Thursday, January 30, 2014

Losing your past

What is the past? For many liberals, it is a bad place, one marked by discrimination, privilege and inequality.

I was reminded of this by yet another attack piece on Senator Cory Bernardi, this time by author John Birmingham. Senator Bernardi, if you recall, has written a book in which he defends the traditional family. John Birmingham chose to mock Bernardi by pretending to be a fellow conservative:
my fellow conservative Australians, we must heed the warning of Cory that the moral relativism of the left threatens Australia's way of life. Why, if these lentil-eating monsters had their way, it would be illegal for a fellow to whip the wretched Chinamen at the steam laundrette for putting too much starch in his dicky, to correct one's bothersome wife with the back of one's hand, or even to launch a simple punitive raid against the natives should they threaten to breach the boundaries at the edge of settlement with their gibbering demands to not be shot or poisoned or run off their so-called ancestral lands.

The senator has reminded us again and again during his time in Parliament that we must "protect and defend the traditional institutions that have stood the test of time". Institutions such as restricting the vote to chaps with property holdings of some significance or at the very least a commission in one of the better regiments. Traditions such as White Australia, keeping ladies out of the universities and the working man in his place.

You get the drift? The message is that Bernardi wants to defend a tradition because in a traditional society white guys got to oppress other people. He wants to go back to the bad past, rather than move to the moral present.

Why would Birmingham think of the past in such a negative way? I believe it has to do with the narrowness of a liberal morality. Liberals begin by denying that individuals should be oriented to an objective good. The liberal idea is that something is made moral by the act of it being freely chosen. Therefore, each individual has to be free to define their own good, without interference from others. So the moral thing, in a liberal system, is to not interfere with how other people define the good or the moral choices they make. This leads to a morality of non-interference, based on qualities such as non-discrimination, diversity, tolerance, respect, openness, inclusiveness and so on.

The past can never live up to this kind of moral standard. That's because liberalism was not established on a greenfield site but was superimposed on a traditional society. The traditional society developed on the basis that it was a space for a particular tradition to develop over time; that it was occupied by a particular people and their culture; and that it was both possible and desirable to orient this culture to an apprehension of what was objectively good.

Liberalism came along with a very different view of society, one in which large numbers of atomised individuals would pursue their own subjectively defined goods within a neutral space. Liberalism became the active principle in the way that politics was understood, but it operated within a culture and society that had developed traditionally over many hundreds of years.

In the Anglosphere, at least, the liberal element did not try to overthrow the traditional one all at once (as was attempted, say, in the French and Russian Revolutions). Instead, liberalism gradually developed toward stages at which the confidence to dispense with traditional institutions was reached one by one.

What that means is that there was still support for some traditional institutions and values within the Anglo past, despite these not strictly meeting the standards of a liberal morality. Fifty years ago it was normal to support the traditional family and the moral culture attached to a traditional family life. Now it is being deemed discriminatory, judgemental and a mark of privilege to do the same.

So the past will never measure up to what the liberals of today hold to be moral. That does allow liberals to feel a sense of moral superiority over the generations who came before them. It also allows them to hold to a sense of progress, i.e. that liberalism is drawing society ever closer to a moral standard.

However, it also means that liberals are not able to identify positively with a history and a culture that they belong to, nor are they able to feel connected in their ancestry, nor will they have a sense of purpose in their role of being a custodian for a cultural inheritance and contributing to it as an ongoing tradition.

When you reject the past as the badlands, then you cut yourself off from important aspects of the human experience. These are lost to liberals.

Liberals lose this aspect of the human experience because their moral standards are too narrowly set - they are focused on a small set of moral criteria based around non-interference, such as diversity and non-discrimination.

If their moral standards went beyond mere non-interference and included, for instance, fidelity in one's relationships, such as to one's fellow countrymen, then there would be a change of mindset.

Even if ideals of character or of masculinity were part of the criteria, then it would be possible to look at the past and see not only failures but also achievements. It would be possible, in fact, to look at the best of the past and find in it an inspiring standard to live up to.

12 comments:

  1. I think Putin is showing that the traditional worldview has a rosy future. A lot of academics have incorrectly argued that the 21st century is going to be China's, clearly, it's going to be the Russian century. They have limitless natural resources and an educated, patriotic and increasingly religious population - this combination, historically, is unstoppable.

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    1. Demographic trends say that Russia will be majority Muslim in a few decades.

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  2. A tactic of the anti-traditionalists, who are also anti-white, is to define the winners of the system they caricature extremely narrowly. According to them, unless you were at the pinnacle of a more traditional, viable, fertile white society, you were an extreme loser and treated as such, with spite.

    The truth is the opposite. In a more traditional, balanced, fertile and viable white society, the winning groups are very broad. With less feminism, women in general were happier. With less divorce, children in general were spared a vast source of woe - and everybody is or once was a child. With men not being pushed out of traditionally masculine roles, men in general were better off too, as was the economy, through their productivity. And so on.

    Though some won more than other, traditional white societies were societies of winners.

    It's the politically correct, anti-white, anti-traditional, unbalanced system that produces small groups of winners giving the back of their hand to everyone else, with spite. For example, non-white mass immigration (which in white countries draws in its train anti-white preferences to address the inequalities and tensions created) may benefit small groups of non-white leaders and opinion-shapers, but it produces very negative results for whites - who used to be the all or most of the population. This is accompanied by severe speech codes and shaming, and by many injustices produced by the preferences and set-asides, and by great inefficiencies, as artificially created or imported conflicts are mediated by courts, lawyers, departments charged with negotiating the problem of "diversity".

    Though some lose more than other, and small unrepresentative groups win, politically correct societies, which are basically white societies dominated by anti-white ideology, are societies of losers.

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    1. Well put. That's a very good, direct response to John Birmingham. The real goods of a society are not becoming ever more evenly spread - quite the opposite. For instance, wealth is being concentrated at the very top of society, the middle is being squeezed; home ownership is becoming more difficult even amongst the middle ranks of society; a culture of stable family life is beginning to be lost amongst the lower and even the middle tiers of society; ordinary white people cannot share in a pride in a communal identity but are treated as oppressors within their own societies; and men, no matter how hard-working and responsible, get treated as the oppressors of their own wives and children rather than having an honourable place in the family as a father and husband.


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    2. Perfectly said.

      It's good for our political enemies that they own the mass media megaphone, because they don't have a case that can survive honest debate.

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  3. Do you suppose that anyone ever whipped a wretched Chinaman in a steam launderette because he (the Chinaman) had put too much starch in his (the whipper's) dicky? Or that, if he did such a thing, for no reason other than the Chinaman's mistake and his own evil temper, the mass of white men would laugh and cheer him on? Do you suppose a punitive raid was ever launched against natives who had breached the boundaries of the settlement for no reason other than to request (politely no doubt) that the punitive raiders stop shooting, poisoning, and expelling them? When a man began beating his wife in the bad old days, do you suppose the neighbors pulled up lawn chairs, cracked open beers, and settled in for the show?

    It is not only a matter of changing values and mores, but also a matter of grotesquely distorted history, in which outrages are represented as normal and the loser in any conflict as an innocent victim (unless he was a white male, in which case he surely had it coming).

    Your argument that the past was different is an argument that needs to be made, but we should not yield too much ground to the left on this. The past wasn't that different. For instance, a great many men in the past were patriarchal and violently intolerant of physical and sexual abuse of women. I have studied an obscure murder that took place in the 1830s. A man, who had become a drunk, took to correcting his bothersome wife with the back of his hand (as Birmingham would put it), and was repeatedly jailed for it. When he finally killed her with an ax, they gave him a trial and, a few months later, hung him by the neck. In a liberal society, that same man would live to a ripe old age, watching television and filing appeals.

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  4. JMSmith: "It is not only a matter of changing values and mores, but also a matter of grotesquely distorted history..."

    Agreed. Even as hyperbole, what he said doesn't work. If he was called on it, he couldn't defend his version of history.

    Which means his argument is really: right, wrong, his side is the one holding the megaphone, and his side is the one you can't freely argue back against, on pain of social and professional consequences.

    Our history, as something that is part of our public discussions, is being rewritten by brute force, by fear and intimidation, and by the power of who owns the institutions.

    Political Correctness really is Communism 2.0.

    If that parallel holds up, Political Correctness is making some of the same mistakes as its predecessor, including a rehash of the useless Soviet expedition into Afghanistan, which did so much to raise doubt about the wisdom of the regime.

    And if that parallel holds up, Communism might not last much more than another 20 years or so.

    Eventually people realize that the system, which can't justify itself by honest arguments or by genuine conformity to democratic norms, is never going to justify itself by the test of "results" either. If technology was going to solve everything, why Chernobyl? If overthrowing "white domination" is a path to paradise, why is Detroit broke, mean, and dangerous for whites?

    You can make the present and the impending squalid future look better, comparatively, by lying about the past. But the Communists did that too. It worked for a while. Not forever.

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  5. my fellow conservative Australians, we must heed the warning of Cory that the moral relativism of the left threatens Australia's way of life. Why, if these lentil-eating monsters had their way, it would be illegal for a fellow to whip the wretched Chinamen at the steam laundrette for putting too much starch in his dicky, to correct one's bothersome wife with the back of one's hand, or even to launch a simple punitive raid against the natives should they threaten to breach the boundaries at the edge of settlement with their gibbering demands to not be shot or poisoned or run off their so-called ancestral lands.

    The senator has reminded us again and again during his time in Parliament that we must "protect and defend the traditional institutions that have stood the test of time". Institutions such as restricting the vote to chaps with property holdings of some significance or at the very least a commission in one of the better regiments. Traditions such as White Australia, keeping ladies out of the universities and the working man in his place.


    I have been listening to 'satire' like this from the left for my entire life. In fact it is basically the only argument I have heard from them for the utter dismantling of our society.

    It's a bit like rap, any fool can do it, it takes only a moment to improvise, and it seems to impress the impressionable.

    It relies on a wilful misrepresentation of the past (As has been said above) and a sort of 'truth to power' rebelliousness.

    I don't think there is any point in arguing the facts with a tool like Birmingham, better to mock him. Lefties like him are the mainstream - their silly little skits mocking straw men are very, very old.

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  6. Mark,

    Leftists are only moral relativists when it suits their purposes. When it doesn't, they become the most strident of moral absolutists. The charge of moral relativism will win an argument, precisely because of this.

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    1. Asher,

      I think their starting point is moral subjectivism, but this then generates a moral absolutism.

      I've attempted to explain this before, so sorry to bore some readers, but if there is no knowable, objective, moral good, then the good is seen to be not what is chosen but the act of choosing itself. What matters is that we are autonomous choosers, i.e. that there are no impediments to the act of choosing which makes us moral agents and which gives dignity to our status as humans.

      However, for this to work at a supra-individual level, each individual must permit other individuals the same freedom of unimpeded choice. Otherwise you end up with the very thing that liberals fear most, namely one privileged group of individuals who get to have this liberal kind of freedom and agency and power at the expense of others.

      Hence there has to be an equality (an equality of autonomy) within a liberal system. In addition, it is important that individuals don't interfere with the choices or self-defined values of others.

      Some readers might be shaking their heads at this point thinking that this doesn't sound much like liberalism in practice - and they'd be right. Because once you have this focus on the "immorality of interference" something else happens. You do then get to moral standards which are held to passionately by liberals - standards of non-interference, such as non-discrimination, diversity, respect, openness, tolerance, non-judgementalism etc,.

      Liberals understand what these are for - that they are to prevent the dominant group in society from upholding their own values and standards and thereby interfering with the self-defined values or choices of others. They also exist to help the liberal understanding of politics and society to colonise the traditional society that liberalism has been superimposed on.

      The problem for white, Christian, heterosexual males is that we have been identified as the dominant group that has oppressed others and whose existence has prevented equal freedom from being extended to other groups (and whose existence represents a point of possible resistance to a liberal order). So liberal standards are applied much more rigorously to us than to other groups. Where other groups are dominant it is not thought to be such a problem (though, having said that, there do exist liberals who seek to squash non-white, non-liberal groups, particularly if they are thought to be a point of resistance to the rule of liberalism).

      The absolutism flows, in part, from the subjectivism.

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  7. The absolutism flows, in part, from the subjectivism.

    Besides myself, you are the only other person I've ever encountered who understands the link between subjectivism and absolutism.

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  8. The problem for white, Christian, heterosexual males is that we have been identified as the dominant group that has oppressed others and whose existence has prevented equal freedom from being extended to other groups (and whose existence represents a point of possible resistance to a liberal order).

    This is also a problem for white, Christian, heterosexual women, and children, who will not thrive without their men.

    Of all the means anti-whites employ to end the white, Christian, heterosexual males, the most important is mass non-white immigration and forced assimilation in all white countries and only in white countries. Unless effectively resisted and reversed, that agenda means there are not going to be any white, Christian, heterosexual males, or females, or children.

    If only for that reason, it is not enough for a man to be a likable bloke and a good friend, a good worker, a good husband and father, or creative, or a good sportsman, or even the head of a religious family. All these things are good, and it's it's a misfortune not to be able to do well at any of them. But the role of the man as defender of his family, his community and his posterity has not been abolished and it is not going to be abolished. It's more necessary than ever.

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