According to Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson, I missed the point of his post “Why Don’t we Have an Elite“. I took the title, and Mark’s concluding paragraphs as a pretty clear indication that Mark believes first, that we don’t have a genuine elite and second, the liberal pretenders to elite status are a bunch of empty, ideological tools – hollow men and women – with too many tickets on themselves. The argument that takes him to that conclusion also gives a very strong impression that the conclusion was the one he wanted to get to.
Not so says Mark, in a response to my last cheap shot in his direction:
Not everyone understood my last post. It was an attempt to draw out the “neutrality strand” within liberalism.
By “draw out”, I think Mark means that he was looking to give an exposition of what “neutrality liberalism” is, rather than decoy a few “neutrality liberals” out into the open where he could get a blast or two at them. No matter (well not to me anyway).
I was having a bit of an obsessive-compulsive day when I read this, and I don’t take very kindly to the suggestion that I’ve missed the point of a piece of writing – that’s one reason that, as a general rule, I avoid leveling that accusation at others. Before a writer accuses his general readership – or even a part of it – of misreading his work, it’s a good idea if he first takes a deep breath and asks himself if the problem wasn’t that he miswrote instead. And no, I don’t claim to be perfect in that regard.
Thanks to the mild OCD, I took another look at Mark’s post on elites, and looked a bit deeper – particularly into the first nineteen of its 40 paragraphs, which I’d skimmed over because I figured that Mark was just repeating his existing position on “neutrality liberalism” for the benefit of readers who came in late. I even followed the link to Western Survival, where another Mark (Mark2 for future convenience) had developed some ideas on “neutrality liberalism” that Mark Richardson (Mark1) commended highly to his readers. Here’s the first paragraph of that post:
Mark Richardson (Mark1) at Oz Conservative notes the prescription of a Dr. Andrew Leigh for the negative aspects of diversity:
After the quoted matter, here’s how Mark2 develops the exposition of “neutrality liberalism” further:
Mark observes: “So here we get back to a basic problem liberal modernists like Professor Putnam and Dr Leigh face, namely of having to make things which matter, not matter.”
More specifically, I think that what is going on here is that liberals, in their well-intentioned, understandable, and laudable desire to make the world a better place, wish to “deconstruct” – i.e., eliminate – any aspect of human identity that leads to friction, with the single (unprincipled) exception of political identity.
Somewhere in this little circle of mutual commendation and agreement (Mark1 agrees with Mark2 and Mark2 agrees with Mark1 and vice versa and vice versa again, etc) Mark1 infers that liberals are rather empty people, who deny themselves any source of personal identity other than the political and are working towards a liberal paradise where we’re all pretty well identical:
Ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, nationality, language, religion, and culture are aspects of human identity that lead to favoritism and discrimination and thus power and wealth inequalities and social friction.
If people’s only significant source of identity were as liberals – people with no religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity – most of the strife in the world would be eliminated…
Because the kinds of identity I’ve mentioned lead to inegalitarian outcomes, liberals like Leigh want to eliminate them. Their ideal is a world where people have no ethnic, gender, class, sexual orientation, national, or cultural identity of any importance. [my emphasis]
That was Mark2 – now here’s Mark1’s exegesis and further development of this notion:
First, the adoption of a neutral stance toward things which matter leads to a major defect in modern Western man, namely a failure to project. Mark captures this defect at the very end of his description of how liberals see things (as quoted above) … [it is actually quoted above - see the emphasised paragraph]
If people have no religious, ethnic, gender, national, class or cultural identity, then they are empty men fit only to observe and admire the “colourful” life they witness in the non-liberal subject, in the “other”. They lack a “self” to carry confidently into the world. They have too little to project on their own account.
Hello, hello – who’s been reading Sartre then? He’s about the only philosopher I can think of at the moment who uses the word “project” in anything like the sense Mark1’s deployed here.
Now that’s a pretty egregious fallacy – one can no more infer, from what a person says in a debate on politics that they must have a particular psychology than one can infer, from the assertion (in ethics) that “People should not kill each other” that, in fact, people don’t kill each other. (Leading to the conclusion that much of what we read in the papers – reports of gangland murders, war and so on – must be fiction, because real people just don’t do that kind of stuff). No wonder then that, in the words of Mark1:
Traditionalists often have a difficult time penetrating this liberal mindset. We experience traditional identity in a radically different manner. It is felt by us to be a natural and positive aspect of self-identity, based more often on feelings of love and attachment than on hostile, antagonistic superiority.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Mark’s found a new strand of liberalism to contend with:
Lyl, you’re right to point out the emphasis liberals place on food. I don’t have a complete answer for why they do so. Perhaps a kind of epicureanism, a living for sensual pleasure, makes sense when you adopt a materialist philosophy.
Perhaps too, as I suggested in a post on multiculturalism, the leftist concept of multiculturalism, in which we are supposed to choose from and create our self from multiple cultures, doesn’t really work, except in reference to ethnic cuisine – hence the overblown emphasis on such cuisine.
It’s going to be interesting to see how that develops. Personally, I think the “emphasis” liberals place on food is very simply explained – it’s about replacing feelings of hunger with feelings of satiety and contentment, as pleasantly as possible – a desire that you’ll find right across the political spectrum. It’s only the spartan ideologues at the extremes who insist on preferring gruel over foi-gras. The only difference is in the rationale: at the right extreme it’s because it ain’t manly and at the left extreme it’s because it ain’t proletarian.
Postcript: well I think that’s me done with this particular barrel o’ fish for the year. Time to look for more challenging sport elsewhere.
This post, and the conversations between MarkI and MarkII remind me of Rudy Giuliani’s recent quip to a convention of Republicans: “I don’t always agree with myself on everything.”
As with most conservative argument, and most of Mark Richardson’s arguments, assumptions about our “nature” beggar every question and so bankrupt every debate in human philosophy. It’s the same kind of argument of an appeal to the deity, or a just-so story.
In arguments from “nature”, X is justified because to do notX would go against our “nature”. QED. A nice circular argument if ever there was. (For a catalogue of what X has stood for in the mouths of conservatives over recent centuries, substitute racial segregation, feudal law, conquest, genital mutilation, slavery, wife-beating, polygamy, monogamy, censorship of nudity, nudity, corporal punishment, banning contraception, banning abortion, witch-burning, gay-bashing, ethnic cleansing, and on, and on…)
Or, to borrow Mark Richardson’s phraseology, conservatives usually invoke the appeal to “nature” because the basic problem conservatves face is to find a way of making things that don’t matter, matter. (cf. religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity).
I have no qualms in stating that I never know what Gummo Trotsky’s posts are about or are supposed to mean and would avoid reading them except for the inextinguishable(but constantly dashed) hope that so many words, so much effort, would just once amount to more than a pile of pretentious gibberish.
Interesting, js. That’s exactly the way I felt every time I tried to read Finnegans Wake.
‘It is felt by us to be a natural and positive aspect of self-identity, based more often on feelings of love and attachment than on hostile, antagonistic superiority.’
This reminds me of the head of the STASI who said they did what they did through LOVE
So to me Mark = Markus Wolf
Mark take yr ‘love and attachment’ and shove them up yr fucking arsehole mate. Thank you T. G ( and Mercurio) for exposing this rancid lying little shit.
We won’t have to step on it.
Mercurius,
a) I don’t know why you should think it so noteworthy that one conservative might agree with another conservative’s argument and attempt to expand on it.
b) The argument “from nature” isn’t circular as you present it.
If liberals argue, for example, that our identity as men and women is unnatural and oppressive and exists as a social construct to shore up gender privilege, then there is a reason for conservatives to counter with the argument that such identities have a basis in nature, being hardwired into human biology, and are often experienced positively, rather than as a restrictive oppression.
It’s possible now to support such a conservative position not only with appeals to our own experience; or to various forms of social scientific research; or to patterns within history; but also to developments within modern science.
c) You claim that conservatives have tried to justify a whole series of things, including genital mutiliation, witch burning, polygamy, gay bashing, and ethnic cleansing. Many things on your list I don’t think conservatives have supported at all. Others haven’t been the critical point of debate between conservatives and liberals.
d) Your comment did, though, confirm the basic point of my posts, namely that liberals like yourself believe that such things as religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity don’t matter.
Professor Rat, I’ve never heard the STASI described as a traditionalist conservative organisation. I think you’ll find that they did what they did in the service of a modernist political ideology, not through a defence of traditional identity.
I’m sorry you can only conceive of love and attachment to forms of tradition as a lie. I think you’re missing out on a very broad current of human experience in this.
I’ll say this for Mark: he at least argues in good faith, unlike most of his intellectual traveling companions.
In fact, I’ll go further: I think Mark is one of the most thoughtful and consistent (nb. NOT monotonous) writers in the Oz Blogosphere, and unlike most blogozens his posts and comments are refreshingly free of bile.
I find his arguments unconvincing, but credit where it’s due: At least he raises the tone.
There’s another line of attack that may be fruitful against the Marks’s illiberalism.
According to the Marks liberalism can be defined by an absence, an essential hollowness. Liberals lack:
Having made this killing observation, conservatives imagine that it’s “case closed”.
But is it?
Look at this list of attributes allegedly lacking in liberals. Is it a complete list of the “essential” features of humanity? Might, for example, handedness (left or right) be another essential distinguishing feature between individuals?
Once conservatives are forced to concede that their models of humanity are incomplete, then their confidence about what attributes constitutute the “essential” human condition collapses.
The corollary of this observation is that conservatives are forced to attempt to construct a closed and completed description of what is “essentially” human.
But this project is impossible.
Liberals, on the other hand, recognise the impossibility of this project, and the injustice and undesirability of even attempting it.
Therefore, open-ended liberals have the only logical, consistent, though necessarily incomplete, description of the human condition.
And conservatives are obscuratist, crypto-totalitarians.
It smacks of dog-whistling, not good faith. He could learn honesty from Dinesh D’Souza.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this “more realistic goal”, a, *cough*,
liberalone?To argue that someone is “empty” simply because they believe that their religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural, identity, should not be used as a basis for coercion of, or discrimination against, “the other” is a pretty “empty” argument, if you ask me. The basis for liberal reasoning on these factors is not that they should be “erased”, but that they should not serve as a basis for political action, inclusion or exclusion,
because of, not despite, the fact that they are such powerful and basic determinants of an individual’s identity. Religion, for example, is so strongly based in the conscience and identity of citizens, that to make religion a substantial factor in politics could only result in conflict. Liberalism is not about erasing the non-negotiable factors in one’s identity, but about basingpoliticsupon the negotiable factors, because only by doing so, can peace in a pluralist society be assured. If a liberal wanted to erase religion, ethnic and national identities etc in society, he would be defeating his own logic because he would be making these factors a basis for coercion. Whilst it is true that Liberalism has a “neutralizing” tendency, its neutrality is based on intersubjectivity, not subjectivity. If a liberal argues that, in our political and social relationships, religion should not be a basis for our inclusion or exclusion of others, this does not mean that a Liberal is themselves devoid of religion. Mark1 and 2 should pay a visit to another Mark we know well here at LP, who is both a committed liberal AND a committed Roman Catholic. Go figure Mr Richardson.I think Mark and Mark (not Mark, but the other Marks) fall for the same, tired, and annoying, semantic, psychological, and ideological confinement and impoverishment of the term “liberalism”. Its easy to attack liberalism if you simply inject into its definition factors and features of its philosophy with which you disagree. But liberalism is more than that. It, and its ethical, economic, and political tenets form one of the firmest foundations of modern western civilization. It is not simply opposed to some traditionalized, hypostatized notions of “culture” or “religion”. It is a PART of our culture and religion. It often pisses me off that so called “conservatives” more often than not attack so called “liberalism” from a liberal perspective. It betrays as much forgetfulness and semantic solipsism as is charged of “postmodern relativism” or whatever other bogeyman is supposedly taking over the world.
Enough with the “crypto-thisthatandtheother” stuff professor R – it looks quasi-brain-dead.
Mark’s comment that
really says it all about the great divide between what are being referred to (in this debate) as liberals and conservatives. My understanding (as one who is definitely in what would be described as the “Liberal” camp – and please correct me if you think I am wrong) of this distinction – between “Liberals” and “Conservatives” – is that these factors do matter. It is their origin that is the main area of disagreement, with “Liberals” believing that much of the social, political and cultural significance of these factors is arbitrary and historically determined. As such, “Liberals” are suspicious of anyone who claims that they may be natural in the sense that they have always existed, and thus will always exist. These factors – religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity – are not the same thing as many other things that ARE natural. They are not phenomena like rainfall, the dispersal of species, or the seasons. It seems to me that these factors – religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity – are the result of human decisions and actions throughout history, and that thus we can decide and act to make them different from the waqy they are currently defined and perceived.
Anyway. There is more that we could say about things, but as a “Liberal”, I will always believe that the social, political, cultural and economic world is the way it is because it has been made that way as a result of human belief and action. Thus, (it would seem to me) that it is entirely possible and feasible (indeed, necessary) to remake and reform the social, political, cultural and economic world that we inhabit…
Cheers…
Missed that Mick. Not sure if we’ll hear any more from Mark, but I hope we won’t have any more flagrant attempts to shove straw up another commenter’s bum.
Spoke too soon, by a couple of weeks.