Paul Engelhard and the lunatic fringe

A reply to https://twitter.com/paulengelhard/status/831459316595097600

You know well enough that there is no such thing as value-free social science. There are always values, and the values and principels of intellectuals of the last 200 years are called Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Now, the problem is that it is the values themselves that suck, they are not suitable for the human species, we as a species thrive with Social Dominance, Social Status and Particularism. The society most suited to the makeup of the human animal is feudalism, that is what tends to happen when artificial systems collapse and human nature takes over, that is why the Game of Tits is so popular.

The problem is, it is incredibly hard for a conservative to even realize that the principle itself is wrong, because he was raised in a liberal society and a liberal intellectual tradition.

Debate Judith Butler but bring some heavyweights? Paul, the first statement of the debate would be that the reason I don’t want women to be equal with men is not that women are so different but equality in general is a bad idea either, men should not be equal either. Yes, I can bring some heavyweights, albeit pretty old ones, like De Maistre or Carlyle. But do you think I would not be laughted out?  That view is not too only too conservative for the fashion of 2017, it was also far too conservative for 1950 and as far as I can tell, 1800.

See, the difference between 1950 and today is that we had the same principles but far fewer unprincipled exceptions.

Have you heard about the late Larry Auster? He was on the “far” right and yet an absolute intellectual heavyweight. Can’t see him invited to your universities. Anyway, his idea of unprincipled exceptions nailed it

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html

“Modern liberalism stands for principles of equality and non-discrimination which, if followed consistently, would make a decent life in this world, or any life at all, impossible. But modern liberal society does not permit the public expression of non-liberal principles, by which rational limits to equality and non-discrimination, or indeed the very falsity of these ideas altogether, can be articulated. This fact forces liberals continually to make exceptions to their own liberalism, without admitting to themselves and others that they are doing so. Such exceptions must take inchoate, non-conceptual, pre-rational forms, such as appeals to brute self-interest, to the need to respond to a pressing emergency, or to common sense. For example, liberals who want to escape from the negative consequences of their liberal beliefs in a given instance will often say that the application of a liberal idea in that instance “goes too far,” without their indicating by what principle they distinguish between an idea that has gone “too far” and one that hasn’t. In fact, it’s purely a matter of what suits their own comfort level and convenience.

Conservatives also must have recourse to the unprincipled exception, but for a different reason than the liberals. Liberals are seeking to escape the negative consequences of their own liberalism. Conservatives, of course, actively oppose liberalism, or, rather, they oppose some aspects of liberalism. But, because the conservatives live in modern liberal society, where principled opposition to liberalism is not allowed, and also because the conservatives themselves subscribe to liberalism and are not prepared to think outside its concepts, the conservatives’ only available means of opposing some aspects of liberalism is by unprincipled exceptions, such as appealing to common sense, or to the shared unreflective habits of society, or saying, “That’s just the way things are,” or asserting that a particular liberal belief is “silly” or “stupid” or “extreme.” These methods allow conservatives to find fault with various symptoms of liberalism, without attacking liberalism per se.

For example, a conservative might advocate the exclusion of Muslim jihadists from U.S. immigration, or the ethnic profiling of Muslims in airport security checks. But he will not challenge, or, indeed, even mention, the underlying liberal belief in non-discrimination that compels us to admit Muslim jihadists in the first place and that requires us to avoid ethnic profiling of Muslims. Instead he will make a non-conceptual appeal to common sense: we’ve got a really serious problem here, we can’t continue admitting these people into America, we can’t continue checking babies and old ladies in airports instead of focusing on young Muslim men, we’ve got to do something. And if there arises a social consensus at that point that the problem is indeed great enough to warrant an exception to the liberal rule (and such a consensus began to emerge regarding ethnic profiling of Muslims in the aftermath of the foiled attack on trans-Atlantic airliners in August 2006, when even liquids and books began to be banned from planes), then this opinion will become an accepted position, without the principle of non-discrimination that led us to the absurdity of admitting jihad-supporters into the West and of prohibiting ethnic profiling of Muslims in airports ever coming into view. Thus the excesses of liberalism that are intolerably costly and dangerous can be corrected, without the liberalism that led to those excesses being criticized or even becoming an object of consciousness, and without the conservatives who carried out the act of correction appearing as anti-liberal.”

The mainstreamization of social progress simply meant that unprincipled exceptions got closed down.

The reason a lot of people on the Right got mad is that the principles are now in full force and the results are obviously crazy.  It is simply infurating.

Nevertheless, people like the late Larry Auster exist, people who are “far” right and yet intellectual heavyweights. But you don’t pay attention to them. It is easier to pick on the lunatic fringe.

There is not only Alex Jones and 4chan. There is the Radish, there is Social Matter, and there is always Auster’s archives.

Here is some more Larry for you: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002234.html

“Many traditionalists believe there was a fateful flaw in the American Founding. It was that America’s liberal principles, relating to abstract rights and the functioning of government, were explicit, while its conservative principles, relating to the moral and cultural nature of the society, were by and large only implicit. As a result, over time, the liberal principles grew more and more dominant, steadily delegitimizing more and more of America’s conservative substance, until we were reduced to what we are now, the Radically Open Society, inclusive of everything and everyone in the world, and thus unable to protect our society from cultural and demographic forces that are radically incompatible with our way of life.”

And this: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008293.html

“The order of being is not a political platform. Each culture and society is a unique and imperfect way of expressing the order of being and putting it into a form to make possible the life of a people. Believing in the substantive order of being does not necessarily mean that one must be against the women’s franchise. Yet at the same time, people who recognize the order of being would be more open to the reality of sex distinctions and would not programmatically deny them as liberals do. ”

“Another reason this revolution is not seen as such is that it represents the logical culmination of tendencies that have always been present in our society, but that used to be held back by other tendencies.

From the earliest days of the Republic, the American mind has been divided between two opposing world views: the classical and Christian understanding that had been the basis of traditional Western culture and of American culture itself up through the Founding period; and the secular and democratic consciousness that was released by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and has been growing steadily stronger in the Western world ever since. To speak of these conflicting visions is not to imply that everyone simply subscribes to one or the other. The consciousness of most Americans over the past 200 years, including that of the Founders, has been an inconsistent mixture of the two perspectives.

In the traditional or Classical-Christian view, life is experienced as participation in (or as rebellion against) a comprehensive order of existence—natural, social, and divine—that precedes the existence of the individual. The basic values and institutions of society are affirmed by its members because they see them as grounded, not in the arbitrary will of men, but in truth. Freedom, creativity, and progress unfold from within the natural and transcendent orders in which man is situated, not in complete rejection of them.* At the same time, though capable of good, man is inclined to every kind of evil, particularly the lust for power. This realistic understanding of our flawed human nature was embodied in traditional morality, with its constraints on inordinate desire, and in the U.S. Constitution, with its system of checks and balances preventing the concentration of power in any one part of the state.

In the modern or Secular-Democratic view, life is experienced as an expansion of the unfettered human will into a reality created by man himself. Man is essentially good, and there is no higher truth from which he receives the order of his being. In effect, man’s preferences define what is good. The basic institutions of society are not grounded in any natural or transcendent order, but in human desire, and therefore must be continually reshaped to satisfy ever-changing human needs and demands. According to liberal democratic theory, the only thing needed to hold such a desire-based society together is a neutral system of rules and procedures to which everyone gives his assent. In reality, as people’s needs multiply and their desires grow more peremptory in the absence of any shared tradition or belief in higher truth, they cease being willing to abide by rules, even those to which they have freely agreed. So they attempt to erect a new society based not on law or contract but on the naked assertion of will—whether it be the will of each person (as in our present culture of radical individualism) or the will of some self-seeking or vengeful minority (as in our system of group rights and racial shakedowns), or the will of “The People” (as in the Jacobin-style rhetoric indulged in by Democrats during the 2000 post-election controversy), or the will of some unaccountable bureaucracy ruling over a post-political order (such as is now taking shape in Europe). Asserting the absoluteness of human will constrained neither by traditional culture nor by divine revelation, the Secular-Democratic consciousness moves simultaneously toward moral anarchy and totalitarianism. Experience shows that if secular democracy is not to become completely destructive of human goods, it must be held in check by surviving elements of the Classical-Christian consciousness or of some other viable social ethos. Through much of modern times, particularly in Britain and America, it was so held in check.

The revolution of our time consists in the virtual disappearance of any remnant of the Classical-Christian consciousness from the leading institutions of American and Western society, and their takeover by liberal and radical elites who have converted them to their own illegitimate purposes. Having elevated the counterculture into the dominant culture while reducing traditional beliefs to the category of thought crime, these elites enjoy unbridled sway over public life. Yet, by skillfully preserving a “mainstream,” “middle-class,” even “patriotic” facade, and by keeping the economy going, they have prevented most people from realizing that the revolution has occurred, and have thus avoided the immediate prospect of large-scale resistance to the new order. The instinctive conservatism of many Americans has also helped consolidate the new regime. Since the essence of small “c” conservatism is to uphold the established ways of one’s society, whatever those ways may be, and since the revolution is now fully established, America’s small “c” conservatives have in large part legitimized the revolution, insensibly adopting many of its values and fashions and giving them the seal of the “normal” and the “traditional.””

And http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000417.html

“For example, limited government and local and popular self-rule were more important. The latter require a moral people with stable loyalties and strong sense of personal responsibility who are able to look after themselves and rely on those around them when they need assistance. Liberty also requires that people obey the law not out of coercion but out of a voluntary sense that one belongs to an actually existing community with a shared sense of moral truth as reflected in its laws. In other words, liberty and self-government require a cohesive culture, which in turn requires strong family ties, which in turn require traditional sexual morality.

I’m not saying that the normalization of homosexuality is the single thing that wrecks society. But it’s hard to see how normalization of homosexuality can be reconciled with a free self-governing society.”

And finally: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001644.html

“For the medieval Christian, truth could never be merely a matter of abstractions, because divine truth was experienced through the concrete acts of the sacraments and through the concrete images of art and architecture. God’s truth was infinite, but man, experiencing that truth through particular forms, and as a member of a particular community, knew himself to be limited. The Protestant Reformation changed the Christian experience on a profound level. (…) the Reformation made words the central focus of salvational experience. (…) Protestantism did not constitute the political religion of modernity, but it prepared the way to it, by taking the multileveled, embodied spirituality of medieval Christianity and concentrating it, as it were, on the divine word alone. It was the Enlightenment which completed the process by secularizing the promise of salvation. (…) the fountainhead of this secularized word-magic was the Declaration of Independence—or rather it was Abraham Lincoln’s cult of the Declaration of Independence, in which he re-interpreted that political document as a mandate for world redemption. In the Declaration (at least as those who came after Lincoln saw it), a nation dedicated to human equality had brought itself into being by words alone, words that two centuries later still have the power to thrill the soul of any sensitive person, even one who is alert to their harmful implications. The Declaration has thus exercised a quasi-religious power over the American mind. In America, all of Western man’s capacity for religious experience, all his capacity for piety and honor and loyalty, have become centered in the words of the Declaration, engendering a restless desire to keep repeating the thrill by repeatedly invoking those words and ideals. For the believers in modernity, phrases such as “All men are created equal” (or its mandatory contemporary equivalent, “I have a dream”) create such a deep impression of excitement (the modernists’ verbal, abstract substitute for religious experience) that the only way they can express those feelings is to seek to impose those ideas, at least rhetorically, on the entire world. But it is an experience increasingly abstracted from real life and ordinary rationality, not to mention from the divine order of existence. It is a purely mental, verbal experience, yet so powerful to its adherents that it becomes the motivation for tireless efforts to transform the world.”