So said Christopher Hitchens about an ideology that "makes very large claims for itself," and lectures those who do not share that ideology concerning what they are allowed to do.
In The Case for Reparations a once-respected national magazine, purporting to advance civil rights, adopts in disguised form the dysfunctional foregone conclusions and disproved socio-political theories of a radical failed ideology (see Hollander's Political Will and Personal Belief, which depicts the utter loss of faith of the radical left's most passionate supporters). It postures morally over the results. It sneers not only at our ways ("scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July "), but at our virtues ("the great democratizer," "And that is us as the uncomplicated, the unvarnished, the un-nuanced champion of liberty the world over. And what the question of reparations ultimately raises, is that this land of liberty, this land of freedom, was made possible by slavery, was made possible by plunder.").
We are told that Slavery Made America. We are told, illogically, that the magnitude of the Civil War represents, not a great moral commitment to ending slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of white folks' lust for supremacy:
I roughly understood then that the Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy.* What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count.
The Liberal Founding announced the central proposition of A Dissenter's Notes: that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are representative Enlightenment documents; and that Enlightenment liberalism was and continues to be the underlying rationale of our country. It quoted eminent German-American historian Fritz Stern:
Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”
A left critique of liberalism by professor Charles K. Rowley reads:
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. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism
In a minute I'll talk about the profound differences between liberal and left in these matters, but first, it should be noted the Democratic Party is not a left party, despite the slovenliness of our language. A left party would not have not bailed out those monster capitalist corporations, Chrysler Corp. and General Motors, or spent much of the last presidential campaign lauding the middle class. For a surprisingly doctrinaire left perspective, look not at the Democratic party but at the academic humanities professoriate. (Books (none by conservatives) about academic radicalism: Follies of the Wise; Fashionable Nonsense**; The Reckless Mind; Literature Lost)
Universalism is illustrated in the Declaration, and in American Revolution writer Thomas Paine. The Declaration: "Having a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; "let facts be submitted to a candid world." Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness." A universalist worldview underlies the words which begin the Constitution: "We the People."
The left by contrast is particularist, from the ending of the Communist Manifesto ("Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.") to Seattle's Kshama Sawant ("Environmentalists and Workers Must Link Up to Stop Global Warming and Fight"). There is always a radical binary, Oppressed and Oppressor, the latter consigned to outer darkness. In the words of Romer v. Evans, "A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause." (This is why The Atlantic's crusade is so jarring. It is such a crude violation of our inclusive values.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates' crusade in The Atlantic is not about any sort of rainbow coalition (contrast M. L. King's "God is ... interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men ... He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race."). It's strictly about what professor Randall Kennedy called a "self-aggrandizing" group—Coates' own. For public-spirited citizens, Native Americans have an argument which is strongly-related to that of African-Americans, but what Coates had to say about their cause, in a video, was "if they can make the case."
Individualism: The romantic tenor inherited from the counterculture may cause us to think of individualism in terms of egotism. However, in the context of liberalism the emphasis on the individual means that civil rights are the rights of the single person: the citizen.
This may be contrasted with the tendency to think of the group as everything, a context which may demote the concerns of the person to mere selfishness. Mill's On Liberty mentions, about page 3, "social tyranny," a pressure for groupthink and conformity resulting from (in left jargon) "solidarity," "group rights," "collectivism," and "communitarianism." (Kennedy, above critiques "the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society." Emphasis added.) Justice operates at the level of the person; by working toward the civil rights of each individual it militates for the civil rights of all, and serves as a defense against social tyranny.
Egalitarianism: Neither the left nor the right supports that foundational American principle, "all men are created equal." (See The Condition of Equality Today.) To say "white supremacy" and "white guilt," as The Atlantic's crusade does, imputes unique evil to white folks. This parallels the Manifesto's belief in the wickedness of the bourgeoisie. As for the right, 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 leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
Meliorism: Steven Den Beste spoke of the optimistic spirit of liberal democracy: "dedication to achieving ideal outcomes." It appears in the Christian scriptures as the parable about experiencing more joy over the one sheep that had been lost, but was found, than over the ninety-nine that were never lost. Meliorism is the constructive aspect of liberalism.
I will close by quoting an earlier post, Reparations: The Worst Fallacies are Those that Trash Liberal Principles:
In his essay "Dragon Slayers,"* Jerald Walker recounts a conversation with "a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt. ... 'How about slavery,' he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. 'But you feel its effects,' he snapped. 'Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,' he insisted, 'are your oppressors.' ... 'After all,' I continued, 'slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn't be standing here.'The man was outraged. 'You're absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs.'"
When I saw this passage yesterday, I realized that Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting a concealed demand for atonement in The Case for Reparations:
Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice. And so should you.
-*--
(*) The growth of the United States should not be pychologized as "white supremacy." David Auerbach suggested (as did our previous post), that it was an effect of the processes of modernity:
From the moment the Industrial Revolution triggered the massive 200-year explosion in growth, we made a Faustian bargain. From that point on, it was pretty much a given that the motor of technological progress and economic growth would lead us to where we are today. Henry Adams called this the dynamo, embodying the dominant force and technological motor of modern human history.
(**) For an extensive background on Fashionable Nonsense, see co-author Alan Sokal's page:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/
In particular, see Linda Seebach's "Scientist takes academia for a ride with parody"
Excerpt:
Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University meticulously observed all the rules of the academic game when he constructed his article on postmodern physics and submitted it to a prestigious journal of cultural studies called Social Text.
The people he cites as authorities in cultural studies are the superluminaries of the field, the quotations he uses to illustrate his argument are strictly accurate and the text is bristling with footnotes.
All the rules but one, that is: Sokal's article is a parody. Under the grandiloquent title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 special issue of the magazine, one entirely devoted to "the science wars," as the editors term the tension between people who actually do science and the critics who merely theorize about it.
Many scientists believe that the emperors of cultural studies have no clothes. But Sokal captured the whole royal court parading around in naked ignorance and persuaded the palace chroniclers to publish the portrait as a centerfold.
Once the article was safely in print, Sokal revealed his modest experiment. "Would a leading journal of cultural studies," he wrote in the May/June issue of Lingua Franca, "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"
Unfortunately yes, and Sokal's deliberate nonsense is anything but subtle. Translated into plain English from the high-flown language he borrowed for the occasion, his first paragraph says that scientists "cling to the dogma" that the external world exists and its properties are independent of what human beings think.
But nobody believes that old stuff any more, right? Now we all know that physical reality is "at bottom a social and linguistic construct."
Is there a sound when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it? Under the theory of social construction, there's not even a tree.
There are so many red flags planted throughout the paper that even non-scientists should have spotted at least one and started laughing, Sokal said Thursday (May 9). "Either this is a parody or the author is off his rocker."
Recently Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates:
White Supremacy is foundational to America. White Supremacy is not a bump on the road toward a better America. It is the road itself, the means by which America justified the taking of land and enslaving of humans, which is to say the means by which America came to be.
Last year TNC wrote, "I would be remiss if I did not offer two other entries into the debate." In this case, what he left out is what the Americans themselves said was foundational: "All men are created equal." While this is a principle oft more honored in the breach than the observance, particularly in the early days of the nation, TNC's sweeping assertion leaves out what is most important.
Equality—liberty and justice for all—is a hard fight. But that fight was and still is the essence of our nation. It gave the suffragists an unanswerable argument for extending the vote to women. It gave Martin Luther King the argument for persuading the nation to undertake the monumental effort to end Jim Crow.
The effort to achieve a free democratic society marshals justice to constrain the abuse of power. Our past—"the taking of land and enslaving of humans"—was a consequence of the enormous advantage of modernity relative to the native societies of North America, and Africa, at that time, which inadequate justice failed to constrain. The nation which did these things has improved since then, because contrary to TNC's misleading language, equality is a fundamental principle, beside which "supremacy" is an aberration. Example: The Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act:
In 1971, barely one million acres of land in Alaska was in private hands. ANCSA together with section 6 of Alaska Statehood Act which the act allowed to come to fruition affected ownership to about 148.5 million acres of land in Alaska once wholly controlled by the federal government. That is larger by 6 million acres than the combined areas of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. When the bill passed in 1971, it included provisions that had never been attempted in United States settlements with Native Americans. The newly passed Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created twelve Native regional economic development corporations. Each corporation was associated with a specific region of Alaska, and the Natives who had traditionally lived there. This innovative approach to native settlements engaged the tribes in corporate capitalism. It was the idea of the AFN [Alaska Federation of Natives], who believed that the Natives would have to become a part of the capitalist system in order to survive. As stockholders in these corporations, the Natives could earn some income and stay in their traditional villages. If the corporations were managed properly, they could make profits that would enable individuals to stay, rather than having to leave Native villages to find better work. This was intended to help preserve Native culture. (Emphasis added)
TNC next critiques a commenter who 'rejects “collective responsibility” because he believes it "implicate(s)
an individual’s [responsibility] based not on their actions but on their
'race.'"' One must start, TNC begins, 'by acknowledging that without "collective responsibility" we do not have a country. Perhaps the most significant form of “collective responsibility” is our tax system.'
What TNC is confusing here is legal responsibility and moral guilt. He associated "white supremacy" and guilt in The Case for Reparations:
Black
nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about
America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy
is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false
consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is
difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a
healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
This is a long way from the obligation to pay levied taxes, which has nothing to do with moral responsibility for the misdeeds of other people. Martin Luther King rejected the idea of judging people based on the group they supposedly belong to when he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
TNC's shift in which he seems to imply that being a citizen of a nation is membership in a collective wrongly places emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity—just what the commenter objected to. This is argument by misnaming.
The measure of TNC's extremism is the way he seizes on the most extreme term in many situations, leaves out authoritative counter-arguments, and ignores middle-ground and practical arguments. The measure of TNC's intellectual dishonesty is that he ignores the most articulate defender of American principles we have had, Abraham Lincoln. The measure of TNC's radicalism is that he ignores the most successful African American civil rights crusader we have, Martin Luther King; and disputes the practical advice of the most successful African American politician we have ever had, Barack Obama.
This is because TNC's case is weak. His real problem isn't white people and their supposed supremacism. His real problem is modernity—what V. S. Naipaul called "Our Universal Civilization"—and its tremendous effectiveness. Success in the United States, as in the rest of the first-world countries, requires what is well-known: Education, and 21st-century skills. The Alaska Federation of Natives, above, opted to "become a part of the capitalist system." Ta-Nehisi, in opting instead for a handout, promotes dependency. That's his best idea.
Recently Barack Obama, asked about Ta-Nehisi's criticism, said:
It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off. (Applause.)
And that is not something that—for me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for greater investment in infrastructure, or jobs in low-income communities.
Ta-Nehisi called this "moral invective."
The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple—talk about class and hope no one notices.
This is not a “both/and.” It is a bait and switch. The moral failings of black people are directly addressed. The centuries-old failings of their local, state, and federal government, less so. (Emphasis added)
That's a radical, extremist slanting of what the first black president said, which unmistakably is a "both/and."
Previous
blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings
decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.
Wikipedia notes:
The phrase "radical chic" originated in a 1970 New York article by Tom Wolfe, titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", which was later reprinted in his books Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Purple Decades. In the essay, Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle. Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions. (Emphasis added)
Exactly.
The US Office of Disability Employment Policy states:
Although
the term is most often used to refer to differences among individuals
such as ethnicity, gender, age and religion, diversity actually
encompasses the infinite range of individuals' unique attributes and
experiences. As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50
million individuals — people with disabilities contribute to diversity,
and businesses can enhance their competitive edge by taking steps to
ensure they are integrated into their workforce and customer base. (Emphasis added)
Comment:
You'd never know it. The nation implements justice for minorities by
several means: Protected class. Affirmative action. Heightened scrutiny
concerning the effect of presumably neutral laws. Lawsuits concerning
harassment, defamation, bullying, unequal pay, inequity in hiring
practices, social exclusion. It is not that all these things necessarily
belong in a liberal democratic society. In some cases they are inferior
substitutes for justice. Protected class and heightened scrutiny look
suspiciously like privilege.* Affirmative action, with its relationship
to quotas and its adverse effect on merit hire and promotion, looks like
favoritism.
But
these are the currently operative ad hoc substitutes for actual
justice. It is telling that people with disabilities are excluded. A
news article from late 2012 concerning a child with cerebral palsy
noted:
There's
case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against
race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding
disabilities. - Jennifer Fitzsimmons, the chief assistant city prosecutor in a rare case where legal action was taken
A year ago a courageous young woman with cerebral palsy wrote about the discriminatory reaction she often experiences in a supposedly progressive city:
I
was born with cerebral palsy, and though I'm 30 years old, I didn't
really accept that until I moved to Seattle last June. It was something I
hid from, something I denied, and it was relatively easy to do so,
because a lot of people seemed to notice other things about me before
they noticed that. ... In Seattle, though, a lot of people seem to be a
little unnerved by my disability, ... But I was caught entirely off
guard by this sudden understanding that being alive in the only body
I've got apparently makes some people uncomfortable in 2014, in one of
America's most progressive cities. I moved here for books, coffee,
writing, nature, food, even rain—not a daily crusade.
If she had been a member of the recognized minorities—a
protected ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation—the response
would have included a lot of people saying, in effect, Yes, we still
need to do more about the civil rights of minorities. Instead, there was
a lot of backlash.
Many
of those who quickly object to minority discrimination deny disability
discrimination even as it is happening right in front of them. As
commenter jacalope observes "The prevailing attitude seems to be that":
1. My disability isn't real
2. My disability is my own fault
3. If I tried harder I could just get over it
4. I'd magically get over it if I only tried my new acquaintance's latest diet/supplement/acupuncturist/exercise regimen
Why
are these discriminatory attitudes alive and well in what Sarah Nielson
called a "progressive city?" Because, since the civil rights
revolution, discrimination against the minorities addressed by that revolution is subject to punishment
under the laws. Social attitudes followed. "No colored need apply"
notices were replaced by affirmative action. Society got the message. No
one would think of telling a person of color, who described a
discriminatory incident or attitude, to "just get over it."
Who
is covered and who isn't covered sends a message. There's no
affirmative action for cerebral palsy, for cleft palate, for little
people, or for all those who are born different (unless the difference
is race or gender). "There's
nothing out there regarding
disabilities," said Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons,
above. That is, there has apparently never been a landmark civil rights
case regarding a disabled person.
Again, society got the message. anonymous:
So you reject:
empathy
normal Seattle passive-aggressiveness
an obviously crazy homeless person
someone who mistakenly talks to your boyfriend instead of you
a mother who was caught in a sudden confrontation
Honey, those are all things we all deal with. It's called the real world.
An article defaming those with birth defects has resided on the Time.com website for over a decade:
Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com
Again, the double standard is evident. Would the public have stood for the above remark if Ms. Ivins had used the n-word instead of the h-word? For that matter, would Time have published the article unedited with the n-word?
It's unthinkable. But in the case of the largest minority, it attracts no attention.
(*) "Privilege": "Private Law"
Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)
The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.
This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.
Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.
Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:
- Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
- A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.
(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:
A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.
The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.
Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)
It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)
The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.
Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***
"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)
For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?
(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.
(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)
(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.
As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.
This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."
Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?
The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"
Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.
That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.
One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.
Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.
(*)
as cited in The Liberal Founding
At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech
and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive
system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas
suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation
Abraham Lincoln fought not only to defend America's physical integrity (by preventing its split into two nations), but America's spiritual integrity—its soul:
Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:
The
principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] 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 others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior
races."
The above was from an article in this blog responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' claim, in The Atlantic, that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding. We cited numerous instances in which Abraham Lincoln documented the actions the Founders took to set in motion the elimination of slavery in the United States.
In "The Limits of Free Speech," The Atlantic continues its disingenuous sabotage of the soul of America. Kent Greenfield writes (March 13):
We are told the First Amendment protects the odious because we cannot trust the government to make choices about content on our behalf. That protections of speech will inevitably be overinclusive. But that this is a cost we must bear. If we start punishing speech, advocates argue, then we will slide down the slippery slope to tyranny.
If that is what the First Amendment means, then we have a problem greater than bigoted frat boys. The problem would be the First Amendment.
No one with a frontal lobe would mistake this drunken anthem for part of an uninhibited and robust debate about race relations. The chant was a spew of hatred, a promise to discriminate, a celebration of privilege, and an assertion of the right to violence–all wrapped up in a catchy ditty. If the First Amendment has become so bloated, so ham-fisted, that it cannot distinguish between such filth and earnest public debate about race, then it is time we rethink what it means.
The sort of cowardly abandonment of liberalism represented by this thread in The Atlantic was skewered last April by a writer possessing the courage of her liberal convictions:
“Call
it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in
his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs
on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in
which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be
changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical
with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which
does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote.
“Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions,
movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the
opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the
strengthening of the progressive ones.”
Note
here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately
identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered
to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain
moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet
in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech
and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive
system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas
suppressed as hateful won’t be their own,” – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation.
Justice Holmes rejected Greenfield's suggestion that the First Amendment has become "bloated" more than eighty years ago, noting, in United_States_v._Schwimmer, that freedom of speech is "freedom for the thought we hate":
Surely
it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution
that she [Rosika Schwimmer] thinks that it can be improved. I suppose
that most intelligent people think that it might be.
Some of her
answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of
the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any
other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who
agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
"As our Constitution provides," Firmin DeBrabander asserted, "liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be."
Continuing a discussion from 2013, we note that Andrew Sullivan's Dish recently posted The Left’s Intensifying War On Liberalism, which reiterates the position that left and liberal are not at all alike. One is about groups—oppressor and oppressed—and inevitable class warfare. Liberalism, as suggested by the characteristic phrase “We the People,” is, this blog has argued, about harmony, cooperation and altruism. The left gravitates toward enmity; liberalism, toward friendship.
This groupism is suggested by a passage I once read (it may have been in Peter Shaw, The War against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of Discourse). As I recall, it claimed to recount a discussion at an AAUW convention.
It went something like this: A committee got to discussing the issue, Who is the oppressor? They agreed that men certainly were oppressors of women. Gay women added that straight women oppressed those of alternative sexual orientations. Socialist women present drew attention to the complicity of non-socialist women in capitalist exploitation. The minority women in the group said, Let's not forget the racist tendencies of white people. Thus the only person who was not an oppressor would be a gay, socialist, woman of color.
This possibly apocryphal story suggests the absurdities of identity politics. Sullivan's post, working from an article by Jon Chait, addresses “what the new guardians of the identity politics left are up to.” He writes, “the illiberal policing of speech, the demonizing of dissent, and extreme identity politics have now transcended the academy and arrived in social media with a vengeance.”
Sullivan cites Chait:
Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.
As mentioned in earlier posts, the left is not actually concerned with civil liberties. It is concerned with “heightened scrutiny” for protected classes. This de facto privilege for those who escape classification as oppressors clashes with basic concepts of political democracy, such as persuasion, the dignity of the single person, equality, and freedom of speech even when it is offensive.
“It seems to me,” writes Sullivan, “they are being intimidated by an ideology that utterly rejects the notion that free speech – including views with which one strongly disagrees – can actually advance social justice, and by a view of the world that sees liberal society entirely in terms of “power” rather than freedom. And if you look across the non-conservative online media, this orthodoxy is now close to absolute.”
He adds, “If reason has no chance against the homophobic patriarchy, and one side is always going to be far more powerful in numbers than the other, almost anything short of violence is justified in order to correct the imbalance. The “victim”, after all, is always right. ... The only “dialogue” much of the p.c. gay left wants with its sinners is a groveling apology for having a different point of view. There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that.”
Perhaps the worst thing about the way of the left is that it doesn't work: “For the past twenty years, the open, free-wheeling arguments for marriage equality and military service have persuaded, yes, persuaded, Americans with remarkable speed that reform was right and necessary. Yes: the arguments. If you want to argue that no social progress can come without coercion or suppression of free speech, you have to deal with the empirical fact that old-fashioned liberalism brought gay equality to America far, far faster than identity politics leftism. It was liberalism – not leftism – that gave us this breakthrough.”
The way of the left militates against freedom of thought. Opinions not approved of are likely to cause those who dare to express them to be reclassified: “Oppressor.”
Sullivan notes, “Which reveals how dismal this kind of politics is, how bitter and rancid it so quickly becomes, how infantilizing it is. Any “success” for one minority means merely that the oppression has been shifted temporarily elsewhere. Or it means that we dissenters in a minority have internalized our own oppression (by embracing the patriarchy of civil marriage, or structural hegemonic violence in the military) and are blind to even greater oppression beyond the next curtain of social justice consciousness.”
Such an us-vs-them outlook fits perfectly with the zero sum game perception, even as liberal enlightened self-interest is harmonious with universal justice.
In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with
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
MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.
In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism
demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the
long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective
truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:
One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)
As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):
It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”
Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:
The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to
falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts.
He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning
clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he
cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or
believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result
is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can
have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is
always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead
to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”
Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding
-*--
(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “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”
Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century, argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**
This is in direct contradiction to powerful “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)
The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.
Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:
The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian
vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e.,
the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and
empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).
In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:
The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.
At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There
is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a
partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that
all the bad guys are on the other side.”
Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:
Almost
any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be
infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization.
Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to
one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar
sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of
Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people
think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove,
but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen
Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.
(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a
technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with
the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving
ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)
(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live
in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and
ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be
further from the liberal spirit.
The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.
The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.
For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.
To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage.
Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without
direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”
A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.
This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.
But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”
Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
(*) Lincoln, of course.
