Hat-tip to Dr. Charlton for alerting me to this old post from Lawrence Auster concerning what he calls the "unprincipled exceptions" to liberalism that allow modernity to function. Auster defines the unprincipled exception as
a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that liberals use to escape the suicidal consequences of their own liberalism without questioning liberalism itself.
It's an intriguing insight, and one I've referenced here obliquely in the past. Liberalism, I've said before, is a mess of contradictions:
It detests metaphysics and declares scientific knowledge to be the only valid kind of knowledge -- a metaphysical, unscientific, and therefore self-refuting belief.
It rejects all the metaphysical bases from which rights can be said to derive, yet insists that it (and it alone) is the true defender of rights in the modern world. This leads it to constantly invent new rights which, just years before, it declared to be unthinkable.
It refuses to accept teleology or essentialism -- yet does not even seem to be aware that this entails not merely a rejection of natural theology and morality but the entire scientific enterprise.
Liberals rarely ever kill themselves when their lives go wrong, even though this is the logical thing to do for an atheist utilitarian who is suffering. Ask them and they will deny that there is anything like a will to live, that is, a real sense of the innate, objective goodness of life (since they don't believe there is any such thing as "innate" "objective" "goodness" at all); at best, they will concede that there is an arbitrary, evolutionarily adapted survival instinct, but cannot explain why, if they believe that to be the case, this has kept them from killing themselves.
They believe, on the one hand, that rape is the most horrible thing imaginable -- and on the other, that sex itself is as meaningless an act as shaking someone's hand -- a contadiction that can only be sustained by the (implicit and always unspoken) understanding that liberals must be lying about one or the other.
Democracy runs on an unprincipled exception, since its continued functioning is contingent on virtues which it cannot cultivate and, indeed, seeks to actively destroy. The Founders knew this (see any of the quotes regarding the abuses of which democracy is capable tossed around by modern pseudoconservatives) and proceeded with their project, anyway.
The list goes on. (Feel free to add your own in the comments section).
Modern "conservatism," such as it is, is wholly unable to counter liberalism because it is itself simply an earlier form of liberalism, and it only has grounds to attack the liberal zeitgeist at these few and dwindling weak points. Modern conservatives imagine that liberalism's great problem is the presence of these unprincipled exceptions, as they think it proves that modern liberalism is incoherent and modern liberals are stupid. In fact, it is, and they are, but that's irrelevant: unprincipled exceptions demonstrate chiefly that modern liberalism is more radical than anyone is willing to let on. They are not evidence of liberalism's inconsistency but of its terrible and overpowering consistency, because no one can fully countenance what a society run consistently on atheist, utilitarian, individualist principles would look like without losing their minds.
In light of this, I'd like to propose the following argument: modernity is simply the advance of liberalism towards its logical perfection -- toward the abandonment of unprincipled exceptions and the ushering-in of a grossly unjust, inhumane, irrational, basically Satanic society.
The only thing that can be done to avert this is to reject modernity wholesale, in its liberal and conservative variants: neither socialism nor capitalism (nor the weird national-socialist kleptocratic mess we have today); neither democracy nor bureaucratic technocracy; neither atheist secular humanism nor fundamentalist Protestantism. Scrap it all.
Excellent! Bookmarked for further contemplation and comment!
Posted by: Out of Sleep | October 18, 2011 at 03:37 AM