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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
The Scourging
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument." -- from a lapel button.
"Everything fails by sufficiently high standards and succeeds by sufficiently low ones." -- Thomas Sowell
It's occasionally said that the modern liberal believes that America deserves to suffer, and that this is the foundation of his near-to-reflexive adoption of anti-American positions in political discourse. The statement might be true of some liberals, but it strikes your Curmudgeon as overly broad. Human characteristics and convictions exist in a distribution; few are present uniformly in all men.
What you are about to read is a composition of generalities. It has wide applicability, but its diagnoses are not universal. There are copious exceptions, just as there are to most generalities about men and nations. It should not be used as a Procrustean bed against which to fit all liberals, nor all their statements, theses, and attitudes, but rather as a template that will fit a large number of them and should be kept ready for the occasions when it will prove useful.
In what follows, the word "liberal" is used exclusively in the American sense; that is, it denotes the liberal who favors the unlimited State and the pervasive regulation of all human affairs, not the individual liberty / free market "classical" liberal who owned the term throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
These past few days, the Internet Commentariat has been agog over a remarkable lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation by conservative writer and humorist Evan Sayet. Sayet's basic thesis is that the modern liberal believes that one can look back over all of recorded human history and find nothing that has worked. "Nothing" is to be interpreted expansively: systems of philosophy; systems of government; core ideals about rights and justice; religions; codes of morality and ethics; patterns of interpersonal relations and organization; and so on. The liberal concludes from this that the fundamental crime from which all our failures flow, is, in Sayet's stunning phrase, attempting to be right.
Some stout scaffolding is required to reach that position. For one thing, one's evaluative criteria for saying that "nothing has ever worked" must be Utopian: the complete extinction of human conflict, the elimination of want, the dissolution of all barriers to social interpenetration and the absence of all social, political, or economic differences among men. For another, one must somehow rationalize that the obvious improvements in the human condition these past six thousand years are irrelevant to our discourse. But once one has done so, there can no longer be usable concepts of "better" and "worse." Therefore, to choose one path over another constitutes arbitrary discrimination, the worst sin in the liberal lexicon. Sayet's label for this liberal gestalt is "the cult of indiscriminateness."
Anyone assessing the human condition objectively and rationally must concede that this is an insupportable stance. Humanity is far better off, individually and collectively, than ever before in history. We live longer, our lives are easier and less marred by pain, a greater proportion of our wants are satisfied, and a greater proportion of our unsatisfied wants are pure luxuries than ever before. If organized thought and effort aren't responsible, then what is? Psychologist Peter Breggin has proposed that the liberal's usual recourse is to explain away both collective and individual gains as the fruits of either luck or crime. This destroys the concept of desert, making it impossible to say of any good thing, "I / we earned it; therefore I / we deserve it."
The liberal abhors the concept of desert. If he is personally prosperous, he is morally obligated to be uneasy about it, for he cannot claim that what's his is his by right without undoing his fundamental assumptions. If his nation is rich, safe, and free, it must have stolen its wealth and security from others, for it cannot be because of any merit in its political system or its people. The past fifty years of liberal claims are thick with invented sins, conjured out of nothing, put forward to explain why America and Americans do not deserve what they have. Any reader of Eternity Road can easily come up with half a dozen such pseudo-villainies.
The refusal to distinguish between better and worse, and the insistence that perceptible improvements cannot possibly be evidence of having chosen a better path over a worse one, give rise to the dominant emotional configuration among American liberals. Your Curmudgeon will call this configuration the scourging.
It is impossible for anyone truly to rid himself of all notions about right and justice. The axiom of action, which governs all the decisions and actions of men, compels us to use some sort of criterion for action at all times. Man acts to bring about better conditions than those that currently exist, or to preserve good ones against perceived threats to them, and for no other reason. Thus, even the Sayetian / Bregginian liberal, resolved upon the proposition that "attempting to be right" is inherently sinful, will at all times be acting in contradiction to that thesis. Nor can he be unaware of it. This is the principal source of liberal guilt.
There aren't many ways to dispel a sense of guilt. Broadly, one must undertake a course of expiation -- penance and / or restitution. But any sort of restitution requires an identifiable victim, and penance is either the acceptance of punishment or an act of renunciation of some desired thing. As regards politically founded guilt -- that is, guilt over the benefits that have flowed to Americans because of our superior political ideals and system -- neither of these things is objectively possible for an American, unless he's a malfeasant official. A substitute must be found.
The substitute is to castigate the country itself -- the United States, its constitutional federal republic, its democratic mechanisms for awarding power, its free-market economy, its Christian traditions, and, most particularly in recent years, its "world policeman" international role. By collectivizing the required expiation, the liberal opens the possibility that he might be unaffected personally. His SUV, his central air conditioning, and his 401(K) account might yet escape the reckoning. It's no greater a stretch of the imagination than the one required to attribute all human advances to luck or crime.
The critical thing, as Evan Sayet notes in his lecture, is always to condemn the sin of discrimination between "better" and "worse." All attempts to argue for America's superiority in any way must be met with an unsparing retort. We are racists, sexists, homophobes, imperialists, looters of the resources of the Third World and practitioners of greed and exploitation in every part of the globe. Without America, there would be no war, no privation, no pollution, and no sectarian strife. Terrorism is our fault. We cannot be allowed the conceit that, simply because we're the freest, richest, safest, most generous and most tolerant society in human history, we've therefore found a better way.
The commandment "Thou shalt not discriminate" is as stringent on domestic matters as it is on international ones. One who argues that particular practices or "lifestyles" are morally superior to others will be branded a "fascist" or "theocrat" by the liberal. Should one dare to argue that certain practices are practically inferior -- that they bring about poverty, disease, emotional maladies or social strife -- the liberal will respond with the claim that all such things are relative, that one cannot prescribe others' ways for them, that it's no one's place to stand in judgment over the choices of others. Indeed, the liberal's favorite political mascots are chosen because of their pathological behavior...for which the liberal insists they must be absolved without demands for reformation or repentance. Such "tolerance" and "nonjudgmentalism" are the marks of the liberal's moral superiority. They license him to rule the rest of us.
The typical liberal has much in common with the typical Bolshevik supporter of the years of the Russian Revolution. Despite his rejection of the notion of desert, he believes that his moral superiority entitles him to a special status. He assumes, unconsciously, that when the revolution has been accomplished and matters settle out, he'll occupy a position of importance, from which he can repay his society for his personal guilt...and settle the hash of those brazen enough to assert their desert. If he allows that things might not work out that way, he certainly doesn't dwell on the possibility. But of course, there will always be more such dreamers than there are posts of authority.
When ascendant, the critical aspect of the liberal mindset is that by unchaining the State, it opens a yawning power vacuum. Pace Lord Acton, power does corrupt, but more important than that, power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible. Persons with a lust for power and no inconvenient moral scruples about using it will rush into that vacuum as surely as air will flow through a crack in an evacuated bell jar. That such persons are likely to be sociopaths tends to escape the liberal's notice. He believes that giving "the right people" absolute power is the path to Utopia, or at least to the expiation of his society's guilt. He's much more interested in how well the Maximum Leader's speeches conform to his worldview. Of course, such sociopaths are highly unlikely to bring about anything good for the societies they rule, but a mindset capable of effacing the differences between free and totalitarian societies is equally capable of deluding itself about the necessity of breaking a few eggs to prepare an Elysian omelet.
Most important at this time is the liberal's willingness to equate America's enemies morally with America. Anyone willing to speak or act against American interests will automatically receive the liberal's support, via minimization, moral equivalence, and ingeniously fabricated counter-accusations. Not only is this a fundamental exercise of the "no better and no worse" premise; to support the enemy against one's own nation's interests is part of the expiation process. Thus, by "justifying" Palestinian terrorism against Israel, Muslim terrorism against the United States, Old World obstruction of American peacekeeping efforts, or Euro-Russian support for Iran's nuclear ambitions, the liberal achieves two objectives at once. Of course, American counteraction against these things is automatically condemned. By liberals' lights, we owe the world a penance, and to defend ourselves against the deliverers of retribution is to withhold what we owe.
The Sayet thesis, married to Breggin's luck-or-crime hypothesis, provides a powerful explanation for much liberal behavior. It appears to be lunacy to persons with an objective appreciation for the value of freedom, justice, capitalism, and the vigorous defense of these things. It's axiomatic to the liberal, whose demand for Utopia and unwillingness to accept any less is incompatible with the "tragic vision" of reality: the acceptance that no good thing can be had without first paying its price...that prices are ineradicable from the fabric of reality.
The liberal will scourge America mercilessly until Utopia arrives, which is to say: forever. He'll posit new sins for it as quickly as we refute the old ones. He'll wave away any evidence or argument for its worth, for its right to act in its own defense, or for its peoples' right to be left alone in the enjoyment of what they've produced for themselves. He'll demand that it prostrate itself before "the court of international opinion" despite the historical record of American benevolence and initiative and international flaccidity in the face of monstrous events. His need to expiate requires it.
If this malady is curable, the cure is not known to your Curmudgeon.
Comments
I have read the work of people who claim they were “liberal” in their youth, but got better over time. On the other hand, I have never heard of anyone being convinced, by rational arguments, to change—at least, not immediately.
By the way, I’m a bit puzzled by your use of the word “desert”. Do you mean “dessert”? Or is there some facet of meaning in the former that I’m missing?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/28/2007 at 01:45 AM“Desert” as in “just deserts,” Alex. Your “desert” is whatever you deserve. No whipped cream on top.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/28/2007 at 04:45 AMRight on the money, Francis. Consider this a hearty and extremely thoughtful “Me, too!”
Posted by Col. Bunny on 03/28/2007 at 04:48 PMThe Left is very willing to make you pay for what they call sins, and keep on paying.
Repentance must be done in sackcloth and ashes for the rest of your natural life.
Posted by Russell on 03/29/2007 at 11:13 AMFYI, a brief yet interesting discussion from January:
Regarding “Hegemonism”
http://www.johnreilly.info/Bulletin/viewtopic.php?t=137Hey Fran, I’m sure you recall the *third* link?
Perhaps worth a re-read (or, for those readers who are new, a read) in light of all this…Posted by Jayson on 03/29/2007 at 11:58 PMFran, I am surprised at you, quoting such pithy wisdom as a lapel button. Any dolt can think up a lapel button; only Robert Frost could nail the problem with the left these days with such absolute precision, and him dead for these past forty some odd years to boot.
Posted by Akaky on 03/30/2007 at 02:04 PMLapel buttons and bumper stickers have several of the same virtues, Akaky: concision, mnemonic quality, and perhaps best of all, dismissibility (“It’s only a lapel button / bumper sticker.”). But what I like about the best of them is the action-at-a-distance quality they often display: you’re five minutes past the guy who was wearing the button when you achieve satori: hey, is that what it means?
On this subject, ponder Dr. Helen Smith’s favorite bumper sticker:
BUMPER STICKERS ARE NOT THE ANSWER
...and your Curmudgeon’s favorite lapel button:
stop staring at my chest!
(tee hee)
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/30/2007 at 02:34 PM“Ignorance is curable with education, stupidity only by death.”
Posted by twolaneflash on 04/06/2007 at 11:04 PM
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