Liberalism has been hijacked. We failed to treasure liberty so it has been infiltrated by authoritarian elites with a superiority complex but are in fact incompetent.
The government is the moochers not the producers. The global institutions need to be defunded and dismantled as they are totalitarian power hungry robber barons.
This is a common perception, but Deenen pretty much demolishes it in Why Liberalism Failed. Lockean liberalism has simply reached its illogical endpoint. A philosophy whose highest good is the removal of limitations on individual will was always going to end up celebrating abortion, drag queens, unrestricted trade, sexual deviance, etc...
The same credo that liberated a black woman from the constraints of slavery in 1860, liberated her granddaughter from the constraints of voting in 1910, liberated her granddaughter from the constraints of sexual behavior in 1960, and is now liberating her granddaughter from the constraints of biology itself. It wasn't hijacked; liberalism is liberationist. It must always have something to transgress or it will die.
I won’t disagree with your assessment. Personally I was never a liberal. I was libertarian and I recognized some problems there as well. The issue today is that authoritarians or anti liberals or some new form of the two have taken advantage of the tolerance of liberals and dragged them into chaos.
"a part of the success of those Enlightenment ideas was that they hugely benefitted – paradoxically and unwittingly – from the persistence of traditions and social norms against which they had set themselves. These long pre-Enlightenment Classical and Christian traditions underpinned the new ideas and nourished them even as they were Progressively being eroded and supplanted by them."
This iparallels (and includes) an insight I wrote about that the "first wave" of the counterculture, the older baby boomers, were able to cut loose with sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, and turn it into fairly serious social/spiritual exploration/evolution, and come out of it all largely the better for it (with some casualties, of course), precisely BECAUSE of the Fifties moral and social straitjacket we'd grown up in. We had all that structure built into us, which enabled us to rebel against against it relatively constructively. Later cohorts that mimicked our revels didn't have those built-in controls.
Speaking for myself, and philosophically buying into communalism, free love, complete tolerance for all individual forms of express and public behavior, then for a period of maybe 5 years living thru this non-system and seeing firsthand that it failed to deliver a better, more satisfying society, the counter-culture era identified a lot of attractive ideas that could not work--and very likely will *never* work in a large diffuse population.
It showed me early, and in concrete fashion, that perhaps there were solid reasons for many traditional practices/values.
The Puritans in Plymouth had the same experience. William Bradford's On Plymouth Plantation talks about how they tried communal ownership for the first year, but it didn't work. One of the reasons they had such a good harvest is the second year was that they adopted a limited form of private property and thus everyone was motivated to produce to the best of his ability.
I'm of the same era--OG Boomer--and now that you mention it, after my experimentation, which predictably often led to unexpected, undesirable consequence, I could gradually "come back" to a more traditionalist normalcy--e.g., that of my parents' generation. Comfortable gender roles, monogamous heterosexual domestic relationships, personal responsibility for one's actions and decisions.
Subsequent generations, mostly starting with the Millennials, may never have been exposed to this fairly rigid traditionalist foundation, and hence when their experimentation failed to give the expected satisfaction and/or comfort, had no such refuge. There therefore remained--and often still remain--unmoored and disoriented.
I agree. In so many fields society seems to have lost the ability to grow organically whilst maintains its core common value system. In fact culturally we have gone backwards. We live in an age where anything older than 20 years is going to be ignored, so nothing is informed by past styles. As you said, each generation now retained less and less of past heritage.
Popular music is a good example of this. Back in the 60s and 70s artists could be influenced by all sorts of music from the past and from other cultures. But with each year that has gone those influences have diminished so that modern music is really anodyne of offensive rap crap.
Not sure how constructive that rebellion was. I think you give it too much credit. I remember the 60's as a surpassingly depressing time, and perhaps a low point of Western civilisation.
As a mass movement the counterculture certainly was (or quickly became) destructive, inane, and self-indulgent in many ways, but for some, maybe many people, there was a serious and sincere core to it—and those people may have owed that to their "square" fifties upbringing and more classical education.
Yeah, I'm about your age, and my image of the Great Cultural Unraveling is related to Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey" where the astronaut, lured outside the spaceship by the evil computer Hal, has his lifeline snipped, and is left spinning helplessly into the void.....wonderful article and series!
"In its pre-Enlightenment conception, he argues, it was a learned self-governance through which one liberated oneself from base and destructive passions. Its modern conception, by contrast, emphasises the freeing of oneself from constraints....a shuffling off of yokes, both personal/psychological and societal/traditional:"
Yeah, the difference between the enlightenment and the Renaissance is the reformation. Enlightenment is the protestant reformation where salvation is equally accessible where the Renaissance man focused on sanctification in a Greek humanist concept which is why the Renaissance man built upwards from where they were (e.g. painting to war engineer to physics to inventions etc) where enlightenment worked downwards from wherever rationalism was to manners, encyclopedia and founding more empirical subjects (e.g. geometry was perceived this way) into rational ones (e.g. algebra). It really did change a whole perception even if prots don't deny sanctification (and technically don't disagree with rcc or eo).
"Key to this, in my view, has been the entry into the blood-stream of the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self love....one that needs correcting via the pop-therapeutic embrace of something called Self Esteem. In the post-60’s decades, self-esteem’s central importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the moral/philosophical spectrum from Left to Right."
I watched the What's My Line TV show from the, I think, 60s first run then the 70s and you see the same stars completely different. They are turbo self conscious and even egotistical. It's such a headrush what a transformation that is. I can only imagine experiencing that. They had to have felt like they were growing but how is self consciousness growing?
"2. A gradual reduction in the social mores and inhibitions that form a big part of how a civilisation holds criminality and licentiousness in check. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' some human appetites that would be better repressed. [* see note 2 below]"
In my American history class [in 1962-63] I don't recall ever hearing about the Romantic Age, but only references to Emerson and Walden and the Transcendentalists. I only became aware of the Romantics as a sub element of history, and using that label, as a mature adult. Even now it strikes me that they had at best only a modest impact vs. the growing scientific knowledge and benefits from industrial prosperity before and beyond the Civil War.
I also don't recall it being explicitly described in my English lit classes either, even though we did have exposure to Byron et al.
In terms of your allusions to hyper individualism, I learned from Larry Siedentop's book Inventing the Individual that our Western cultural relationship to the individual as a prime element of society and law, with concomitent rights, etc., evolved from or was derived from the prior Christian (and probably Jewish) outlook: man made in the image of God, etc. Non Western cultures don't have this core belief, although Japan, Korea, and others have come around to some degree in response to the clear advantage of republican government over other forms.
Thanks for these comments ssri. The great significance of Romanticism, as I tried to explain, was that it was this that turbo-charged the individualism part of the Liberal Individualism dyad..... eventually leading to too much Me Me Me narcissism. It also led to the copycat pseudo-individualism that I discussed.
Your comment makes me wonder if narcissism is something that is nurtured or is native to those born that way. I recall a story some years ago about Trump attending some bridge opening in NY as a young man, wherein the mayor was prominent but the actual architect for the bridge was essentially ignored. Supposed Trump vowed from that experience to promote his name and fame and not remain an anonymous "nobody" contributor. He is also reported to have been something of a bully and trouble maker even as a teen, so it is equally likely he was born that way? Or he still has daddy issues trying to measure up to his father's expectations?
But going forward I would rather have Trump's narcissism than Biden's or Obama's.
I start my civics class every semester with the Declaration and I challenge my students to get to "all men are created equal" without starting from "man made in the image of God". I've been doing it for 8 years. It's not possible. Human rights have to have a transcendental source of some kind; apes (even really smart apes) don't have rights. Apes live not by "natural law" but by "jungle law", and as I point out to my students, jungle law is a very brutal environment, especially for women and weaker men.
Perhaps I was not clear about my views, or you failed to extract them from my text?
I don't take the "image of God" to be a real (and divine) representation of humans*, but a human created metaphor, probably so early thinkers could separate themselves from the animals* in some moralistic level way? I take that view as a cultural "discovery", along with the aspects of "self evidence" about rights. If by "it's not possible" you mean it cannot be achieved without reference to a fully accepted (psychological) reliance on a divine source, then I suspect you have failed to appreciate some of your students' responses. Possibly you have introduced your own transdendence desire onto your position (essentially a pro divinity bias?).
Many atheists and agnostics assert that we can be moral without God. We come to accept the merit and wisdom of human social and legal experience captured in the Torah or NT, and the benefits such adoption has across society in promoting rule of law and related civility. Those writers should have learned something from the previous 8000 years of settled civilizations, especially after the "discovery" of writing. We hold this view of morality as a derivation of our evolved instinctual nature as ultra-social anaimals (see Michael Tomasello), wherein feelings of reciprocity, theory of mind, and a very strong desire for social acceptance contribute to levels of cooperation among humans that no other mammal species demonstrates [ants, bees, etc., don't count in this discussion.] From this evolved mental foundation various cultures have expanded these feelings and capabilities into a variety of moral and legal structues, some more successful than others in providing safety, peace, and prosperity.
I still struggle to understand discussions of natural law or natural rights as expressed by most lawyers and political commentators, if and when they fail to introduce any discussion of evolutionary psychology as providing us with a complement of instinctual inherited mental capabilities. Ambiguous references to "nature" are just not deep enough to fully explore this aspect of our "human nature" and their legal underpinnings. The psychologists and neuroscientists are beavering away to obtain better answers, but the variability in human responses probably makes definitive conclusions more difficult.
*Humans are clearing derived and evolved (physically and mentally) from the image of a common ancestral ape from 6 or 7 million years ago. The homid fossil record is really quite clear on this, coupled with more recent DNA studies. Any discussion of this feature of humanity that does not include this data is certainly flawed.
Of course atheists can be good people. But it is not possible to derive or defend a universal moral order without some kind of transcendental source. Steven Pinker has spilled gallons of ink over his career trying and failing to do this.
The logic is simple: any moral law defined by man can be redefined by man. Your own comment highlights the problem, "we come to accept the merit and wisdom of human social and legal experience captured in the Torah or NT, and the benefits such adoption has across society in promoting rule of law and related civility." By your logic, if the "wisdom of the Torah" (let's say "thou shalt not kill") ceased to "promote civility", it would be morally permissible, even necessary, to alter it and permit murder. A moral law, even rooted in some kind of collective wisdom, can never be universal.
This is not a new observation; it goes all the way back to Aristotle.
I put Inventing the Individual on hold from my library. Thanks for the recommendation.
Your response presents an opportunity for me to repeat something I have stated "somewhere" several times. Namely, we have people who claim that morality must be absolute, irremediable, "set in stone" (as on stone tablets). And we have people who claim morality is all relative and changeable. I say, it has elements of both. The (sort of) absolute element is our evolved mental states or general human psychology, including that mix of aggression and cooperation, love and hate, etc., over which we have little or no direct control, as it is determined by the random flucuations of DNA combinations at conception [providing a strong argument for pro-life positions, by the way]. But humans in general have this psychology in common, perhaps dismissing the 4% of the population that are presumed to be psychopaths? Conversely, the cultural element of morality is all over the place. In fact the existance of "honor killing" in tribal and/or Islamic cultures is an example of a morality that allows and even demands such killing to preserve family honor and thus civility among various families/clans/ tribes.
Islamic morality is not universally equal to Christian (or Judaic) morality by any means (see Robert Spencer, Bill Warner, et al.) It is certainly not a "religion of peace" as a once famous person announced. Then again, a barren and hostile desert is a very different environment that lush grasslands or wooded forests. Different survival criteria may be (or seem to be) needed?
Perhaps for me, evolution by natural selection is a form of transcendence, in that it is a marvelous and beautiful "design solution" to the issue of how do you create and then maintian life on a planet and in a universe subject to constant changes in environment? There are limits to how far this can work, but accepting death as non-survival of the less well adapted (a passive result of DNA changes and environmental conditions - no teleology required!). But if there is an intelligent designer, that design approach has a lot to offer as a solution.
Yes, I was very impressed with his book Dominion, having read it after reading Siedentop's Inventing the Indivual. Holland seems to have taken the celebrity from his publication and become the equivalent of Carl Sagen in the realm of historians, with a multitude of public presentations and podcasts, outclassing even the more astute Niall Ferguson. Holland does cause us to recognize things we might miss, saying things that are "obvious" and where the response is "of course that's right!", but we don't appreciate it until he has said it.
Scientific advances have called into question many of the details of religious scripture (across almost all faiths?). But we have evolved and survived based on a level of social cooperation derived from accepting some set of common beliefs (and the more logically absurd the beliefs the more we trust those who hold them in common with ourselves). It seems some greater understanding for a (classically) liberal path forward may still come from study of evolutionary psychology and neuroscientific studies of various kinds. The human mind remains a largely unknown frontier. For me personally, it remains a major mystery of my life as to why so many otherwise very intelligent people are also devout religious believers while I and many others have settled for or adopted a much more secular outlook.
So the issue remains for us to find or adopt some belief system that is logical and scientific, but also congnizant of our "original sin" and fallen natures. Our founders made a good start with the Constitution, but more is still needed.
"....it remains a major mystery of my life as to why so many otherwise very intelligent people are also devout religious believers ..."
It is because we believe it is true. Many of us have looked very deeply into religious belief and can find no flaws in Christian belief, scientific or otherwise.
The mystery is what happens before life begins or after life ends and having a hopeful belief system to help understand that mystery is an intelligent approach to life, imo. A belief system by definition is not logical or scientific.
I don't happen to agree with either of your two statements, but they do provide good examples of what I am struggling to understand from those with a more believing mindset.
I used to often ask "what is wrong with me that I don't believe as they do?" and the reverse of "what is wrong with them that they don't believe as I do?"
I finally decided there is nothing "wrong" with either side, but that we exist along a sprectrum of evolved psychological preferences for experiencing "transcendence", with some people desiring that experience more strongly than some of the rest of us. Some people can satisfy that desire without reference to a divine source or force; others not so much. This is similar in kind to the spectra (or range) of the many capabilities we possess, such as mathematical, musical, artistic, athletic, alpha vs beta, introvert vs. extrovert, photographic or auditory memory, etc.
Cannot disagree more. God gave us a brain and we should use logic and science to seek truth. I have been involved in science since third grade (!), been a researcher in grad school with viral DNA transcription, and spent 40 years as an intensive care doc and anesthesiologist. Based on logic and science, everything points to a creator God and the truth of Christianity. I did not want to believe this, but I followed the science and this is where it led.
Do we perhaps need to distinguish between the French Englightenment philosophes, seeped more deeply in an aristocratic milieu, along with a still somewhat corrupt Catholic Church justifiably worthy of distain and rejection, vs. the Scottish/English and then American Enlightenment contributors? These latter had a culture of common law and Protestant work ethic to help them restrain liberty. I think the phrase "liberty is not license" captures this idea. But also I understand (from Newt Gingrich) that the idea behind "pursuit of happiness" meant for the colonial leaders the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, with virtue being first personal approbrium and behavior (aka reputation). When this was practiced widely, the result was a society wide level of virtue. This in turn was what was required for a successful goverment "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- i.e., citizen sovereignty and self governance.
"Liberalism" in itself has not failed. It has however received a whole new meaning, that has nothing to do with the concept at its inception. Just like "fascism" no longer has the same meaning now as it had in the 30's of the previous century, or like "communism" was a totally different thing in Marx's day as it is now.
As you quote Deneen in your article: "In its pre-Enlightenment conception, he [Deneen] argues, it was a learned self-governance through which one liberated oneself from base and destructive passions."
Liberalism was striving to achieve greater liberty, in the full realization that more liberty comes with greater responsibility.
What people call "liberalism" these days is a complete perversion of liberty: this woke cult comes with a complete rejection of any responsibility of personal actions or choices. Instead, the woke cult adherents are quick to label themselves "victims" if personal choices have bad outcomes. They insist others are to blame for their misfortune and that the government solve their problems. Because they reject personal responsibility, they are clamoring for ever greater government control, which is of course antithesis to actual liberty.
Semantics, eh?! I'll never forget seeing John 'the Duke' Wayne on the Dick Cavett show and the Duke made a concise definition of what a classical liberal is. He stated that a true liberal is an open-minded individual willing to look at all sides of a situation and then make a decision. He went on to call himself a liberal and said he makes all his political and life decisions with that viewpoint.
Progressives, as they like to be called in the 21st century are much more like fascists than liberals.
Like me ( and Bertrand ;-) ), almost anyone who has delved into linear development of 'philosophy' concludes that there is never really any 'great leap forward'. Its usually a few inches at a time as the crank-handle is turned , and the gearbox transfers that Herculean effort into half a wheel's circumference forward......from the stall of the last Hercules's efforts, to the new line in the sand.
The best metaphor I can indite is the 'Youtube' "Philosopher "X" in Ten minutes' series.
So Philosopher X is framed in the light of Philosopher 'W' for 3 minutes, before his own unique magnificent contribution to the genre is perfectly well explained in another 3 minutes. The last period is spent discussing his relationship with his forthcoming nemesis (Philosopher Y) for the last three. A lifetime's effort catalogued in 3 minutes....no wonder they mostly go mad.
Post-Modernists are today's dominant Philosophical crankers - as Dogmatic as any Opus Dei self-flagellant, yet as high and loved-up as any 'E' crew raver, ...united by their group disdain of the 'squares'
I stopped at Camus....the Absurdist.
I expect I'll never bother with an attempt to crank the handle again.
Our increasing slide to insanity, Chaos, unTruth, inJustice, disOrder, Hell as acceptable since the early 1960's Satanic-Modernist's capture of the Vatican.
What is needed? to reverse or remove laws and policies that harms each of our own and entire society's mental intellect, judgment, and moral-blindness, that for most of history would be considered insane or evil like; abortion, birth-control, divorce, father-children and parents-children separations directed by State, sex assignment as a choice, drugs and sexual mutilations, open televised genocide, .., treated as acceptable, raised with insanities as normal or praiseworthy, that harms us all and moral-blinding that increases over time, more insane and amoral sickness.
This whole essay reminds me of the words of John Adams: "We have no Government capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry would break our constitution as a whale goes through a net."
Many people know that quote, but the full context is important.
Adams is writing to a group of militia officers lamenting the results of the French revolution. (He never says "France", but his audience knows). Unbeknownst to Adams, Napoleon is waiting in the wings to put an end to the industrial-scale head-severing and restore order in Paris. Adams is contrasting the licentiousness and militant secularism present in France with the liberalism augmenting a Christian moral order present in America.
That Christian moral order is now gone: 2 millennia of cultural inertia run down by Locke in a couple of centuries. We haven't gotten to the industrial scale severing of heads (yet) but licentiousness and militant secularism... check and check. Morally, we look more like revolutionary France than 1900's America. And that's liberalism's fault. It liberated us from all constraints, including moral law. Adams was one of the few founders who, like Tocqueville, saw this potential from the beginning. That's why he ends this letter stating that America is intended for "a moral and religious people and wholly inadequate for the governance of any other."
Lockean liberalism rests on a shared, pre-liberal, moral order which it can neither derive nor defend. It did some amazing things, liberating us from constraints of race, class, sex, etc... but it won't stop until it explodes the entire society in an orgy of Huxleyan proportions. Both political parties are now trying to kill it before it kills us. Left and Right are both peddling various forms of a "value-laden" (as opposed to Locke's "value-neutral") state: whether progressive wokeness, Catholic integralism, MAGA nationalism, or Bernie socialism. There are still quite a few people (Bari Weiss, Andrey Sullivan, David French, David Brooks, Nikki Haley, etc...) playing Weekend at Bernie's with John Locke's philosophical corpse, but it's dead. The only question is what's going to replace it.
I have to say that, having identified the problem presciently in Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen's Regime Change is a real let down. His "solutions" are so mild that it's clear he is far more bound to Lockean liberalism than he lets on.
I agree with you about Deneen. I got two valuable insights from Why Liberalism Failed. (I flagged them both in this essay: 1) the two contrasting understandings of Liberty and 2) The Enlightenment's paradoxical benefitting from the social mores it tried to supplant.) But I got all this from the Introduction....and the suceeding chapters were mostly just repetition. I also bought Regime Change but gave up after a few pages unimpressed (although to be fair, I can rarely finish a non-fiction book, generally finding far more wisdom to be found in novels).
"finding far more wisdom in novels". A very interesting comment, Graham, and one that I'm just now starting to realize myself. Not ready to start a poetry reading club yet, but I'm slowly leaving my highly rationalistic framework.
The contemporary phenomenon you are describing draws mostly from postmodern and poststructuralist thought as far as I can see. This is actually much more of a backlash against enlightenment rationality, universal truths, meta-narratives and the 'believe' in progress. It emphasizes small subjective narratives and pluriformity/difference, in theory at least. Even though a lot of it seems hyper-liberal in aspiration, I think it has actually more in common with romanticism. Also, if you look into it, a lot of postmodernism fundamentally applies Nietzschean thought instead of enlightenment thought and classical liberalism.
"2. A gradual reduction in the social mores and inhibitions that form a big part of how a civilisation holds criminality and licentiousness in check. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' some human appetites that would be better repressed."
How to start to reverse this - to shove our nasty deprived perverse self-centered skeletons back into the closets? Some Public Pain&Shame, perhaps?
- Each local community would have a Judgment-Committee of 5 to 9 that are fathers or grandfathers that have raised children well that displays good prudent Judgment, and they would rule on local violations of good social behavior for adults 15-years and older. Such violations as defined to be against good social order, such as; lies, stealing, disrespecting social-standards, etc.
In today's society False-Witnessing, Lying, harming the reputation of others cannot be corrected, so such abusers will never benefit in Loving Correction – a punishment to make clear they behaved badly and motivation to not repeat the abuse. Using Public Pain&Shame will pay the wages of their sin.
Punishment involves public pain and shame. Once a week, those to be punished would be taken to a public place like a park or public building courtyard and restrained to an anchor, and a collar attached to their neck, and for the directed period defined by the Judgment-Committee, the length of time that the collar delivers the taser sentence.
Those people that do not want to be punished need only to be respectful to those in their community and if they make a mistake, they personally engage those they harmed and give satisfaction for the damage, if possible. If not, then the Judgment-Committee is used.
Those of age 14-years old would be required to view at least 3 of these punishments before turning 15-years old and be a risk of the same punishments for those community social crimes.
- Because of the changes to liberty, the over-reach of government and the feminization of society it is no longer possible to personally punish those that disrespect or damage the reputation of others. It was once possible to respond with measured violence to correct such abuse from others, without the police and courts being called. Since then the suppression of such correction has resulted in widespread disrespect and reputation damage with no punishment. A society of untrustworthy liars where we use to have a society of trust.
I propose a return of the concept of a duel. If someone is disrespected or suffers a harm, then they may ask for 'Satisfaction' and if the abuser refuses to provide acquitted satisfaction for the harm, they caused then a duel may be scheduled.
The duel would be in a place defined for have it, with supervision, and proper equipment. A local police station, court-house, or other public location.
A room with two stations, each with a chair and a button at. The two people write-up the grievances to be placed in the Public Database (later the video of the event attached.) and then each person has a neck-collar locked into place and when both buttons are pressed, then both the collars start to deliver the same taser pain to each at same time, starting low-power and increasing. The tasering does not stop until both buttons are released.
If the person refuses to duel, then becomes an automatic civil punishment; public pain and shame.
- #PublicDataBase, an international public database to warn others of misbehavior of people and organizations, to include all relevant crimes against human dignity that is below or excluded from criminal law – and all people would have access to such. Those accused could record their rebuttal to the accusation.
A central international site where anyone can enter a Record for anyone, groups, businesses, that has damaged social trust; False Witnessed, broke promises, refused to return borrowed objects or pay small loans, .. or for companies that failed to complete obligations, etc.
The Records would be back-connected to those filing them, no anonymous filings. Proper use of this service would be to read the Record, the Rebuttal, and the Records of those who filed, so the user may gauge the Record filer has merit, and to what extent it is likely significant.
Those people filing frivolous Records would damage their reputation and display their untrustworthiness.
The root cause of the liberal pathology, is its hatred of religion - and of Christianity in particular.
With its dismissal of Christian beliefs as "superstitions" - as if its own enthusiasms weren't the real superstitions. And as if science and reason (and philosophy) could fill the gap left by Christianity.
Worse, liberalism forgets that the West was built on Christianity; no Christianity, no West, whether in 725 AD or 2025 AD.
Meanwhile a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian who is also a pathological liar and life-long grifter will in 3 weeks time become the US President.
Narcissus on steroids.
He is surrounded by similar toxic ultra narcissistic totally godless personalities - some/many of which pretend to be religious.
Some/many so called conservatives pretend that he is "God's" chosen vehicle to re-Christianize America or bring "God" back to the center-pole of US culture.
He was a key-note speaker (ranter) at the Gabfest introduced via these two essays. Note the now well known so called conservative politician featured in these essays. And the author/book that he has endorsed.
Note 2 — you admit you don’t have anything to support your assertion. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was that it insisted that any assertion be supported by objective evidence, so I understand why you now reject it.
The question I always ask anyone who thinks individualism is bad: if each individual person can’t make decisions for herself, who should make those decisions?
“ Adducing empirical evidence to ‘prove’ this would, however, take a whole essay in itself and is a subject very muddied by ‘progressive’ capture of criminal justice systems and hence of the kinds of data that they generate.”
That statement is an admission you don’t have anything evidence to support your assertion and are not going to look for any.
Dennen's Why Liberalism Failed (which Graham references here) lays out this case in great detail. I think Graham does a decent job here (given space constraints) as well, but if you really want a full evidentiary hearing, read Deneen.
I own that book and need to read it, but I need to work up the energy to wade through Deneen’s purple prose. Is there some reason right wingers always write like they’re stuck in 1750?
Graham's comment elsewhere here is correct. You could probably get away with he first couple of chapters since the rest is examples.
In your original comment, you asked, "if each individual person can’t make decisions for herself, who should make those decisions?" Who decides?
We decide collectively. We collectively put up the guardrails that govern behavior. We collectively make tax policy. We collectively decide what substances are permissible to consume and which aren't. We collectively rule some things sacred and others profane. And despite how individualistic it is, even modern America does this.
Can collectivism be taken too far? Absolutely! That's always a risk since it produces an inefficient, stultifying society (USSR comes to mind). But extreme individualism carries its own risks to efficiency, to virtue, to cultural stability. These two errors are the Scylla and Charybdis of every human society.
(Note, that's not the argument Deneen makes; that's more Burke or Buckley.)
Liberalism has been hijacked. We failed to treasure liberty so it has been infiltrated by authoritarian elites with a superiority complex but are in fact incompetent.
The government is the moochers not the producers. The global institutions need to be defunded and dismantled as they are totalitarian power hungry robber barons.
This is a common perception, but Deenen pretty much demolishes it in Why Liberalism Failed. Lockean liberalism has simply reached its illogical endpoint. A philosophy whose highest good is the removal of limitations on individual will was always going to end up celebrating abortion, drag queens, unrestricted trade, sexual deviance, etc...
The same credo that liberated a black woman from the constraints of slavery in 1860, liberated her granddaughter from the constraints of voting in 1910, liberated her granddaughter from the constraints of sexual behavior in 1960, and is now liberating her granddaughter from the constraints of biology itself. It wasn't hijacked; liberalism is liberationist. It must always have something to transgress or it will die.
I won’t disagree with your assessment. Personally I was never a liberal. I was libertarian and I recognized some problems there as well. The issue today is that authoritarians or anti liberals or some new form of the two have taken advantage of the tolerance of liberals and dragged them into chaos.
"a part of the success of those Enlightenment ideas was that they hugely benefitted – paradoxically and unwittingly – from the persistence of traditions and social norms against which they had set themselves. These long pre-Enlightenment Classical and Christian traditions underpinned the new ideas and nourished them even as they were Progressively being eroded and supplanted by them."
This iparallels (and includes) an insight I wrote about that the "first wave" of the counterculture, the older baby boomers, were able to cut loose with sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, and turn it into fairly serious social/spiritual exploration/evolution, and come out of it all largely the better for it (with some casualties, of course), precisely BECAUSE of the Fifties moral and social straitjacket we'd grown up in. We had all that structure built into us, which enabled us to rebel against against it relatively constructively. Later cohorts that mimicked our revels didn't have those built-in controls.
Yes that's an interesting parallel. I do wonder though how many really came out of the counterculture on the plus side....other than pop stars!
Speaking for myself, and philosophically buying into communalism, free love, complete tolerance for all individual forms of express and public behavior, then for a period of maybe 5 years living thru this non-system and seeing firsthand that it failed to deliver a better, more satisfying society, the counter-culture era identified a lot of attractive ideas that could not work--and very likely will *never* work in a large diffuse population.
It showed me early, and in concrete fashion, that perhaps there were solid reasons for many traditional practices/values.
The Puritans in Plymouth had the same experience. William Bradford's On Plymouth Plantation talks about how they tried communal ownership for the first year, but it didn't work. One of the reasons they had such a good harvest is the second year was that they adopted a limited form of private property and thus everyone was motivated to produce to the best of his ability.
I'm speaking for myself, of course (but not only). I came out of it VASTLY on the plus side, partly because I never went all the way into it.
Indeed.
I'm of the same era--OG Boomer--and now that you mention it, after my experimentation, which predictably often led to unexpected, undesirable consequence, I could gradually "come back" to a more traditionalist normalcy--e.g., that of my parents' generation. Comfortable gender roles, monogamous heterosexual domestic relationships, personal responsibility for one's actions and decisions.
Subsequent generations, mostly starting with the Millennials, may never have been exposed to this fairly rigid traditionalist foundation, and hence when their experimentation failed to give the expected satisfaction and/or comfort, had no such refuge. There therefore remained--and often still remain--unmoored and disoriented.
I agree. In so many fields society seems to have lost the ability to grow organically whilst maintains its core common value system. In fact culturally we have gone backwards. We live in an age where anything older than 20 years is going to be ignored, so nothing is informed by past styles. As you said, each generation now retained less and less of past heritage.
Popular music is a good example of this. Back in the 60s and 70s artists could be influenced by all sorts of music from the past and from other cultures. But with each year that has gone those influences have diminished so that modern music is really anodyne of offensive rap crap.
Not sure how constructive that rebellion was. I think you give it too much credit. I remember the 60's as a surpassingly depressing time, and perhaps a low point of Western civilisation.
As a mass movement the counterculture certainly was (or quickly became) destructive, inane, and self-indulgent in many ways, but for some, maybe many people, there was a serious and sincere core to it—and those people may have owed that to their "square" fifties upbringing and more classical education.
What a fantastic comment! Spot on!
Yeah, I'm about your age, and my image of the Great Cultural Unraveling is related to Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey" where the astronaut, lured outside the spaceship by the evil computer Hal, has his lifeline snipped, and is left spinning helplessly into the void.....wonderful article and series!
Thank you.
"In its pre-Enlightenment conception, he argues, it was a learned self-governance through which one liberated oneself from base and destructive passions. Its modern conception, by contrast, emphasises the freeing of oneself from constraints....a shuffling off of yokes, both personal/psychological and societal/traditional:"
Yeah, the difference between the enlightenment and the Renaissance is the reformation. Enlightenment is the protestant reformation where salvation is equally accessible where the Renaissance man focused on sanctification in a Greek humanist concept which is why the Renaissance man built upwards from where they were (e.g. painting to war engineer to physics to inventions etc) where enlightenment worked downwards from wherever rationalism was to manners, encyclopedia and founding more empirical subjects (e.g. geometry was perceived this way) into rational ones (e.g. algebra). It really did change a whole perception even if prots don't deny sanctification (and technically don't disagree with rcc or eo).
"Key to this, in my view, has been the entry into the blood-stream of the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self love....one that needs correcting via the pop-therapeutic embrace of something called Self Esteem. In the post-60’s decades, self-esteem’s central importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the moral/philosophical spectrum from Left to Right."
I watched the What's My Line TV show from the, I think, 60s first run then the 70s and you see the same stars completely different. They are turbo self conscious and even egotistical. It's such a headrush what a transformation that is. I can only imagine experiencing that. They had to have felt like they were growing but how is self consciousness growing?
"2. A gradual reduction in the social mores and inhibitions that form a big part of how a civilisation holds criminality and licentiousness in check. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' some human appetites that would be better repressed. [* see note 2 below]"
That's great stuff.
Thank you Shawn.
In my American history class [in 1962-63] I don't recall ever hearing about the Romantic Age, but only references to Emerson and Walden and the Transcendentalists. I only became aware of the Romantics as a sub element of history, and using that label, as a mature adult. Even now it strikes me that they had at best only a modest impact vs. the growing scientific knowledge and benefits from industrial prosperity before and beyond the Civil War.
I also don't recall it being explicitly described in my English lit classes either, even though we did have exposure to Byron et al.
In terms of your allusions to hyper individualism, I learned from Larry Siedentop's book Inventing the Individual that our Western cultural relationship to the individual as a prime element of society and law, with concomitent rights, etc., evolved from or was derived from the prior Christian (and probably Jewish) outlook: man made in the image of God, etc. Non Western cultures don't have this core belief, although Japan, Korea, and others have come around to some degree in response to the clear advantage of republican government over other forms.
Thanks for these comments ssri. The great significance of Romanticism, as I tried to explain, was that it was this that turbo-charged the individualism part of the Liberal Individualism dyad..... eventually leading to too much Me Me Me narcissism. It also led to the copycat pseudo-individualism that I discussed.
Your comment makes me wonder if narcissism is something that is nurtured or is native to those born that way. I recall a story some years ago about Trump attending some bridge opening in NY as a young man, wherein the mayor was prominent but the actual architect for the bridge was essentially ignored. Supposed Trump vowed from that experience to promote his name and fame and not remain an anonymous "nobody" contributor. He is also reported to have been something of a bully and trouble maker even as a teen, so it is equally likely he was born that way? Or he still has daddy issues trying to measure up to his father's expectations?
But going forward I would rather have Trump's narcissism than Biden's or Obama's.
I start my civics class every semester with the Declaration and I challenge my students to get to "all men are created equal" without starting from "man made in the image of God". I've been doing it for 8 years. It's not possible. Human rights have to have a transcendental source of some kind; apes (even really smart apes) don't have rights. Apes live not by "natural law" but by "jungle law", and as I point out to my students, jungle law is a very brutal environment, especially for women and weaker men.
Glad to see you get this. Too many people do not.
Perhaps I was not clear about my views, or you failed to extract them from my text?
I don't take the "image of God" to be a real (and divine) representation of humans*, but a human created metaphor, probably so early thinkers could separate themselves from the animals* in some moralistic level way? I take that view as a cultural "discovery", along with the aspects of "self evidence" about rights. If by "it's not possible" you mean it cannot be achieved without reference to a fully accepted (psychological) reliance on a divine source, then I suspect you have failed to appreciate some of your students' responses. Possibly you have introduced your own transdendence desire onto your position (essentially a pro divinity bias?).
Many atheists and agnostics assert that we can be moral without God. We come to accept the merit and wisdom of human social and legal experience captured in the Torah or NT, and the benefits such adoption has across society in promoting rule of law and related civility. Those writers should have learned something from the previous 8000 years of settled civilizations, especially after the "discovery" of writing. We hold this view of morality as a derivation of our evolved instinctual nature as ultra-social anaimals (see Michael Tomasello), wherein feelings of reciprocity, theory of mind, and a very strong desire for social acceptance contribute to levels of cooperation among humans that no other mammal species demonstrates [ants, bees, etc., don't count in this discussion.] From this evolved mental foundation various cultures have expanded these feelings and capabilities into a variety of moral and legal structues, some more successful than others in providing safety, peace, and prosperity.
I still struggle to understand discussions of natural law or natural rights as expressed by most lawyers and political commentators, if and when they fail to introduce any discussion of evolutionary psychology as providing us with a complement of instinctual inherited mental capabilities. Ambiguous references to "nature" are just not deep enough to fully explore this aspect of our "human nature" and their legal underpinnings. The psychologists and neuroscientists are beavering away to obtain better answers, but the variability in human responses probably makes definitive conclusions more difficult.
*Humans are clearing derived and evolved (physically and mentally) from the image of a common ancestral ape from 6 or 7 million years ago. The homid fossil record is really quite clear on this, coupled with more recent DNA studies. Any discussion of this feature of humanity that does not include this data is certainly flawed.
Of course atheists can be good people. But it is not possible to derive or defend a universal moral order without some kind of transcendental source. Steven Pinker has spilled gallons of ink over his career trying and failing to do this.
The logic is simple: any moral law defined by man can be redefined by man. Your own comment highlights the problem, "we come to accept the merit and wisdom of human social and legal experience captured in the Torah or NT, and the benefits such adoption has across society in promoting rule of law and related civility." By your logic, if the "wisdom of the Torah" (let's say "thou shalt not kill") ceased to "promote civility", it would be morally permissible, even necessary, to alter it and permit murder. A moral law, even rooted in some kind of collective wisdom, can never be universal.
This is not a new observation; it goes all the way back to Aristotle.
I put Inventing the Individual on hold from my library. Thanks for the recommendation.
Your response presents an opportunity for me to repeat something I have stated "somewhere" several times. Namely, we have people who claim that morality must be absolute, irremediable, "set in stone" (as on stone tablets). And we have people who claim morality is all relative and changeable. I say, it has elements of both. The (sort of) absolute element is our evolved mental states or general human psychology, including that mix of aggression and cooperation, love and hate, etc., over which we have little or no direct control, as it is determined by the random flucuations of DNA combinations at conception [providing a strong argument for pro-life positions, by the way]. But humans in general have this psychology in common, perhaps dismissing the 4% of the population that are presumed to be psychopaths? Conversely, the cultural element of morality is all over the place. In fact the existance of "honor killing" in tribal and/or Islamic cultures is an example of a morality that allows and even demands such killing to preserve family honor and thus civility among various families/clans/ tribes.
Islamic morality is not universally equal to Christian (or Judaic) morality by any means (see Robert Spencer, Bill Warner, et al.) It is certainly not a "religion of peace" as a once famous person announced. Then again, a barren and hostile desert is a very different environment that lush grasslands or wooded forests. Different survival criteria may be (or seem to be) needed?
Perhaps for me, evolution by natural selection is a form of transcendence, in that it is a marvelous and beautiful "design solution" to the issue of how do you create and then maintian life on a planet and in a universe subject to constant changes in environment? There are limits to how far this can work, but accepting death as non-survival of the less well adapted (a passive result of DNA changes and environmental conditions - no teleology required!). But if there is an intelligent designer, that design approach has a lot to offer as a solution.
Good conversations. Thank you.
Tom Holland has written well on this also.
Yes, I was very impressed with his book Dominion, having read it after reading Siedentop's Inventing the Indivual. Holland seems to have taken the celebrity from his publication and become the equivalent of Carl Sagen in the realm of historians, with a multitude of public presentations and podcasts, outclassing even the more astute Niall Ferguson. Holland does cause us to recognize things we might miss, saying things that are "obvious" and where the response is "of course that's right!", but we don't appreciate it until he has said it.
Scientific advances have called into question many of the details of religious scripture (across almost all faiths?). But we have evolved and survived based on a level of social cooperation derived from accepting some set of common beliefs (and the more logically absurd the beliefs the more we trust those who hold them in common with ourselves). It seems some greater understanding for a (classically) liberal path forward may still come from study of evolutionary psychology and neuroscientific studies of various kinds. The human mind remains a largely unknown frontier. For me personally, it remains a major mystery of my life as to why so many otherwise very intelligent people are also devout religious believers while I and many others have settled for or adopted a much more secular outlook.
So the issue remains for us to find or adopt some belief system that is logical and scientific, but also congnizant of our "original sin" and fallen natures. Our founders made a good start with the Constitution, but more is still needed.
"....it remains a major mystery of my life as to why so many otherwise very intelligent people are also devout religious believers ..."
It is because we believe it is true. Many of us have looked very deeply into religious belief and can find no flaws in Christian belief, scientific or otherwise.
The mystery is what happens before life begins or after life ends and having a hopeful belief system to help understand that mystery is an intelligent approach to life, imo. A belief system by definition is not logical or scientific.
I don't happen to agree with either of your two statements, but they do provide good examples of what I am struggling to understand from those with a more believing mindset.
I used to often ask "what is wrong with me that I don't believe as they do?" and the reverse of "what is wrong with them that they don't believe as I do?"
I finally decided there is nothing "wrong" with either side, but that we exist along a sprectrum of evolved psychological preferences for experiencing "transcendence", with some people desiring that experience more strongly than some of the rest of us. Some people can satisfy that desire without reference to a divine source or force; others not so much. This is similar in kind to the spectra (or range) of the many capabilities we possess, such as mathematical, musical, artistic, athletic, alpha vs beta, introvert vs. extrovert, photographic or auditory memory, etc.
Cannot disagree more. God gave us a brain and we should use logic and science to seek truth. I have been involved in science since third grade (!), been a researcher in grad school with viral DNA transcription, and spent 40 years as an intensive care doc and anesthesiologist. Based on logic and science, everything points to a creator God and the truth of Christianity. I did not want to believe this, but I followed the science and this is where it led.
The book and the documentary entitled DYING TO KNOW are both excellent meditations on death and dying.
Do we perhaps need to distinguish between the French Englightenment philosophes, seeped more deeply in an aristocratic milieu, along with a still somewhat corrupt Catholic Church justifiably worthy of distain and rejection, vs. the Scottish/English and then American Enlightenment contributors? These latter had a culture of common law and Protestant work ethic to help them restrain liberty. I think the phrase "liberty is not license" captures this idea. But also I understand (from Newt Gingrich) that the idea behind "pursuit of happiness" meant for the colonial leaders the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, with virtue being first personal approbrium and behavior (aka reputation). When this was practiced widely, the result was a society wide level of virtue. This in turn was what was required for a successful goverment "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- i.e., citizen sovereignty and self governance.
Well said. Ironically, following your comment, Gingerich is a devout Roman Catholic.
Yes, but he was a Baptist (I think, Protestant anyway) before he married his current Catholic wife, Calista. :-)
Something of a scandal around that in the 2006 timeframe?
I remember that in Sept. 2007 he said if he had had access to $30M he would have run for the presidency. Imagine him debating Obama = no contest!!
I suspect he has lost a little of his sharpness and edginess in the last few years, but then so have I.
"Liberalism" in itself has not failed. It has however received a whole new meaning, that has nothing to do with the concept at its inception. Just like "fascism" no longer has the same meaning now as it had in the 30's of the previous century, or like "communism" was a totally different thing in Marx's day as it is now.
As you quote Deneen in your article: "In its pre-Enlightenment conception, he [Deneen] argues, it was a learned self-governance through which one liberated oneself from base and destructive passions."
Liberalism was striving to achieve greater liberty, in the full realization that more liberty comes with greater responsibility.
What people call "liberalism" these days is a complete perversion of liberty: this woke cult comes with a complete rejection of any responsibility of personal actions or choices. Instead, the woke cult adherents are quick to label themselves "victims" if personal choices have bad outcomes. They insist others are to blame for their misfortune and that the government solve their problems. Because they reject personal responsibility, they are clamoring for ever greater government control, which is of course antithesis to actual liberty.
Semantics, eh?! I'll never forget seeing John 'the Duke' Wayne on the Dick Cavett show and the Duke made a concise definition of what a classical liberal is. He stated that a true liberal is an open-minded individual willing to look at all sides of a situation and then make a decision. He went on to call himself a liberal and said he makes all his political and life decisions with that viewpoint.
Progressives, as they like to be called in the 21st century are much more like fascists than liberals.
Like me ( and Bertrand ;-) ), almost anyone who has delved into linear development of 'philosophy' concludes that there is never really any 'great leap forward'. Its usually a few inches at a time as the crank-handle is turned , and the gearbox transfers that Herculean effort into half a wheel's circumference forward......from the stall of the last Hercules's efforts, to the new line in the sand.
The best metaphor I can indite is the 'Youtube' "Philosopher "X" in Ten minutes' series.
So Philosopher X is framed in the light of Philosopher 'W' for 3 minutes, before his own unique magnificent contribution to the genre is perfectly well explained in another 3 minutes. The last period is spent discussing his relationship with his forthcoming nemesis (Philosopher Y) for the last three. A lifetime's effort catalogued in 3 minutes....no wonder they mostly go mad.
Post-Modernists are today's dominant Philosophical crankers - as Dogmatic as any Opus Dei self-flagellant, yet as high and loved-up as any 'E' crew raver, ...united by their group disdain of the 'squares'
I stopped at Camus....the Absurdist.
I expect I'll never bother with an attempt to crank the handle again.
I'm now old enough to know better.
Our increasing slide to insanity, Chaos, unTruth, inJustice, disOrder, Hell as acceptable since the early 1960's Satanic-Modernist's capture of the Vatican.
What is needed? to reverse or remove laws and policies that harms each of our own and entire society's mental intellect, judgment, and moral-blindness, that for most of history would be considered insane or evil like; abortion, birth-control, divorce, father-children and parents-children separations directed by State, sex assignment as a choice, drugs and sexual mutilations, open televised genocide, .., treated as acceptable, raised with insanities as normal or praiseworthy, that harms us all and moral-blinding that increases over time, more insane and amoral sickness.
God Bless., Steve
This whole essay reminds me of the words of John Adams: "We have no Government capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry would break our constitution as a whale goes through a net."
Many people know that quote, but the full context is important.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102
Adams is writing to a group of militia officers lamenting the results of the French revolution. (He never says "France", but his audience knows). Unbeknownst to Adams, Napoleon is waiting in the wings to put an end to the industrial-scale head-severing and restore order in Paris. Adams is contrasting the licentiousness and militant secularism present in France with the liberalism augmenting a Christian moral order present in America.
That Christian moral order is now gone: 2 millennia of cultural inertia run down by Locke in a couple of centuries. We haven't gotten to the industrial scale severing of heads (yet) but licentiousness and militant secularism... check and check. Morally, we look more like revolutionary France than 1900's America. And that's liberalism's fault. It liberated us from all constraints, including moral law. Adams was one of the few founders who, like Tocqueville, saw this potential from the beginning. That's why he ends this letter stating that America is intended for "a moral and religious people and wholly inadequate for the governance of any other."
Lockean liberalism rests on a shared, pre-liberal, moral order which it can neither derive nor defend. It did some amazing things, liberating us from constraints of race, class, sex, etc... but it won't stop until it explodes the entire society in an orgy of Huxleyan proportions. Both political parties are now trying to kill it before it kills us. Left and Right are both peddling various forms of a "value-laden" (as opposed to Locke's "value-neutral") state: whether progressive wokeness, Catholic integralism, MAGA nationalism, or Bernie socialism. There are still quite a few people (Bari Weiss, Andrey Sullivan, David French, David Brooks, Nikki Haley, etc...) playing Weekend at Bernie's with John Locke's philosophical corpse, but it's dead. The only question is what's going to replace it.
I have to say that, having identified the problem presciently in Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen's Regime Change is a real let down. His "solutions" are so mild that it's clear he is far more bound to Lockean liberalism than he lets on.
I agree with you about Deneen. I got two valuable insights from Why Liberalism Failed. (I flagged them both in this essay: 1) the two contrasting understandings of Liberty and 2) The Enlightenment's paradoxical benefitting from the social mores it tried to supplant.) But I got all this from the Introduction....and the suceeding chapters were mostly just repetition. I also bought Regime Change but gave up after a few pages unimpressed (although to be fair, I can rarely finish a non-fiction book, generally finding far more wisdom to be found in novels).
"finding far more wisdom in novels". A very interesting comment, Graham, and one that I'm just now starting to realize myself. Not ready to start a poetry reading club yet, but I'm slowly leaving my highly rationalistic framework.
The contemporary phenomenon you are describing draws mostly from postmodern and poststructuralist thought as far as I can see. This is actually much more of a backlash against enlightenment rationality, universal truths, meta-narratives and the 'believe' in progress. It emphasizes small subjective narratives and pluriformity/difference, in theory at least. Even though a lot of it seems hyper-liberal in aspiration, I think it has actually more in common with romanticism. Also, if you look into it, a lot of postmodernism fundamentally applies Nietzschean thought instead of enlightenment thought and classical liberalism.
"2. A gradual reduction in the social mores and inhibitions that form a big part of how a civilisation holds criminality and licentiousness in check. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' some human appetites that would be better repressed."
How to start to reverse this - to shove our nasty deprived perverse self-centered skeletons back into the closets? Some Public Pain&Shame, perhaps?
- Each local community would have a Judgment-Committee of 5 to 9 that are fathers or grandfathers that have raised children well that displays good prudent Judgment, and they would rule on local violations of good social behavior for adults 15-years and older. Such violations as defined to be against good social order, such as; lies, stealing, disrespecting social-standards, etc.
In today's society False-Witnessing, Lying, harming the reputation of others cannot be corrected, so such abusers will never benefit in Loving Correction – a punishment to make clear they behaved badly and motivation to not repeat the abuse. Using Public Pain&Shame will pay the wages of their sin.
Punishment involves public pain and shame. Once a week, those to be punished would be taken to a public place like a park or public building courtyard and restrained to an anchor, and a collar attached to their neck, and for the directed period defined by the Judgment-Committee, the length of time that the collar delivers the taser sentence.
Those people that do not want to be punished need only to be respectful to those in their community and if they make a mistake, they personally engage those they harmed and give satisfaction for the damage, if possible. If not, then the Judgment-Committee is used.
Those of age 14-years old would be required to view at least 3 of these punishments before turning 15-years old and be a risk of the same punishments for those community social crimes.
- Because of the changes to liberty, the over-reach of government and the feminization of society it is no longer possible to personally punish those that disrespect or damage the reputation of others. It was once possible to respond with measured violence to correct such abuse from others, without the police and courts being called. Since then the suppression of such correction has resulted in widespread disrespect and reputation damage with no punishment. A society of untrustworthy liars where we use to have a society of trust.
I propose a return of the concept of a duel. If someone is disrespected or suffers a harm, then they may ask for 'Satisfaction' and if the abuser refuses to provide acquitted satisfaction for the harm, they caused then a duel may be scheduled.
The duel would be in a place defined for have it, with supervision, and proper equipment. A local police station, court-house, or other public location.
A room with two stations, each with a chair and a button at. The two people write-up the grievances to be placed in the Public Database (later the video of the event attached.) and then each person has a neck-collar locked into place and when both buttons are pressed, then both the collars start to deliver the same taser pain to each at same time, starting low-power and increasing. The tasering does not stop until both buttons are released.
If the person refuses to duel, then becomes an automatic civil punishment; public pain and shame.
- #PublicDataBase, an international public database to warn others of misbehavior of people and organizations, to include all relevant crimes against human dignity that is below or excluded from criminal law – and all people would have access to such. Those accused could record their rebuttal to the accusation.
A central international site where anyone can enter a Record for anyone, groups, businesses, that has damaged social trust; False Witnessed, broke promises, refused to return borrowed objects or pay small loans, .. or for companies that failed to complete obligations, etc.
The Records would be back-connected to those filing them, no anonymous filings. Proper use of this service would be to read the Record, the Rebuttal, and the Records of those who filed, so the user may gauge the Record filer has merit, and to what extent it is likely significant.
Those people filing frivolous Records would damage their reputation and display their untrustworthiness.
--
Other suggestions?
God Bless., Steve
The root cause of the liberal pathology, is its hatred of religion - and of Christianity in particular.
With its dismissal of Christian beliefs as "superstitions" - as if its own enthusiasms weren't the real superstitions. And as if science and reason (and philosophy) could fill the gap left by Christianity.
Worse, liberalism forgets that the West was built on Christianity; no Christianity, no West, whether in 725 AD or 2025 AD.
You haven't actually read the essay have you!
Well, actually I did.
It's only halfway to repentance.
btw Are you the....Spanish Inquisition ?
Meanwhile a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian who is also a pathological liar and life-long grifter will in 3 weeks time become the US President.
Narcissus on steroids.
He is surrounded by similar toxic ultra narcissistic totally godless personalities - some/many of which pretend to be religious.
Some/many so called conservatives pretend that he is "God's" chosen vehicle to re-Christianize America or bring "God" back to the center-pole of US culture.
He was a key-note speaker (ranter) at the Gabfest introduced via these two essays. Note the now well known so called conservative politician featured in these essays. And the author/book that he has endorsed.
http://www.thenerdreich.com/unhumans-jd-vance-and-the-language-of-genocide
http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2024/03/08/cpac-attendees-america-under-attack
It's a pity the choices were so bad that such a flawed man was elected President -- twice.
Note 2 — you admit you don’t have anything to support your assertion. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was that it insisted that any assertion be supported by objective evidence, so I understand why you now reject it.
The question I always ask anyone who thinks individualism is bad: if each individual person can’t make decisions for herself, who should make those decisions?
Did you actually read the essay? If so you seem to have spectacularly failed to understand a word of it.
“ Adducing empirical evidence to ‘prove’ this would, however, take a whole essay in itself and is a subject very muddied by ‘progressive’ capture of criminal justice systems and hence of the kinds of data that they generate.”
That statement is an admission you don’t have anything evidence to support your assertion and are not going to look for any.
Dennen's Why Liberalism Failed (which Graham references here) lays out this case in great detail. I think Graham does a decent job here (given space constraints) as well, but if you really want a full evidentiary hearing, read Deneen.
I own that book and need to read it, but I need to work up the energy to wade through Deneen’s purple prose. Is there some reason right wingers always write like they’re stuck in 1750?
Graham's comment elsewhere here is correct. You could probably get away with he first couple of chapters since the rest is examples.
In your original comment, you asked, "if each individual person can’t make decisions for herself, who should make those decisions?" Who decides?
We decide collectively. We collectively put up the guardrails that govern behavior. We collectively make tax policy. We collectively decide what substances are permissible to consume and which aren't. We collectively rule some things sacred and others profane. And despite how individualistic it is, even modern America does this.
Can collectivism be taken too far? Absolutely! That's always a risk since it produces an inefficient, stultifying society (USSR comes to mind). But extreme individualism carries its own risks to efficiency, to virtue, to cultural stability. These two errors are the Scylla and Charybdis of every human society.
(Note, that's not the argument Deneen makes; that's more Burke or Buckley.)