The outrage in Arizona has sparked another cycle of mutual recriminations between liberals and conservatives that points up what seems to be a growing chasm running through our political culture. Each side sees itself as faithful to good old American principles, and sees the other side as tending (at least) towards a dangerous extremism.
It is remarkable how difficult it is to have a calm, polite discussion on anything connected with politics. Evidently there are a lot of already hurt feelings on both (or all) sides – people feeling they are habitually misunderstood and maligned.
This, I have to admit is my case. The difficulty with any form of intellectually-developed conservatism is that the intellectual mainstream, which is fundamentally liberal feels very confident and within its rights in dismissing any view that does not share its fundamental assumptions as discredited, “un-intellectual,” moronic. (By “mainstream” I don’t mean , say, opinions of the majority of Americans. I mean the dominant paradigm(s) of the more articulate classes that dominate in higher education and, yes, the “mainstream media.” Most of the time these paradigms are invisible because, well, they’re paradigms, and generally unquestioned. Thus: there are stupid people associated with the Tea Party, or there are stupid things Glen Beck has said, and therefore it’s clear we don’t need to take seriously people who are alarmed about the growth of government.
How would I define the essence of this mainstream? Well, that’s the kind of long question that is hard to include in a blog comment or post, but let’s start with this: the liberal mainstream takes it to be obvious that government is a “secular matter,” not deeply connected to religious beliefs or “personal” morality, and that “democracy” is, let’s say, autonomous, self-grounding, just a tool for securing personal freedom and some degree of economic security that people work out collectively, pragmatically. In a word: freedom is a good independent of “virtue,” or of any goods higher or deeper, more authoritative than that of individual freedom itself. The conservative intellectual position (or the one that interests me – you can see I’m not at all a libertarian) holds instead that liberal democracy necessarily draws upon moral/ religious reserves that it does not itself create. Freedom is not good — in fact, it’s not, finally, even thinkable, when severed from virtue. That, in shorthand, is what is at stake in every fundamental political question that we face.
Of course people within both paradigms disagree with those holding the others. Liberals tend to dismiss conservative assumptions, and conservatives tend just as much to dismiss liberal assumptions. But actually I believe there is an asymmetry, and it is this asymmetry, I confess most abjectly, that can make me a little grouchy. Unlearned conservatives tend straightforwardly to reject liberal assumptions, when they can see them, as immoral, impious, contrary to divine writ, or whatever. This is not, in turns out, the most effective way to invite careful discussion and deliberation. But liberals tend to dismiss conservative assumptions as … well, just stupid, unsophisticated, intellectually groundless. That is, liberals enjoy a deep sense of being supported by the dominant intellectual mainstream, and they take it to be obvious that conservatives are just stupid.
Of course many conservatives are just stupid, because many people are just stupid. And even more people are just stupid when they are passionate politically. I don’t know if I could get you to agree at the outset that, yes, many conservatives are stupid and many liberals are stupid – and that we don’t make much progress just invoking again and again the stupid positions that can be found on each side. But here is the asymmetry: liberals are very confident that conservatism itself is just stupid, whereas ordinary conservative folk (not me, it goes without saying J) are worried that liberals are smarter than they are, that the liberal mainstream is in possession of some sophistication that goes along with higher degrees (the universities being flagrantly dominated by left-liberalism) and media-cultural prominence. Conservatives often lack the intellectual resources to understand the contestability of liberal assumptions, but liberals think that every educated person knows that conservative assumptions are just a relic of past prejudices.
Of course I think, and I can argue (and have argued in pages that won’t fit here), that a deeper intellectual investigation exposes the frailty of liberal assumptions and opens the possibility of deep articulations of more conservative premises. But you don’t need to agree with me to see the asymmetry I’m trying to explain. I suppose, though, that if you think what I propose re. deeply intellectual conservatism is impossible, then you must think that stupid conservatives are truly representative of conservatism, whereas stupid liberalism is just an aberration.
Do I think liberalism is stupid? Well, I observe that it can be stupid. But there are smart and good liberals, and their smartness and goodness sometimes shines through their impatience with the stupidity of conservatism. But yes, I indeed think liberalism, even at the highest (or deepest) level, is over-confident, complacent, and therefore blind and, yes, even dangerous. By highest levels, I might mean someone like John Rawls, or Richard Rorty (OK, they’re dead now, but they’re still pretty alive), but if you wish I could go back through JS Mill to Locke and to the foundations of liberal individualism in Hobbes. But you don’t wish.
(By the way: if you think liberalism arises not from such theorists but from Protestant freedom of conscience or from pragmatic social learning, I think you end up in the same place, that is, with some delusion of a neutral public space and of unmediated individualism).
So, of course, we can go on endlessly pointing out some conservatives who are smarter than some liberals, or some liberals who are smarter than some conservatives – but really, the question is, what would the very smartest position be, more like the basic liberal assumptions, or more like the conservative. I think the latter, but of course I recognize smart people can disagree. But let’s just try to be clearer what we’re disagreeing about. But to do so we would have to navigate around the asymmetry I’ve described. Liberal condescension will eventually destroy itself, since it cannot know itself; but it threatens to take down the sound practice of liberal democracy with it. So liberalism is more than ever the enemy of liberty.
January 14th, 2011 | 9:22 am
There are in fact many things that well-educated supporters of liberal philosophies know, that your average guy on the street doesn’t. All of us know things that other people don’t – that is why communication is so important: not one of us knows more than anyone else, we all just know different things.
But some of the most relevant and exciting new information coming out of various new areas of research, tends to be left-tilting.
But what good does that do anyone, if instead of arguing their case, they evade the subject? It is up to the left to figure out that they aren’t going to get anywhere by simply denigrating & refusing to listen to other viewpoints. Just because they know something relevant doesn’t mean they know everything. Liberals in American politics over the past several decades have consistently responded to unintended consequences by shutting down the feedback mechanisms, resorting to evasion and denigration instead of conversation.
I believe that the left as a whole relies heavily on avoidance rather than on persuasion because they themselves have a few denial-issues they’re not ready to confront.
IMO the biggest denial issue confronting liberals today is how, on the one hand, that we are all entitled to self-governance, the right to participate in a free and fair meritocracy, etc.- and on the other, a deeply held belief that a single perfect society is possible, and that the smart or elite members of society need to take the active role in shaping that society for the benefit of the stupids.
That might be why they apparently live in fear of the people they think of as the stupids. They know that even stupid people want to be active participants in the political process, and have a voice – and under the current law they have that right. But they’re stupids! They’re not qualified! And what they want is “wrong”! So what do you do? Ignore them and hope they go away? Or ignore them and hope they don’t shoot you?
January 14th, 2011 | 12:45 pm
It is easy for people, whether they be liberal, conservative, or something else, to think they have come to hold the positions they hold because they are smart and good. It may be the case that some of these folks ARE smart and good, but as long as we see this as the why our own beliefs came to be (and remain) ours, we are setting ourselves up to believe that any who differ from us must not have our qualities, i.e., they must be stupid and evil.
As at least some kind of conservative, I recognize that the substantive positions I hold are quite frequently directly or indirectly attributable to the traditions I inhabit. I did not create them from scratch, or arrive at them by some purely neutral, disinterested, objective reasoning. Recognizing also that there are a multiplicity of traditions out there, I can attribute the positions of others to their place in other – and rival – traditions, whether they consider their positions tradition dependent or not. When I take them as participants in a rival tradition, holding positions contrary to my own on that basis, I need not take them as holding the positions they do because they are stupid or evil (though they might well be stupid and evil, since some humans are). Since I do not need to impute stupidity and an evil character to them in order to defend my own position (or argue with theirs), I can offer even my greatest opponents respect even as I strongly disagree and contend with them.
January 15th, 2011 | 12:29 pm
Thank God for giants such as Pope Jon Paul 11 as well as our current Pope and the many saints in The Church who demonstrate to us what true freedom is about – to be able to live to the best potential that The Father has for us , being able to see each other in the merits and love of God Incarnate , with its attendant grace to be forgiving , caring for the dignity of each other , to expose and help those who are caught up in enemy camps – an enemy that is poweful, intelligent, deceptive , that has been against us since our first days !
Is it foolish to discount such an enemy and to think that we are ‘free’ to fall for its seductions and false promises !
Is it wise to recognise that God can make use of even the little in the eyes of the world, to call attention to these ever prevailing truths !
January 16th, 2011 | 9:15 am
This is a very smart essay in a number of ways, primarily, I think, by pointing to liberal condescension as a factor in causing the loss of liberty.
But, I don’t think ‘conservatives’ have anything to fear from this ‘condescension’.
Contemporary liberalism fails or rather derails because this system is defined by certain attributes that require the liberal to constantly seeks to particpate in the “Utopian imagination.”
In immanest terms the liberal has to participate in an “intellectual fraud,” purposefully deceive himself, or be so incompetent as not to be able to move beyond “..the more sophisticated illiteracy imposed by an educational system.”
In transcendent terms the liberal can define himself as “Christian” only by perverting the teachings of the Word, or by constructing a false God in the “social justice” Jesus. If the ‘liberal’ proclaims his rejection of God, the distortions of the liberal activist tend to move toward a recognition that violence/revolution is required to establish a Utopia where human perfection obtainable.
Liberalism is a pathology that incorporates a decline or distortion of mental and spiritual faculties that negate any possiblity of carrying on a discussion of reality. The reality of the liberal is the activist’s ‘dreamworld,’ while the Platonic-Aristotlian “image of reality” understands the failings of man in the cycles of existence where some level of order is obtained, then succumbs to decay, disintegration, and the failures inherent in the ‘fallen’ nature of man.
January 16th, 2011 | 2:27 pm
I have a friend with whom I have been having conversations for about 8 years. We talk of things that matter. We disagree about most things. He is a self described Darwinian materialist with the requisite progressive perspective. We get along quite well. We both have our agendas and yet often in the flow of conversation we hit on moments of agreement. I think this is because very few people have thought of everything implied by their political, philosophical or ideological views. In these gaps there seems to be an opportunity for conversation shorn, to a degree, of our previously mentioned positions. Aside from the issues of the day and subjects that are timeless I have tried to engage him in a way that would reveal the source of or the reason for his view of things. He is liberal and he is not stupid but as I tell him, he is wrong. Why he is wrong extends beyond the particulars of his stated beliefs and bleeds into his experiences and the tilt of his mind. This attempt to find his reasons came from my attempts to understand how it is that people of equal intelligence, who are well informed, well intentioned, well spoken and who live on the same planet can come to such diametrically different conclusions. Without having come to any comprehensive conclusion I have reached a considered one. Perspectives and attitudes regarding human sexuality with all its accompanying issues is the great divider. This is not to say that everyone on each side agrees with everything attributible to their side but in general the divide is here. Added to this is the realization that this has not always been the case and many of the other things that have divided humans still do but my sense is that even these have come to rest left and right of the divide. Finally though even the issues related to sexuality and its offspring come down to one question and that is what does it mean to be a human and how do and how should our answers play out in a free society.Until we can approach something like a common moral language we as a people are in danger of slipping into cultural, political and moral incoherance and that would be stupid.
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