I am inclined to agree with West's assessment of the source and origin of Progressive thought in Hegel, although my own interpretation of Dewey isn't quite as the unabashed statist he appears in the article. It is this particular point that is key:
To this end, Dewey writes, "the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs."
This is, of course, the foundation of Marxism and the driving force behind its relentless political control of the individual. Marx honestly felt his was a philanthropic approach toward human actualization and most of his less worldly followers still feel this way despite the nearly universal horrors of his theories in application.
This is, frankly, an insurmountable problem for Progressivism in my opinion, for the following reasons. First, that the nature of the State under Hegel is not one whit less mystical than the mythical state of nature codified by Rousseau and held as the foundations of late Enlightenment philosophy that informed the Founders. As a human construct one might expect the State to be less influenced by the various geists with which Hegel's treatment imbued it. It is not apparent to me how a human mechanism driven by spirits is an improvement on a state of nature driven the same way.
Second, that one cannot simultaneously deny the existence of individual human rights in favor of those dictated by an all-knowing and presumably benevolent State and pretend that it is individual welfare that is the State's ultimate objective. One has to cheat by re-defining the individual as purely an element in a collective entity, an economic class to a pure Marxist, a class dictated by power relationships to a neo-Marxist such as Lukacs. These collective entities fail as a description of human totality because of their inherently limited definitional characteristics - one may, for example, simultaneously be a homosexual (oppressed class) and a member of a ruling military elite (empowered class) - the Nazi government was full of them. Any attempt at analysis of the constituent individuals on the basis of class relationships fails due to the crossover. It turns out that human beings really are individuals and that any theoretical attempt to distill them into collective entities fails from inherent incompleteness.
And so to the discussion of the source of human rights. For Hegel these were a gift of the State (specifically the post-Revolutionary French state) in a historical reaction to the abuses of monarchy, wherein those rights, such as they were, were of a very different nature. An individualist may object that one cannot be granted by a construct something that one already has without it, whether as a gift of God or as a characteristic of a state of nature. For Hegel both God and nature were equally fictitious; for his critics so was his State.
So we on the individualist side are reduced to Jefferson's somewhat hopeful formulation that certain rights are self-evident (they aren't), or as a gift of God whether one believes in Him or not. They may, in fact, be axiomatic, which leads directly toward the notion of a social contract, which has its own difficulties with respect to mysticism. After all, no one is presented, at birth, with a copy of the Constitution and a choice as to whether he or she wishes to accept that as life rules. It isn't a real contract. Anyone can opt out of its requirements and remain a citizen, and many on the radical Left do precisely that.
But that's as close as we are likely to get to the sort of pragmatic, rough-and-ready arrangement on which to build a real nation of inherently flawed human beings. It will satisfy no theoretical philosopher on either side. What of that? Philosophy, especially political philosophy, is no less an artificial construct than the State it purports to build. Theorists tend to forget that.
Surely the court of human opinion has come down on the side of the pragmatic on this issue in the tendency to vote with one's feet against a State that claims to promote human welfare toward a State that actually shows the results, however flawed theoretically. To a theorist that is a sign of the flawed nature of humanity. To the rest of us it's a sign of common sense.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Political Seance 101
http://tinyurl.com/29b3qn
“.....Let us begin with some definitions. Spirituality is nothing less than a quest to understand the Truth of our existence. Politics has to do with one’s philosophy of government, and more generally, of the relations between men and society.
There have obviously been countless political philosophies down through the ages, mostly bad ones. For that matter, there have been countless false or partial religions. Some false religions, such as Islam, swallow up politics, while some bad political philosophies, such as leftism, attempt to do away with religion and drain the world of its transcendent dimension, either in subtle ways, such as various “liberal theologies,” or in more ham-handed ways, as in the case of the metaphysical yahoos at the New York Times or in the ACLU. Once you have drained reality of its transcendent dimension, there is only a horizontal struggle below for mere animal existence. The only ideal is that there are no ideals except that people with religious ideals are dangerous.
However, one cannot actually do away with religion, one can only displace it and insert false religion in its place. For example, if you are a secular leftist who sees reality as nothing more than a class struggle between exploiter and exploited, victim and oppressor, you are in fact a worshipper of an idol named Mars. This is nowhere more obvious than in the unrelieved rage of a ghost-dancing spiritual community such as dailykos or huffingtonpost.
The envious collective has always demanded the sacrifice of what is individual, distinctive, exceptional and “higher.” In it’s modern form, this is embodied in the left’s war against objective standards of any kind: standards of morality, standards of truth, standards of college admission, aesthetic standards, etc.
If you are in favor of leftist collectivist schemes which deny the spiritual primacy of the individual self and swallow up excellence, you are a worshipper of a fellow named Moloch.
There is no getting around the fact that the “culture war” is at bottom a theological dispute between secular and traditionally religious forces.
But it would be a great error to conclude that the war therefore involves atheistic vs. theistic camps, much less logic vs. faith.
Rather, it is a war of competing theisms, each rooted in faith and steeped in metaphysics. Radical secularists are rarely neutral about God—in fact, they are quite often burning with a passion about spiritual matters.
At the foundation of the secular leftist revolt against God is the attendant idea that there is no such thing as absolute truth, for God, among other things, is the ground and possibility of Truth. One of the benefits of religion—properly understood—is that it prevents the mind from regressing into the magical worldview, the circular maze of pagan thought that preceded the major revelations. Sophisticated secularists believe they are making progress by leaving the “superstitions” of religion behind, but this is rarely the case. Instead of believing “nothing,” they tend to believe in “anything,” which is where the pseudo-religion of contemporary liberalism—that is, leftism—comes in. Secular leftists simply elevate relativism to the status of an absolute.
A fundamental distinction that must be maintained is this difference between liberalism and leftism. The modern conservative movement of which I consider myself a member is classically liberal, whereas contemporary liberalism is in reality a deeply illiberal philosophy that is ultimately rooted in leftism.
This is a key point, because in liberalism the emphasis is on liberty, whereas in leftism the emphasis is on equality.
The secular world is a prison where the human spirit is confined as a result of having foreclosed the wider world of vertical liberty. It is an elaborate cognitive system that has been constructed for the purposes of living in the Dark.
It’s language is a sort of braille, it’s ideology a cane for moving around in an endarkened world. Only the recovery of spiritual vision confers true freedom, because it allows one to move vertically.
The American founders were steeped in Judeo-Christian metaphysics. As such, they did not believe in mere license, which comes down to meaningless freedom on the horizontal plane.
Rather, they believed that horizontal history had a beginning and was guided by a purpose, and that only through the unfolding of human liberty could that “vertical” purpose be achieved. Our founders were progressive to the core, but unlike our contemporary leftist “progressives,” they measured progress in relation to permanent standards that lay outside time—metaphorically speaking, an eschatological “Kingdom of God,” or “city on a hill,” drawing us toward it. Without this nonlocal telos, the cosmos can really have no frontiers, only edges. Perhaps this is why the left confuses truth with “edginess.”
Liberty—understood in its spiritual sense—was the key idea of the founders. This cannot be overemphasized. According to Michael Novak, liberty was understood as the “axis of the universe,” and history as “the drama of human liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.” It was for this reason that Jefferson chose for the design of the seal of the United States Moses leading the children of Israel out of the death-cult of Egypt, out of the horizontal wasteland of spiritual bondage and into the open circle of a higher life. America was quite consciously conceived as an opportunity to “relaunch” mankind after so many centuries of disappointment, underachievement, and spiritual stagnation.
Now the lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. Co 3:17
The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftism in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection.
The first step in this process is a complete skepticism that rejects traditional ideals of moral authority and transcendent moral obligation—a complete materialistic skepticism combined with a boundless, utopian moral fervor to transform mankind. However, being that the moral impulse remains in place, there is no longer any boundary or channel for it.
One sees this, for example, in college students (and those permanent college students known as professors) who, in attempting to individuate from parental authority and define their own identities, turn their intense skepticism against existing society, denouncing it as morally shoddy, artificial, hypocritical, and a mere mask for oppression and exploitation.
What results is a moral hatred of existing society and the resultant alienation of the postmodern leftist intellectual. Having condemned the distinction between good and evil as dishonest, such an individual can at least take great pride in their “honesty” and “courage.” To a leftist, the worst thing you can call someone is a hypocrite, whereas authentic depravity is celebrated in art, music, film, and literature.
Few people seem to clearly understand the type of destruction that follows when the moral impulse is detached from its traditional outlets. We can see the deadly combination of these two—“skepticism and moral passion,” or “burning moral fervor with hatred of existing society”—in every radical secular revolution since the French Revolution—from the Bolsheviks to nazi Germany to campus unrest in the 1960s.
For a while, America escaped this destruction because it had a very different intellectual genealogy, having been much more influenced by the skeptical enlightenment of Britain and Scotland than the radical enlightenment of France. In addition, America never lost touch with its Judeo-Christian ideals, which inspired individuals to work to improve and humanize society without violent disruption of traditional ways or heavy-handed government intervention.
As the contradictory ideals of liberty vs. equality began to ramify through history, it resulted in the very different nations and societies we see today, for the more liberty a nation has, the less her people will be equal, while the more equality is pursued by state policy, the more freedom will necessarily be attenuated and diminished.
The nations of the European Union are, of course, the embodiment of the perennial leftist dream of a cradle-to-grave welfare system. But in order to achieve the goal of radical equality, the Europeans must maintain a confiscatory tax system that radically undermines liberty, since they begin with the assumption that your money does not belong to you, but to the state.
This flawed understanding of equality is an atavistic and deeply pernicious holdover from our most primitive social arrangements. While it might have made sense in the “archaic environment” of psychobiological evolution in small face-to-face groups, in order for human beings to evolve psychohistorically, it was necessary for them to overcome their “envy barrier,” and to tolerate the painful idea that some might possess more than others.
In his classic work, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, Helmut Schoeck notes that our most economically misguided ideas stem from the futile attempt to eliminate envy. In order to placate the envious individual, government must intervene with policies that do achieve the desired end of of creating more equality, but at the cost of inefficiency, lack of economic growth, and ultimately far less wealth for everyone. Only by tolerating envy is economic development possible: “the more both private individuals and the custodians of political power in a given society are able to act as though there were no such thing as envy, the greater will be the rate of economic growth and the number of innovations in general.” A society is best able to achieve its creative potential if it functions “as if the envious person could be ignored.”
Likewise, well-meaning leftists who seek the completely “just society” are doomed to failure because they are based on the idea that it is possible to eliminate envy, when human beings inevitably find something new to envy.
Ironically, the pursuit of equality achieves its goal in a perverse sort of way, by dragging everyone down to a lower level of prosperity. The Fall 2005 Claremont Review of Books contains a revelatory article by Gerard Alexander, spelling out some of the dire results of the pursuit of equality. For example, on average, U.S. per capita income is 55% higher than the average of the 15 core countries of the European Union.
In fact, the largest E.U. countries “have per capita incomes comparable to America’s poorest states.” Alexander points out that if France, Italy or the U.K. were somehow admitted to the American union, “any one of them would rank as the 5th poorest of the 50 states, ahead only of West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Montana.” Ireland, which is currently the richest E.U. country, “would be the 13th poorest state, Sweden the 6th poorest.... 40% of all Swedish households would classify as low-income by American standards.”
In addition to impeding a nation’s wealth-producing capacity, the mindless pursuit of equality results in chronically high unemployment. France has lived with unemployment between 8-12% for some 25 years, and if anything, this underestimates the true figure because of forced early retirement and extensive but futile job-training programs. And there is a disproportionately negative impact on the poorest sectors of society, since a high unemployment rate pushes aside the least skilled workers first.
But “ironically,” the sense of entitlement that is nurtured in the entitlement society means that its victims will feel entitled to more entitlements, thus resulting in even worse conditions. This is just part of the underlying dynamic of what we saw with the Muslim riots in France. “Buying them off’ with yet more social programs will only result in a greater sense of entitlement and more unrest, since, once the spigot of a person’s sense of entitlement is opened, it is very hard to shut off. This is partly because our sense of entitlement is rooted in the earliest infantile experience, when we are, for the only time in our lives, actually “entitled” to mother’s magical ministering of our every need and whim. The universe revolves around the moment-to-moment needs of the baby, which is as it should be. For a baby.
If there is a “human-animal” spiritual realm, then it is actually the purely immanent-horizontal space occupied by Western Europe. Although they think of us as “selfish” because of our low taxes and smaller government, it is actually the other way around. Although superficially socialism may appear to be more humane, Mark Steyn points out that “nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the broader social interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him.” In this sense, Social democracy is eventually “explicitly antisocial” (National Review, 11-7-05).
There is a further corrosion of the soul that takes place with European style socialism, in that, because it elevates material desires to the highest, it cynically cuts the heart out of any transcendent view of the world, anything beyond the immediate animal senses. As Steyn explains, it perversely elevates secondary priorities such as mandated six week vacations over primary ones such as family and national defense. And change is almost impossible, because the great majority have become dependent on government, which causes a sort of “adherence” to horizontal. You cannot rouse the ideals of a nation that has lost its ideals. Any politician who threatens the entitlement system cannot get elected in Western Europe. The situation is analogous to an addict who has given over his power to the pusher.
By attempting to create the perfect society on earth through government coercion, it actually diminishes our humanity, since it relieves human beings of having to exert the continual moral effort to make the world a better place, as this is only possible by maintaining contact with the realm of transcendent moral ideals. In other words, European socialism is actually a flight from morality, thereby making people less humane, not more. It is a bogus kind of freedom, because it merely frees one from the vertical while condemning one to the horizontal. As the new Pope has written, “I am convinced that the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes.... The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia.”
Part Two tomorrow.
But the frontier is gone, we’re reduced to running in circles.
We must 'constitutionally insist' on the principle that our rights to life, liberty, or property are self-evident,
[or, - are a gift of a creator, - whether one believes in one or not], - as part of our constitutional social contract.
They may, in fact, be axiomatic, which leads directly toward the notion of a social contract, which has its own difficulties with respect to mysticism.
Our constitutional contract is not 'mysticism' in any aspect. - We are all required to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, just as we demand that same oath of all officials, fed, state, or local.
After all, no one is presented, at birth, with a copy of the Constitution and a choice as to whether he or she wishes to accept that as life rules.
We are, in effect, presented with that choice at 18, or at naturalization. - Everyone should read our Oath of Citizenship. - All citizens bound by its provisions.
It isn't a real contract. Anyone can opt out of its requirements and remain a citizen, and many on the radical Left do precisely that.
Yep, we have always allowed many radicals to opt out of its requirements and remain [voting] citizens. - This is a political judgment call. - One that perhaps should be revisited by Amendment.
What you said.