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February 23, 2006
Keith Windshuttle carries the intellectual flag for Australian conservatism these days. His most recent paper is 'The Adversary Culture: The perverse anti-Westernism of the cultural elite', which was given at the Summer Sounds Symposium in Punga Cove in the Marlborough Sounds of New Zealand. It is a theme that the conservatives go on about at great length.
Rafe Champion over at Catallaxy reckons this is an important paper, as it 'highlights the importance of the cultural agenda, in addition to the more obvious political battles that have to be waged to defend western civilisation as we know it. ' Is it important?
Let's see. Windschuttle starts thus:
For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. Before the 1960s, if Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Even a radical critique like Marxism was primarily an internal affair, intent on fulfilling what it imagined to be the destiny of the West, taking its history to what it thought would be a higher level.Today, however, such thinking is dismissed by the prevailing intelligentsia as triumphalist.
Okay. This refers to the postmodern questioning of the grand narratives. So what is wrong with that?
Windschuttle says that the today's overwhelmingly negative critique of Western civilization is based on relativism:
According to this ideology, instead of attempting to globalise its values, the West should stay in its own cultural backyard. Values like universal human rights, individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many "ways of knowing". In place of Western universalism, this critique offers cultural relativism, a concept that regards the West not as the pinnacle of human achievement to date, but as simply one of many equally valid cultural systems.
Really? What ever happened to immanent critique that highlights the gap between Enlightenment ideals and practice? Best not to mention that as it would destroy the message.
Shouldn't we try to resolve this conflict between univeralism and particularism in a philosophical way if it is so crucial ? Nay. Universalism is good, relativism is bad. That is all that needs to be said. Windschuttle doesn't even bother to consider the concept of reason in history that has been around since Hegel. Why bother with such philosophical concerns? Best to not introduce Nietzsche's ideas about perspectivism either. It complicates things too much even though the postmodern left relies heavily on it to justify its questioning of western universalism.
Windshuttle is no liberal. The "question of universals," for liberalism is one of nominalism, which supports the position that there is nothing beyond the particular and that human societies are made up only of individuals. So Windschuttle is dumping liberalism whilst supposedly defending universal right.
This indicates the way that Windschuttle's performance is that of a cultural warrior. It makes you hanker for the intellectual grunt of the French New Right doesn't it.
Windshuttle notes a contradiction in the postmodern kind of leftism. He says:
The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures, no matter how uncomfortable we might be with their beliefs and practices. However, there is one culture conspicuous by its absence from all this. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.
How does the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze square with that claim?
After a catalogue of the various horrible consequences of this decadent adversary culture Windschuttle ends his text thus:
Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.
The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.
The left is an enemy within. It has to be stopped. It's undermining our capacity and will to fight the enemy without.
There stands the poverty of Australian conservatism for all to see. Give me the French New Right anyday.
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That last bit about "barbarism and decadence" sounds like a bit of "ur-fascism". Cf. www.jamesrmaclean.com