|
June 23, 2008
A fundamental defect of liberalism is that it is founded on a contradiction. Liberalism purports to be a rationally transparent, culturally and religiously neutral account of objective reality, accessible to all human beings in terms of their shared universal reason. However, in truth, liberalism is merely one particular, debatable account among others, stemming from a particular debatable tradition of rationality. Highlighting liberalism as a tradition diffuses its primary rhetorical strategy of preempting any debate as to the debatable character of its own premises.
So the basic incoherence of standard liberalism is that it is a particular political/economic tradition that pretends it is not a tradition. Enlightenment “reason” now seemed to be only empty rhetoric, being just one narrative of one particular culture’s self-understanding among many, and a deeply problematic narrative at that. If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their political language, to learn to explain and advocate liberal democratic moral ideals in a vocabulary that can express the particularism of liberal political norms without thereby invalidating them.
In order to defend itself in the present intellectual climate, liberalism must adopt a postmodernist, narrative approach to its own origins and history, accepting the a priori characterization of all philosophical systems as culturally and historically particularistic. If it does not reconfigure itself in this way, it remains vulnerable to the critiques of both the anti-modern traditionalist and the postmodern genealogist.
Is there such a liberalism?
|
Is there such a liberalism?
Yes, it involves an ethic of inquiry rather than one that values conclusions. Knowledge in such a system is treated as tentative and dialogue arises out out of a context that contains no preconceived or fixed purpose, but addresses the immediate circumstances.
Such a value system can be tracked back to hunter gatherer groups which were leaderless and involved a mutuality recognition of necessities that had to be considered in such a manner that what, if anything, needed to be done became increasingly apparent.
Such a culture would require small groups of people to work. It would not be suitable, initially, for larger groups which is why it is so little appreciated. Nevertheless, it does exist.