Enlightenment Liberalism and the Middle Class

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

Last Friday James Fallows asked what the idea of middle-classness has meant to America:

In periods when U.S. society has not been more open, mobile, and equal than others in the world, many Americans have still acted as if there are benefits to believing, or pretending, the contrary. Through ups and downs, we have preferred to believe that the standard middle-class social contract is intact, and that those who follow the rules -- study, marriage, work, discipline -- can expect a reasonable middle-class outcome.

Last year Fallows quoted Clinton's speech to the Democratic Presidential Convention:

We Democrats, we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor folks to work their way into it, with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. You see, we believe that "We're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "You're on your own." ...
Now, there's -- there's a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth.
When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected. It hurts us all.
We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us.

These imply altruism, an orientation suggested at least as far back of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (who cited the Israelites' "love thy neighbor as thyself"), but not described as such until the nineteenth century.

In Homegrown Democrat, Garrison Keillor emphasizes the altruism of the social compact:

Don't take all the cookies, even though nobody is looking. Think about the others. Do unto them as you would have them do unto you, which is the basis of the simple social compact by which we live. And also You are not so different from other people so don't give yourself airs--God isn't going to make an exception in your case so don't ask.

Liberalism, Keillor adds, is "the politics of kindness." Social Security, Medicare, and most recently, an Affordable Care Act to prevent the citizens of a prosperous nation from needlessly dying because they can't afford what it costs to treat curable illness.
 
So: liberal virtues set beside middle class values. In addition to "universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism"--and altruism--we have, in the words of one of the Founders, the deep cognitive emphasis of liberalism:

The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815

"Study, ... work, discipline": improve yourself is a constant theme of middle class people. Get an education, develop a skill, become knowledgeable and capable. People come from all over the world to study in the universities of the middle class nation Adams and his colleagues founded.

In last Friday's article, Fallows continued:

We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work. Compared with most European countries, our economy is more polarized and unequal. ... It has become hard to imagine new waves of opportunity and mobility comparable to those created by the 19th-century settlement of the West, the GI Bill, or the post-World War II migration to the Sun Belt.
In these circumstances, does it make sense for America to maintain the ideal, or myth, that we are a middle-class society? I believe it does, ... It remains worthwhile, because most of the elements of middle-class identity encourage traits America needs.
One of those elements is: Because I'm middle class, I have something in common with my neighbors and fellow citizens. The United States has been at its best politically and economically when we have viewed other members of society as "us" rather than "them." ...
Finally, to be middle class is to believe that any goal should be within reach. Success takes effort, and it depends on luck. But a long string of ascents from middle-class-or-below origins, from the Wright brothers and Henry Ford a century ago to Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor in our day, suggests a possibility rare in other societies. We are better off believing that this is still the American way. 

In The Liberal Founding this blog cited Historian Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development.

This is the theme former President Clinton repeated:

We believe that "We're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "You're on your own." ... It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected. It hurts us all. We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us.

"Most of the elements of middle-class identity encourage traits America needs."

First Quarter 2013 Wrap

The year began with the lengthy Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, which noted the fashionable nonsense peddled by many humanities academics. It accused today's humanities departments of

• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Two articles on "passing" defended the right to personal independence, the first of which noted, as differences between liberalism and the assumptions of the left:

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. ...

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. ...

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said.

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics developed a proposition from MetaIntellectual Analysis, above:

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience. ...

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable. ...

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

Executive Power and Imminent Threat argued that administration drone policy looked suspiciously like outmoded notions of the Benevolent Despot:

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power. ...
This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all. ...
It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.   

"Be proud, do not apologize" noted dissenters to politicized Islam such as Ibn Warraq, who declared:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize. This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html]

Wafa Sultan drew attention to a barbarism which cannot be excused under the rubric of "faith":

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values? expanded on another theme of MetaIntellectual Analysis, citing an intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews:

The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds.

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, in the spirit of John Adams' "Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition," discussed some of the signs and wonders of science, including Euler's intriguing equation, e^(πι) = -1, and rejected the claim of runaway scientism that science disproves free will, noting "science is [not] an a priori discipline."

A reprise of the discussion of movement conservatism cruelty argued:

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor. 

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will? argues that there is a Platonist source for this anti-humanist position:

The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science. ...

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

In The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is a certain kind of high-flown anti-intellectualism reminded the Dissenter:

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

(See The First Six Months' Wrap for earlier posts.)

People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction

In "Be proud, do not apologize" this blog noted that Wafa Sultan said:

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. (Emphasis added.)

The person or persons who set off the bombs at the beginning of this week may have had no more to do with a particular religion than those who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City eighteen years ago today. But it is evident which example was followed.
 
Two days ago Slate.com reprinted a 2004 George Saunders article, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction:

Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.
At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man's penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.
During Phase IV, just after lunch, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs were dropped, during the lazy afternoon hours, on crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb momentary silences were then heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage, and/or frantic imprecations to a deity. No sleeping baby was awakened from an afternoon nap by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/her domicile during Phase IV. (Emphasis added.)

And so forth.

Eventually this insanity will end. But to quote the scriptures of a religion which has itself all too often been fanatical, "How long, O Lord?"