What’s Wrong with the World

Zippy,

This post interests me greatly, first because I appreciate the idea and agree with you that the "essence of authority is to discriminate: to make substantive judgments between claims, to pick the winners and losers in conflicts, and to morally bind those subject to that authority to act based on these determinations." However, isn't part of the dilemma for any system of government to figure out WHERE that authority should be used. It seems like a lot of battles between conservatives and liberals are over the proper scope and PLACE for government. For example, whether or not the government should be in the business of setting wages, whether or not the government should set up day care centers, whether or not the government should confer rights on gay couples, etc. So even liberals like authority, even if they don't acknowledge it as such, when they insist that a Catholic adoption agency place children with a gay couple. They are willing to make the authoritative claim that gay couples can raise children just as well as normal couples and use state power to enforce that claim.

But conservatives, at times, don't want state power to be used for ends we think should be left to individuals. I mean, other than hard-core crunchy cons, does any conservative really believe it is the government's job to forbid grocery stores from selling Doritos? Clearly we also think that sometimes it is necessary to "mediate" at least SOME political action, and let individuals exercise their freedom to do what they want with their lives.

So, if I have this right, the anarchist tyrant thinks it's right to criminalize "hate speech" because "hate speech" implies that some things are right and other things are wrong, and that's against his creed?

Kalb has done great job of unmasking the true nature of Liberalism; "It aims to dissolve what is left of traditional society and construct a universal form of human association that will constitute a technically rational system for the equal satisfaction of desire. Religion is to be banished from public life, ethnic and gender distinctions abolished, and a worldwide order established, based on world markets and trans-national bureaucracies, that is to override local differences in the name of human rights, international economic development, and collective security."
http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/

His dissection though, could dwell a little more on the role technology plays in bringing us to perfect communion. Market and State will combine to relieve men of the anxiety of existence through the advanced, unbiased intelligence of the machine. NASA and Microsoft are busy preparing us for the Age of Singularity.

"Integration of the human nervous system and computer hardware...Blending of humans and computers with user interfaces..."
http://singularityu.org/

Jeff:

[I]sn't part of the dilemma for any system of government to figure out WHERE that authority should be used?

As you suggest, that is a general problem for any governance, yes, whether liberal or illiberal governance. An appropriate approach would be to ask where it is substantively morally good to exercise authority and where it is not (understanding that what is morally good also supervenes over what is prudent: if it is imprudent to do X, and it is not evil to refrain from doing X, then doing X willfully is immoral). But since liberalism just is an attempt to divorce such substantive moral questions from direct pertinence to politics, and instead politically defer to the will of free and equal emancipated Man, permitting moral questions to influence the political realm of actual authority only through the mediation of the free and equal wills of Supermen with absolutely equal rights, a paradox - one natural terminus of which is the anarchist tyrant - arises.

Lydia:

...implies that some things are right and other things are wrong, and that's against his creed?

It isn't the fact that some things are right and some things are wrong which is against his creed. Rather, his creed requires such questions to be banished from the exercise of this-worldly coercive authority over men: the legitimacy of authority derives from the will of free and equal emancipated Man, not from what is substantively good and evil independent of Man's will.

It isn't that Man is the measure of all things. Rather, it is that Man is the measure of all earthly authorities over men.

NASA and Microsoft are busy preparing us for the Age of Singularity.

Heh. Indeed. http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=040506B

But one could tell the person advocating laws against "hate speech" that such speech (e.g., criticizing Islam or saying that homosexual acts are perverse and unnatural) isn't in itself a use of coercive authority, so what's his problem? He has to go farther than banning the use of the good to determine coercive authority.

Thanks for the link. The best explication of modernity's endgame;
Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc and we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

Celebrate a future in which humans are superfluous, but sated. Says it all.

"supermen who are self-created through reason and will, defining the meaning of existence for themselves..."

This view of human nature is often proposed by people who insist they aren't proposing a view of human nature. They often claim they are merely enacting procedural mechanisms of compromise and peacekeeping for a free and pluralistic society.

This two-faced stance, an anti-essentialist essentialism, is probably one source of the anarchist's self-contradiction. It is oxymoronic, like "controlled chaos."

There is a kind of salutary paradox that expresses the contradictions of existence. But this anarchist presents a paradox that closes in on itself rather than opens up to the universe.

Recall Shigalyov from Dostoevsky's "Demons":

"I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other."

Lydia:

But one could tell the person advocating laws against "hate speech" that such speech (e.g., criticizing Islam or saying that homosexual acts are perverse and unnatural) isn't in itself a use of coercive authority, so what's his problem?

The assumption seems to be that the anarchist tyrant is both capable of seeing reason and wants to see reason. But once that becomes so he ceases to hold incoherent beliefs, and therefore ceases to be a liberal.

Less flippantly, he doubtless sees such speech, and perhaps rightly so, as a prelude to the exercise of coercive authority. No speech is in itself an exercise of coercive authority, to be sure; but the "in itself" is an artificial separation of things which in reality are concomitant.

Though again, it isn't my objective to defend his position as rational; more, I expressly contend that every loyalty to political liberalism is in fact irrational.

he doubtless sees such speech, and perhaps rightly so, as a prelude to the exercise of coercive authority.

What's perhaps even more interesting, he sees such speech as implying that the government may "take sides" even in ways that are not directly coercive--for example, by giving formal recognition to heterosexual couples as married but merely withholding such recognition from homosexual couples. Another example might be "Muslim profiling" at airports, which one might view as semi-coercive even if it is simply a matter of focusing non-punitive search patterns. Or "discrimination" in hiring for jobs in the police. There are plenty of ways in which governmental actions can recognize some things as important or relevant even when those actions are not coercive in any ordinary sense of that word. And naturally, various societal values will inform those governmental choices. A particular type of liberal just simply cannot stand that thought.

For what it's worth, I doubt that the anarchist in question considers himself a liberal.

For what it's worth, I doubt that the anarchist in question considers himself a liberal.

A fair point, though my post was merely prompted by observing a particular discussion, it wasn't intended to be about a particular person or discussion. Over the last two decades or so I've encountered many anarchists or quasi-anarchists who seemed, paradoxically, to have totalitarian tendencies. While this seems like it should be unexpected, because paradoxical, I think it is something we actually ought to expect; it is this that the post is fundamentally about. Liberalism just is a damaged, incoherent conception of political authority which happens to dominate almost all first-world political thought, and the anarchist tyrant is its quasi-telos.

Also, again not addressing a specific person or discussion but rather to make a more general point, I'm not much concerned with what a person considers himself to be. What I am concerned about is what a person is in fact. A liberal is a person who in fact has and exhibits significant loyalties to liberalism, whether he accepts and embraces the label or not. I'm not a nominalist, I'm an essentialist, so fighting over labels is to me entirely beside the point: a person either is a liberal or is not, and whether he agrees that he is or is not a liberal is entirely irrelevant to whether or not he is, in fact, a liberal. (The additional question "what is liberalism" is something I've addressed any number of times in this space and elsewhere).

Over the last two decades or so I've encountered many anarchists or quasi-anarchists who seemed, paradoxically, to have totalitarian tendencies.

I guess I'm not seeing that there's anything particularly liberal about anarchism. One could of course be a liberal and an anarchist, and many have. But one could likewise be anti-liberal and an anarchist, and many have. To the extent that one strand has historically dominated over the other, I'd say anarchism has to be classified as an anti-liberal movement, rather than a liberal one.

Political modernity is opposed to those creeds, customs or mores that thwart the quest for personal self-fulfillment on the basis of unscientific, arbitrary and outmoded factors such as religious texts, tradition and cultural heritage.

Liberalism is perfectly consistent when it insists it alone can police the Public Square. The utopian mission is to establish a moral order of perfect equality for completely free individuals through the application of purely rational procedures and standards. It is the conservative, or right-Liberal who sounds like a slightly unhinged customer beset by an acute case of buyer's remorse when he accuses the inventors of the Empty-altar of resorting to double-standards. The point all along has been to incrementally end all the prejudice, discrimination, discernment and common sense accumulated over several millenniums that obstruct the completion of a man-made Paradise able to transcend the limits imposed by nature and God.

Does this question of whether anarchism is or isn't liberal have any relation to my repeated lament that I never meet a real libertarian?

I guess I'm not seeing that there's anything particularly liberal about anarchism.

There are doubtless illiberal anarchies, just as there are illiberal tyrannies: neither tyranny per se nor anarchy per se are premises of liberalism. But the insistence that authoritative discrimination is in general illegitimate - that, as I think someone once insisted, citizens of the Reich have absolutely equal rights - leads quite naturally to simultaneous (and therefore incoherent) assertion of tyranny and anarchy.

Does this question of whether anarchism is or isn't liberal have any relation to my repeated lament that I never meet a real libertarian?

I expect it is in the same family. My own view is that there are no real libertarians at least in part because a real libertarian is something it is not merely impossible, but incoherent, to be.

Anarchy and Tyranny work hand in hand to the mutual benefit of each. Policies aimed at liberating the autonomous individual from the constraints of family life invariably lead to high rates of out of wedlock births. The resulting social pathologies enable the paternalistic regime to usurp more power. So too, in economics where the dislocations and anomie caused by unfettered competition and ruinous speculation, allows the State to play the role of pain-reliever and safety-net provider. Never mind it is because of the very practices it promoted with its partner the Market. It is part of the choreographed dance.

The libertarian and the socialist, the anarchist and the authoritarian are pairs of twins working in tandem to pursue all that matters to each; self-aggrandizement.

Does this question of whether anarchism is or isn't liberal have any relation to my repeated lament that I never meet a real libertarian?

Have you considered online dating? :)

Zippy,

You say: "But since liberalism just is an attempt to divorce such substantive moral questions from direct pertinence to politics, and instead politically defer to the will of free and equal emancipated Man, permitting moral questions to influence the political realm of actual authority only through the mediation of the free and equal wills of Supermen with absolutely equal rights, a paradox - one natural terminus of which is the anarchist tyrant - arises."

This confuses me, I guess because I'm now not sure what you mean by liberalism. It seems to me that the idea of "permitting moral questions...only through the mediation of the free and equal wills of Supermen" is simply a fancy way of stating the political truths of the Declaration -- "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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." So are you suggesting the Declaration is a form of liberalism? That true conservative thought would reject its truths? If yes, I would ask you how it is conservatives govern themselves using substantive moral questions -- like Plato would you prefer philosopher kings?

Jeff:

It seems to me that the idea of "permitting moral questions...only through the mediation of the free and equal wills of Supermen" is simply a fancy way of stating the political truths of the Declaration -- "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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." So are you suggesting the Declaration is a form of liberalism? That true conservative thought would reject its truths?

If that is what we take the Declaration to mean, then yes, we should reject it, or at least reject the part we take to be saying that; because it is false.

That true conservative thought would reject its truths?

I would say that truly coherent thought rejects political liberalism, yes, though presumably rejecting liberalism does not necessarily imply conservatism.

If yes, I would ask you how it is conservatives govern themselves using substantive moral questions ...

"How best to govern" is a very general question. I don't pretend to give a comprehensive answer to it. But I know that justifying the authority of governance by appeal to incoherent, false premises is something we ought not do.

"So are you suggesting the Declaration is a form of liberalism?"

When (mis)interpreted and applied under individualist and egalitararian assumptions, yes. A few months back Paul Cella recommended a book, BASIC SYMBOLS OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION, by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey. I'm currently reading it and would recommend it highly -- it deals with this very issue.

Kevin Jones' quote of Dostoevsky above is apt. If anyone recognized early on that both anarchy and "liberalism" would lead inevitably over time to totalitarianism it was he. One even gets this implication from the first part of "Notes From Underground," I'd say.

You can also find a similar argument in the writings of both Roger Scruton and Paul Gottfried when they discuss multiculturalism and political correctness. They flesh their arguments out differently but the conclusion of both is that "diversity and tolerance" ends up not in greater freedom of speech, but in more control over what's allowed to be said. When you apply this same argument to society at large beyond just speech, you can see that socio-political authoritarianism develops from liberalism in the same manner.

I think, Jeff, that one of Zippy's points here (with which I heartily agree) is that anything like the Casey decision's "mystery of life" passage is pernicious bunk. And a particular type of pernicious bunk that is likely, most ironically, to lead to tyranny in its own right. I doubt very much that Jefferson meant anything so crazy as that Casey passage by the Declaration, but if he did, so much the worse for him.

So, for example, the person who thinks everyone has a right to define the mystery of life for himself and live it out accordingly starts by legalizing abortion and ends by trying to criminalize peaceful protests in front of abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers (deeming them "deceptive"). Such a person starts by pushing for the legalization of p&rn&gr&phy and ends up demanding (as I just read about the charming Mr. Ogden) that taxpayers fund a Braille version thereof or that parents have to permit their children to receive explicit sex education. You get the point. Freedom becomes un-freedom for those who don't want to get with the program for themselves and their kids.

I've been thinking about this post, and there is one question unanswered: Why do liberals have so much more tolerance for some forms of "imposing one's morality" than for others? Specifically, what about environmentalism? You never hear a liberal opining that it should be banned as "hate speech" when some radical greenie goes around saying that the human race would be better exterminated for the good of the planet, that people who have more than two children are irresponsible and should be stopped, and the like. Yet that's a sort of "pure" tyranny. That is, it isn't a proposed tyranny in the name of greater freedom. It's just a replacement religion, a replacement worldview and set of values in and of itself. So why doesn't the supposedly freedom-loving liberal get as het up about that as about, e.g., criticisms of homosexuality?

My own uninteresting answer is that it's just chance. The liberal is so blinded by the chance fact of his having been raised in a certain type of liberal culture that he's accustomed to treating some forms of tyrannical action (or the proposal thereof) as understandable, reasonable, and high-minded and others as bigoted and intolerable. He doesn't even notice the double standard.

"So are you suggesting the Declaration is a form of liberalism?"

Of course it is.

Why do liberals have so much more tolerance for some forms of "imposing one's morality" than for others?

The short answer, I believe, is that liberals resist the imposition of traditional morality more strongly than they resist the imposition of novel new quasi-moralities invented by liberals.

The longer answer is something like the following:

Liberalism is inherently incoherent and anti-human. The more liberals attempt to be fully self-consistent, the more incoherent and anti-human their demands become: thus the anarchist tyrant as the liberal pseudo-telos.

But liberalism has an additional feature, the unprincipled exception (a concept explored to some depth at Lawrence Auster's blog View from the Right), which prevents it from immediately self-destructing.

Illiberal principles are not permitted to assert explicit authority in the liberal order. But because liberalism is incoherent and ultimately self-destructive, something has to keep things from falling apart: something has to assert a stabilizing authority in order to hold things together. This thing, this assertion of illiberal authority which is not permitted to be explicit but which nevertheless has effect, is the unprincipled exception. Unprincipled exceptions are often asserted as an appeal to common sense, an assertion that to take things to the rational next step clearly demanded by liberal principles is "silly", etc. But they are never permitted to explicitly challenge liberalism itself. They exist to dampen the advance of liberalism enough to keep it from self-destructing. As a form of parasite liberalism is incapable of existing on its own, and unprincipled exceptions, originally vestiges of the moral core of Christendom, have been what has kept liberalism - ultimately an authoritative assertion of the illegitimacy of authority, which is the same as asserting the free and equal superman - in power.

Now, liberalism is not a formal Platonic system which exists "out there" all at once as a fully fleshed-out self-consistent Form or whatever: it is a (ultimately incoherent) political ideology which exists in time, and which is adhered to at any given time, by more or less loyal liberals in a more or less consistent manner, in an historical context. In its relentless pursuit of political emancipation from history, tradition, nature, and nature's God, liberalism eats up and destroys traditional authorities, including eventually the very unprincipled exceptions which have sustained it at any particular point in time. But liberalism's vision of reality, of what is possible, is false. So where yesterday's unprincipled exceptions were vestiges of traditional authority (think prohibition or at least shunning of divorce), today's unprincipled exceptions are new ones invented by liberals themselves (think prohibition or at least shunning of pollution - a comparison I've drawn before to much wailing and gnashing of teeth). Because they are new, and invented by liberals, they carry less of the whiff of the untermensch - the traditional oppressor of the proto-superman - and are therefore more tolerated by liberals.

I made my last comment into a new post since the theme seemed worth exploring on the main page.

Liberalism has many awe-ispiring accomplishments to its credit, especially in the technological/material realms. Has a public philsophy it enjoys a virtual monopoly due largely to its remarkable consistency and achievements. Pollution threatens human longevity (and immortality is a goal), as does polysaturated fats, so they will be banned. Unborn children place restraints on the personal strivngs of the parents, they are optional and subject to banishment. Liberalism couldn't dictate the terms of the debate, if it weren't so logical to those living on modernity's flatlands. Because it has so successfully shaped the mental landscape of all its subjects, to overthrow it requires appealing more to the heart, than the intellect.