Wednesday, July 08, 2009

What conservatism shouldn't be

Samuel Goldman, at Postmodern Conservative, invites his fellow Americans to raise their glasses "to Locke and the semi-hemi-demi-Lockeans who’ve served this nation."

Why? Because a Lockean inspired government regarded Americans,

as free men and women rather than as members of a class, church, guild, tribe, town, or race.


Cripes! Isn't this a fundamental statement of liberalism rather than conservatism? Isn't it liberals who believe that you make people free by stripping them of their communal attachments?

A Lockean politics takes things away from the individual: sources of identity; ways of life; a sense of belonging; objects of love and loyalty; a close connection to generations past; an attachment to particular forms of culture; a larger, non-hedonistic reason and purpose to act in the world; and culturally embedded ideals to strive toward.

If it's just us as stripped down, abstracted Lockean individuals what are we left with? What is our freedom? A freedom to shop and consume? To participate in our individual careers? To choose our own entertainments? Are these really the highest forms of freedom we can live by?

And where does the logic of a Lockean politics end? If I become free by setting myself against my class, guild, church, tribe, race and town, then why wouldn't I deepen the process by setting myself against my nation and my sex? Why does Samuel Goldman permit himself to speak as an American or as a man but not as anything else? Wouldn't it be more consistent with a fully developed, modern day Lockeanism if he spoke only as the individual Sam?

So I won't raise my glass to Locke as I don't believe that individual freedom is won at the expense of traditional forms of community. The stand alone Lockean individual has an impoverished sphere of life to exercise his freedom in. We are better off aiming at a larger, more significant freedom, one that is enjoyed within the communities and traditions we belong to.

12 comments:

  1. Good post!

    Isn't Locke considered to be one of the fathers of modern Liberalism?

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  2. I believe Samuel Goldman intentions are good, but I think he is confusing a symbolic idea. For example, I believe we should treat people like we would like to be treated regardless of church, guild, tribe, town, or race. To suggest that the only true way to be “free men” is to do away with mankind’s church, guild, tribe, town, or race is dangerous and short sighted. This is dangerous because this ideology leads to totalitarianism. Short sighted, because mankind is not perfect. Again, I believe regardless of church, guild, tribe, town, or race we should treat others like we would like to be treated. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” How was Jesus able to be perfect while under the rule of Caesar? Samuel Goldman idea is debunked!

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  3. Anonymous @ 2:34 writes, "I believe we should treat people like we would like to be treated regardless of church, guild, tribe, town, or race."

    OK, but make sure to add "regardless of sex or age" and you'll get a clearer view of how reality/sanity limits this statement.

    Yes, we should treat all people as we would want to be treated. But thanks to Leftist distorters, we also have to clarify that we do not mean we must treat everyone THE SAME.

    I should treat a woman as I would want to be treated if I were a woman, or a foreigner as I would want to be treated if I were a foreigner, and so on. But I cannot and should not pretend that I can treat everyone as "just an individual" because of course that's not what anyone really is.

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  4. Midwesterner,

    I concur with your comment regarding my post; I figured there would be some ambiguity to my statement. However, I intended it to be that way.

    One thing I did make clear was that it is symbolic, not to be taken literally like Samuel Goldman. When I said, "I believe we should treat people like we would like to be treated regardless of church, guild, tribe, town, or race." I did not mean to treat everyone exactly “THE SAME”. If you took my statement literally then I can see the danger in this statement also. Your added comment Midwesterner was the very argument I was trying to explain in my first post.

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  5. Locke: another Enlightenment rationalist fruitlessly trying to articulate the deadness of his own heart. All that comes out is a lifeless rationalism.

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  6. Jaz, said “Locke: another Enlightenment rationalist fruitlessly trying to articulate the deadness of his own heart. All that comes out is a lifeless rationalism.”

    Who is the Enlightenment rationalist? Anonymous post? Or Samuel Goldman and Lockean? If you are referring to the Anonymous post, then what do you mean by “trying to articulate the deadness of his own heart.”?

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  7. Locke is the Enlightenment rationalist. John Locke. And people who are his disciples are almost uniformly drearily dead-souled. That's the Western world.

    The summary of Locke, from Wiki:

    John Locke; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans, and contributors to liberal theory. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.

    Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self", figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness". He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived by sense perception.


    That could be the text Mr. Richardson reads every morning and says, "As I live, before God, I will debunk that!"

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  8. Ha…Jaz, I should have gone with my first inclination. I thought Locke was a blogger’s avatar name. Well then, I concur!

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  9. Jaz quoted this from wikipedia:

    Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness". He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived by sense perception.

    This led, in practice, to extreme forms of scepticism. If it is all about individual sense perception, then how can we know that our minds are accurately interpreting what is being sensed? Perhaps we are conditioned to associate an idea with a particular sense perception.

    By the time you get to John Stuart Mill in 1800s, you get doubts about the real existence of the material world, or at least claims that it is the individual mind which constructs reality. The superior mind is held to imaginatively create reality itself rather than passively having its reality created through others via "association".

    Sorry if this is too much to take in, but at some stage traditionalists are going to have to attack not just at the political level but at the underlying philosophical level as well.

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  10. Anonymous:

    Right. I didn't mean to sound like I was contradicting you. I only meant to say that if we add "sex" and "age" to Mr. Goldman's list, the absurdity of doing away with any of the previous categories (e.g. guild, tribe, race, etc.) becomes immediately obvious.

    I just meant it as a suggestion, not a correction. You're absolutely correct.

    Incidentally, when talking with Bible-believing, you can make the same point via Galations 3:28, which in addition to listing Jew and Greek also lists male and female.

    Christians who believe in destroying the physical distinction between Jew and Greek (and any other ethnicity) should remember that by the same logic they are obliged to destroy the physical distinction between male and female.

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  11. "Wouldn't it be more consistent with a fully developed, modern day Lockeanism if he spoke only as the individual Sam?"

    He should also change his name since the name "Sam" is part of a specific, inherited tradition.

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  12. Yet it is Mill, of course, that pronounces ethnic homogeneity as the mainstay of freedom.

    "A PORTION of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past."

    What would Mr. Goldman say of the "semi-hemi-demi-Lockean" Israel?

    "...free men and women rather than as members of a class, church, guild, tribe, town, or race?"

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