is just "more liberalism." The administrative and carceral state must expand. We need enhanced hate speech laws to throw the defectives in prison, and enhanced welfare to meet more biological needs so that fewer people "rebel."
But these people aren't really rebelling, they are simply becoming the people liberalism tells them they are "by nature" and should be. They are engaging in the same "no-holds-barred" competition that progressive liberalism's obsession with "meritocracy" creates in more cultivated forms in the elite.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My father is a Zionist, and when I was 14 he moved the family to Israel with the expectation of settling there permanently. It didnt work out for various reasons and we returned to the States, but what I learned in the year we spent there was that a democracy based on Jewish nationalism is not a robust democracy. Even if the intent is equal treatment for Jews and non-Jews alike, in practice the biases in favor of Jewish religion and culture translate into the institutionalization of unequal treatment. Im an atheist , but I would never dream of prioritizing atheist migrants over religious ones, any more than I would prioritize white migrants over people of color simply because whites happen to be the dominant population of the U.S. We tried that for 40 years when strict immigration limits were set in the 1920s to keep out Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asians, under the pretext that they could not assimilate American values.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Frankly, I think we tend to underestimate both the ability of migrants to assimilate to the dominant culture and their ability to contribute to its economy. We undervalue the tremendous motivation involved in choosing to leave ones home country for a foreign land.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Everything youve said so far makes you sound like a kind of Socialist Christian Nationalist. Maybe Ive been missing it in your posts, but I dont get a clear sense of what kind of political system you are advocating for. Is this something youve concocted in your own head, inspired by your forays into Aristotle and Medieval theology, or does it exist somewhere else? What I mean is, is there an example of a political system that exists now or has existed in the past somewhere in the world that you think comes close to your alternative to liberalism, are are you spinning out your own utopia in the tradition of half-baked political thinkers like Chomsky and Fisher? Can you point me to contemporary political theorists who articulate a post-liberal political vision that resembles what you have in mind? Would you say that Bernie Sanders socialism comes closer to your model than conservative and progressive liberalism? If Sanders were to repackage his socialism with a religious emphasis would that come closer to what you have in mind?
The thing is though, if you pair back all the Manosphere-speak in the book, the decrying of "manginas" and terse formulations of the imperatives of evolutionary psychology in catch-phrases like "beta need and alpha seed" (it is truly atrocious), what you'll find is a view of humanity that isn't that far off mainstream liberal welfare economics, or the more "enlightened liberalism" of guys like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris. It's basically those anthropologies boiled down to their essence and stripped of all social niceties or appeal to sentiment, and then presented in particularly low-brow form.
It is, I'd argue, in many ways a "demonic" anthropology; it's pretty much the anthropology of Dante's damned in Hell (which of course borrows from a wide history of conceptions of demonic, fallen man).
Phil Cary says that one of the key differences between ancient and modern thought is that the ancient were chiefly afraid of degenerating into beasts, whilst today we are scared of becoming machines. But actually, given mainstream philosophy of nature, I'm not sure there is really all that much difference between these two outcomes anymore. The brute just is a particular sort of machine.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Its easy to attack, but more difficult to lay yourself on the line by committing to a detailed alternative to liberal politics that others can then pick apart. I already know what youre rejecting. I want to know exactly what it is youre selling.
Well, first I'd just point out that Israel is very much a liberal ethno-state, not a confessional state. Most modern liberal states were founded as ethno-states (and in Europe this involved a vast project of ethnic cleansing). "A German state for the German people." "An Algerian state for Algerians (and not just equal rights in a French state)." "A Kurdish state for Kurds and a Tibet for its people, etc."
This is still a mainstream idea; nationalism was sublated by liberalism and remains a pillar of its legitimacy. But Israel faced particular internal and external challenges that stopped it from embracing the liberal drive to homogeneity in Europe. This might have more to do with the size and cohesion of their minority population more than anything else. As German children born today face becoming minorities in Germany by middle age we are seeing a fascist party become a major political player in a state where citizens undergo an extensive protective indoctrination against fascism and where the far right faces significant state repression and censorship. The bet of globalized neo-liberalism was that it could digest and destroy culture rapidly enough to make replacement migration a feasible solution to falling birthrates. I think there is ample evidence in the rise of the far-right to show that this bet is not paying off. The leftist response so far seems to be mostly to advocate for greater state powers of coercion, and perhaps even a turn away from popular democracy, to resolve this issue. However I am skeptical that this would work even if they could win elections (which I am also skeptical of).
Anyhow, my original point wasn't whether such restrictions would be wise, but rather that I cannot see how they have any immediate bearing on the liberty of current citizens, save for liberalism's particular ideological preference for severing the individual from custom and culture as a means of promoting "liberty."
However, when large numbers of migrants of a particular background have concentrated in Europe they have at times advocated for their own communitarian festivals, corporate events, legal systems, and ways of life. And liberalism has, in general, not been willing to accommodate this. Liberalism can be indifferent to the culture and religion of new arrivals precisely because it bars culture, custom, and religion from public life and from defining the common good around which the polity is organized. It's an "any color you like, so long as its white," sort of thing, i.e. "any culture you like, so long as it remains irrelevant to the realities of market and administrative state."
But I'd argue that the only reason liberalism can be this accommodating is because of capitalism's tendency to eradicate culture and particularity in the first place. Also, it's worked [I]so far[/I] because the cumulative effects of the replacement migration strategy are back loaded. It's one thing when 10% of a population is recent arrivals. It's another when that climbs to 50% in a generation, particularly when new arrivals become a sizeable majority in younger age brackets and the working aged population, while natives make up the lion's share of an extremely expensive pensioner population whose benefits crowd out investment in the young (now majority minority). In many ways, it seems like a recipe for a return to ethnopolitics in the long run (which we're already seeing today), and it's a dynamic driven by neo-liberalism's growth fetish.
It's the capacity of modern liberalism/capitalism to break down culture that matters here. There are minority populations who migrated into locales across the globe who remain culturally, religiously, and even genetically distinct even after centuries in their new homeland (e.g. minorities in Iraq or Syria). The sort of assimilation seen in modern liberalism is not a historical norm. It's not that pluralistic societies didn't exist in the past, they absolutely did. It's that they remained pluralistic generation after generation, rather than becoming rapidly homogeneous.
This history is precisely what gives lie to liberalism's claim to be "value neutral" and to not engage in positive indoctrination. In general, when we see assimilation in history, as opposed to long term pluralism, it is because of (often coercive) regimes to attain homogeneity (e.g. Rome in the western half of the empire, Chinese imperial policy, the Spanish Reconquista, etc. ).
"Just offer a realistic alternative to a totalitarian and now globally hegemonic force." A tough ask! Unfortunately, I think humanity will have to weather the collapse of liberalism and it's attendant ecological disasters before any decisive break is possible. Maybe the God of progress will save us, but I doubt it.
What likely comes after liberalism has been described variously as a sort of "techno-feudalism," a combination of technocratic rule and "consent-based" corporate (often patronage-centric) governance for those with the skills of connections to still be "economically viable" in the era of artificial intelligence. We can already see this new system coming into being in the new "company towns" (Musk just won his vote for his "Starbase" community), planned cities like Telosa or the Saudi "Line," or the global elite's capacity to create legal city-states like Próspera, or communities like Fisher Island and the Villages (I am shocked that one named Galt's Gulch hasn't opened). "Voluntary" citizenship in such communities (based on "consent") will be incentived by the collapse in funding for public services that is already hitting developed countries who are still early in their demographic crises.
Changes in military technology that privilege small elite cadres with expensive training and equipment are occuring on a scale not seen since the stirrup led to feudalism and the rise of the mounted, hereditary knight in Europe. What happens when the mobilization and buy in of "the people" is no longer necessary for winning wars? Or, as Michelle Alexander says of the plight of inner city African American populations, what happens when elites no longer want to exploit the people's labor but just see them as a problem/burden to be contained? Probably nothing good for public services, particularly when this is paired with the divisive demographic conditions mentioned above.
Hence the emergence of the "consent-based," marketized corporate citizenship as a marketized "escape" from low quality public safety and services (we already see this dynamic with US school districts and localities to some extent). This is, at least, the sort of theory that is appealing to the West's oligarchs these days, and it has a certain sort of economic logic to it.
What this opens up is the prospect for the return of the polis as the fundamental political unit, a more natural scale for governance. And this in turn opens up the possibility of creating communities that aren't based on liberalism. This is far more difficult today, because liberalism says: "you're perfectly free to pursue your own alternatives, it's just that these must have no real authority (power) over individuals, and you have to pay for liberalism's institutions first and then use whatever is left over for any alternative, while also being unable to force members to pay for any alternative in the way the state does." So, one reform to push for is to say "let state funding follow the citizen to their communities of choice, rather than corralling it into liberal institutions and saying 'you're free to fund your own alternative,' as if this wasn't essentially an economic impossibility for most of the population."
So for instance, if you don't want your child to undergo 180 days of liberal indoctrination a year for the first two decades of their life, the economic reality for most families will mean spending a substantial share of all household income on education (if decent options even exist in a locale the family can afford, which is unlikely for most). Likewise, one can organize for an alternative civil society and provision of welfare only after one has paid for the liberal version, something that is only slightly plausible today because the liberal version has been financed by tremendous debt, but which will become impossible when taxes are raised to fund the tsunami of liabilities that are already on the books.
A polis based around a more robust conception of the common good would do many things differently. For instance, the purpose of education would be the development of virtue and happiness, not workforce preparation and enabling people to meet whatever desires they happen to develop. It would probably provide for civil defense through universal citizen military service instead of a standing professional (and increasingly mercenary) army/police force. And it would foster specific festivals and common events/rthyms as opposed to restricting these in the interests of individual and commercial interests (e.g. the old Church calendar had holidays very regularly, as opposed to just a handful during which much commerce still continues.
Catholic philosophy has the most robust development of such alternatives, but arguably this is simply because Catholicism has maintained the only strong university/intellectual system outside of liberalism. Orthodoxy certainly has many of the same intellectual resources. Whereas Protestant Christian nationalism tends towards "liberalism with Christian characteristics," and so is self-undermining.
The irony is that entry into Catholic intentional communities sort of requires becoming a liberal exceptional individual first, both due to the need to cultivate heterodox beliefs one will not be exposed to in liberal institutions and because it requires wealth.
Not that other formulations wouldn't be possible, I have just not seen them developed. I hope they will be, since, although a confessional society can be pluralistic (and indeed, can safeguard religious freedom in a way liberalism will always deny) it would nonetheless be beneficial for many people. Yet I know of no secular intentional communities outside the history of rapidly collapsing communes or ethnic colonies. In general, secular criticisms of liberalism are just that, criticisms, not alternatives, perhaps because they are often wed to the materialist metaphysics that leads to liberalism in the first place.
I certainly give you points for imagination. Youve broadly assessed the modern history of political and economic structures and, rather than aligning yourself with an already existing model, you want to start over with a sweeping new vision, albeit one which draws from ancient and medieval
sources. My first observation about such an approach is that it stems from what I would call an apocalyptic interpretation of where we are now. In the apocalyptic view, something is terribly wrong and rotten at the very core of current practices. From your perspective, contemporary politics and economics are unmoored from a proper moral ground, so it is inevitable that the world will drift toward greater and greater moral collapse if it doesnt change course. There will be more totalitarian and hegemonic repression, ecological disaster, a return to feudalism:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I mentioned, its not as if you think there were periods in human history where large swaths of culture practiced approaches to politics and economics grounded in moral rectitude. For you, there was never such a pre-Capitalist, pre-liberal Eden from which humanity was expelled. For
you the only path is forward into a brave new world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
For my part, I have never bought into the apocalyptic narrative, the things have gone terribly wrong and we need a whole new approach kind of thinking. I suspect such musings have more to do with projections from ones personal experience of crisis than a neutral assessment of the cultural scene. When writers like Noam Chomsky, Giles Deleuze or David Graeber proclaim their wholesale rejection of modern political and economic culture I read this as their failure to understand important aspects of the relation between human nature and disrcursive practices.
I image how if they were given the power to magically wish into being their preferred social structure it would inevitably evolve into some variant of an already existing system, not due to immoral or coercive forces but because it happens to express what we need and what works for us at present, even if it is always far from perfect, and always in process of reform and modification. With regard to your preferred utopia, I think the political power of the states is more than enough to allow for retreat from secularism where there is enough of a consensus in favor of it, but as far as outright secession from the liberal capitalist state, I dont think there is anywhere near the appetite for rejection of capitalism as you apparently do. To be honest ,give. your view that we have never had an adequately moral social system, I cant help but suspect that no utopian plan for humanity that you can invent would relieve you of your sense that human beings are on the wrong track.
Just to highlight this: I agree, and too often, in authoritarian hands, it turns into "Make X Great Again!" with results we can all observe daily. We, meaning Western democracies, in fact have taken a whole new approach, in roughly the last century, and as a result things are vastly better off for women, poor countries we used to exploit, working people, people of color, and people with illnesses and disabilities. (Not nearly good enough, but a lot better.) Now if we can only stop killing the planet, we might actually get somewhere. I guess the "things" that are supposed to have gone terribly wrong are certain European intellectual arguments about virtue. Hmm. On balance, surely this is less important than eradicating polio? Anyway, people seem about as virtuous, taken one by one, as they ever were.
That would make sense if Trumpism and the rise of the far-right in Europe were some sort of foreign, extrinsic force attacking liberalism from without, rather than something produced by liberalism's own contradictions. But Trump is just an extension of trends within liberalism (and not just the US) going back decades.
Likewise: "you either affirm neo-liberalism and late-capitalism or you want a return of polio, Jim Crow, slavery, etc." seems a bit much. Do any of the traditionalist critiques you have in mind argue for a return to such things? I doubt it. So what's the claim then, that all of the advancements you've listed were primarily caused by liberalism and would simply be unachievable without it? That without liberalism one must have slavery?
Historically, liberalism actually opposed many of the things you mentioned, often quite aggressively, and only grudgingly acceded to them due to its need to combat socialism (or when it was outright defeated on these issues). The end of child labor laws, advent of state pension systems, the end of Jim Crowthese were all grudgingly accepted by liberalism after being advocated for primarily by socialists (but to be fair, progressive liberals too). Often (as in the case of federal support for the end of segregation) liberalism explicitly embraced these in terms of them being a "lesser evil" in the fight to contain communism. For instance, liberalism only "stopped colonialism" after killing millions of people trying to sustain it (and in the French case, seriously considering using nuclear weapons on Vietnam to "keep it free"). The military defeat of the liberal nations then becomes, in the revisionist history, "something nice liberalism did." But the liberal states didn't give up their colonies because of "open ended liberal debate," but because they lost on the battlefield or risked immanently doing so if they tried to force the issue.
Competition was a check on liberalism and in order to compete liberalism had to sublate elements of nationalism and socialism, making them core parts of liberal norms (e.g. "an Algeria for Algerians," not just liberal rights for Algerians under a French state; the adoption of core elements of the socialist platform into virtually all liberal states). I don't think it's any coincidence that median wages across the developed world stagnated, despite robust productivity growth, as soon as liberalism's last opponent collapsed, or that standard of living and life expectancy began to decline following the triumphant "End of History" victory. What the "End of History" did was let liberalism and capitalism go back to being more fully themselvesback towards the Guilded Age, but with Christianity also increasingly out of the way as a rival/check on capitalism.
Polio and measles are interesting things to mention, since these are coming back in the US thanks to the liberal ethos and erosion of all sources of authority outside the coercive power of the state.
At any rate, critiques of liberalism do not claim that liberalism and capitalism erode tradition and culture over night. Indeed, that they don't is part of the problem re the politics of replacement migration. They have done so steadily however, which is precisely why these critiques claim we have Trump, a Europe that is unable to stomach short term declines in consumption to check Russian aggression, etc. Yet the dominant, hegemonic, now globalized force at "the End of History," which faces no real rivals, somehow manages to defend itself by claiming its flaws are mostly really just attacks from without (this is, IMO, only plausible in the case of radical Islam).
Right, that's a pretty common response, and in line with Fukuyama's argument. Liberalism is inevitable and human nature. I disagree on that obviously. I will just note that this same claim was long advanced by reactionary monarchists in much the same way. Monarchy was natural. It was in line with human nature itself. It was inevitable, and evidence to the contrary was a temporary aberration. This was also the claim of Marxism. It too was inevitable. Both collapsed, and there were signs that they would do so prior to the fact. For my part, I don't think humanity can reach the End of History while life entails the contradictions that liberalism embodies. Just the problem of the Last Man identified by Fukuyama should have been enough to clue him into that IMO.
But the end of the Ancien Régime, the Tsardom, and the Soviet Union were not the apocalypse. The end of liberalism will not be the "end of the world," even if "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." It will almost certainly be painful though, as was the death of the monarchies, but that was hardly a reason to keep traditional monarchies around forever, or to be a reactionary.
There are three broad principles of the modern liberal state: capitalism, democracy, and liberalism.
In my view, it seems that both capitalism and democracy are subservient to liberalism. For instance, progressive liberals are willing to constrain capitalism precisely because they see it as conflicting with liberalism. Conservatives are skeptical of this, but only because they don't see unrestrained capitalism as at odds with liberalism.
There are pretty vocal groups on the left and right who are skeptical about democracy, precisely because democracy can constrain liberalism. Hence, I would say liberalism is the highest principle. "Freedom over all else," with freedom obviously being the ideal of freedom in the liberal tradition.
I didn't have liberalism as such in mind at all -- though perhaps I should have, but I forgot the name of the thread! I was adding my voice to @Joshs's doubt about the apocalyptic view of history, in which things have gotten noticeably worse and we need to do something quite radical about it. I would be dubious about such a view no matter whether it was voiced with a left or a right accent. Au contraire, the evidence of historical/ethical progress in Western democracies is to me overwhelming -- again with a grim caveat about the looming environmental disaster.
I'm happy you agree that they are advancements, though.
I don't understand this. Is there a particular liberal philosopher you have in mind, who says this? I'm trying to associate "Freedom over all else" with, say, Rawls, and it doesn't fit at all. Once again I have the feeling that there's a whole conversation, largely polemical in nature, about "liberalism" going on that I've never followed. To me, liberalism is epitomized by Political Liberalism by Rawls, not by what is amusingly called "liberalism" in the US.
Gotcha, so I guess or disagreement might be this: I think the rather titanic problems of liberalism in the current moment, not least of which is the rise of the far-right and long term discontent over the replacement migration strategy vis-á-vis growth, the long term problems of globalization in the developing world (where in at least some instances it appears to retard growth and good governance), and the looming ecological crises, are not accidental to liberalism itself, but directly attributable to it
As mentioned earlier, I think Locke and Mill's justification of enslaving populations by force to "liberate them from indolence," is a prime example. Cold War colonial war rhetoric is also a good example. Obviously, the wars were so difficult because people in the occupied states largely did not want to remain part of the colonial empires. But, they had to be "freed by force" because the communitarian ideologies (Marxism, political Islam, etc.) that held sway with large segments of the population oppressed individual and market rights (liberal freedom).
Hobbes grounds the state entirely in the atomized individual in the "state of nature." The state has legitimacy just insomuch as it is a better choice for individuals qua individuals to actualize their individual freedom (generally as fulfilling whatever desires they happen to have). This is the core assumption of "social contract theory," which is certainly still present in contemporary liberal theorists. An ideal society maximizes liberty for individuals as individuals (including liberty vis-á-vis desires for material goods, which is why "economic growth" and consumption play such an outsized role in liberal theory and welfare economics).
This is the ordering of the higher (common good) to the lower, the whole to the parts (in line with reductionist tendencies in materialist thought). The common good becomes merely a colocation of individual goods. The "veil of ignorance" is all about the individual for instance, and indeed the individual as initially abstracted from all community and common goods or social identity.
By contrast, there is Hegel, one of the great critics of social contract theory:
[I] My particular end should become identified with the universal end otherwise the state is left in the air. The state is actual only when its members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when public and private ends are identical. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens. That is perfectly true. If all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, if they do not find that the state as such is the means to their satisfaction, then the footing of the state itself is insecure. [/I]
A common critique of liberalism is that this conception of the state (which often finds its way into legal decisions, particularly in the US through the Federalist Papers) only works so long as custom, culture, etc. continue to bind individuals together as wholes. Yet liberalism, and particularly capitalism, undermine all such connections, making liberalism self-undermining.
Democracy can constrain liberalism?
Well, people naturally can vote to power undemocratic authoritarian people, who do away with democracy, the rights of the individual and the rule of law. Yet is that democracy in the end? Few if any authoritarians, even the Marxists, say they are doing away with democracy (but are just improving it to listen actually to the people).
Now democracy constraining capitalism and the market mechanism can indeed happen, but I don't think that is "constraining liberalism". The usual case is for example social democratic parties limiting the free market in the objective of curtailing the excesses of the free market, which typically tends in reality to form an oligopoly in the market, not the theoretical and perfect "free market". And people are happy with this. Most liberals and even libertarians understand that not everything can be solved by the market mechanism and naturally you have to have solid institutions for capitalism and the markets to perform well.
Besides, those that are sceptical about democracy (or neoliberalism) are nearly everybody simply angry about how badly the whole system is working currently: that it's only the rich or those close to power that benefit, or that there is corruption or inefficiency or useless bureaucracy. It's really only a very few people that are inherently against democracy as the vast majority believe that "the people" are still quite rational and capable of handling a democracy.
OK, as long as we don't equate these alleged problems with "the apocalyptic decline of Western civilization"!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of liberal political theory? Extreme cherry-picking, wouldn't you say? :smile:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, of rhetoric, not liberal political philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This I would accept as a traditional liberal political tenet, but set on its own, it sounds as if there has never been an issue about what kind of maximization is appropriate or possible, nor how social identity may further individual flourishing. We both know that isn't so. Not for nothing is Rawls' book called A Theory of Justice, not A Theory of Liberty.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But it needn't be, as Rawls makes clear. If common goods and social identity are part of what you want the ideal state to value, then you'll choose accordingly from behind the veil, even though you may not know your own status. This isn't to say that the original-position thought experiment isn't rife with problems. Perhaps for that very reason, it's proved enduringly useful, as philosophers like Nussbaum work to clarify and improve it.
I maintain that Western Civilization has been in serious decline since the death of Marcus Aurelius and the ascension of his son to the purple! :cool: :rofl:
No, and it seems absurd to me to call this cherry picking when all the major liberal states engaged in absolutely massive colonial projects that they justified in the terms of liberalism, for most of their history, across most of the world's landmass, affecting most of the human population, largely stopping only when military defeat forced them to stop (and arguably, they just continued it by other means under neo-liberalism via less direct coercive measures to force liberalization, e.g. in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc., including backing armed groups, coups, etc.)
Locke and Mill I pick because they are foundational liberal theorists, but I could just as well point to America's Founding Fathers (the oldest example of liberalism in practice) or the justification of colonial rule and slavery by the liberal scions of the French Revolution. The big drive for abolition (which only targeted the most egregious practice of this sort) came from Christianity (as it did in Europe at the end of antiquity, where slavery was largely abolished), not liberalism. The "Battle Hymn of the Republic," is not a secular or deistic ode for instance.
Did some liberals object to these practices on liberal grounds? Yes, particularly to the exceptionally egregious institution of African chattel slavery, although even most of those who balked at hereditary slavery nonetheless championed colonial expansion over the rest of the American continent on liberal grounds (and the subsequent genocide of the native population).
But saying that just because there were some unheeded liberal voices against colonial expansion across North America, into India, into almost all of Africa, into China (attempted but partly repelled), and the Middle East, or say, opening Japan to trade with artillery fire, etc., that this isn't "real liberalism" would be a bit like saying collectivization wasn't "real communism" because a handful of communists opposed it.
I think so. Desegregation was unpopular, even in the North where it largely had to do with bussing for schools (e.g. riots in Boston). It would have lost as a ballot question, even if African Americans were allowed to vote. If you're familiar with the way democracy interacted with sectarian politics in pre-war Lebanon or post-war Iraq, I think you can find lots of examples of this sort of tension between democracy and individual liberty.
The Western liberal states have benefited from largely homogenous populations, so they haven't had these same tensions (lately). But that's because of both huge, sometimes coercive campaigns to create homogeneity and titanic rounds of ethnic cleansing to sort people across Europe.
Right, skepticism over "illiberal democracy" doesn't tend to result in a wholesale abandonment of democracy. Rather, complaints against Brexit, Trump, Erdogan, Orban, etc. are generally against "populism" and a democracy that is "too direct." Hence, advocacy for changes like a switch to closed list parliamentary systems, where party elites pick the MPs and people just vote for a party and their platform, or the advocacy for rank choice voting specifically as a means to preclude radical shifts in policy (both of these policies might be good ideas BTW).
For progressives, checking democracy generally involves strengthening the reach and independence of the administrative state (the "deep state" of career professionals, technocracy) often at the expense of the directly elected executive and using courts (and so appeals to other elites , judges) to expand rights that voters cannot overturn. Or progressives recommend something like a city manager system, where the executive is selected by elected representatives with the help of the administrative state itself. Whereas conservatives have tended to just want to weaken the state so that it cannot be wielded by the "people" against the individual.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So do I. There is no political or economic system which is inevitable and optimally reflective of human nature. The nature of human nature is to transform itself via cultural development.
Monarchy and Marxism were no more or less natural than liberalism. When in the course of history one political-economic system replaces another it doesnt mean the previous structure was unnatural , false, unethical or not workable, only that the culture eventually outgrew it. The more successful a cultural order the more thoroughly it transforms the possibilities available to thought and the more effectively it sets itself up for its own surpassing.
Like Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, I foresee a post-liberal order, but this means building upon , while transforming, the insights that allowed liberalism to surpass previous systems of thought. You, by contrast, dont seem to want to build upon liberalism but instead reject it wholesale. This suggests two possibilities to me. The first is that the guiding inspiration for the new order you want to create involves ignoring the past three centuries of liberal thought in favor of religious and philosophical ideas propounded prior to the rise of liberalism and capitalism. The second possibility is that your definition of liberalism is so narrow that you dont recognize how your own vision fits within the three-century-old spectrum of liberal thought. The first possibility places you somewhere in the vicinity of the Far Right, but Im not prepared to slap that label on you.
Quoting J
:100:
Yeah, that Commodus was a severe disappointment . . . downhill ever since.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, we're just at cross-purposes in terms of what we're referring to as "liberal." I call citing such views cherry-picking because they are (far) outliers in terms of liberal philosophical theory. (And are you sure about Mill and "enslavement"? He says the opposite in "The Negro Question.") To put it mildly, this isn't what we study when we study Locke and Mill, any more than we give time to Kant's racism or Heidegger's Nazi nonsense. It's too easy to pick the worst things Philosopher X said, and claim you've characterized their views fairly.
Whether there is such a thing as "major liberal states" justifying bad actions in terms of a benighted understanding of philosophical liberalism, I leave to you. And of course the atrocious colonialism of European nations is the opposite of rare; you and I agree there, no cherry-picking involved. I just think blaming it on liberal political theory is too easy.
BTW, I think this is fair if the measuring point is 1925 (a century). But what if we use 1975, half a century? Or the end of the Cold War, when neo-liberalism was really taking off and liberalism ceased to have any competition to "keep it honest." Certainly, there has been some expansion of rights since then, but also a lot of backwards steps.
Since then, median wages across the developed world have stagnated despite gains in productivity from the information revolution, while wages for lower income workers have actually tended to fall in real terms. Economic growth has tended to almost totally benefit a small elite, and economic mobility has been declining. The Black-White wealth gap in the US expanded to become larger than under Jim Crow, while America's underclass endures homicide rates above those of the Latin American states used to justify refugee status (or states with active civil wars in some cases).
Plenty of other similar stuff I'm sure you're familiar with. My point would be that if a trend extends across half a century, and appears to be accelerating, it isn't a hiccup.
Mill was against the institution of slavery as practiced, on liberal grounds. However, in "Considerations on Representative Government," he calls for compulsion over uncivilized peoples in order that they might lead productive economic lives, even if they must be for a while compelled to it, including through the institution of personal slavery. This is very similar to Locke's justification of slavery as "freedom from indolence," many of the American Founder's justification of slavery as "temporary but necessary," and liberal justifications of colonialism up through the 20th century.
I don't think these are equivalent to something like Kant or Hegel's statements on race because these sorts of justifications were used in revised form by liberal theorists and statesmen through the ends of colonialism and the justification of some of the more unsavory parts of neo-liberalism look very similar. If freedom is primarily (or at least largely) freedom to consume, then "economic growth" becomes a justification for all sorts of actions because it is "emancipatory in the long run." Also, they come directly out of the vision of freedom and the "state of nature" anthropology, they aren't some sort of ancillary comment tacked on to theories that would otherwise negate such views.
The justification for colonialism also looks a lot like the justification for tearing down the Church and forcing monks and nuns out of the monasteries and convents in France, Italy, and Spain (or the mass executions of clergy in France). The people have to be "freed from custom" to live more individualist, productive lives. Hence, it isn't just a sentiment grounded in racism, the same logic extended to the Infernal Columns' actions Vendee in France.
Thanks for this reference, I wasn't aware of it. Sigh, even Mill . . . racism runs deep.
Looking over the historical moments you cite, all I can do is repeat that such a picture would have us believe that some monolithic thing called liberalism never gave a damn about morals or justice or good government, caring only for individual freedoms no matter the cost, tearing down whatever was necessary to achieve them, etc., etc. That is very far from what I see in Rawls, the liberal theorist whose work I know best, and what I know of modern history (though I am not a historian). Meaning no disrespect, have you actually read A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism? There's much in both books that would interest you, I think.
Populism is many times very illogical. Populist can praise liberal/libertarian values and in the same time go against them. Perfect example of this is when populist claim to be "free speech warriors" and also curtail and limit views that they don't support.
The illogical aspect of this is even more clear when we look at authoritarian system like Marxism-Leninism. Democracy ought to have functioned through the party, and in fact the term "Soviet" is an adjective that comes from the Russian word for council or assembly. How democracy can work when the whole ideology starts with there being the class-enemy of the capitalists shows this fatal flaw in the thinking. In fact populism makes this separation of the "ordinary people" and the "evil elites" also, which basically undermines the faith in democracy from the start. Populism has the tendency to favor "strong men" who are needed because the republic doesn't work at the moment.
The case about democracy being "too direct" is basically made by there being a Constitution that cannot be changed with a simple minority or in some cases, at all. I do welcome these kinds of safety valves.
I'm not sure if Mill was necessarily motivated by racism. His initial examples on slavery are from ancient Europe. He just has a view of "natural man" as wholly without liberty that I find questionable.
I read Rawls a pretty long time ago now, and I am not sure if I had a chance to finish the book. I don't think liberalism "never gave a damn about morals, justice, or good government." Liberal theorists often write about these at great length. They just tend towards defining them in terms of the individual. Good government is a priority, and can be given extremely expansive focus in progressive liberalism, but it's also there primarily to enable the freedom of the individual to flourish. There is a marked contrast here with classical and Marxist political theory. Individual freedom is generally raised up over morality because moral questions are privatized to the extent possible (with "rights" holding down what morality enters into the public sphere). This only makes sense. If you have a theory of government that avoids giving answers on man's telos, instead making this a private, individualized matter, then what is important is enabling the private exploration and attainment of that telos, whatever the individual determines it to be.
Lots of liberal theory sounds utopian, that's true. I remember thinking that with Rawls. But this is also true of plenty of Marxist theory, and even some "Third Position" crypto-fascist theory that stays away from racism and militarism. It's certainly true of Hegel as well. Obviously, no theory is realized perfectly, but I think a useful question is if contradictions or intrinsic tensions in the theory lead towards problems in their implementation. I think this is the case in both liberalism and Marxism. It's perhaps most obvious in conservative liberalism in the way it necessarily sidelines and renders irrelevant the very cultural and religious institutions it most wants to conserve by excluding them from the state and thus the broadest conception of the common good (through a commitment to "small government") while also fetishizing a market that tends to bulldoze culture.
I do recall one specific explanation from Rawls to the effect that his theory must exclude a notion of "just desert." This tends to hold just as true for conservative liberal theories, which instead look at rights. By contrast, progressive and conservative politicians and citizens are constantly justifying their platforms in terms of just desert. The difficulty for liberal theorists is that, once the question of man's ultimate telos is privatized, one loses any ability to ground standards of excellence, and thus of desert.
This is maybe the most important contradiction, in that it seems to contradict human nature. I have seen many an avowed moral anti-realist, and many people who claim that political theory should not be based on morality, but I've never seen them discuss any political topic at length without falling into continually invoking standards of excellence and desert. A focus on rights alone leaves political theory chestless (and arguably losing any sense of telos also leaves all notion of rights critically undermined. Fukuyama, a great advocate of liberalism, expresses just this concern at the end of The End of History and the Last Man.)
And my personal favorite, Habermasian social democracy, as well. It seems to come with the territory, since our states are so far from utopian.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is where I think you misunderstand liberalism, or the Rawlsian version, at any rate. You apparently have the idea of a government that can "give answers" on matters such as human telos, or avoid doing so. But what would this mean in practice? How does a state "give an answer"? The liberal replies: by imposing authority, by precluding or impeding the realization of answers that disagree with the state position. And this it must not do, if a reasonable degree of individual freedom is to be preserved. Or, if by "give an answer," you simply mean that a state can name founding principles while ensuring that active, legitimate opposition is respected ... well, that is liberal democracy!
Also, as I've noted before, to say "what is important is . . ." implies that it's the only important thing. But Rawls considers many factors to be important, not least of which is finding a just balance between "enabling private exploration" and gumming up the works for everybody. It's essential to keep this concern for balance in mind when discussing Rawls. He simply doesn't fit the model of "advocate of individualism."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Who are these people? Rawls is obsessively concerned with morality, ethics, and justice -- he just doesn't see them in the terms you do. He strongly believes that justice is best served by the government's regarding basic issues of religion and morals as "diverse and irreconcilable." The crucial emphasis is on regarding. We must insist on public neutrality in this arena -- demand that our government take this attitude -- regardless of what we may personally hold true, if we want a just society.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Suppose you removed the bracketed phrase, so we're just talking about individual flourishing. Wouldn't that be OK? It certainly would be to me, and I think to Rawls. So what is it about "freedom" that seems so wrong-headed to you? Is it the idea that humans may flourish best when they are not politically or economically free? Genuinely not sure what you have in mind here.
Quoting J
This was badly phrased, and gives the impression that Rawlsian liberalism would take no stand on, for instance, matters of public safety. What Rawls in fact says (in the opening pages of Political Liberalism) is that democratic societies will always be marked by disagreement on some moral doctrines, and that some of these disagreements may be both "perfectly reasonable" yet irreconcilable. Part of the job of a good liberal government will be to find a workable balance for these disagreements within a state that protects the rights and safety of its citizens.
Apologies for the poor gloss.
For my part, I find the slogan "freedom" annoying in this context because of it's extreme myopia. It is all too easy in the context of a society to notice the restrictions on what one may do and so to wish for freedom. But freedom from social (and hence governmental) constraints means the loss of all the freedoms that are the result of social and governmental constraints.
To begin with the trivial, a universal rule that we should drive on the left (or right) side of the road restricts us all, but also gives us freedom from the dangers of negotiating traffic in the absence of such a rule. The laws restricting our freedom to break contracts give us the freedom to make contracts, and the restrictions on what one may do with other people's property give us the freedom to own our own property (and do what we like with it). The restriction on my ability to enforce my desires on other people means that I don't have to be continually battling with other people who wish to enforce their desires on me. And so on.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I was very puzzled by this remark. It seems to me that any comprehensive, or would-be comprehensive, theory of this kind will be unable to justify itself except on its own terms. I must be missing something. A counter-example would help.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think this is exactly right. On the other hand, I have noticed that people who hold different theories often seem to have a similar difficulty in seeing the problems that liberals see in their theories. Finding the common ground on which disagreement can be articulated and dissected is very hard.
But the biggest issue with liberalism was neatly identified by Popper (I think in "The Open Society"). Liberals can tolerate anything, except intolerance.
Of course. Some sort of absolute personal freedom to do anything whatsoever is a non-starter -- and has nothing to do with liberal political philosophy. I can't think of anyone, actually, for whom this is a "slogan" -- some early 20thC anarchists?
The context in which this came up was whether there's something sketchy about a government organizing itself "primarily to enable the freedom of the individual to flourish." I don't think either @Count Timothy von Icarus, who raised the question, or I meant to imply that such a government wanted to return its citizens to some nightmare of self-willed anarchy. The question, rather, was why a desire for individual freedom, in and of itself, should be suspect. I don't want to be free of traffic regulations; I very much want to be free to read what I like. I was asking why talking about "freedom" as the freedom for an individual to flourish seemed wrong-headed to Count T.
Strong points. :up:
It looks like we would have to engage in "extreme cherry picking" to try to construe the effects as unrelated to liberalism. On that view "liberalism" tends to shrink into nothing at all, with no efficacy or effects or dynasty.
I don't know about wrong-headed. But I do think there are difficulties about understanding it, especially as the liberal view seems to suggest that social intervention in the actions of individual is, in principle, a Bad Thing.
The problem with this is that it seems to believe that we individuals spring into life fully formed, ready to make choices. But that is not the case. We are born, we grow up and learn what we need to know about our environment, including our society; only then are we capable of exercising the freedoms that our situation affords us.
Roughly, my view starts from understanding an individual as a member of society, which not only defines the freedoms and restrictions that individuals live with, but educates and trains them to do so. What counts as flourishing depends on the options enabled by the environment and the society in which one lives.
Liberalism has got one thing right - the point (telos?) of society is the welfare (flourishing) of the individuals who are its members. But the idea that the social context in which we live is some sort or imposition on us is a misunderstanding.
I realize that's grossly over-simplified, but starting from the premiss that society and government are impositions on us is a mistake. The society in which we live is the condition of the possibility of flourishing (or not) and of our being free (or not).
Not grossly, though we both know there are important nuances left out. And funnily enough, I associate the position that "government imposes on individual freedoms" with certain strands of conservatism, not liberalism. The current hatred, in the US, of the federal government by right-wingers may be an offshoot of this, though of course no intelligent conservative would create DOGE.
I daresay there are strands of liberal thought that downplay the role of societal formation, and imagine a citizen as being in a position to make some ideal free choices. All I can say is, Rawls and Habermas (if you count him as a liberal theorist) are painstakingly aware of the trade-offs here.
:up:
In particular, the influence of a sort of Humean anthropology, which is extremely dominant in economics (and thus has huge influence on liberal governance) leads to a view where passions and appetites "just are." Reason exists to help us satisfy them. It's just a tool.
Such an anthropology cuts the legs out from under any coherent second-order volitions, the desire to have or not have different desires. But classically, virtue involved desiring the right things. We are virtuous when we enjoy doing what is right. We flourish more when we have desires conducive to human flourishing rather than self-destructive desires. Harmony and proper ordering must be cultivated, they aren't a given (or irrelevant).
Freud only increased this tendency, since his pseudoscience suggested that the root cause of all mental illness was the repression of desire, and tended to suggest that we not try to shape our desires (they are anarchic primitives) but instead simply channel them.
I actually think this is an area where liberalism is wrong, although it is almost right. The liberal states final cause would be the good of its citizens, yes. Yet this is where controversy arises. Is the good in question here the common good of all citizens (the lower ordered to the higher), or is it the individual good of each citizen (the higher ordered to the lower, as in reductionism)? Classical political theory suggests the former, but modern liberal theory suggests the latter, i.e. that the state exists primarily for the good of individuals qua individuals.
A second issue crops up in defining the good of man, whether as an individual or as a corporate body. Liberalism tends to declare that such talk of natural or ultimate ends is beyond the scope of liberalism, and thus beyond the scope of the state. Rather, individuals each have a right to decide such things for themselves. However, this open-endedness essentially forecloses on any conception of the human good that cannot be privatized and individualized. There is a tension here where trying to avoid giving an answer still very much results in the state weighing in on the human good, and in a quite totalizing manner because it demands excluding all sorts of things from education and public life (e.g. notions of virtue and telos).
I would say this tension exists in both conservative and progressive liberalism. Conservatives tend to want
a small state, but this tends to exclude (and thus perhaps undermine) the cultural and religious institutions they want to conserve. Progressives have the difficulty of trying to justify very large scale corporate projects (e.g. the welfare state) solely in terms of a collocation of atomized individuals' very loosely (and often privately) defined good, while also doing so without being able to rely on any notion of "just desert" (because such a notion requires a standard of excellence, which requires a human telos).
To sum up, the issue for the liberal state is that it has difficulty understanding its own final cause. It promotes the good of individuals, but then leaves the nature of this individual good as a privatized open question that it will not weigh in on. This creates a sort of ongoing tension in political life, as good governance often requires a more expansive notion of the common good.
Plenty of Marxist theory and traditionalists allow that they do not promote the liberal version of individual liberty to the same degree as liberalism. There is a reflective awareness that they are open to both internal and external critiques on this front. Traditionalism will generally allow that its preferred structures will not perform as highly vis-á-vis fostering consumption, it just tends to deny that greater consumption is all that important.
Perhaps this is because they are minority positions instead of the hegemon. By contrast, as I said, liberal critiques of liberalism tend to only focus on whether current forms of liberalism are living up to liberalism's own standards. There is a sort of blindness to the possibility of external critique. This leads to the phenomenon that Deneen observes, that the "solution to the problems of liberalism is always more liberalism."
I think this thread is great evidence of this. To criticism, the response has often been: "so you want theocracy or Stalinism then?" This is a response Fisher documents as well. It's a blindness to other conceptualizations of freedom, such that rejecting liberalism's version of freedom is equivalent with simply embracing tyranny. The vision is absolutized.
Misunderstand, or just don't agree with?
What sort of individual freedom is being preserved though? Only if freedom is defined in terms of potency/absence of restraint is the state's imposition of a certain understanding of human telos always a check on freedom. Put another away, the state is only always in error when it strays from liberalism if liberalism is always in accord with prudence and justice. Liberalism is only necessarily prudent if man has no telos or if his telos is unknowable, otherwise it represents unwarranted skepticism.
By contrast, if freedom is not "the ability to choose anything," but rather "the self-determining capacity to actualize the good" then it is not clear that the state always infringes on liberty when it answers such questions.
Anyhow, consider two justifications for gun control and making recreational drugs illegal. The liberal might say:
"We must control access to firearms because irresponsible or violent use of firearms by some individuals constrains the liberty of other individuals. Kids should be free to go to school without getting shot. Likewise, the abuse of recreational drugs by some individuals unduly constrains the liberty of other people through traffic accidents, poor parenting, etc."
By contrast, it's clear that either of these legal constraints could also be justified (perhaps better) in terms of a more definitive vision of the human good. The constraint might be the same in either case though, but in the aggregate liberal states will often have difficulty fostering certain goods because of their ideology.
Take education. Education is increasingly justified in terms of workforce preparation (and future individual consumption), and this justification has been used to drastically reduce any focus in civics, the liberal arts, philosophy, ethics, or any physical training. Education was, across the globe, not just in the West, originally conceived as training/habituation in virtue, excellence. This isn't open to the liberal society because, lacking any conception of man's telos, it lacks any standard of excellence for man. What is left as a standard of excellence comes from culture, religious institutions, etc., which provide this standard for as long as they exist, but liberalism and capitalism erode these institutions and standards by excluding them from public life. What is left is a sort of "democratization of excellence," which in capitalist economies tends towards a fetishization of wealth and "market value" (hence why the problems of eldercare and childcare get framed in the market terms of "uncompensated labor").
Education becomes primarily a means of "making more money" and "getting to do what you want," not of "cultivating excellence." This is problematic for any anthropology where self-determination and self-governance (both individual and collective) require positive cultivation, and where there is some definitive human purpose outside of the satisfaction of irrational sentiments and appetites (the latter being a popular conceit of the Anglo-empiricist tradition due to its impoverished psychology).
There were many pluralistic societies that existed as pluralistic societies for centuries prior to liberalism. While it is true that a more positive notion of the human good might be used to constrain opposition, it need not. "Being respected and protected for being wrong" might itself be conducive to human flourishing.
Liberalism allows pluralism by making different competing positions equally meaningless and irrelevant to public life (bourgeois metaphysics).
But this is a consideration in terms of individual liberty. One person's individual liberty can be justly constrained only because it "gums up the works for everyone else," i.e. because it infringes on other's individual liberty. That's a hallmark of liberal theory and the way it justifies rights and law.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not sure which is the case for you, that's true.
This was a genuine question for you. There is a classical liberal response to the question of how a government would "give answers" on such weighty questions -- that it involves unacceptable uses of state power -- this was the answer I sketched. I'm still wondering how you think of it, though; I'm not really sure which part of the position seems wrong to you. How ought the state, as you conceive it, give answers about the human telos, and why would that be acceptable?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again . . . what do you mean? Who is answering, and with what means? Do you mean through laws, or proclamations, or economic policies? I know you have something in mind but I can't see it yet.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm still at a basic loss about what you conceive the alternative to be. What would be the other, presumably more attractive, reason for constraining individual liberty?
I may be confusing liberalism proper with the neo-liberalism of the seventies, which, in my book, is a very peculiar variant of liberalism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I realize that you made this point a while ago, but in this context, I need to comment. I do not seriously doubt that the attitude of Mill and Locke here includes an element of racism. But I think that the issue is a real one. We do not plunge infants into all the choices and responsibilities of adult life, but keep them in a special status until we think they have learnt enough for their choices to be meaningul - and we do not give them a choice in the matter.
Now, I wouldn't want to be caught suggesting that aboriginal people who have not had contact or experience of Western society are in any way like children. But, it seems to me, that the fact remains that they need to understand the society they are grappling with before their choices in that context can be regarded as meaningful. It seems to me that Mill (and Locke) at least recognized that problem and the responsibility of the new arrivals in managing their relationship, even though their solution was far from sufficiently respectful.
Quoting J
I have read some of both, but not enough, nor recently enough to venture a comment. But I'm happy to accept that some liberals, at least have also taken this seriously. I remember a good deal in Rawls about his veil of ignorance. I can accept that, to some extent at least, people can empathize with the situation of someone living in very different circumstances. That's not nothing. Whether it can balance the years of training for life in the circumstances I was "thrown" into is another question.
Actually, I'm inclined to think that liberalism may be the best way of coping with the fact that we have to work out how to proceed from where we are, with all our different perspectives, as opposed to drawing up something from scratch. Even the Founding Fathers of the USA didn't try to do that; they tried to build on what was already known and thought, but build better.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I wouldn't venture to positively claim that humans have no telos or that any telos they do have is knowable. But there is much disagreement about what the telos of human beings is. So perhaps liberalism is prudent, after all.
Perhaps, though, we should have a couple of cautions based on what has happened in the last 30 years or so. First, acknowledge that tolerance has limits and it is foolish to tolerate enemies who will not return the favour. Second, recognize that liberalism, however tolerant, will appear intolerant to certain ideologies which do not seem to understand the practical wisdom of compromise. Third, there is nothing that guarantees that liberal values will be adopted by anyone who has not yet done so, and nothing to prevent people who have adopted them deciding to abandon them. Fourth, never forget that, even though negotiations and compromise are much to be preferred, they require co-operation from the other side, which may not be forthcoming; a plan B is often helpful. Neglecting those precautions seems to me to sum up the myopia of liberalism in recent decades.
Yes, this is key. I get the sense that hardcore opponents of liberal theory would object, right at the start, to the claim that we do have to do this -- that it may not be an ideal place to start but there's no way to create a different starting place without either tyranny or miracles. We find ourselves -- we in Western democracies, that is -- in a lively and diverse, if often acrimonious, conversation about what sorts of values and practices ought best to guide us. We can either encourage that conversation, hoping perhaps for a Peircean ideal convergence of inquiry, or attempt to abort it by the imposition of one set of values. (I'm still not clear how this would actually be done.)
The other point of strong objection, I think, is that Rawls (and to an extent Habermas) believes this pluralistic situation is inevitable and irreconcilable at this moment on some moral issues. "What are the grounds of toleration," Rawls asks, "given the fact of reasonable pluralism as the inevitable outcome of free institutions?" Opponents of this view would say three things:
1. You ought to be able to specify the grounds of toleration -- and we believe they're inconsistent and objectionable.
2. "Reasonable pluralism" is in the eye of the beholder.
3. What is it about "free institutions" that you think makes this outcome inevitable?
All three are perfectly good points to raise. But what is distressing to me is that, so often, opponents of liberalism seem to believe that merely to raise them is to defeat liberal theory -- as if these were stunning new insights that had never occurred to Rawls or Habermas! I think this attitude probably springs from never having actually read the philosophers in question, and using a straw-man cartoon of "liberalism," largely derived from contemporary politics, as the target. (I appreciate, BTW, your candor about your own knowledge of R and H.). But of course these issues have been intensely and carefully examined, repeatedly, in the literature.
How about something like Twin Oaks? Not a cult!
Blog post evaluating the successes and failures of Twin Oaks.
Does tolerating different views necessarily mean reconciling them? Surely, if they could be reconciled, tolerating them would not be necessary. (One only tolerates views and actions that one disapproves of. It would be odd to say that one was tolerating a view or action that one approved of.)
Quoting J
I'm afraid I must be missing something here. These don't look like objections to liberalism to me.
1. Surely, a liberal approach to toleration would be to tolerate unless there are grounds to do otherwise. If the grounds for tolerating something have to be spelled out, the default position will be not to tolerate. It's the different between whatever is not forbidden is permitted (liberal) and whatever is not permitted is forbidden (restrictive).
2. "Reasonable" does not mean the same as "subjective". To be sure, "reasonable" suggests a certain amount of flexibility and room for different opinions. But if the members of our society are the ones to determine how much pluralism is reasonable, what rational grounds for complaint might there be?
3. I don't see what institutions are considered to be free here and what status the others might have.
I shouldn't think so. As you say, the tolerance presupposes that they won't be reconciled any time soon.
Quoting Ludwig V
Nor to me, frankly, but I'm trying to present what I've seen as typical objections. I should probably let those who hold them make the case.
Quoting Ludwig V
This point deserves a more thoughtful reply, as it speaks to both the strengths and weaknesses of Rawlsian theory. Pushed for time now but I'll come back to this . . .
For the UK and the USA, the alternative to religious freedom was having communities tear themselves apart in sectarian violence, so it was a matter of cultural survival. Not all communities have that problem. Is religious freedom really a core principle? Or just attached to the economic/political agenda?
Coming back to this: The context here, for Rawls, is what he says about "reasonable pluralism" as the "inevitable outcome" of such institutions. What he has in mind, I think, are institutions such as a free press, freedom of speech, no state religion, and a "free market." Leaving the last one aside for the moment, we can see the degree of freedom he's picturing concerning speech and religion. Broadly, he's imagining institutions that exact no penalties for a pluralism of views, and place no barriers to the expression of such views, and prohibit the state from placing a hand on the scale when there is disagreement. I would say that this is, very broadly, the "free institutions" enshrined in Western democracy.
But . . . Rawls is on much shakier grounds if he also regards Western late capitalism as a free institution. I am not sure he does. He's aware that economic inequality is not only a matter of individual good or bad fortune, but is to some extent a feature of the system. But I don't know if he ever seriously considered socialistic reforms -- pretty sure there's no discussion of that in either Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism. I'd have to reread both him and Nussbaum to have an educated opinion one way or the other.
That's all very well. But doesn't he recognize that all these freedoms are heavily qualified?
I found Prospect Magazine 2018 - Rawls' Justice as Fairness
I think he does. In Political Liberalism, for instance, in the section called "Free Political Speech," he points out that "the basic liberties not only limit one another but they are also self-limiting" (341), and goes on to give a very nuanced discussion of how this is so. This section ends:
I would call this "heavily qualified," if you think about what he's actually saying. The possibly ideal liberty to speak as one pleases becomes confined to its "central range," which appears to be reasonable political discussion about matters of justice as they relate to structure and policies. The use of "reasonable," alone, would force a discussion of what this means in terms of limits.
Excellent. This is just how I read him too -- though as I said, I'd need to do some rereading on this question to be sure. But we find him saying typical Rawlsian things such as:
I call this typical because his conception of a "capacity" is usually individual, such that "economic capacity" might not qualify -- though I think it should. And the "essential minimum degree" bit has generated a lot of debate, which would certainly have to be extended into the economic area as well.
Yes, I agree. All very interesting.
I wonder who does the specifying and adjusting? In real life I think that there is a great deal of consensus developing and then being enforce in the same kind of ways that the rules of etiquette are enforced - spontaneous, non-organized individual reaction.
Quoting J
I think the talk of capacities comes from Nussbaum. As to economic capacity, I assume that means the capacity to earn money. But the limits of what might earn money are quite wide; so it's a different kind of capacity from, for example, the capacity to drive lorries or raise cattle. Perhaps, in this case at least, it may be more a question of finding some capacity that each person has that people will pay money for, as opposed to a capacity like the ability to play music, where it is more a question of selecting among the population.
The question of education raises its head again.
Rawls is modern liberalism par excellence, if we take Keynes as his economic counter-part. The idea of justice includes classes of various kinds such that all the people, in the veil of ignorance, would agree to those classes before rolling the dice to find out which class they are in.
The big difficulty there is... well, whatever. I know i'm not a liberal. I agree with you that there's no discussion upon "just how low can the lower class go?", because he was not a member of the lower class.
A good question, which can be asked of both Rawls and Habermas. Rawls has in mind a sort of ideal dialogue or dialectic, that seems clear, but there might be different answers about how it is realized by the state. Your analogy with etiquette is fine, but the problem is that we wouldn't tolerate etiquette police, whereas it seems we do need enforcement of these naturally occurring, non-organized forms of consensus.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, she's developed it in a particularly interesting way, but the quote does come from Rawls, who also used the term often.
Quoting Ludwig V
At a minimum, but I also have in mind the various power-capacities that economic privilege endows one with. I don't need to spell this out, I'm sure; the fact that my parents were middle-class US citizens gave me some obvious unearned and unfair advantages over others. This is a problem for classical liberalism because, while there's arguably not much we can do about differences an individual is born with, the differences in economic status are systemic, not "natural," and could be ameliorated. Indeed, they might not exist at all, which is hard to imagine with differences of, say, gender or physical robustness or IQ-type intelligence.
Quoting Ludwig V
An interesting alternative to guaranteeing a minimum standard of living. I suppose a more social-democratic view here would challenge the idea that economic viability needs to be deserved or earned at all. But I can easily see a capitalist society using your idea as a sort of bridge.
We can notice how this thought developed in a related area. It used to be held that the right to vote was no such thing, but rather had to be earned, if you will, by being a member of a certain sex and racial and economic class. Now liberal democracies believe that all adult citizens (with some troublesome exceptions) indeed have this right. But the parallel with "right to be economically stable" hasn't been made yet. We still believe, by and large, that people should earn their living. There's been, at least, some movement toward thinking that those who are unable to do so can be supported by the state, but this rarely translates into anything you or I would recognize as economic stability. (I'm speaking now about the US, which lags so far behind in this area -- 16.3 % of children below the poverty line??? :cry: .)
Quoting Moliere
Not sure about that last part? :smile: But yes, this is a huge problem with the veil of ignorance, for Nussbaum and many others. Rawls assumed a lot when he imagined what we could know and not know, accept and not accept, conceptualize and not conceptualize, from behind that veil. The idea is resilient, though, because you can correct and stretch it without breaking it and making it useless.
Quoting Moliere
Not entirely fair. Rawls has all kinds of things to say about this, most famously his "Difference Principle":
As for the ad hominem part -- well, maybe being a member of the lower class would be a necessary condition for seeing it differently, but certainly not a sufficient one. See Broke and Patriotic, by Francesco Duina.
I began to think that I was saying something not worth saying.
Quoting J
Fair. I am not a Rawls reader, though I've done selections from A Theory of Justice.
From my perspective, though I haven't read what you recommended so this is off the cuff, is that it's very easy to accept economic differences when you're higher up, and not so easy when you're lower down. So even if we go with the veil of ignorance I suspect the people who roll snake-eyes will still feel bitter and want more out of life.
As an observation about people, I completely agree. And that bitterness would have a special sting since, as discussed, no one need be born poor.
Rawls has been described, personally, as a rather unworldly fellow who didn't care much for his own comforts. Thomas Nagel talked about "his purity and his freedom from the distortions of ego," but also said that "my dominant sense of Jack was that he was a natural aristocrat." Not sure that's the praise he would have wanted, if it is praise! But it speaks to your point, in that one's life experiences can't help influencing what you find acceptable, and maybe even noticeable.
It seems to me that the project of disentangling nature from nurture is extremely difficult, if possible at all. The two interact during the whole of life and the prospect of separating them is very dim.
Quoting J
I think we would do better to consider the ways in which we negotiate this issue in real life and, with luck, working out improvements to those. More likely to be meaningful than something dreamed up in an armchair.
Quoting J
Yes, they do. And it is a problem. Insofar as compulsory education can address the issue, that's all we have.
Sure, but isn't there a clear distinction to be made between "born with a speech impediment" and "born into poverty"? Most of the boundaries are fuzzier than that, agreed, but in principle I think it's a conception worth clarifying when we can.
Quoting Ludwig V
I vote for both/and rather than either/or. Theory + political realities.
Quoting Ludwig V
Can you say more about what the problem is, as you understand it? (The exceptions I had in mind are the various state laws about convicted felons voting.)
Yes, but the outcome of having a speech impediment as an adult might well rest on both causes interacting, not only after birth, but even before (polluted environment). But I'm happy to think of a specfrum, which results from the interaction of the two causes.
Quoting J
Well, yes. Thought experiments and idealizations have their place. But so does hard, practical experience. Perfect impartiality may be beyond reach in practice, but practical arrangement can achieve something, and good practical arrangments can do better than bad ones.
Quoting J
I wasn't thinking about the details. There are various categories of people barred from voting in the UK.
The arguments are slightly different in each case. But the reasons seem obvious, except in the case of those in prison. I'm unclear whether the reason is that those in prison are regarded as unfit to vote or whether loss of the right to vote is part of the punishment.
Yes. Habermas has perhaps done better with this than Rawls, because much of what he's written about this has been in response to ongoing European issues about which there is real debate, and real concern about how to frame the debate. These are very much practical issues.
I had no idea! Is this an outgrowth of the tradition (if I've got this right) that certain members of the royal family may not vote either?
Quoting Ludwig V
I realized I didn't know, and spent a bit of time consulting online sources. In the US, the answer appears to be "neither" -- felon disenfranchisement evidently began as part of the Jim Crow reaction to Black emancipation. The idea was that, because more Blacks spent time in prison (wonder why!), they could be further excluded from political influence once they got out. White felons were collateral damage, on this account.
As for current arguments, the answer appears to be "both": The idea of "civil death" as a punishment for certain crimes goes back many centuries, and is seen as both a just punishment for criminally harming the state, and a just precaution to make sure that such malefactors can't do further harm with their vote. The ethical connection between committing a felony and being unqualified to vote is, I guess, taken for granted.
The British Constitution is a wonderful thing. Strictly speaking, the royal family are entitled to vote; it's just that they think it would be tactless to do so. The same applies to the bishops of the Church of England, who are all classified as "lords spiritual" and are automatically working members. Nor (since 1999) does the ban apply to hereditary peers who have not been elected to be working members. But even those who are banned from voting in Parliamentary elections are allowed to vote in local elections.
The first law about this was passed in 1699. The official reason for the ban is that members of t[e House of Lords are there in their own right and so do not need a representative in Parliament. They can speak for themselves.
Quoting J
Yes. It all looks like a bit of a mess. It seems likely that the real reason the practice survives is that "votes for criminals" does not look like a vote winner.
:lol:
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, and you really can't overestimate the degree to which the US is plagued by racist and classist assumptions. In depressingly large segments of the population, "votes for criminals" translates as "more so-called 'rights' for those people".
It seems patently obvious that you can, and that this is the standard driven by media/social media. The vast majority of the US is objectively not racist. Classist? A better argument can be made.
But more generally, the US is constantly finding surrogates for explicitly racist policies, most recently the moves against immigrants. Our policing and justice system is of much longer duration. I have no hesitation in calling the belief that the US criminal system is fair and equitable a "racist assumption." It is impossible to believe this without ignoring the reasons why -- just to pick one feature -- people of color have less effective legal representation than white people. This is the systemic part. To say, "But that's not because of their race, it's because of ____ (usually some version of poverty or lack of education)" is to avoid the question, "But how did that come about? Why is this group poorer/less educated?" etc. The racist assumption here would be that, somehow or other, there is a racially neutral explanation of this.
All that said, there are many ways of using the word "racism" and I don't mean to dispute your right to use it differently. I'm just trying to explain what my comment meant.
That is honestly, in my view, utterly bananas my guy. This makes me think perhaps you have never left your house. Obviously not, but having been around the States and understand how to look at sample sizing etc... this claim is one for which I would want to prevent you from holding office its so absurd. This purely to illustrate how flabbergastingly made-up this appears to someone looking in.
Quoting J
Is this one of those "everyone's racist" arguments? Cause if so, this isn't even worthy of discussion. If everyone has it, why are we talking about it like its a bad thing? Its human nature if so.
If that's not the argument, I would suggest you're reading 'lines' and just eating them up. Its hard to even understand what's being brought forward in those sorts of tests. "implicit bias" means almost nothing. Humans discriminate. That's about 99% of our mental activity. There's also a bit of a bugaboo here: Racism against the majority is rife. I do actually care whether that ruffles feathers - it is. Karmelo Anthony is a PERFECT example of some rather extreme black privilege (until he was charged, I should add. It looks to have stopped).
Quoting J
That may be your view, and why you think 50% of the US is racist. I think its utterly preposterous. There is an argument here, though, that I think gets ignored: Non-racist policies carried out by racist people give a certain flavour. I'll say no more than to add that there are plenty of explicitly racist policies: they aren't aimed at black and brown people.
Quoting J
Your position is that a racially neutral explanation for any racial disparity would be, fundamentally, racist? Are you hearing yourself? Or am I not getting it?
Whichever answer, this doesn't apply to the actual commission of violent crime. What's the 'racist' explanation there? Particularly given its mainly intra-racial?
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
Gee, you really make me want to continue the conversation! :wink:
I can see I've pushed your buttons, so I'll let it drop, no hard feelings.
I'm replying to this comment in this thread because my thoughts are more on topic here.
I think the above is largely correct. However, the question then is: "why do people now think truth is incompatible with democracy?" A very robust appreciation for democracy existed in the United States in the early 20th century without an embrace of this sort of pluralism, without any apparent conflict.
Superman fights for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," a phrase which could be delivered back then without any undercurrent of irony. In 1948, even "the world is essentially meaningless and purposeless" types like William Stace could espouse faith in logos and man's capacity to follow it. There is, up through the early Cold War, a "cult of the Founding Fathers" that tends to present them in terms not unlike how the ancient Greeks saw figures like Solon. And then there is stuff like the broad success of The Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia in the earlier context, versus the sorts of stories that are popular today, like A Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games. The latter two are considered "more realistic," in part, precisely because of uninspiring, more cynical endings.
I think post-modern skepticism re grand narratives, and a more general skepticism of logos's capacity for leading human life, has a larger impact on popular culture that is often acknowledged (through a variety of pathways, particularly its effect on the liberal arts). I'd argue that it is this skepticism that makes truth threating (rather than empowering) for democracy. That is, truth and reason should make democracy more secure, but in this climate the two come into conflict.
Also, the fact that logos is no longer fit to lead human life redoubles the modern liberal phobia of thymos (spiritedness, honor culture, etc.) sparked by the World Wars. So what you get is a society focused on epithumia (sensible pleasure and, in particular, safety) and "reasonableness" (which seems to often tie back procedurally to safety). This is, pointedly, not unlike how Juvenal and Tacitus saw their own society as its citizenry allowed the Roman Republic to die.
Now, I'll catch some flak for this, but for historians and theorists who use something like the epithumia, thymos, logos distinction, there are two types of "societies of epithumia:" the primitive, which must struggle to meet basic needs, and the decadent. Ibn Khaldun might be an example here. Or as William Durant puts it: "every civilization is born a Stoic, and dies an Epicurean."
To bring this back to Rawls:
A common critique of Rawls is that his "reasonableness" isn't enough to motivate citizens to attain arduous goods. It's procedural, and motivated by safety. Other liberals tend to draw on a similar sort of motivation (e.g. Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, etc., i.e. "it's safest to prefer the progressive liberal social order; it's most likely to get you 'good enough' circumstances"). Hence, it doesn't really address Fukuyama's point about the inherent human drive towards megalothymia. More to the point, people are unlikely to want to storm beaches or resist sieges in the name of "reasonableness," i.e., to take the sorts of personal and collective risks that civilization requires.
I think those are fair critiques, but I would add that "reasonableness" also isn't a strong enough motivator to keep societies' leaders and elites honest. When faced with tensions between duty and personal pleasure or self-aggrandizement, reasonableness is not the sort of principle that gets people to do the hard thing, especially not when that means taking on significant risks. For that, you need a sense of thymos, arete, and pietas, all the old civic virtues. Hamilton for instance, wasn't willing to storm trenches because he thought his system would be a reasonable maximization of the self-directed pursuit of utility, but because he (like many Founders) self-reflectively thought of himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus or Cocles.
Certainly, thymos can lead to great evils, but it also leads to great goods. That's Plato's whole point. Logos needs to rule through thymos. Liberalism tends to cut out thymos because it will not allow any standard for human greatness or just desert to enter the public sphere (Rawls explicitly bans just desert from consideration). More to the point, in its contemporary form, it tends to preclude the "rule of reason" because reason, once deflated and deprived of proper authority as logos, only speaks to "how to get what we all want," and not "what should we want."
So, as Rawls might put it in his deontological contractarian terms:
Yet we face the same sort of challenges one sees in criticisms of Hume:
Rawls has a "thick" theory in some respects, but this conception of the common good is thin. I don't think it's thick enough to support the demands of civilization in the long run, although it might work well enough for a while, especially for a civilization with economic and martial hegemony already in place and an existing culture it can draw on for values. But we're now seeing both of those factors evaporate.
Not to mention that Rawls himself is undermined by the advance of skepticism since the 1970s. Even his instrumental, Kantian reasonableness starts looks shaky in the face of today's logos skepticism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Could part of it be that the United States was explicitly formed as a republic and not a mere democracy?
After all, what does Benjamin Franklin say when he emerges from the Constitutional Convention, which moved the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation to a Constitution?
The Articles of Confederation were a more thoroughly democratic form, and the natural question asks whether the move away from that can manage to be a republic without falling into a monarchy. Thus, arguably, the recent epoch you identify is more bound up with democracy than the former epoch. I think we have seen a resurgence of democratic thinking in the last few decades.
If youre going to use the word postmodern it might be useful to distinguish political and sociological adoptions of the term from philosophical usages. For a range of thinkers, from Wittgenstein and Husserl to Deleuze and Heidegger, the critique of grand narratives involves anything but skepticism concerning truth. That is to say, for them it is the belief in foundational truth that courts skepticism, and the way beyond such skepticism requires the invocation of a groundless ground, a non-foundational yet determinate notion of truth.
Funny enough, that post originally included a paragraph about the old trope that: "no critic of post-modernism has ever understood it, and even if they have understood it, post-modernism has never actually effected anything" You know, the old "no true post-modernism," or "real post-modernism has never been tried." But I thought it was too long.
Well, it is a slippery term, not unlike "existentialist." But I do think it's a term we need because there is a real difference between early to mid-20th century liberalism, and the later "post-modern" "neoliberalism" (there might be "no true neoliberalism" either though). This difference accelerates with the decline of the USSR, and is exemplified by strong skepticism vis-á-vis grand narratives, an embrace of strongly relativistic theses, a heavy focus on debunking as opposed to positive argument (although this is already being identified in the 1950s), a heavy embrace of irony and desacralizarion , and I would say "logos-skepticism." By "logos-skepticism," I mean skepticism about the capacity of logos (reason, rationality) to be the organizing principle and asperation of society and individual life.
For instance, early Christian thought, particularly Origen and Clement of Alexandria, is extremely logo-centric in this way. Homer's Greeks are thymos-centric. They have an arete culture where "excellence" is the key pursuit of human life. Virgil would be a sort of mid-point, pivoting from arete to pietas, an alignment of honor to principles.
William Stace is a fine example because he thinks we face nihilism, but still has faith in logos, in principles. "To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and live honorable" without "childish" props such as religion and teleology. There is a refreshing lack of irony in "Man Against Darkness."
Like I said, I think the biggest factor here is how the new outlook permeated the liberal arts, down to high school classrooms. Hanson and Heath's "Who Killed Homer?", now almost thirty years old, covers the effects on the discipline of classics for instance. There is the shift to focusing on "subverting," "decolonizing," "deconstructing," "constructing," "queering," etc. texts on the one hand, and then the tendency to begin cramming the latest scientific and mathematical jargon into humanities studies on the other, as well as a pivot to the abstruse (if not downright obscurantist).
There is a lot going on there, but one theory I like is that the reason the humanities latched on to this sort of style and thinking so readily is that the early-20th century focus on the primacy of science left the humanities as "a mere matter of opinion and taste." They weren't rigorous enough. They didn't produce "progress." They didn't fit in well with the now-dominant German conception of the "research university" as a place primarily concerned with publishing new technological findings. Aping the style of the sciences gives the humanities at least something of the atmosphere of the "legitimate fields," while being aligned towards "progress" gives them a claim to be doing something for society akin to what the natural sciences do through the development of new technologies.
Hence, the creation of analyses like:
This is quite far from the "liberal arts" as the arts that "make men free" in terms of a capacity for individual self-governance and self-rule, although at least the less pessimistic, more Marxist thread in this shift still maintains something of this focus by still maintaining at least some idea about what exactly is being progressed towards.
I think this is debatable. Arguably there is an equivocation on what is meant by "truth" in play, but that's not what I meant by logos-skepticism at any rate.
I think you are missing an important point. For many in the aftermath of the two world wars, it was clear that the Grand Narratives that they had inherited were a busted flush. They perceived that those narratives involved a great deal of irrational myth-making, which could not stand up to a rational critique. New departures were an absolute necessity in order to avoid any repetition of history. (OK, that's an emotional sketch. But I don't think it is wrong. It is an appalling failure and a great sadness that they project appears to be on the brink of falling apart. But perhaps it never really stood a chance.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's true. But the embrace of reasonableness was intended to avoid the necessity of storming beaches and resisting sieges, which were regarded as grossly uncivilized activities. Risks, by all means, but avoidance of barbarity as a priority.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That is certainly true. Are you suggesting that it is not a problem? Things have moved on since the fifties, though the Arts and Humanities are still in a perilous position. But then, so are the (pure) sciences, which seem to survive as the hand-maidens of Applied Science and Engineering, which is where the money is - or, if you prefer, are essential to the modern economy.*
I should not be too scathing here. In the curriculum of medieval universities, the professions, (Theology, Medicine and Law) were the crowning subjects. Humanities (otherwise known as the trivium) were preparatory, grounding subjects. It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the status of the Humanities improved and became the mark of a civilized, cultivated person. This was a rational response to the improved market for an education for those who would never need to work.
* EDIT Please don't think that I mean to cast any aspersions on either Applied Science of Engineering. My censure is against the near ubiquitous use of money as the only or primary measure of value.
Right, but the arc of the argument is that people who won't storm beaches or resist sieges (who lack thymos) also won't stand up to public corruption or resist the temptation to public corruption, and won't forgo current consumption for the sake of future goods (e.g. Europe's response to Russian aggression, the inability to moderately curtail consumption to address what appear to be unfolding environmental and fiscal disasters for future generations). So it isn't just about an ability to engage in war, but an ability to avoid war and crisis in the first place.
One reason for this is that the empiricist psychology undergirding liberalism tends to be fairly impoverished (in a number of ways). One way this manifests, in classical terms, is essentially the claim that man only has concupiscible appetites (i.e. an attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain), while ignoring the existence of irascible appetites (i.e. an attraction to the pursuit of arduous goods, where hope, not pleasure, is the key positive motivating force). Indeed, a lot of economics and political science is explicitly built on an anthropology that explicitly lumps all motivation into a concupiscible utility. And it is considered "reasonable" for man to be wholly concupiscible, a creature of epithumia, as is evident when people are chastised for voting "against their own economic interests," as if this, above all else, is what politics seeks to provide. Well, in liberal theory, that's perhaps true, the "common good" is just an aggregate of individual concupiscible goods, of consumption.
But Fukuyama's point, which seems to have been borne out quite well, is that human nature and the drive to meglothymos doesn't disappear just because one wants to banish it. Calling it "unreasonable" does little when the life of epithumia is itself not self-justifying, if it is ultimately "meaningless and purposeless," and the result of an irrational pleasure drive that reason can only do its best to satisfy. C.S. Lewis makes a similar but more nuanced point in the Abolition of Man, which is that, not only will thymos not disappear, but it will be destructive if it isn't oriented properly, and that orientation cannot be to epithumia, but must come from logos.
I think the voices that helped develop our current thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism were themselves plenty dogmatic and stuck living out their own myth, both the Russell-Stace-Camus types who declared the "obvious" meaninglessness and purposelessness of reality, and the later post-modern logos-skeptics, who themselves never challenge the empiricist presuppositions that led them towards skepticism.
No, I think it's a huge problem. It ignores what the liberal arts are for. They are the ground, as you say, for making men capable of self-governance and self-rule (collectively and individually) as well as the ground for a common stock of ideas for political life, the pursuit of a common good. The move to make English all about "on the job communication," is atrocious in this regard.
I'd disagree about the value given to them in previous epochs. When Saint Augustine regularly cites Virgil, etc., he is drawing on a common culture and set of ideas as a vehicle for his thought. These played a quite large role in thought and politics, as the surviving texts themselves show. The liberal arts might be preparatory, but they are extremely important in this regard. You see this in John Milton being invited to essentially take on a role akin to Secretary of State in revolutionary England because of his learning for instance.
They were considered essential for those entering public life from antiquity. This is why ancient political works and the works of the Church Fathers are full of literary references. I would also suppose it's why they tend to have good rhetorical style, that even comes out in old translations. You could give Origen or Augustine to a high schooler and expect them to come away with something fairly clear, without being bored to tears, which is certainly not true of a lot of philosophy or theology.
This is a very strange debate. You seem to be arguing that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the dominance of liberalism. But I believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the increasing dominance of illiberal forces, some of which call themselves neo-liberal. We agree about something! On the other hand, I'm not sure there has ever been a time when the world wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Certainly, not in the last three hundred years.
I can't work out what the key points are here. Some possibly random comments:-
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. It is certainly true that the successes of liberalism in, let us say the 19th and 20th century were the result of deep commitment and dogged determination. So it is odd that you think that people of that kind are "thumos-phobic" (if I've understood what you mean by that correctly). Their positions were based on rational argument, so it is also odd that you think that they were "logos-sceptical" (If I've understood what you mean by that correctly).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My understanding of thumos is that everybody has it - the capacity to adopt and pursue values with commitment and effort. The problem with it, for Plato at least, is that it needs to be directed correctly. It may be true that reluctance to forego current consumption may be part of the reluctance of Europe to support Ukraine properly. But a big part of it is a reluctance to go to war. I don't think that's a bad thing, (so long as it is not overdone!)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think this distinction would stand up to analysis. But perhaps you are channeling the distinction between epithumia and thumos? In any case, it seems to me that the widespread condemnation of epithumia is wrong-headed. Our appetites include things that are not merely pleasurable but essential. The problem arises when they are pursued to excess or in the wrong way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That, or something very like it, is indeed the traditional argument for them. But, for many, what happened in Germany in the first half of the 20th century has more or less destroyed that argument. At the very least, we have to note that love of the humanities is not sufficient to prevent people going down some very wrong paths.
Well, the irony here is that Germany is very often the primary example advocates of the classical education use to push their case (with at least some degree of plausibility IMHO). The modern research university is based on the German model that eschewed the liberal arts and the classical education structure and focused on technological progress and technical training instead. Germany was the poster child for a move towards rigidly technical education. Public debates in the US and UK [I] specifically[/I] centered around the fear that this was giving them a leg up in economic and military competition as they rushed into their own reforms.
Nazism was also not particularly a project of the intelligentsia in the way communism was in Russia, so it seems harder to blame elite education.
Well, my claim is that contradictions and problems in modern liberalism are causing the rise of those illiberal forces. If it weren't for these internal dynamics, the external threats would be quite manageable. That is, liberalism in its current form is self-undermining. That's not saying that there is nothing good about liberalism, capitalism, modernity, or republican government. Quite the opposite. I find these trends particularly disturbing precisely because I see the benefits of republican government. Right now though, I think liberalism is destroying the future of republics, or at least putting them in jeopardy. At a certain point, an Augustus [I]does[/I] become better for most people than rule by recalcitrant oligarchs. That was the reality of the death of the Roman Republic; it led to the best governance in a very long time.
Right, I think you're missing what I've said about the timing. I said skepticism about thymos (always present to some degree) increases after the World Wars, and increases again in the post-modern/neo-liberal period after 1970. Logos-skepticism doesn't really enter the picture until that later period. As I pointed out, you can see quite the opposite attitude in the 40s and 50s. Now, truth and reason are seen as in someway inimical to democracy if they do not allow for a "bourgeoisie metaphysics" that allows for multiple, conflicting truth claims (pluralism). Previously, truth and reason were seen as supporting democracy, because people could be led towards the best path by reason and commitment to principles.
The erosion of culture by capitalism no doubt plays a role, because culture directs logos and thymos, but in our fractured environment culture lacks the capacity to act as a unifying force.
Exactly. My claim is that today, we don't direct it so much as we just try to suppress it. It conflicts with "reasonableness" and a focus on safety.
I agree 100%. There is nothing wrong with epithumia. What is problematic is when a society is led by epithumia, when it becomes epithumia-(appetite and safety)-centric. In our current case, this happens because of thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism (or even logos-phobia; I can't tell you how many times I have seen people argue for robust pluralism/relativism, including the wholesale violation of the principle of non-contradiction, because to do otherwise would court autocracy).
Yes, but just because problems are perennial doesn't mean they don't get better or worse. The state of the West, or of the US specifically, is arguably more dismal that it has been in a long time, and the forces leading to this seem unlikely to abate or be mastered any time soon without significant change. Again, this is because the challenge to liberalism comes from within liberalism itself. If China and Russia fell into revolt tomorrow, the prospects for the West would not look particularly brighter. Indeed, the lack of external threats might accelerate the decline, the way it did for Rome after victory in the Second Punic War.
Can you say more about why post-modern skepticism makes truth threatening?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A good point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Where could I find this in Plato? This is the sort of thing that I tend to think Simpson neglects in his critique of liberalism.
Excellent. :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Simpson would add that Rawls himself admits that he is incapable of adjudicating in favor of Western values over any other value system. His project is a working out of the axioms of Western values without being in any way able to justify those values. This is similar to Keys' point.
There are several dimensions to this, so it's a tough question. I think it is part of a far larger tendency in modern thought, the move to define freedom in terms of power/potency (as opposed to the capacity to actualize the Good). Milton's Satan is a great emblem of this, and it's no surprise that he gets read as a hero by future generations after this trend accelerates. There is a certain (although, IMO counterfeit) freedom in Hamlet's remark that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." This means we ultimately decide everything, through, in Satan's words, the "unconquerable will." D.C. Schindler's book "Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty" is pretty good on this.
You can also see this tend in the idea that ontology might be oppressive if it is not [I]creative[/I]. On the classical view, this makes no sense. Ignorance is a limit on freedom, and being creative in error just binds you in ignorance.
Next, Marxism had been fairly popular in the West, particularly in academia, for a long time. But by the late Cold War, the many infamies of Marxist regimes had come to light and they seemed more like the norm rather than the exception for that ideology. People had already argued that capitalism was bankrupt and couldn't turn back now. Yet their great alternative was revealed to be more akin to Hitlerism than utopia, and no new alternative was forthcoming. So there is a sort of reflexive shell shock militating against strong belief.
So that's the broad context, but then this is paired with a number of influential skeptical arguments of "skeptical solutions" to questions of knowledge. Wittgenstein, who has been interpreted in extremely diverse ways, is especially influential here. The linguistic turn and a tendency towards deflationism (or just bracketing out questions of truth) in logic also helps. I mentioned this in the thread on pragmatism.
If all debate is actually just about power relations, then it's best to tamp down on commitment.
This opens the door for narratives that frame all great historical evils as resulting from dogmatism and overwrought belief. There are other factors here too, e.g. the rise of the managerial class/culture documented by MacIntyre and Taylor, etc. As noted before, the problem is:
A. This misses how heroic and good historical events (e.g. ending slavery) also involve strong conviction; and
B. That plenty of disastrous events, e.g. the fall of the Roman Republic and the later collapse of the Western Empire, stem more from a lack of conviction, not a surfeit of it. As Yeats put it:
[I]The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.[/I]
Sounds familiar.
So IDK, I think it is partially historical accident, but I also think it fits into the broader pattern of connecting of liberty (and the Good) in terms of power. Truth is threatening because it gets associated with religion, Marxism, Nazism, etc.
Republic, 442 b-c is one place (using the analogy of the city). I think Plato refers to the spirited part of the soul as the "natural ally" of the rational part when he first introduces the typology .. too, and maybe in a few other places. This comes out in the chariot image of the Phaedrus too.
On this point, C.S. Lewis (whose Abolition of Man focuses on just this question, particularly in the first chapter "Men Without Chests") also gives Alanus ab Insulis' De Planctu Naturae Prosa (iii) as an example, although I'm not familiar with that text.
I think you can find the same sentiment expressed at many points in the Philokalia though, for example by Saint Diadochos of Photiki, who, unlike many Pagans, does not see the irascible appetites, or anger in particular, as bad, but rather sees them as tools for rebuking the appetites, passions, and demons. He memorably advised that one fashion a whip from the name of Christ and drive out the demons from the soul as Christ drives out the merchants from the temple (the body itself being a temple to the Holy Spirit).
St. Thomas lays out a similar role for the irascible appetites in the first part of the second part of the Summa (roughly questions 20-30 IIRC), where he covers all the appetites (concupiscible then irascible) and discusses how none are evil of themselves, but are evil in their use (object, ordering to reason, or effect on habit).
So, while the idea is in Plato, it's often remarked that it is characteristically Christian to have a full-bodied redemption and endorsement of the lower (non-intellectual) appetites and the body in their "natural" (i.e. regenerated) state. Pagan thought tended to evolve to be more skeptical of the passions, appetites, and body. The Aeneid, for instance, seems to play with this tension quite a bit.
A deficiency that might be compounded if you did things like cut the cultural canon (Homer, Virgil, Milton, etc.) out of education due to concerns of "bias." Having removed all "bias," nothing supports one view over any other.
I was surprised to see very little use of the term 'neoliberal'. It seems to me that many of the issues raised in this discussion are best exemplified as criticisms of neoliberalism?
I don't buy that the term 'neoliberal' is meaningless. It strikes me as a pretty clear switch towards the market and other technocratic innovations, pure rationality, per the technocrats, as the only legitimate guiding principals?
Morality as a personal brand?
Regardless, I think the OP is correct. Liberalism is myopic. Perhaps, per Chris Hedges, 'turning a blind eye' is an inevitable byproduct?
Okay, good.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agreed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
True.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Good points all around. :up:
Good stuff. Also, it would be great if you learned how to add links to your quotes. :razz: You can actually highlight text, click "quote," and the website will do it for you.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, that's also a good point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure. I am familiar with those but I will revisit them.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's fair, although that tradition is also wary of anger, if not spiritedness per se.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, and you have Thomas following Aristotle in contending that a lack of anger can at times be a vice.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right!
Once tradition is considered evil and reason is considered impotent, a sort of anti-tradition revolutionary mindset is largely all that's left (along with the ascendancy of the victim).
But there is a third possibility, to recognize that tradition has good and bad elements and that reason has its power, but also its limitations. Less dramatic, but much more reasonable. Sure, those who are addicted to excitement will worry about lack of "conviction", but excitement, in itself, is neither a good nor bad thing - it depends on what one gets excited about.
"Reasonable" as in "known as true/good by reason," or "reasonable" as in the procedural, safety-centered sense of Rawls and co.?
I've developed a habit of using "reason" when I'm talking about a limited sense of reason, which has to do with truth/falsity and logic. When I'm thinking of a more expansive sense of reason - especially a sense that enables one to think carefully and coherently about values of one sort or another especially in the context of action - I use "reasonable". I started doing that so that I at least could keep straight in my mind which sense I was in at any given time.
Without prejudice to any different usage that Rawls may make of the word. Though reading some of your comments, I've wondered whether you shouldn't be developing a Greek sense of balance - it would help when considering issues of safety and such.
A good example of this is the incoherence of saying gender and sexuality are malleable objects of choice. If we suspend the bias of assigning gender both an essence (male is one way, female another) and an application (this baby is a boy, that baby is a girl), there will be nothing on the landscape for someone to choose from when they might later decide to reassign themselves a new gender.
During adolescence, we must break from the authority of our parents in order to become fully formed individuals. Liberalism is the reification of adolescence as if it was full maturity, seeking always to break and tear down. The liberal forgets that as they destroy one institution, it gets replaced by another, or the destruction simply leads to a diminishment of life, just like the adolescent has not yet learned that there are reasons the adults constrain them, and that they will find they impose the same restraints on themselves and their children one day.
Gotcha.
Well, that you think:
Needs to be said to me suggests a rather dramatic misreading on your part. What part of "liberalism has difficulties with thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism/phobia" suggested to you: "traditional is always good and reason is omnipotent?" was remotely on the table?
Where has anyone suggested anything like that? This has sadly been the norm throughout this thread. That all critiques of liberalism tend to get reduced to Stalinism or theocracy is actually something Fisher spends a lot of covering. "There can be no alternative, the solution to the problems of liberalism is always more liberalism."
Second, a concern for safety would motivate a proper acknowledgement and orientation of thymos to logos. Without this, liberal societies are subject to the decay of the state and norms we currently observe. This does not promote safety. Instead, it tends towards radical destabilization, e.g. active duty military forces being sent into major cities, a general support of lawlessness whenever it is "right," etc.
This is exactly what Tacitus and Juvenal say about their own epoch of republican decline. The citizens, desiring safety over justice and the arduous work of self-governance (agony in the Greek sense), ended up going down a path where they got (and deserved) neither.
What epoch do you believe we would be "returning" to in that case?
I apologize. This was carelessly and badly written. I don't see what I can do to make things right but to apologize and delete this paragraph. I hope that does something to make amends.
Quoting Leontiskos
See above.
Thanks for bringing this up as I hadn't read it before (I joined the forum late).
I'd also like to comment on the topic of the opening post. These will be a few comments on liberalism "from the outside."
First, I'd like to thank the author for the content. Your post, as always, is systematic and phenomenological, which in itself sets your posts apart from the more pragmatic approach that dominates this forum.
Now, regarding the content itself. Before joining this forum, I hadn't noticed the fact that, within liberalism, the concepts of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are often conflated. This seems very maximalist for a representative of a "non-Western culture," because for my region, these two concepts are crucially different. Not that you specifically did this, but I wanted to point this out for clarity.
I'll try to explain my understanding of this distinction and why I think it's important. Sources cite various characteristics that can be used to distinguish one from the other (for example, Linz on types of non-democratic regimes), but it's difficult to discern the difference until you've experienced it firsthand. I'd like to highlight one key characteristic (among others):
Totalitarianism is a phenomenon whereby a person, citizen, or individual is transformed into an instrument of the state's dominant idea (a person is reformatted to fit the ideology, and if not, is subject to repression; for those ideologically loyal, the task must be accomplished at any cost. A person is a tool).
Authoritarianism is a phenomenon when an individual, citizen, or personality can pursue their private lives without interfering in state affairs (a strong hand, but I can live my own life).
Soft authoritarianism is characterized by paternalism: here, unlike liberalism, social benefits are provided not through competition, but in exchange for loyalty or non-interference in politics.
As for me, at the moment, I'm inclined to believe that soft authoritarianism may be preferable to liberalism under certain conditions. Unfortunately, this is an extremely unstable construct (external interference or resource depletion quickly destroys it), but sometimes it lasts for decadeslike the "stagnation" of the Brezhnev era in the USSR. I'm not promoting this, but it's worth considering the social guarantees of that era: housing was free (although there were waiting lists); education was free; healthcare was free (with sick leave paid up to 100%); plus sanatoriums and children's camps. This, at the very least, makes you wonder: is it worth "shouting about freedom" or is it better to focus on stability? At the same time, internal ideological criticism (so-called "righteous anger") remained permissible. Here I mean criticism of individual government officials for not fulfilling party standards.
All these benefits, which could be achieved without excessive competition, evoke sentiments opposite to those described by Khan in his book, "The Burnout Society." You don't need to be the bestjust do your usual duties, and you'll have everything you need. People don't need to "burn out," but stagnation sets in: the economy slows, lags behind technological progress, and the system gradually collapses (unless there's a constant resource like expensive oil). The "burnout society" gives way to a "sleep society." And we know what happened to the USSR.
But a more interesting question arises: hasn't the individual in the "burnout society" become a "tool," as in totalitarianism?
Another problem with liberalism (and in this it's no different from other ideologies) is its hostility to any "supra-ideological" criticism. You can confidently criticize Republicans or Democrats, but if you criticize the ideology itself, the state, or its consensus, you risk marginalization (not in the mines, as in totalitarianism, but social isolation).
Here I would like to say that the myopia of liberalism, which you initially write about, in my opinion, is being overcome from within extremely slowlyso slowly that there simply may not be enough time for change. I think the solution to the problem (by the way, you are proposing roughly the same thing) lies in the honest recognition by liberalism of the following idea: Freedom from everything (that is, the loss of all boundaries or limits) leads to dissolution into nothing.
This topic intrigued me. Phenomenology is good because it provides new keys to understanding. Now let's take these keys (which I suggested above) and check the numbers. I'll use two countries as an example: Singapore, with its soft authoritarianism and paternalism (one party for 65 years, elections, but don't get involved in politics, paternalism - housing/healthcare in exchange for loyalty) and South Korea, with its liberalism (22nd place in the world on the Democracy Index and the birthplace of Byung-Chul Han) and burnout society. And AI helped me with this:
Draw your own conclusions
I agree. There is a yin of conservative permanence (boundaries and limits) needed for the yang of liberal progression (marked by new boundaries and new limits). And vice versa. Breathing is both in and out.
Its never been either/or despite what campaigning politicians tell us.
The myopia of liberalism is really the recent (enlightenment) moment of the ancient myopia of prideful human beings; liberalism just made this pride more available to more of the masses. So many today feel entitled to know better than others, to know better than history, so much so we can talk of imposing our enlightened wills through force. We allow ourselves willingly to stay blind (myopic) to any challenges to the holier than thou perches weve built for ourselves. Because this used to be the role of the king and the pope and the high classes, we think we are being progressing behaving as tyrannically as only kings used to.
Liberalism taught us that there is no essential difference between a king and a commoner, so there is no such thing as an actual king, and we are all just citizens. We the people alone consent to our government. This is a good political starting point, so liberalism is a force for good, certainly in politics.
But the west is hollowing its own good ideas of meaning and political application.
Today, liberalism has no ability to recognize what is worth preserving and cultivating. It demands constant motion and redefinition. Freedom from everything as you say. We all pontificate about basic rights, and then allow others to tell us what those rights look like in practice, and what those rights dont look like in practice. So what good is freedom if we freely use it to pick our slave masters? Too many of us ask for a king, a government, to save us - which is a complete affront to the original liberal ideas of a constitutional republic.
But only rigorous discipline, daily practiced anew, builds the possibility of freedom. For instance, only a constitution fixed in stone, can guarantee political rights remain alive and functioning in the world. New leaders and new laws arent needed to protect life and liberty. The constitution is enough. Now brave people are needed to live freely. It should be simple to see this now, though it remains hard to live in practice. But instead, todays liberalism seeks to make everything easy to live in practice (insulting words need hate speech legislation - we want life to be so easy we never face mere insult), so they strain and squint on the myopic view and ignore how utterly difficult and unrealistic this makes life in practice.
We are building slaves to blindness, using bright lights to do so.
We need to resist our own urges for the simplicity of myopia. We need to listen more, and humbly seek assistance from neighbors (not a government), while still taking responsibility to contribute to peace and prosperity.
Instead fight is the most important word we demand to hear from every politician, more important than clarifying what we might be fighting for, and more important than showing how what we fight for must include all human beings or it becomes a recipe for failure. But the perpetual revolution must run out of fuel. Nothing we do is perpetual, which is why we are fools for not treating our constitutional norms as fragile and precious.
Government and discipline aren't absolute necessities for freedom though, they're means of structuring freedom which is the very conundrum that this thread is criticizing.
I agree. I'll try to expand on my idea a bit.
Shifting boundaries, rethinking boundariesthat's truly necessary. This is the very essence of the process of becoming: humans, culture, and society exist in a mode of constantly refining and clarifying limits. But the abolition of boundaries is not the same thing. Shifting is work, responsibility, choice. Abolition is a renunciation of responsibility, replacing becoming with dissolution.
I think this can be clearly seen in a simple example. Let's imagine someone deciding, "The skeleton limits human flexibility." They could even hold a rally demanding "freedom from the skeleton." I have a feeling nothing good will come of it. Because some boundaries are conditions for movement, not obstacles.
Here's an example of rethinking boundaries. With age, joints wear out, and some can be replaced. This is an intervention in boundaries, yes. But it is a conscious action that requires calculating risks, understanding the consequences, and taking responsibility for the body. We are not abolishing joints as a class of phenomena.
The same is true in a political-cultural sense. No being exists in an ontological void. When we shift boundaries, we always do something else: either we make room for another, or we take space from another.
And this is something that is often forgotten within the framework of that very "freedom from everything": that any gesture of liberation is always a gesture of redistribution of space between beings. And remembering this is no less important than remembering one's own rights and one's own development.
Quoting Fire Ologist
This is the key point. How can this be surpassed from within the ideology of freedom from everything? I have no idea.
As long as the Western world had a solid skeleton of everything it was gradually freeing itself from, everything looked wonderful. Today, it's become clear that not everything is as simple as it seemed.
I'd also like to introduce a bit of honesty. We're so intent on exaggerating that rereading this text might give the impression that the world will collapse tomorrow. (It's not for nothing that governments around the world try to exclude criticism of their own ideology.) But no. For now, this looks like just the intuition of a small number of people. Tomorrow, the world could take a turn no one could have imagined.
Frankly, there's no methodological precision in presenting these statistics. I was simply suddenly intrigued by the question: what if we compare the indices of two very similar countries, but with different political regimes? There was no one to compare the US with.
But there needs to be something in place, some structure, before freedom can be enjoyed. Something needs to be necessary.
Quoting ProtagoranSocratist
It does seem like a paradox. I see the conundrum of sorts, but dont see it as an impasse or contradiction to the possibility of freedom.
[quote=Goethe]This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.[/quote]
This is rigorous discipline. We dont achieve freedom and then simply remain free. We achieve freedom by achieving, a rigorous acting towards modesties we have set for ourselves. Freedom exists in living freely, not in some stagnant, unmoving free thing being free with no effort. But nevertheless, the stagnant unmoving structure is that out of which one might live freely.
Quoting Astorre
That is great stuff. :100:
Quoting Astorre
Yes it is like freedom may exist (or may not) in the space between boundaries and structures.
Quoting Astorre
Yes. It is like one persons freedom must have a cost, and that cost involves an imposition (an oppression) on some other thing, or space, or another person.
Quoting Astorre
Yes, it is romantic to feel so free as we tear every institution down, but now we find ourselves in a world where we no longer know what to do, and this is a new limitation, a new enslavement of sorts with nowhere to look to direct our iconoclasm and revolution.
I have no idea either, but think it has to do with two things. First, the western reification of linear rational thinking has led us to overlook the importance and raw reality of the paradoxes of being human. We in the west run into a paradox or an antimony and we call it a dead end, and turn around and run away. We need to embrace paradox, and occassionally recognize the reality of the impossible. This is how freedom immerges, impossibly. Second, we are the cause of our own slavery. Like original sin, its in our nature to enslave ourselves. We sort of fear or just fail to recognize the goodness of the limitations inherent in freedom and we lash out, destroying our own possibility of freedom. (And of course this is a paradox as well.).
I think it may be as simple as maturity. We have a duty (so a limitation is put on us) to seek and build our own freedom. We have to take responsibility away from the society and the government and biology and the universe and place our freedom in our own hands. (We can seek help, but it must remain up to me for me to be free.). We cannot be made to be free anymore. We need to make ourselves free. And then freedom only happens in flashing instantaneous moments, before we fall asleep again and need to start all anew
So I may have merely in all of this really just reframed the issue, offering a description but no solution or reasoning.
But then again, a linear reasoning comprised of fixed, immobile beings, will not do justice to the becoming that is the heart of the things that live, like freedom and learning, and knowing and most of all loving.
Think of love as the purpose of freedom. No such thing as freedom, and there is no such thing as love. But no such thing as fixed knowable boundary, and there is no such thing as freedom. (Im moving too freely now, so Ill set my boundary right here )
This is a wonderful act of self-determination, something only a truly existing, becoming subject is capable of. (I'm actually working on a related ontology project.)
By the way, recently in another thread here on the forum, someone posted a link to a study in which scientists demonstrated the non-algorithmic nature of the world.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22950
And it was a great inspiration to me. For there are things in the world that we have yet to discover, things to be disappointed in, things to criticize, or things to repent of.