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January 16, 2005
The Review section of the Australian Financial Review (subscription required) is marketed as serious intellectual stuff--brain food-- for the economic elite of Australia. It keeps the thinking businessman informed of what's what in the intellectual world. Since you pay a lot for the AFR ($2.50 a copy) you would expect some intellectual grunt that goes beyond appealing to your prejudices, gives you something to chew over and makes some contribution to the public debate within deliberative democracy over what a free society means.
On Friday The AFR published an article by Andrew McIntyre, the assistant editor of the Institute of Public Affairs quarterly Review, entitled 'The Modern Imperative.' This wears the mantle of quality journalism from a think tank, which links back to the libertarian theoreticians of note, from the classical liberals to Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and their trenchant critiques of the despotic state in the name of individual liberty. McIntyre's article defends the liberal project of Enlightenment science, irreversible progress and a material triumph for mankind, with its enrichment of quality of life and reduction in pain, suffering and squalor.
This is a fairly standard liberal narrative and this kind of defence of liberal modernity is what you would expect from the IPA's free market liberalism. In the article McIntyre makes a gesture to the dynamic, 'bright young thing' libertarianism of Virgina Postrel and her book The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. Postrel is deeply opposed to the way many US libertarians (notably Rothbard and those of the Ludwig von Mises Institute) forged a working alliance with the old-style paleo-conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan. So this implies that an IPA liberalism will not hope into bed with one nation conservatives, does it not?
Let us grant that liberal modernity has achieved the above narrative that Andrew has set out. I'm granting the narrative because I want to explore a particular kind of liberal mentalaity.
McIntyre gives us an insight into the liberalism of the financial and business world, as it is the way this kind of serious journalism defends liberal modernity that is interesting. My case is that Andrew, as an IPA publicist, works with a good and bad mentality of a liberal fundamentalism. It is this because it demonizes the opposition to a liberal modernity as the voice of unreason. This is what is usually done to the environmental movement by the IPA,(eg., a green religion) but it is unusual to see all non-liberals tarred in the same way. That's my argument anyhow.
True, McIntyre's rhetorical strategy picks up on a common strand of reasoning in Australia which links the pre-and post-modern critiques of liberal modernity. This link is suggested here:
"Both pre-modernist and the newer-postmodernist of modernism seem to be two sides of the same coin. Both believe that the liberal project has failed: both denounce modernism."
Well that is true if one redescribes 'denounce' with 'critique', or overcoming. But the implication that they---the pre-modern and postmodern critiques of liberal modernity--are the same kind of thing(unreason) is what is questionable. Do both denounce as opposed argue. Do all on both the pre-and post-modern sides denounce modernism as distinct from arguing?
Does Andrew argue that unreason case? Let us have a look.
Most of the article is concerned with the Christian Church's negative reaction to liberal modernity. Hovever, McIntyre does say that:
"Postmodernism's archaic response to modernism is very similar to that of the church, and of most traditional culture, in its recoil from the notion that history embodies no permanent stability."
And this:
"However, many of the elements of the Christian church and the post-modernists and the left not only despise modernity and its successes, they spend their time making tenditious economic analysies to show how inquitious it is."
Despise?
There are the small matters of Auschiwitz, the Gulag, colonialism, the destruction of aboriginal society and environmental devastation to consider when it comes to evaluating liberal modernity. Have not arguments been presented about the negative consequences of liberal modernity? 'Despise' indicates a negative emotional reaction, not the use of an emotionally-informed critical reason concerned with the good life.
Where is the argument for the reduction of a critical reason to raw nasty emotion of despise?
The journalist strategy is pretty clear. Make the pre modern and postmodern critiques the same, and then use rhetoric to show they are both an unreason. It is towards the end of the article that Andrew makes the identity between pre and post-modernism more explicit.
He says:
"It is hard not to feel that pre-modernist thinking is a worringly perverse form of atavism, particularly when it includes attacks on modern science and Enlightenment values. The contemporary Christian church is not exempt.Post-modernists, and the left generally, dispaly a very similar form of atavism, dressed up in trendy post-modern clothes, displaying similarly stubborn forms of non-negotiable fundamentalist attitudes impervious to empirical evidence. To reject modernism and material progress does not, on the evidence, seem to be a realistic option."
So both pre-modern and postmodern are anti-reason. They are not critiques at all. Both are a fundamentalism that is the opposite of the reason of liberal modernity. The stark dualism is very explict.
Why the word 'attack' not 'critique' of science and Enlightenment values (personal and economic liberty)? Attack means smashing up science per se, whilst critique implies a questioning of the pressuppositions of science, such as scientism, mechanism, realism, subject object relation etc. It's a big difference.
What is required is an argument that shows the post-modern critique of science and enlightennment values of liberty and reason are a form of atavism, a fundamentalism and unreason. The critique is a critique of the categories (or metaphysics) of the liberal scientic enlightenment, not refusing to acknowledge the empirical evidence like a biblical fundamentalist who bases everything on faith.
I suggest that what we have here is a liberal fundamentalism that demonizes the opposition, implying that it is reponsible for all the bad things about liberal modernity. This is suggested in Mcintyre's closing paragraph:
"...to not face a world that provides no evidence or utility for a metaphysical reality, which indeed impedes rational decision-making (a mark of secular liberal progress) could mean a return to an infernal new barbarism and primitivism that does not bear thinking about. We simply have no choice."
No choice! Is that not an indication of a closed mentality by those in favour of free markets, instrumental reason and technocracy.
Those working in the premodern and postmodern traditions would deeply disagree about the nature of metaphysics and metaphsyical reality would they not? That should put a question mark under any guilt by association.
The above paragraph says that pre and post-modernism impede rational decision-making, and represent a new barbarism and primitivism. Hence we have no choice but to stick with liberal modernity.
It is a fundamentalist form of consciousness because it does not address the arguments of the criitcs of liberal modernity about the nature of liberal rational decisioning as an instrumental reason; the argument that barbarism (fascism) may have its roots in the Enlightenment; or the arguments of a Heidegger, Foucault or Deleuze.All we have are devil type figures and a contentless criticism.
What Andrew McIntyre does to defend liberal modernity is find similarities and ignore differences, emotionalize the critics, say that only liberalism has reason on its side, construct an unreason (the devil) and then deploy fears about a barbaric future bought about by the devil of unreason. Does that not indicate a fundamentalist mentality?
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Gary I agree.
The inevitable outcome of Andrew's version of modernism and the so called "enlightenment" is the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that Eisenhower warned us about and Lewis Mumford described in "Technics & Civilisation" and "The Pentagon of Power".
The Pentagon power complex(MIC) and its all pervasive influence being the indisputable FACT of world wide politics and "culture" in January 2005.
Even a cursory look at Andrew's writings in the IPA Review show very clearly that the Pentagon death machine is his very favourite institution---all in the name of "freedom" of course.
The "culture" of death rules.
The "enlightenment" definitely had some positive effects.
But its true nature was the systematic shutting down of the Divine Radiance/Light and also the Divine Feminine or Goddess from the cultural landscape and possibility of western "man".
Real God was well and truly dead by the time of Nietzsche and the Goddess was eliminated by the witch burnings and the full scale assault on ALL non western ("primitive") cultures with its end result being Margaret Thatcher.
John Forth