liberalism & modernity37 quotes
Related themes: politics · family · freedom · tradition & conservatism · history
“People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government. Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said ‘You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!’ Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship. If you ‘criticize’ society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a ‘bold iconoclast’ or ‘having brave and revolutionary new ideas’ or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.”
“Of course, as we use it [the sacred], it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or life-style with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or sex; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”
“As for ourselves, on the one hand, contemporary science, or rather the ideological use made of it by the mainstream media, leads us to believe that we are hardly more than lucky monkeys, produced by the chance encounter of irrational forces. On the other hand, we harp upon the “dignity” of man, endowed with “human rights” that are supposed to provide us with the unshakable ground for our moral choices and legal rulings. Little wonder that some people propose to enlarge the notions of rights to animals, since human beings themselves are conceived of as animals that happen to be endowed, nobody knows why, with sacred and unalienable rights.”
“Although it may appeal to a man’s selfish instincts to sit in sweatpants and type on a computer in a locked room while gnawing on a turkey leg, he’s spiritually, civically and morally improved by embodied interactions, by spending time in public space.
The relaxed fashion and behavior in the home may seem preferable to the formalities of the office, but the current resentment toward a public standard of appearance indicates widespread maladaptation and stunted maturity, a pathological obliviousness to others and a decline of outwardly directed behavior in professional and collective settings. We dress like refugees and mental patients because of mass-produced sleepwear and because we’re not expected to cultivate self-respect or restraint. We don’t value bodily comfort obesity and chronic illness ravage the body, bad choices trouble the soul.
People wear comfortable clothes in public because they’re uncomfortable, because their bodies are panicked and inflamed from decades of nutritional and emotional chaos.
Modern hedonism violently contradicts the sagely approach to moderating passions and limiting pleasures. Unrestrained eating, drinking, drug intake and consumption of media implies hatred of the body, not love of the senses.”
“Division of labor multiplies inconvenience, obnoxious intermediaries, liaisons and representatives. Zeno’s paradox of infinite middlemen between middlemen. People make their living by making my living harder to make. Division of labor is subtraction of organic bonds. Almost everyone I know I met through an economic or electronic exchange. No human contact without an application, contract, a bill or an app. Professional and romantic relationships dissolved with a message, a phone call. Cutting someone out takes less than a gesture. Whole networks pulverized and reformed every six months.”
“Even with appliances and devices, the technical outsourcing of family to machines, a single man is also his own wife and maid, his own father and grandfather and son. A laborer and a housekeeper and cook, activities manager and social director. He’s responsible for seeking out his own wisdom and recreation. The atomized self tends toward androgyny, in that it must carry out the work of both sexes.”
“Reality used to impose itself on you, while fantasy was your own doing. Now illusions flush your brain and reality is something you laboriously construct, rip from the earth and beat out of people.”
“The leftist concept of emotional labor used to describe how service jobs require a performance of happiness and camaraderie. Now the idea is cited in a petulant demand to be paid for listening to your friends and family. Economic thinking has seeped into every domain, corrupted all relationships. We feel pressured to treat coworkers like friends and feel entitled to treat friends and family like clients. A warm smiling face for bloodless transactions and a self-interested logic applied to the most intimate bonds.”
“History is littered with examples of men who, when pressing their case in the public square, have thought solely about the interests of their land, tribe, religion, or self; but it is sprinkled only lightly with men who, in making their arguments, have taken care to respect the enduring principles that have served to break the cycle of strife, faction, and war.”
“At the beginning, then, globalization was a Communist idea. Today, it finally seems to be coming to fruition by means of liberalism. Put another way, history’s real irony is that globalization is being realized by the opponents of those who initially proposed it.”
“Opinions on the right of intervention naturally evolve with the times, espousing the dominant values of the period. Speaking generally, the opposite of what each period finds most important will not be tolerated. When religion dominated, it justified wars, as Montesquieu observed: ‘Religion gives to those who profess it a right to enslave those who do not, in order to more easily propagate it.’ Today, one can say the same thing of the morality of human rights, while religion is compelled to be tolerant because it has assumed a lesser importance.”
“Our contemporaries no longer seek a ‘socially homogeneous universal state,’ as Alexandre Kojève put it at the time of communism, but rather a morally homogenous universal state. It is natural that rather vague ambient idea of a world government should be put at the service of the dominant values of our times.”
“The lesson of the twentieth century is the following: we have limits that we do not choose, and which it would be in our interest to accept rather than suppress, given the damage attempts at suppression have caused.”
“The subject is he who opens his eyes to human weakness and organizes society in a way that responds to this reality. Instead of unconsciously assimilating his heritage like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his heritage like the contemporary individual, he recognizes that he is an heir. Instead of remaining submerged in his world like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his world like the contemporary individual, he engages himself in this world. Engagement and the recognition of one’s heritage are expressions of accepted finiteness even within the quest for freedom.”
“A core feature of liberal philosophy and politics is recognition of the arbitrariness of almost every border. This runs as a golden thread in considerations not only of the political understanding of borders—primarily national borders—but of any existing differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation, all of which come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice. All such ‘borders’ are interrogated for their arbitrariness, and few can ultimately withstand the pressure of such interrogation—even those that are not arbitrary but are nevertheless limiting. Borders and boundaries based in geography, history, and nature must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism…Liberalism’s logic seeks to eliminate not only borders as we normally consider them—through political and economic globalization—but also the ‘boundaries’ that exist in nature. Today’s emphasis upon issues of identity—especially arising from the sexual revolution—arise equally from the liberal abhorrence of ‘forms’. The human form above all that requires elimination is sexual difference, a goal advanced by increasingly aggressive efforts to secure state-funded birth control, abortion, and artificial forms of fertilization and gestation of children. The people most committed to protecting and preserving the environment and the technological manipulation of nature are often the most fervent in support of eliminating every evidence of natural differentiation between men and women, through chemical and technological manipulation.”
“At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism.”
“Building on liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license.”
“Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridicial defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. It’s two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.”
“One of the key differences between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ today is over whether liberalism can and should see its primary locus as the nation or the world. Both sides share the view that liberalism is a universalist philosophy, but they differ over how best to advance that universalism. Mainstream conservatives have sought to advance liberal universalism through the vehicle of the nation, primarily through globalized economic policy and aggressively interventionist and even imperialist militarism. Liberals believe the nation state must eventually be superseded by global governance, best represented today by the European union. Both sides of this project—the two faces of liberalism—have failed.”
“Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.
Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and the market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.”
“Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While ‘conservative’ liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community. And while ‘progressive’ liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of ‘manners and morals,’ preferring the open market place of individual ‘buyers and sellers,’ especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as ‘consumers’—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than ‘citizens’—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.”
“What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our ‘consent’. It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that ‘state of nature’ that existed before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”
“...feminist viewpoints emerge in tandem with technological advancement and social atomisation, and direct their efforts at mitigating the sex-specific impacts of a high-tech market society on women. But if the causal relationship between feminism and atomisation is complex, what’s indisputable is its deep implication in what it seeks to remedy. And thus many of the solutions proposed by feminism in response to women’s specific challenges under market society serve in practice to worsen women’s alienation and subordination to that market.”
“For women, this ideal of personhood took definitive legal form in the legalisation of abortion, and broader form in the rejection of ‘care’ as in any sense a female domain or obligation. But the net impact of women rejecting a sexist obligation to shoulder the burden of care hasn’t yet been men taking on an equal part of that burden. Rather, it’s been an awkward mixture of poorer people—usually women—being deputised as paid substitute carers, and those most in need of care often going without.”
“Mothers are only visible within this market society to the extent that we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is largely seen as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realization.”
“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.
Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.
Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.
Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.
For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”
“What travels under the term ‘progress’ is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits. This is usually framed as moral advancement, but in practice follows a two-step ratchet. This first is a shining picture of the utopia that will follow when all the old norms are dissolved and new, improved ones are free to form in the space this cleared. Then, whatever has been smashed in pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.”
“Ironically, then, the very notion of human rights inadvertently opened the door to more virulent forms of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In effect, the sweeping claims about the natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global assertions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more powerful and sinister even than the traditionalist ones. The new forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference. In the new racism, Jews were not just Christ-killers, their inherent racial inferiority threatened to stain the purity of whites through intermarriage. Blacks were no longer inferior because they were slaves; even as the abolition of slavery progressed around the globe, racism became more, not less, poisonous. Women were not simply less reasonable than men because they were less educated; their biology destined them to the private, domestic life and made them entirely unsuitable for politics, business, or the professions. In these new biological doctrines, education or changes in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature.”
“Carelessly we have abandoned the stabilizing values of our forebears, from the simplest traditions and values to the most complex strategies that survive over generations, since we believe we no longer need them. Enduring values that transcend the individual have been set aside, and at the center of the world we have placed the individual, around whom everything revolves and with whom everything ends. By giving the appearance of pushing back disease, famine, and war and leading longer lives in general, we believe in our own immortality during the best years of life. But that isn’t true, no matter how much we gloss over the decline of the body and banish the process of dying from our everyday lives and consciousness. The cathedrals of faith and prayer have been replaced with clinics of health and science. But clinics are not cathedrals. They can only treat physical ailments. We have replaced the spires of churches with towers of books in university libraries. But all this rational knowledge is not the same as wisdom.”
“Today we have largely done away with such customs and like to make fun of what seem to us to be pointless traditions. But the question is whether instead of the supposed freedom we have gained (in this case, the choice of wedding days), we have lost in the bargain a framework for life that these customs provided. At the very least we have created more problems for our-selves.”
“Today the human ambition is to be a creator. There are great creators, middling creators, and small creators, but everyone has the desire to be a creator. And it seems to me, once again, that to understand what is, is not something that stirs the ambitions of our contemporaries. They are more interested, one might say, in what is not. Rousseau, the great master of the modern in this matter, said, “Only what is not is beautiful.” For me, fundamentally, the opposite is true: only what is interests me. And this is perhaps the reason why, at least since I became an adult, I have not been able to be on the left, because the left prefers to imagine a society that is not, and I have always found the society that is more interesting than the society that might be.”
“Among your instincts you will find the longing for strong friendships, that the modern evil tries to snuff out. And they have good reason to try this, because every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. The modern zoo wants you instead to be a weak and isolated ‘individual.’”
“It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own “religion”—the many find solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so, and they shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for it. So much of modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission!”
“Thus everywhere we see that the very comforts and safety produced by the best men leads to the usurpation of society by those parts of the human spirit that are oriented instead toward a different kind of life, that everywhere the mode of the yeast wins out…and usually wins out very quickly. And in the West, whose special fate has been confused for History or Progress of the entire species, this development has taken place through the promotion of logos or reason and all the manifestations of this: the adulation of empty words, of legalism as a guide for social and political life, of the cult of science that is very far from real science. All of this has been a cover for the ascent of the blob human, of the lower orders of the spirit and is instead delivering not just the West, but all of mankind, to a condition of domestic brokenness and servility.”
“Since it is above all the analytical attitude which predominates in philosophy, its latest disciples have everywhere been engaged in dissolving and decomposing. In physics, they have found nothing but objections to make to the author of nature. In metaphysics, they have found nothing but doubts and subtleties. Ethics and logic have provided them with nothing but harangues against the political order, against religious ideas and against the laws of property. They have aspired to nothing less than the reconstruction of everything, by means of a revolt against everything. And without remembering that they themselves are in the world, they have torn down the pillars that support the world.”
“Our minds, our souls, our bodies work most efficiently, most profoundly, most happily, when moving and, in particular, walking. Modern civilization imprisons us in offices, and treats tramps, Gypsies, mystics, and nomads as misfits. But in fact these wanderers are in tune with an ancient and more natural form of human life. It is homes and cities and sedentary jobs that are unnatural. To find yourself, you must travel.”