Liberal, Left

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. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

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

 "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

A collection of notes on the difference between liberalism and the outlook of the left, in no particular order:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.
• This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
• The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
• This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
• The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.

To be continued . . .


(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

"You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

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 . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment"

A pair of recent articles have suggested that the United States has become a harsher nation with less tolerance for dissent, whistle-blowing, constructive protest, or civil disobedience. Jathan Sadowski wrote, of Edward Snowden's exposé of massive NSA surveillance:

If Snowden were sure to receive a fair, just trial, he might not have chosen to embark on his journey around the world, from hideout to hideout, potentially sharing more valuable secrets with countries that America isn’t on the best of terms with. The way whistle-blowers are persecuted now, though, leaves little reason to believe Snowden would enjoy such treatment.
Yes, Snowden could walk with head held high into federal custody. But it’s not clear that this would do much of anything besides ensure that the rest of his life is hell.

Later in another magazine, Eric Levenson wrote:

Unlike Snowden, after leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971 [Daniel] Ellsberg did not flee the U.S. and faced trial for his leak, but "the country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago," Ellsberg writes in a column that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald calls a "must-read." Ellsberg's trial was thrown out due to "the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal," including denied bail and post-arrest isolation for Bradley Manning that would be applied to Snowden, too.

The erosion of liberty, and the transformation of the open society intended by the Founders into a fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment, has proceeded by slow, steady increments in the last half century. The incarceration society,  the prosecutorial society, the society in which Bradley Manning is casually abused in an overlong wait for his day in court—a court whose impartiality and equity we have reason to doubt—these are the symptoms of the transformation of a free country into a regime which no longer appears to be any such thing.

At the same time the liberal democratic principle that the party out of power is, ethically, the loyal opposition ("a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests"), has been obliterated by movement conservatism's unbelievable betrayal of what the Founders stood for. In The Guardian, Michael Cohen writes that the GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverage:

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. ...
In the narrow pursuit of political gain, Republicans have adopted an agenda that is quite simply, inhumane and cruel. Even if one is charitable and defends it on the ground of adherence to an ideological agenda of smaller, less intrusive government (except in the case of lady parts) it can't be defended. If one's ideological predisposition means denying food assistance to people who are laid off from their job or forcing a woman to carry a dead fetus to term or preventing individuals from getting health care coverage, then you have a monstrous ideology.

In the past such "crises of the Republic" been met with a fervent, often religiously based revival movement by the people. The last such was perhaps Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade—don't forget, he was a Baptist minister who spoke in a southern preacher's stirring sonorous crescendo—but is any such voice on the horizon? Would it be heard in the present absorption with the relentless trivia of social media?

Write for the Public Good

Advice from a pair of writers:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. - Thomas Merton, "Letter To A Young Activist"

The great Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Tayler, a writer of nonfiction, recently meditated on the question of how one becomes a writer. He settled on a much more onerous approach:
The question for me was not, then, how does one read to write, but how does one read to live? I conceived early on the conviction that one should lead one’s life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted.
The protagonist of “The Death of Ivan Il’ich” died moaning, in agony, overcome with the realization that he had wasted his days on earth following social conventions. He lacked l’esprit frondeur, and he paid for it. Conventions now are hardly less pervasive than they were in Tolstoy’s day; we’re pressured to start a career, build our résumé, earn a certain amount of money, and so forth. But remember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Akhmatova, in a translation by Martin Cruz Smith:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

For other examples of principled writing, see Fritz Stern and Timothy Ferris in The Liberal Founding.

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."