Auster and Richardson

Posted by Guessedworker on December 19, 2004, 07:50 AM | #

The root of the division here is ancient.  In modern times the conservativism founded upon Lockean individual liberty and a model of Man wrought by Nature is in conflict with a liberalism which relies upon the Tabula Rasa.  Mighty philosopher though he was, Locke was simply ignorant on the issue of Nature and Man.  But, like Helen, he launched a thousand ships on the political sea.  Lockean liberalism is the father of modern liberalism, libertarianism, marxism and, in part because the liberty of the individual is at its core, conservatism.

Libertarianism has more in common with liberalism than conservatism.  Like the latter it propound duties, if only insomuch as these serve the individual’s freedom from the encroachments of external force.  But it also propounds a freedom that cannot abide any Natural restriction upon the notional, self-defined individual, including racial and national identity and including human difference.  In this its reveals its closer kinship with modern liberalism.

I would make one other quick point.  Marxism as theory stands in the Lockean tradition.  As practice it is the bastardisation of liberalism for the purposes of warfare and crime, and therefore not part of the Western political canon.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 19, 2004, 07:56 AM | #

And another ...

John, libertarianism in the raw can be read every day at Samizdata.  You go post a few comments about human difference and I guarantee you will be IP-banned in a jiffy.  Freedom of speech there does not include the freedom to discuss any limit set upon the individual by Nature.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 19, 2004, 01:31 PM | #

”[...] I know of NO conservative who denies that we are in at least some ways constrained in what we do by ‘human nature.’  So the claim that there are conservatives who believe in some sort of absolute liberty is a total straw man.”  (—from the log entry)

Is John Ray missing that we are entitled to attribute undeclared aims and principles to a man which clearly are implied in his words and deeds? 

Goerge Bush is a conservative, right?  And if George Bush can’t think he shouldn’t be president, so as a pure formality we extend him the benefit of the doubt and assume he can see broader meanings of his policies, see their obvious implications, right?  Therefore his insistence on, let’s say (to take just two examples of many), continuing Bill & Hillary’s policies of placing women in the armed forces in roles nature unsuits them for in practical and moral ways when he could reverse this policy at the stroke of a pen, and of replacing the white population of the U.S. with other races, mainly non-white third-worlders (the year 2040 being the target date the Marxists, Wall Streeters, and conservative republicans have set for completion of this transformation) can only mean we are entitled to conclude he denies human nature as regards sex and race. 

Libertarians are profiting from the labor of others without shouldering their fair share of the burden.  They won’t be able to get away with sitting on the fence forever:  major social turbulences are moving toward some sort of conclusion.  Sooner or later lilbertarians are going to be forced to choose between normalness and degenerateness.  Then will you see libertarianism vanish in a puff of smoke as some of them choose one, the rest the other.

Posted by Cathal Copeland on December 19, 2004, 01:52 PM | #

John, you write that “[t]he claim that there are conservatives who believe in some sort of absolute liberty is a total straw man.”

Well, there are certainly people who call themselves conservatives who seem to “believe in some sort of absolute liberty”. The American neoconservatives whom Lawrence Auster castigates are generally pretty much in favour of open doors immigration policy; many are not even opposed to state recognition of gay ‘marriage’ and the legalisation of gay adoption. You can’t get much closer to ‘absolute liberty’ than allowing your country to be invaded by foreigners and officially approving and celebrating lifestyles that adversely affect the reproduction of the human species in a civilised family environment. I suppose they are ‘conservative’ in the sense that they will support US foreign policy until the sky falls in, but that seems to be about all. 

Basically, many are cryptoliberals simply masquerading as conservative for tactical purposes. They are deceiving others and some may even be deceiving themselves, i.. they may truly believe that one can be simultaneously conservative and yet advocate policies that de facto doom your own society to self-destruction.

I think that’s the point Auster is making.

Posted by Phil on December 19, 2004, 03:21 PM | #

I would agree with Auster but would also add (though I do not wish to detract from the fundamental points in this post):

The destiny of Liberty and self-government are tied up with the Nation and with the Peoples (which incorporates the idea of origin, which in its turn is tied up ultimately with that ugly word - Race).

No Liberty in the proper sense exists beyond those confines. Beyond that lies first the politics of the lowest common denominator (Libertinism - licence to do as you please, i.e. I have the “liberty” to play with myself in the confines of my quarters).

One can read Madison, Jefferson or any of the founding fathers of the United States and nowhere would one find the crass and vulgar ideas of Libertinism that are preached day in and day out by the political imbeciles that one often encounters among the Randists or such types.

The founders of the United States wrote the justifications for Liberty in the Federalist Papers. Their gravest concerns are to be found couched in the most reasonable language. These men were writing the destiny of a free people - a people that were united by blood, by their faith in God and by the solidity of their mores. Destroy those things and one winds up with the debauchery and dissolution that is the characteristic of most cities in the West - anything goes being the defining characteristic; the nadir of man.

Can Liberty really exist without virtue? Can there be virtue in naked vulgar cosmopolitanism? I think not.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 19, 2004, 05:20 PM | #

You’ve got that right.  What ultimately keeps libertarianism unworkable is a deficiency of respect for morality.  And you’re completely right about there being unwritten assumptions in regard to religion, race, national heritage, and an associated common morality undergirding the U.S. system, in the absence of any one of which the whole edifice is bound to come crashing down—which is exactly what it bids fair to do in the not too distant future now that the leftists and country-club republicans have had their way with the system’s underpinnings these several decades.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 19, 2004, 05:24 PM | #

(Sorry again—I omitted to say in my comment of 9:20 that it was a reply to Phil’s post right above it, of 7:21.)

Posted by Paul Cella on December 20, 2004, 04:28 AM | #

Mr. Ray, I do not think you are being fair to your opponents in this debate. The question between libertarians and Conservatives is not whether “rights connote duties,” but whether duties precede rights.

The Conservative (when he has his philosophical wits about him) recognizes that the first fact of man is a duty: his duty to respond (through worship) to his Creator.

It is only from the performance of this duty that man’s true rights flow.

Posted by Matt on December 21, 2004, 02:07 AM | #

Right liberalism is far more dangerous in the long run than more pure ideological leftism.  It is the deep recess where the disease lives on in times of retreat.  Someone who consistently gets strep throat has to eventually have their adnoids removed, because the disease retreats there even when the person is otherwise healthy, and it re-emerges in any moment of weakness; and each time it re-emerges the disease is worse than the last time.  Eventually it will kill the patient, after many escalating cycles of illness, if it is not dealt with comprehensively.

If we really hope to save the patient we have to kill off liberalism completely. That includes removing the places where it hides, pretending to be subordinate to the “common sense” of right-liberals like Mr. Ray. It isn’t enough to allow for a
“good liberalism” that remains subordinate to the transcendent as mediated by tradition.  The West must utterly repent of its liberalism if it wants to survive; it is not enough to tame it and put it in a cage.  It is not in the nature of liberalism
to remain contentedly caged.  Liberalism must die, absolutely and completely, if any remnant of the West is to survive.