My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker.

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

An acquaintance of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote the following rough draft in imitation of Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem—And Ours." With the former's permission:

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

There is one thing someone who surveys the current political scene can be confident of, that people believe, or say they believe, that "liberal" and "left" mean much the same thing. As a liberal, I find this to be a problem. The left as it is now constituted does not have the values which characterized the old left: rationality and individualism, civility, toleration, privacy, impartiality, objectivity, generosity, public-spiritedness, optimism, humanitarianism, and equality. When I ask what I should think with respect to the social and political issues of the day, neither the left (nor the right) seems to offer guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory.

How, for example, should I think about white people? (I happen to be white.) The left seems to find that the cases of man's inhumanity to man fall disproportionately on Caucasians. Should I view white people as uniquely bad, and perhaps deserving of punishment wherever I find them? Should I see white people as guilty because of the history of slavery? Some conduct reflecting these sentiments has entered into everyday life. Many depart from what may be their usual candor and frankness when the reference is racial or ethnic minority groups or members. Many whites, Shelby Steele observes, have confessed to him "that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist." An unwritten rule that "We must say only good things about these people" seems to be in effect. In remembrance of a regrettable past, the joshing and jostling and hurly-burly which characterizes our conduct with equals is forgone. An unnatural politeness, even solicitude takes over with respect to members of certain groups.

One answer is suggested by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader said several things which guide me in my response to the injustices of the past. He said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He did not draw a distinction between one group of humans and another. "God is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men," King said. "He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." From such a perspective the problem with theories of group guilt is that it divides King's "human race" into two separate, unequal categories, one part burdened by accusation and shame, the other indignant, resentful, and inclined to feel justified in seeking retribution.

In a liberal society every person gets a fresh start. It was one of the goals of the civil rights revolution that blacks should no longer be asked to know their place, but should have as much opportunity for the full realization of their abilities as everyone else. Theories of racial guilt in practice means that some do not get a fresh start, free and clear, but will go through their lives being limited or targeted in visible or invisible ways because of the deeds of other people in another century. The problem of inequality which the civil rights revolution addressed is not solved by relocating the inequality from the formerly oppressed to the former oppressors, it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of inequality* in any form. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King reminded us. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

But what of the continuing problem of racism? Perhaps the descendants of the people who did these things will be less likely to act in prejudiced or unjust ways if their self-esteem and confidence is reined in by a sense of guilt for the past. I answer that "we should not cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy." [James Piereson] We will not be serving our fellow citizens well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. [Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, p. 196] Guilt is powerful. Its legitimacy derives from the care we take to establish it. For this reason liberal societies established the principle that a citizen is innocent until proved guilty, sought to maintain an independent judiciary, and honored due process and rules of evidence.

Instrumental guilt, guilt propounded in order to compel a course of action we deem desirable without a legitimate grounding in culpability, violates the fundamental rule of liberal societies that no one should be subject to the will of another. If I were to be found guilty of robbing a store, following a trial in which the rules of due process were observed, I could still count myself a free human being. My guilt, and any appropriate punishment resulting, would be a foreseeable consequence of my own actions freely taken. My deeper freedom—freedom from the arbitrary acts of another—would be unimpaired. White guilt, as Professor Steele also observed, is another animal; not a belief in one's guilt, but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as guilty because of one's skin color alone. It represents not a victory of anti-racism but a rebirth of racism in another form. It revives the ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission.

Another problem with theories of group guilt is that they impair the sense that in the end the society we live in is the result of what we all do and think. Senator Barack Obama recently observed that the achievements of the civil rights revolution are dimmed somewhat by a lessening of the sense of our common interests and goals. The liberal ideas which emerged around the time of the American Revolution included the conviction that cooperation and altruism create a better society and a better life than any of the alternatives. The sense that we are all in this together runs through King's thought as it runs through Obama's, as when he reminded us that injustice to one endangers all. Over and over again King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" His work reflected the sustained theme that within each of us, regardless of our differences, is the possibility of a better person. Theories of group guilt go in the opposite direction to this positive theme. Where King sought to unite us, these theories seek to divide us. Where King sought to uplift us, theories of group guilt invite suspicion and distrust by some of those he addressed.

"The poor you have always with you" is a timeless problem of every society. When we phrase this problem as the contemporary left seems to, postulating a "dominant culture" and its relationship to those who are left out or disadvantaged, we are making a specific assumption about humankind and our life together. When instead we phrase the problem of poverty and injustice as Martin Luther King did, in terms of great principles which uplift and unite us, we are in the presence of a completely different vision of humanity. One worldview perceives the problem as primarily one of identifying enemies who have taken what is not rightfully theirs. It conceptualizes the problem of the poor and outcast, the have-nots, as the result of intentional wrongdoing by the haves; and it imagines the solution in terms of punishment and redistribution. By contrast the vision which animated the civil rights movement was that when we the people work together to further the public good, we all benefit.

The vision of political democracy has always been that the people themselves can constitute the government, because they have common interests which they can identify and work toward together. The democratic outlook may or may not be correct, but a politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. It is difficult to see how a better life for all can be achieved by a process which is primarily negative, such as identifying enemies to be deprecated and degraded. I have watched as the left has moved from attitudes resembling Martin Luther King's—attitudes of mutual respect and cooperation—to attitudes of opposition traceable to places in Central Europe which had never really known political freedom or democracy.

Sometimes, when I find myself in gatherings of the left, it seems that all I hear is a litany of negatives: "European, bad; white, bad; male, bad; corporations, bad; capitalism, bad—yet without any alternative suggested or a hint of what a world shaped as they think it should be would look like. This seeming vision of a world of enemies stands in sharp contrast to the principle of public-spiritedness. "The Americans, on the other hand," remarked Alexis de Tocqueville in his analysis of the democratic disposition, "are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state."

White people, the current left seems to say, committed foolish and terrible mistakes. They, and their European Civilization, despoiled the planet, polluted the skies, corrupted the earth with monstrous smoking factories, imposed the barbarism of colonialism on the third world, and enslaved a dark race. To prevent this from happening again, we must struggle against the people who committed such monstrous crimes, we must make them pay for what they did, and we must not aid and abet them by accepting or tolerating any aspect of them or their ways.

But King rejected the easy path of sweeping generalization and simple condemnation. When he received the Nobel Prize for Peace, Martin King said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history." As Randall Kennedy wrote, "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless."

If equality, in the form of the principle that no one is worse than anyone else because of their race, enabled Martin to end a century of Jim Crow prejudice, it cannot be a progressive principle to demonize white people or the civilization which originated the proposition that all men are created equal. There are no shortcuts: no group has a monopoly on virtue or evil.

The century of the American Revolution—the Eighteenth Century—was a heady time for liberalism. Voltaire, centuries early, wrote the appropriate response to the fanatics of September 11: "If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities." Across the Atlantic, the fledgling American republic's declaration of human equality enabled Martin King to create a revolution simply by asking their descendants to live up to their own stated principles. As Abraham Lincoln had realized a century earlier, Americans believe in uplift, and it is not a mistake to appeal to the better angels of their nature.

I can find no such high-mindedness in what the left has become.

(*) Correction. Originally read: "it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of equality in any form."(Revised by editor 11/18/13)

The sweet enjoyment of partaking good laws under a free government

I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers. - The conclusion of George Washington's Farewell Address

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote, of The Fast and the Furious franchise,

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .

Yglesias describes this deficit of social capital:

The problem, of course, is that this sort of particularistic outlook is very dysfunctional on a social level.
As David Madland has written, the low-trust ethics it embodies are, in fact, typical of societies featuring a high and growing level of income inequality: 

One study of U.S. states measured the percentage of state residents who think “most people can be trusted”... It found that “a 10 percentage-point increase in trust increases the growth rate of GDP by 0.5 percentage points” over five years. 
Trust reduces transaction costs because less time and resources are spent verifying and policing. And trusting people see the world as full of opportunities. With higher levels of trust, people are more likely to innovate, seek out trade and new technologies, and generally take economically sound risks.

This, says Yglesias, is "a world where the system increasingly seems to be rigged." He speaks of the type of hero who "ultimately ends up violating his obligations to law and order to discharge a personal debt"—that is, someone for whom Washington's mutual cares of fellow-citizens—the public good—have become an unreal abstraction:

[This] outlook is increasingly appealing in an increasingly unequal America. But it's ultimately destructive of the social institutions needed to generate prosperity. And yet at a time when elites long ago stopped caring whether the gains of economic growth would be widely shared, and in recent years seem to have turned their backs on the unemployed altogether, then these are the heroes we'll turn to.

In Arguments for Liberalism, this blog noted that Former President Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, drew our attention to the fact that: 

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.

An increasingly callous, unjust and venal society seems, so far, oblivious to the decline which it is bringing upon itself. The Liberal Founding put it somewhat differently:

The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society.

The Social Darwinism of Movement Conservatism

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders. (See below.)

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote:

The budget House Republicans have written cuts $0 in Medicare spending over the next ten years. It cuts $0 dollars in Social Security spending ever. It increases national defense spending. It sharply cuts cuts rates on high-income families. And it balances the budget. So who loses out? Poor people. It is true that starting in Year 11, the House GOP budget begins to cut Medicare spending. But it does so in a way that does very little to protect the interests of low-income retirees. And the cuts to Medicare are not used to avoid cuts in programs for the poor. In fact, the cuts to Medicare are not even used to avoid tax hikes on the poor. The style of tax reform favored by the House GOP ensures that along with spending on programs for the poor being cut, working class families will pay more in taxes.
Just to sum up—the actually existing GOP agenda overwhelmingly suggests that not only do Republicans think that government spending is bad, but also that government spending on the poor is an especially pernicious form of spending. They appear to believe that taxes are bad, but that taxes on the poor are an especially benign form of taxes.

Merriam Webster defines Social Darwinism as:

a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence

Russell Kirk included in his Ten Conservative Principles:

For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

To give further wealth to the wealthy on the backs of the poor, while undermining what remains of the humanitarian safety net meant to succor those afflicted by poverty or illness, in the name of the "health" of a civilization founded on the proposition that all are created equal, is a heartless betrayal of what George Washington called "the public good." In his Farewell Address he spoke of the error which

gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens ... facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. (Emphasis added.)

Public good. Literally, the good of the people. Not the good of the "civilization" at the expense of the sick and the poor in the name of better "orders and classes." Lincoln said that the United States had advanced beyond the Old World order of "classification, caste, and legitimacy," and the first Justice Harlan, in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, declared, "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Yet if Yglesias is correct in his analysis, we now have the Republican Party surreptitiously advancing a wealthy class; and if the Merriam Webster definition above is correct, this favoritism toward the rich reveals a social Darwinist theory of sociocultural advance which is fundamentally incompatible with "all men are created equal."

Let's look at the rest of what Lincoln said about "legitimacy." Lincoln is referring to the sentence from the Declaration which begins "We hold" and asserts, among other things, that all are created equal:

But soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. ... The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities" another bluntly calls them "self evident lies" and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races." These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard ... of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves. (Emphasis added.)

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders, "supplanting the principles of free government."

Katharsis

Robert Silverberg's novella "Breckenridge and the Continuum" is the story of a conventional middle-aged man who sets off for exotic places and finds himself among companion wanderers on an aged planet:

The city was extraordinary . . . an ultimate urban glory, a supernal Babylon, a consummate Persepolis, the soul's own hymn in brick and stone.

Breckenridge tells garbled myths:

Then Breckenridge said, "I suppose I could tell you the story of Oedipus King of Thieves tonight." The late-afternoon sky was awful: gray, mottled, fierce. It resonated with a strange electricity. Breckenridge had never grown used to that sky. Day after day, as they crossed the desert, it transfixed him with the pain of incomprehensible loss. ...
The aurora flashed with redoubled frenzy, a coded beacon, crying out, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME. ....

Messages come to those Breckenridge left:

The third cable said: GUESS WHAT STOP I'M REALLY IN TIMBUKTU STOP HAVE RENTED JEEP STOP I SET OUT INTO SAHARA TOMORROW STOP AM VERY HAPPY STOP YES STOP VERY HAPPY STOP VERY VERY HAPPY STOP STOP STOP It was the last message he sent. The night it arrived in New York there was a spectacular celestial display, an aurora that brought thousands of people out into Central Park. There was rain in the southeastern Sahara four days later, the first recorded precipitation there in eight years and seven months. An earthquake was reported in southern Sicily, but it did little damage. Things were much quieter after that for everybody.

The Moral Order in Popular Writing

You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. - Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air

[The manumitted slave] Thorby . . . answered, “If you are Captain Fjalar Krausa, I have a message for you, noble sir.” . . .
“To Captain Fjalar Krausa, master of Starship Sisu from Baslim the Cripple. Greetings, old friend! Greetings to your family, clan, and sib, and my humblest respects to your revered mother. I am speaking to you through the mouth of my adopted son. He does not understand Suomic; I address you privately. When you receive this message, I am already dead. My son is the only thing of value of which I die possessed; I entrust him to your care. I ask that you succor and admonish him as if you were I. When opportunity presents, I ask that you deliver him to the commander of any vessel of the Hegemonic Guard, saying that he is a distressed citizen of the Hegemony and entitled as such to their help in locating his family. If they will bestir themselves, they can establish his identity and restore him to his people. All the rest I leave to your good judgment. I have enjoined him to obey you and I believe that he will; he is a good lad, within the limits of his age and experience, and I entrust him to you with a serene heart. My life has been long and rich; I am content. Farewell.” - Citizen of the Galaxy, Simon and Schuster trade paperback edition, pp 63 ff [by the early Robert A. Heinlein]

Later, in the same work, crew-members of a ship of the Hegemony:

"Not me," Stancke said firmly.
"You. When you're a C.O. and comes time to do something unpleasant, there you'll be, trying to get your tummy in and your chest out, with your chubby little face set in hero lines." p. 181

And:

Colonel Baslim ... one of the toughest, sanest, most humane men ever to wear our uniform. p. 189
Did [Thorby] really have blood relatives somewhere?
"I suppose so," he answered slowly. "I don't know."
"Mmm . . ." Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. pp. 190-1

This spot-on send-up of academic jargon that "darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge":

[Thorby's grandfather, a professor:]
"I heard you use that term 'sold' once before. You must realize that it is not correct. After all, the serfdom practiced in the Sargony is not chattel slavery. It derives from the ancient Hindu gild [sic] or 'caste' system--a stabilized social order with mutual obligations up and down. You must not call it 'slavery.'" p. 236
"I don't know any other word to translate the Sargonese term."
"I could think of several, though I don't know Sargonese . . . it's not a useful term in scholarship. But, my dear Thor, you aren't a student of human histories and culture. Grant me a little authority in my own field." p. 236

my first affair with that older woman
she was ten years older
and mortally hurt by the past
and the present;
she treated me badly ...
 
yet we had our moments; and
our little soap opera ended
with her in a coma
in the hospital,
and I sat at her bed
for hours
talking to her,
and then she opened her eyes
and saw me:
"I knew it would be you,"

she said. - Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

From Robert B. Parker's Spenser series of detective novels:

  [Spenser:] "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

  [Susan:] "Certainly . . ."
  "Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner . . . You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it's always present and imminent?"
  She nodded.
  "That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."
  "That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.
  "It would to Hawk." p. 126
  I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place." p. 127
  "One of the rules," she said. . . .
  "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." p. 134 [Robert B. Parker, Ceremony]

For my ivy league friends
you should have seen them back then: raggedy-ass, wild-eyed, raving
against the order
now
they have been ingested, digested, rested
they write reviews for the journals
they write well-worked, quiet, inoffensive poesy
they edit so many of the magazines that I have no idea where I should send this
poem
since they attack my work with alarming regularity
and
I can't read theirs

 - Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Peter S. Beagle - The Folk of the Air:

  [John Erne, the combat master:] "I never met a real musician who wasn't a miser with himself. They'll never come all the way with you anywhere." p. 150 
  Farrell: "You're like me." ...
  "Am I? I don't have room for more than the one seriousness, if that's what you mean. ... People invite me to their history classes, and I give demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl." ...
  "This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don't know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you're like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real." p. 151
  Erne: "A dead art form," he said, "like lute music. As unnatural to the animal as opera or ballet, and yet nobody who puts on even cardboard armor can quite escape it--any more than you can escape the fact that your music believes in God and hell and the King. You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. The bitch of it is, all we ever wanted to be was experts." p. 152
  Ben [alter ego is Egil Eyvindsson]: "[This university tolerates] Blacks and Chicanos out of fear--and expect[s] to be praised for it." p. 161
  Ben/Egil: "Things taste so different there, Joe; the light's all different, the constellations, the facial expressions ..."
  The cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. p. 195
  The gyrfalcon kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them so explosively that Farrell stepped back from the dark, living emptiness of her gaze.
  Frederik said, "Look at her. she balances between habit and what we'd call madness, and for her there's no such thing as the future. I don't think there's really any present, either--there's just the endless past going around and around her, over and through her. When I hold her on the glove--"He indicated the leather jesses that leashed the falcon's ankles, "--she's more or less tied to my present, but the moment I let her go, she circles up into her real time. Her real time, where I never existed and where nothing's extinct." p. 204

you get so alone at times that it just makes sense
when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the
major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel very bad because--being a student of the word and the way, I realized
that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each utter pretense. - Bukowski

The Folk of the Air: The goddess Sia: "I like it here," she said softly. "Of all worlds, this one was made for me, with its silliness and its cruelty, and its fine trees." ...
"And still you desire one another ... I know gods who have come into existence only because two of you wanted there to be a reason for what they were about to do that afternoon. Listen, I tell you that on the stars they can smell your desire--there are ears of a shape you have no word for listening to your dreams and lies, tears and gruntings. There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that?" p. 272
Ben: "Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don't love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don't know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it's like. [...] Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. [...] I'll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure." p. 283
"Um. Egil didn't think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn't care a lot about anything."

help wanted
I was a crazed young man and then found this book written
        by a
crazed older man and I felt better because he was
able to write it down. - Bukowski

Amour-propre and the Uneasy Age of "Identity"

"They're all about identity." - TV commentator's remark concerning the comments on a discussion of "rights."

Defining Liberalism: "Passing" argued that "A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity." I was reminded of this on seeing the Wikipedia entry:

Amour-propre (French, "self-love") is a concept in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that denotes a self-love that depends upon the opinion of others. Rousseau contrasts it with amour de soi, which also means "self-love", but which does not involve seeing oneself as others see one.

In Lila, Robert Pirsig notes that "truth stands independently of social opinion."

Mill's On Liberty describes the political effect of social opinion:

When society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.* (See extended quote at end of post.)

Since what this blog calls The Liberal Founding and its grounding in a document which begins "We the People," it has been assumed that in the context of affairs bearing on the Republic the identity which matters is "citizen," that is, member of the People. With the advent of the counterculture (what it was "counter" to was, in part, this central principle of our polity), identity-as-concern—amour-propre—became prominent, at least in media discourse. Identity-as-concern—anxiety about race, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation and all the other artifacts of faction—assumed a poisonous importance in public life.

The Founders were serene in the confidence that, endeavoring to serve what George Washington called "the public good," their labors and ambitions harmonized with secure status as part of the People. Thoreau, by contrast, seems to have felt that what confronted him was not the People but society, with its "opinion" and its "mandates" as above—and the anxiety of alienation pervades his writings. Where the Founders created a government to ensure liberty, Thoreau declared, "The government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it." (Emphasis added.)

What would it mean if, in fact, since what some call a cultural revolution, we are now in the age of the social?

It could mean an age of anxiety about identity. It could mean preference for social opinion over truth. Preference for group-think. It could mean the elevation of social standards, grounded in opinion, over ethical standards. One would be more likely to see conformism than to see moral courage, abject submission to social tyranny more likely than the courage of one's convictions.

Thoreau's remark paves the way for the abandonment of public-spiritedness—of the democratic disposition—and for the appearance of dysfunctional government.

(*Mill's complete paragraph:) Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

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?"