Who loves liberty?
[NOTE: This is in some ways a companion piece to this earlier post today.]
Commenter “ConceptJunkie” made an interesting comment the other day. “Concept” was describing a friend of his—a very intelligent lawyer—who voted for Obama:
He still insists today that Obama is doing a great job, and there are another 40% (give or take) of the electorate who feel roughly the same way. I cannot imagine what the President would have to do to shake the confidence of these people, but I have no doubt it would have to rival the worst of the 20th century dictatorships, and in all honestly, not even that would do it for a lot of them.
When he was first elected I heard more than one seemingly-intelligent, seemingly-educated person bemoan the fact that he would be limited by the Constitution and would not be able to Do What It Takes to really fix the country.
They were literally complaining that he wasn’t a dictator. That 21st century citizens of the United States would say something like this is enough to make one despair for all of humanity, and that’s no exaggeration.
I don’t care if the President is the second coming of George Washington, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, King Solomon, Moses, Pope Leo XIII and King Louis IX, I would never suggest he or she be given that kind of power. Nor would such a leader desire it.
My observations dovetail with Concept’s.
Particularly since Obama was elected, I have appreciated more and more what I already knew to a certain extent, which is that the vast majority of people don’t care about liberty and/or the rule of law in the abstract. They might pay lip service to it, but they are all for its suspension if the person in charge talks a good line that they buy. The end not only justifies the means for them, they don’t even see that they have to justify it, or that the means are shady or dangerous, so intent are they on expediting the implementation of whatever policy they think is needed.
Only some people care about liberty deeply enough to say along with Concept, and actually follow through on their statements: “I don’t care if the President is the second coming of [fill in with the hero of your choice], I would never suggest he or she be given that kind of power.” From my anecdotal observations, the majority of Democrats don’t care, although some do (I’ve written about the phenomenon before, here). Some on the right don’t care, either, but I don’t think it’s as many, although I could be wrong about that.
I don’t think there’s a poll that can tap into this phenomenon, either, because people will lie about it, or fool themselves.
Part of how this happens is that most people read receptively rather than thoughtfully. It’s a habit that starts in school, when the student is required to spit back what he/she reads rather than question it.
It takes much more energy to read actively. I don’t think I did it often when I was young, although I think I always did it more than most. But by the time I was in grad school, although I was still a liberal Democrat, I was questioning so much of my reading that my textbooks had arguments written by me in the margins of almost every page. I was also known for challenging my teachers in class, while my classmates would roll their eyes at my eccentricity. Mostly my fellow students seemed to have little interest in the most important controversies or ethical issues. And they were not kids, either; some were even middle-aged. But they seemed to just want to assimilate the material quickly and get out of there with a degree—in fact, quite a few told me so.
Many people carry that into their lives outside of school, and bring that attitude to their reading of the MSM or watching the news. And you can be sure that the left—or any other tyrant—banks on it.
“I don’t care if the President is the second coming of George Washington, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, King Solomon, Moses, Pope Leo XIII and King Louis IX, I would never suggest he or she be given that kind of power. Nor would such a leader desire it.”
It’s worth remembering that Washington was offered that type of power and he soundly rejected it. There was a truly great man and a truly great president.
As to your remark that Americans don’t value liberty or the rule of law, how can they when many of them do not even know that Washington, D.C. is the capital or where it is? Our system of public education is a complete failure. I think frontier kids were sometimes better educated on the fundamentals of a free society than the moderns who emerge brain dead from our public indoctrination mills.
Oh yes, remember that Harvard graduate, Obama, thought the US had more than 57 states, that the atomic bomb was dropped on December 7th, and that a Navy Corpsman was a Navy ‘Corpseman’. Harvard isn’t what it was either.
“Many people carry that into their lives outside of school, and bring that attitude to their reading of the MSM or watching the news. And you can be sure that the left–or any other tyrant–banks on it. ”
They were carefully taught, and the lap dog media reinforced it.
More people will care when they belatedly realize what they threw away.They won’t have a clue how it happened and when it began.
This post is enough to put me in a funk for the long weekend. It is sad but true. I have always believed that the country was protected by the quiet majority. A President doesn’t have any power if he doesn’t have anyone to follow his illegal or improper orders. Now, I have my doubts. The free press has rolled over and become Obama’s cheerleaders and lapdogs. Government officials (e.g. Holder, Lerner, et al) knowingly violate the law, oaths, etc. Kagen, Sotomayor and Ginsberg are disgraceful. It makes me sick to think about it.
“the vast majority of people don’t care about liberty and/or the rule of law in the abstract.” neo
Yes, it’s true, whch means that humanity still has to learn to “Give the Devil the Benefit of Law”…
“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power sufficient to endanger the public liberty. John Adams
“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.” James Madison
“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” Abraham Lincoln
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Winston Churchill
“Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.” Archbishop Chaput
“It’s worth remembering that Washington was offered that type of power and he soundly rejected it. There was a truly great man and a truly great president.” Rachelle
“In London, George III qustioned the American-born painter Benjamin West what Washington would do now he had won the war. “Oh,” said West, “they say he will return to his farm.” “If he does that,” said the king, “he will be the greatest man in the world.””
There’s a reason why Washington is referred to as ‘the American Cincinnatus’. For those unaware, Cincinnatus was a very early Roman “aristocrat and statesman whose service as consul in 460 BC and dictator in 458 BC and 439 BC made him a model of civic virtue.” Voted in for 6 months as dictator with near-absolute power in response to a war crisis, after just 2 weeks, he immediately resigned his authority with the end of the crisis and, but a few years later, did it all over again. He too like Washington was a farmer…
I have always thought that the Germans of WWII were not atypical. Given the right stress at the right time, pretty much any society on the planet will countenance mass murder of outgroups. All you have to do is hide it well enough so that your supporters don’t have to publicly take a stand for or against it- you just have to give them plausible deniability.
Geoffrey Britain,
Another aspect is that the people recognized the importance of Washington’s decision to the extent that no subsequent president until FDR dared run for a third term. We simply do not recognize character anymore. And the only liberty most care about is sexual liberty and freedom to smoke pot.
How true. Even if it, in my belief, was Christ at the helm… if He ordered me to do evil I would slay Him on the spot. That seems off, and it is. I don’t think Christ would order evil, or that I could slay him, though I could be mistaken in identification, in theory. Consider it a conceptual zero point theory reference, allowing for the impossible to solve the root, if the ideal holds.
Actually, if Christ had His way, I think He would prefer people like me around Him than people who would do anything He said, or allow Him anything, just because He is who He is or because they believe He will solve their problems. He can’t, and He won’t, I think. He will simply open the way for solving our own problems, solving the big one to allow us to solve the rest.
Yes, that is why liberals are so wrong. They know they can’t solve their problems. They are looking for someone who will. Weakness seeking release. Death is a seeming secular form of release. They are a sad lot.
KLSmith, 4:40 pm — “More people will care when they belatedly realize what they threw away. They won’t have a clue how it happened and when it began.”
“They” will be offered clues aplenty by the enemedia-education complex. In plain English, it’ll all have been the Republicans’ fault. And that “interpretation” will stick like glue. It will be recognized as fact, not as interpretation or opinion.
‘Democracy(fairness/equality)is 2-wolves and a sheep sitting down for supper. Liberty is the sheep coming fully armed and ready to contest the meal.’
Thank you, Founding Father. Me & Mine will take Liberty.
What it comes down to is respect for the bonds society has placed around governmental power and its exercise. The men who debated and wrote the Constitution understood this better than almost anyone alive today, and it explains the very structure they created. Over the course of 220 years, though, those bonds are badly tattered, and I think are now being fully broken. All that is left is the memory of the rule of law in this regard, and that will be gone as the people who are between 40 and 100 years of age die off. At some point, their numbers are such that nothing can constrain the power of tyrants who bathe themselves in popular approval.
Reading Starship Troopers was a real eye opener. Just the idea that the status of citizen had to be earned as a means of idiot-proofing the political system was radical to me in the summer before high school.
M J R : True. and actually most of them probably won’t realize what they threw away. If immigration reform leads to a massive influx of new Democrat voters, though, it will be harder to blame Republicans if they are no longer in power. I guess blame will be shifted to whatever type of boogeymen they blame in generic third world backwater banana republics.
Makes what happened in germany easy to understand…
the eternally reasonable guard the door to hell…
Harvard isn’t what it was either.
not since feminism… the ladies bemoaned that radcliff was somehow not good enough, and so…. from there, the color of ones skin or having a pudenda counted more. those who were smart and were not wealthy enough, like yours truly, were dumped and impeded by an army of leftist political termites.
Well, often third world banana republics blame the USA … what will we, and they, blame if we become a third-world banana republic too?
I’m reposting this here because of its importance. Just got this off of Drudge.
Judicial Watch has just put out this statement:
Blame? They won’t have to blame people. They’ll just line them up and execute them. BLaming people is for weaklings.
Y,
No need to execute, just line them up to drink the Jim Jones kool-aid. They will do so of their own volution. That is the measure of their state of brainwashed.
But the left does believe in liberty even more so they think. They look around and see people aren’t free because of their position, gender or something. Maybe they live in another country, a poor one, so they aren’t free. So many problems need to be solved which can only be corrected by a strong leader. So just shift the social order and, voila, people free to find fulfillment. A religious person might think a person isn’t free because of sin or their conscience, but why would a government help them with that? And the serious thing is that their time has come.
The authoritarian temptation is all too prevalent among people of all political inclinations. It is so simple and tidy in the abstract: why not bestow absolute power upon a wise man (or group of men…or “people”!) provided he is sufficiently wise; and benevolent and just. The concept is at least as old as Plato.
Conservatives are not immune to this temptation. I challenge anyone here to pick their most admired political figure. Maybe Ted Cruz? Mike Lee? Allen West? Scott Walker? In weak moments haven’t you flirted with the thought of him having dictatorial powers? Oh of course, bestowing such power on a leftist, or more reckless soul would be tragic and treasonous. But a restrained, wise conservative? He would use it carefully and prudentially, yes?
It’s okay. In fleeting, frustrated moments I have thought the same. The point is just that: it’s just a passing, unserious fancy. Nothing more.
For too many on the left, it is far more. Those inclined toward the left of the political spectrum just seem much more susceptible to the authoritarian impulse. I won’t digress on the plethora of historical examples. Such has been described eloquently by Aron, Revel, Milosz, Kolakowski, Hollander, Sowell, and many, many others.
In the simplest, must blunt terms: Utopianism and Authoritarianism (or even Totalitarianism) dovetail nicely. Some might even say they have a symbiotic relationship. And the intellectual underpinnings of most leftist politics is deeply utopian. There are utopian strains in some rightward politics too; but they are far more tepid and less cohesive.
Right after Obama was elected, I remember hearing similar musings to what ConceptJunkie described. Such ruminations are far less vocal today. However, I do wonder, I seriously wonder, how many of my otherwise decent, friendly and morally upright friends and colleagues on the left would passionately cheer and enthusiastically enable, if Obama did openly assume dictatorial power.
Such thoughts are too shuddering and heartbreaking to really fathom.
Ackler Says:
” I challenge anyone here to pick their most admired political figure. Maybe Ted Cruz? Mike Lee? Allen West? Scott Walker? In weak moments haven’t you flirted with the thought of him having dictatorial powers?”
NO.
Oh yeah, we’re going to be able to vote our way out of this.
Keep telling yourself that.
Cincinnatus, yes.
“That sets the stage for the scene in Lord of the Rings, “The Mirror of Galadriel,” between Galadriel and Frodo. Galadriel is already keeper of Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and therefore has much power. She says to Frodo:
“…Yet if you succeed in destroying the One Ring, then our power is diminished, and Lothlé³rein will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.”…
“You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel,” said Frodo. “I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me.”
“…For many years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands…”
“And now at last it comes! You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
‘She lifted up her hand and from the ring she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.
‘Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.’
“I pass the test,” she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”
The keystone to Churchill’s greatness, his love of England, was what enabled him to also pass the cup of temptation: he was sorely tempted, being a very ambitious man, to take power sooner (and he could have, on more than one occasion): but his love of his country was even greater than that ambition, and he would not take the reins to steer her wrong. Could not do it.
God bless him.
AS far as Christ commanding us to do wrong: He knows that any such manipulation wouldn’t be authentic obedience or authentic love, just a simulacrum of that. (Think of the Grand Inquisitor.)
Our freedom isn’t just a political necessity, it is a spiritual one. Only the acts a soul freely chooses are authentic, real, genuine, worthy. All else is lies, fake facades, pretense. Of course, in the strictest sense, we’re all free in our hearts and minds, but having a nation that makes that freedom flourish, that’s a pearl beyond price.
Ordinary folks I know, or perhaps better than ordinary–educated, active in charities, etc.–think the same as the lawyer mentioned. But only for somebody like Obama. Bush, on the other hand…. The idea that a machine is controlled by who has the controls and that the power is thus unconstrained never occurs to them. Or perhaps they think that if somebody they don’t like–another Bush–appears, calling him names will suffice.
But that was/is in the beginning. Now, however bad things get, they can’t afford to admit it. Not only did they choose wrongly–disastrously–they did so with the sense of moral and intellectual superiority, and they were unrestrained in their condemnation of those who disagreed. They cannot admit it to themselves, nor to anyone else.
It would be extremely difficult to walk any of that back. Their paths are fixed.
In weak moments haven’t you flirted with the thought of him having dictatorial powers?
Why would I give ultimate power to people who have not demonstrated the Will or Capability to kill the Left? Sarah Palin was the best candidate in a long while, and America proved they no longer deserved a real leader.
People like Mike and Parker are a better candidate for ultimate power than some DC pol.
We know that our schools have failed in many ways. In my opinion the primary failure has been to ignore the importance of the Constitution as the key to our legacy.
I recently wrote to my twin grand children on the approach of their 18th birthdays. I told them that not every worthy candidate would agree with them on every issue; but, the key principle to judge any candidate by was reverence and adherence to the Constitution. I also commented that there are many forms of government, and several that work well for particular countries, but none are better than ours; and that is because of our Constitutional foundations.
Yeah, that’s probably a conclusion that occurs to a lot of people. At least to those who’ve a particular bent of mind or a certain kind of upbringing.
I remember the first time that popped into my head as a kid in high school, during one of those classroom debates on some social issue or another.
But of course, the left, doesn’t agree. For them, there is no “spiritual” core to man to protect. Therefore, no sound inferences can be drawn as regards the integrity and flourishing of such an unreal entity.
In law, the left has proposed that you can indeed legislate morality. It comes in the form of social, and ultimately perhaps, population management, but they believe it can be done. You break a few eggs and voila’: the new socialist man and all of that.
Or now, it’s the polymorphous perverse pan-sexual non-binary gendered social element which seeks (and we must not presume to judge the value or legitimacy of the seeking) some kind of fulfillment through the validation and esteem of its – what? – fellow fulfillment seekers or enablers? Isn’t that what society is all about? A mutual grooming circle of inclusion and esteem and non-judgmental validation?
Though, from my perspective it seems a hard task to logically schematize how a being which is held to have no inherent nature can then objectively be said to be fulfilled; nor how reciprocal associative obligations or duties are to be grounded in a universe populated per ideological stipulation by fundamentally sui generis entities.
Nonetheless, what I think is needed here, and I mean on this blog, is for the blog-mistress, who is herself a psychologist, to remind us all of what we were fed some decades ago in college in those psychology courses most of us took. The often covert, frequently overt, ideology peddled along with the “data”
I am not only thinking of behaviorism here, but also of the doctrines of Freudian-ism, and even somewhat paradoxically, to organismic psychology to an extent or effect.
In fact the entire intellectual (or at least therapeutic part of it) edifice of the modern age, philosophical, legal and psychological, has been directed toward reassigning the locus of moral action from the individual agent, to some form of collective expression or subsistence. Thus, nicely relieving man of the burden of personal guilt and judgment, while freeing him as a “self” for greater levels of social integration and self-realization; whatever kind of self that concatenation of mechanical impulses to which he has been ideologically reduced, might be said to imply.
But just how this moral collective is supposed to exist as a coherent entity capable of exuding subordinate definitions, has unfortunately, never been adequately explained.
I think we are expected to take it on faith. Or maybe it’s just one taste among many.
DNW –
Yet another fantastic comment.
You know one of my hobby horses is existentialism, and one of the points you made hits on a sour spot I’m now trying to highlight in some of my academic work.
There is hardly any debate that the roots of existentialism lie in a particular style of Christian philosophy – not necessarily Protestant, but mostly Protestant – and most obviously, at least, in the work of Kierkegaard.
For my part, I love Kierkegaard, and no matter how Aristotelian-Thomist I become, I will always love Kierkegaard (just saying). My personal passion notwithstanding, the question of whether existentialism – the project of authentic personhood, freedom, and moral responsibility – makes any sense at all in a secular context is not raised all that often, or all that loudly when it is. This is odd.
In Alastair Hannay’s new translation of The Concept of Anxiety he writes an introduction that speaks, if read attentively, to the problem you noted in your comment. Bear with me here, I’ll have to be simultaneously long-winded and simplistic. But I think you’ll see the point.
The Hegelian view which Kierkegaard spent his substance fighting was basically that subjectivity (the individual, “subjective spirit” so called) and its attributes (conscience, character, moods, etc.) were there simply to harmonize with and instantiate, as it were, “objective spirit,” i.e., current forms and norms.
So, for Hegel, “sin” arises when the conscience takes the question of good and evil into its own hands and away from the hands of the collective – a kind of sociological version of the Fall.
The whole point of Kierkegaard’s rebuttal on behalf of the “single individual” was that the subject, and only the subject, could obtain knowledge of good and evil through faith in God and action inspired by Christ. The subject is only a subject properly speaking when subjected to something, something believed in, deferred to, and usually admired and emulated, but sometimes simply feared. In any case, Kierkegaard offered that the concern with subjectivity – with selfhood, freedom, and responsibility – is universal, and hence we’ll inevitably subject ourselves to something. That can – and emphatically should – be God. But if it isn’t God, then it is…
Well, to put it nicely, it is “Objective Spirit.” To put it accurately, though, it is the Collective, in one form or another (the Soviet, the People, the Fuhrer, the Dear Leader, the State, whatever).
The idea the lefties have seems to be something like a mutant hybrid of the worst of Kierkegaardian existentialism and Hegelian historicism. They want the depth psychology and vocabulary of the Dane, and the sweeping world-historical grandeur of the Swabian.
One might say: “Well, yeah – i.e., Marxism!”
Fair enough.
But it’s more like Marxism plus Heideggerian scented postmodernism (for short we can just say Rortyanism). Old School adamantine Marxism doesn’t look a whole lot like the left we see today, at least in style and presentation. What looks more like it is a Hegelian collectivism where the individual is given permission to say “But I’d rather do this, because this is what makes me ME.”
The me-ME idea is one that is so powerful it’s a bit like Justice Jackson’s “loaded gun,” lying around for the next deranged power-hungry demagogue to pick up and point. But, indeed, what content can it have when the only thing there to define it is an external object that is either an incomprehensible abstraction (the Objective Spirit, collective, etc.) or a crude biologism riddled with inanities and contradictions?
It’s like trying to combine libertinism (which is the logical end-point of existentialism without soul and God) with Spartan communism. It makes not a lick of sense, and I’m inclined to see it not as something to be understood intellectually but rather diagnosed psychologically or anthropologically. Ackler mentioned Aron, and he had a nice term for it in his book The Unfinished Revolution: Psychodrama. For it does express clashing urges in the human soul, the human psuche. But that is just the problem – it’s like a work of expressionist art, a kind of modern doggerel that we now see spilling out into the increasingly gray and dark world of entertainment.
It’s there in some form in all of the shows and movies, or at least the more critically acclaimed ones. The urge to libertinism; the threat to community this poses; the potentially stifling effects of the Community Spirit; the uneasy tension left at the conclusion when no real resolution is obtained. ‘Round and ’round we go. The only lasting impression left is a vague nausea.
It makes for some compelling drama. But poetry, if you will, is not a political philosophy (I always took this as the point of Socrates’ getting rid of the poets in the Republic). An expression of the messy contradictions of the human spirit is not a principle of prudent constitutional politics.
This is another place where Kierkegaard has a lot to say to us, particularly though his exposition of the category of the Interesting, that summum bonum of the esthetic life.
The left being fundamentally irreligious goes straight to the esthetic as its sphere of existence, top-to-bottom. Fundamentally, they can conceive of nothing like a struggle for salvation or redemption before an infinite, transcendent judge. So instead they can only seek to make life interesting (for them).
I suppose the pathological obsession with the interesting is rooted in their antipathy to religion, and it is this obsession which leads to what could be called their political expressionism. They see it as a way to redeem life – to make it bearable, in other words – by making it intriguing. “Compelling drama.” So they express every intense urge they have, be it for absolute license or absolute dictatorial rule, and drown themselves (and us) in the chaotic deluge this generates.
Apologies if the preceding is a bit unwieldy. It just popped into my head when I read your comment, and I needed to riff on it.
DNW:
I am not a psychologist. I was a psych major, and I have a master’s in MFT, which is quite different (although these terms are very confusing, I admit). In my graduate program Freud was barely mentioned.
My undergrad knowledge of psych is rusty, and it was mostly experimental psych rather than clinical. Freud was merely discussed for a week or so in a single course, “Personality Development.” So I can’t say if you’re correct in your characterization of his work, but I don’t think you are. My vague memory is that he asserted the primacy of guilt in human development, and was not interested in abolishing it, just in reducing the burden of people who were almost paralyzed by it when in fact they hadn’t done anything all that wrong. He was, however, as far as I can see, anti-religion.
It’s worth remembering that Washington was offered that type of power and he soundly rejected it. There was a truly great man and a truly great president.
Rachelle, not true. It wasn’t offered. Someone suggested it. But it wasn’t gonna happen. Anglo-Saxon culture at the time had a well established rule of law dating back at least to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The American War of Independence was a follow up on that war, fought for similar reasons of rule of law. We were not going to have a king.
I’ll add that Washington did not wish to be king, he left office after two terms setting in place that tradition that was finally broken by FDR.
But Washington was a product of his culture, a culture that valued rule of law. It was a long established English tradition, cemented for good by the 1688 Revolution (but predating it) that you could not be taxed without representation.
Also note, the English Revolution was also an American revolution, so our actual War of Independence was really our second revolution.
I always thought Republican efforts to pass the line item veto were a bad idea. Sure, it would be a good thing when you have a responsible man like Reagan in charge, but a bad thing with the likes of Obama.
One other thing Republicans must consider is that the people who work for the government tend to lean Democrat. The civil service tends to push its own agenda, working with someone like Obama and against a Reagan or Bush. Putting more power in the hands of the executive branch thereby increases the power of Democrat administrations much more then Republican ones.
Ackler: “However, I do wonder, I seriously wonder, how many of my otherwise decent, friendly and morally upright friends and colleagues on the left would passionately cheer and enthusiastically enable, if Obama did openly assume dictatorial power.”
On one hand, they can rationalize just about anything. But on the other hand, I don’t agree that they have a strongman dictatorial impulse. While Obama employs Weberian charismatic authority, which is characteristic of dictators, the Left’s power is their full-spectrum social cultural/political activist social movement, not the man. Obama is a valuable agent but not necessary for the Left.
That said, if the Left activist movement determined that their interests are best served with Obama or another personality donning the dictator’s cloak, then they would rationalize it – more likely by arguing the alternative, a version of BDS/anti-GOP, is intolerable rather than arguing for the beauty of dictatorship. Put in those terms, they might be uncomfortable, but they would accept it.
This aesthetic focus you mention, the modern left’s thrust toward “The Interesting”, and its allegiance to a creative expression, which is seen as forming reality post hoc, while simultaneously emanating from what, or a place (man) which is essentially nowhere and nothing, is probably way too often overlooked.
You hit it. “Redemption” through creative activity. Redemption from what? Why, nothing of course. LOL
I cannot at this moment remember whether it was Peter Berger, or Michael Novak, but one of them, in something they published back in the sixties and which I read 20 years later, offered up “art” as a paradigm in order to resolve the persistently perplexing question as to exactly ‘What are moral principles, fundamentally?’.
How are the moral principles grounded, or deduced, or formed? You can substitute “truths” or some other likely term for “principles”, as long as the gist of question asked remains directed at just what kind or reality it is that moral propositions are presumed to have.
With nothing objective to conform to, we make it up as we go along in the most comforting or sublime manner we can imagine … I guess.
But, within that presumptive framework, there is no essential “we” to be discovered either. “We” as individuals are taken to be a process with no enduring center and no objective point of reference.
Thus, all that existential talk of nothingness finally becomes somewhat clearer to people like me; though liberals may have through some psychological affinity understood it intuitively.
Nothingness is not on this take, some kind of super-attenuated hypothetical “out there” beyond the solar system, behind which there is an absence of God the law-giver, but rather, or better also, the complete lack of a formative essence or an objective reference point within the experiencing subject himself, eh?
I guess if one is really convinced of the absolute pointlessness, ultimately, of all events and actions, then it makes no sense to dully ask after the “meaning” or the “sense” of an urge; much less its ordinateness or its conformity to some non-existent principle.
There are under this scheme no reasons, and no destination, just will.
But, as you ask, the will or who, or what?
It’s clear that, as you point out, liberal morality is incoherent – from the standpoint of how we have always understood “morality” – no matter how you frame and re-frame it.
Modern liberals should, if they wish to be honest, come up with a new vocabulary entirely to express their desires. Something in the line of grunts of satisfaction and snorts of disapproval.
Not likely to be too efficacious when it comes to persuasion though.
My mistake. I assumed you were because of your mention of your practice.
What I am referring to here, is not Freudian ego psychotherapy and as practiced by Freud per se, but to certain core doctrines widely adapted. Such as the unconscious, as opposed to the conscious and rational as the human animal’s real driving force and probably the authentic man.
You might enjoy reviewing this stuff if you have not recently,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Guattari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan#Return_to_Freud
or even this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1966/psychoanalysis.htm
I think you are right that insofar as Freud himself was concerned guilt was a necessary condition for civilization. He even talked of things such as “perversion”, and seemed to believe in ordered and disordered sexuality.
And of course, re “all that wrong”, you like many of us probably asked your professors if it might not have been the case that what Freud was treating and investigating, was not so much universal human phenomena, as a kind of social class generated series of dysfunctions or phenomena more or less peculiar to fin de siecle Europe.
Nonetheless, his supposed core discovery of the unconscious, reconfigured man mentally and morally, much like Darwin did physically. Man, the artifact. Not of a providential creator, but of a processing, or kaleidoscopically pointless monistic materialism, right down to his non-existent core.
I think that “The Future of an Illusion” pretty well demonstrates that.
If you saw the Left as mankind’s new religion, You and Us All would be anti religion.
that is a quote from 1909, How to Study and Teaching How to Study (McMurry). The book was much cited prior to 1926, but it seems the “education” academia establishment has abandoned all the scholarship prior to 1930, which seem to synch up with a take over of the “collective” paradigm vice the earlier education of independent citizens.
It’s not really an unexpected problem, it is one of the problems cities present, vice organizing on the township or county level. Cities are collective organizations that by providing so many services reduce the the resident to a mere element of the collective. With the standard abuses that entails.
Things have progressed for the worse as state and the Federal government have undertaken tasks best left to local governments, or at least control of the tasks through funding and one-size-fits-all regulation.
The primary function of guilt is to generate faith and religion to counter it or to refine it into something beneficial to society. Humans eating food so that their children starved, was something guilt was designed to stop. If Freud was to reduce guilt, he probably disliked how religion emphasized guilt consciously while providing a spiritual, not psychological, release. Although the spirit was the psychological. And the body was also connected to the spirit and mind.
So Freud was looking at it in one direction, but religion had looked at the same issue from the ancient perspective.
Martial arts and warriors had looked at it from the physical perspective, linking to the mind and spirit.