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August 3, 2003
Peter Cuthburtson over at Conservative Commentary has an interesting post on Why so many leftist bloggers lean right. It is about lefties in the media (the BBC and Guardian) thinking that their conservative opponents are ignorant and prejudiced, and so they have little understanding of conservative arguments on an issue.
Peter says:
"So as they [liberal/lefties] recognise all the reasons to support the views they hold, they have no knowledge or appreciation of the arguments on the other side, or the reasons for thinking their own standpoint might be wrong. The only logic they have been exposed to is on their side, so everyone on the other must be motivated by hate, greed, bigotry, lunacy and bloodlust."
Peter makes a general point about a phemomena I mentioned here and illustrated here. This phemonena in public debate is particular distressing for someone who has been trained in philosophy, for I just take it for granted that there are arguments on both sides of an issue, it is the arguments that are examined, and the task at hand is to take apart the argument.
I'm not sure what Peter means by conservatism as I have not explored his weblog sufficently. What has motived this weblog has been an attempt to understand Australian conservatism that sits behind the populist conservatism of the last two decades. The philosophy seemed to me to be pretty thin. (See postings here and here on Australian conservatism). Those posts were an early attempt to come to grips with Australian conservatism--it appeared to me that this conservatism lacked a common philosophical core and was little more than a series of splinters around a myriad discussions of specific policies and issues. What does give conservatism its core is the social construction of an urgent threat from a enemy---international terrorists. It is this threat makes conservatives strong and united notwithstanding their internal differences.
What I am going to do on this post is to show my lefty affinity with conservatism. Philosophy.com is a lefty webog (my roots lie in the German marxism of the Frankfurt School, and in particular Adorno---it was Aesthetic Theory that turned me on). I have a great deal sympathy with the conservative critique of liberalism (& here) and modernity. By conservatism I mean the conservativism of a Burke; or an Oakeshott or [here])or a Russell Kirk. It is seen as the traditionalist school, but it is to be distinquished from the current neo-con foreign policy doctrine of pre-emptive strike and unilateralism.
And to be distinquished from the wishy washy conservatism that is really free market liberalism and libertarianism. There are very few libertarians around who argue that liberty is valuable for its own sake irrespective of the consequences. What we have are utilitarians who are strong on individual property rights and free competitive markets. They are mostly free market economists, and from what I can gather, they assume that freedom works," in the sense of generating far greater social prosperity and individual utility than non-free or socialist societies. They do not see the need or possibility of justifying individual rights on any other basis other than market efficiency and wealth creation.
Economic prosperity is the good, and all the arguments are pretty much about utility, efficiency, economy, wealth creation and the (spontaneously evolved) liberal market order. Politics, from I can gather, means government and that is about the use of coercive power to protect life, liberty, property, and the obligation of contracts. Happiness is bundled off into the prive sphere. Happiness is an individual personal thing and reason cannot evaluate different and subjective values or ends.
On this account we citizens defend Australia from international terrorism for the sake of economic prosperity. Sitting behind this is the assumption of self-interst and self preservation. In defending Australia we are defending a way of life that amounts to little more than individual rights in self-preservation and self-interest, and so the protection of mere life and a low sort of liberty. It is pretty thin stuff, but that is what you get when you reduce society to the competitive market. Civil society, culture and political life fade away.
Back to philosophy.com and its leftylean right. I don't bother to reconcile what many would take to be deep contradications. Suffice to say that my postgraduate training was in Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger They are powerful thinkers on the discontents of modernity, and this gives you a certain oomph; an omph that makes me quite sympathetic to this review of Leo Strauss.
Take the following passage:
"And yet, for all its universality and global sway, the spell of modernity seems to be breaking. The western self can no longer ignore the reality that modernist forces have caused the devastation of the landscape of rationality and turned it into a wasteland of nihilism and contingency."
My response? That's dead right. I'd shrug and say it's only recycled Nietszche. Hence we have a problem with modern enlightening reason and the Enlightenment tradition. The Enlightenment project has gone off the rails.
Then the next bit from the review:
"All the works reported here attest to the presence of the anti-modern spirit that, so soon after the passing of the juggernaut of modernity, breathes over the intellectual heartland of the downtrodden traditionalist and the disillusioned modernist. The rebirth of a host of alternative discourses, both Western and non-Western, that all challenge the hegemony of the modern meta-narrative is a significant development of our times and even though it is impossible to hail every act of anti-modern insurgency as an emancipatory exploit, the dethroning of the regime of modernity can no longer be contested."
My response? Of course. No problems. What do you expect with the decay of modernity. All the bits that have been rejected, scorned and repressed for so long reappear.
And the next bit is easy as well, namely that Leo Strauss:
"...is today regarded as one of the most formidable philosophical critic of modernity... Behind Strauss's conviction about the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary philosophy, his radical doubt about modern rationalism and his recognition of its spiritual and moral crisis lurks the giant of medieval Jewish philosophy, Moses Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors. That Strauss himself studied Muslim philosophers, and through them discovered his 'mentor' Maimonides; that one major academic enterprise for the study of medieval Islamic philosophy, that of Professor Muhsin Mahdi and his students, has been directly influenced by Strauss's ideas; that his indictment of modernity for its 'theological-political' flaws fully coheres with the Islamic judgement in this regard, count, I believe, more than adequate reasons for the Muslim interest in the work of Leo Strauss."
No problems. It's in Hegel. The whole Enlightenment project is grounded on faith. And it cannot justify its presupposed faith in reason. This gives rise to its theological-political flaws. And the stuff about the world construct of natural science? Well that's Heidegger's thesis of the scientific of the world picture of modernity.
So what is the common ground between ground between conservatism and Marism. It is one of 'lets get stuck into liberal modernity and its entrenched categories of instrumental rationality and individualist subjectivity ' folks. We need to take a hammer to these idol of the modernity---sound them out for their hollowness. And where do we do that from? Where do we stand whilst we critique liberal modernity? In the tacit, practical, ethical knowledge of our common life. It is this that enables us to confront "the terror of nothingness and meaninglessness of life"--and I would add 'in the liberal market order.'
And the differences? Whereas Strauss & Voeglin make a religious turn, I stick with an aesthetic reason concerned with embodied human suffering. In a world where an (utilitarian) economic reason is hegemonic aesthetics gives expression to human experience of suffering and lends it a hand. Aesthetics is the realm of sentiments, affections, spontaneous bodily habits customs that cohere in what is often called a common life.
The other difference with Strauss is that he stands on the ground of natural right to critique modernity whereas philosophy.com stands on the historicist ground opened up by Hegel. But that dispute is a whole other ball game.
All I wanted to show in this post is show another way a lefty can lean right.
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I wonder how you see any affinity between Hegel’s radical modernism and Strauss’s conservatism who target actually Hegel’s historicism as the main source of “decaying relativism” of modern consciousness.