Liberalism and Disintegration

 

What is meant by liberalism?  In every day language to be liberal means to be open minded and easy going.  In politics there is a link and that link is not necessarily positive.  As G K Chesterton pointed out, one’s mind, like one’s mouth, should on the whole be closed unless receiving something nutritious.  To be open to everything is in a sense to be willing to undergo disintegration.  It is to lose integrity.

The great proponent of open-ness, the French-Jewish philosopher Derrida referred to the Old Testament story of Rahab the whore who aided the Hebrew spies in the taking of Jericho with its supposedly impregnable walls (as pointed out by Jonathan Pageau).   Here we have two key symbols – the whore who loses her integrity of her body for money and the walls, which, when they fall end the integrity of the city.  Derrida promoted a radical open-ness, but for us we can see the fundamental attack upon integrity of  a radical open-ness.

The reactionary Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev regarded Western liberalism as something like a progressive disease that destroyed the integrity of the body politick.  His use of “progressive” is interesting given its adoption by the most radical wing of liberalism.  If our concern and priority is integrity rather than open-ness, then progressivism does seem to lead to disintegration.

Liberalism’s roots can be found in the disintegration of metaphysics.  With the Franciscan thinkers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham we saw the development of two new ideas that caused a schism with the classical world of thought.  With Duns Scotus we find the development of the “thisness” of things or their haecceity.  What the essence of this new philosophical outlook entailed was that the classical idea of participation  in the metaphysical was lost.  It meant this because Duns Scotus believed that particular things are irreducible and individual (indivisible).  On the face of it that might suggest support for integrity, but the problem is that it works both ways.  In reducing everything to the particular, the integrity of universals is undermined.  By atomising everything it becomes impossible to participate meaningfully in general identities or the transcendental; or at least as the centuries unfolded such a problem was to be revealed.

When the Franciscan Duns Scotus is linked to the other revolutionary Franciscan thinker, William of Ockham, the momentum towards disintegration is further intensified.   With his nominalism Ockham denied the existence of universals.  Forms were merely names given to link disparate things (hence nominalism).

Such a philosophical paradigm can clearly be contrasted with Platonism, with its mystical and otherworldly intellectual forms; but it also breaches withAristotle with his empirically-derived forms and for our purposes, most importantly Aristotle’s telos or the goal towards which all things that exist are oriented (Man’s telos being virtue).

When this reductionist philosophy was applied to the world of Man it eventually became impossible to sustain the idea of the telos – that Man had an overarching purpose that he might fulfil or of which he might fall short.  We can see here the foundations of liberalism, which denies some overarching purpose such as virtue as oppressive and from which we are to be liberated.

Alasdair MacIntyre has identified this lack of telos as the key reason why liberalism cannot give an account of virtue and why liberal societies are falling apart.  It is not surprising that once Western theology and philosophy had taken such a reductionist turn, the philosophy of John Locke became intellectually possible.  The very hierarchy of the State no longer had any claim to universals over the particular.  The anointed Monarch no longer could rely on his participation in the transcendental, but must strike up a contract like a merchant to bring men out of the Lockean ahistorical fiction of a state of nature.

Combined with this disintegration is the influence of England’s religious internecine struggles.  The Protestants saw themselves as being liberated from Rome.  A narrative of liberation fed into popular consciousness and was very compatible with this new ontology of nominalism, where the hierarchies could no longer appeal to universals.

Here we find the moralistic tone of liberalism’s project of demolition.  To destroy general identity and any  chance of participation in higher meaning is narrated as “liberation”.  If we no longer participate in higher meaning or any collective identity then we are free to be the reduced and directionless atoms we really are, driven by our passions.  That in essence is the liberal project.

Contrast that with the more elevated vision of human nature – one that sees us as having a telos and belonging to more general categories.  We are not simply atoms, but are peoples, we participate in religious tradition, we are gendered. 

It is no accident, however uncomfortable classical liberals feel, that the activists at the extreme fringe of liberalism – wrongly termed cultural Marxists – are pushing to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of general human identity, including even gender.  This is simply the narrative of liberation from meaning and belonging being followed through to its nihilistic goal.

What is attacked by liberalism is the integrity of categories and the possibility of participating in higher meaning.  That is not to say any collective identity or means of achieving collective identity is right.  There is a Royal Path between liberalism and the worldly-focused totalitarian agendas (themselves bastard offspring of the Enlightenment).  A cultural and political environment that fosters participation in higher meaning and collective identities is that for which conservatives should strive.

The misleading rhetoric of liberalism suggests that it can provide such an environment, where all can pursue meaning in their own way.  The reality is that liberalism like all ideologies has its own totalising narrative.  The narrative of liberation means that all general and higher identities become categorised as oppressive and as a result must be abolished.  This means that in practice liberalism cannot stop at a compromise between conflicting higher identities, but must wage a campaign against them all.  This is exactly how the Western cultural journey of progressive decline is being played out.  First a collective telos of society, usually religious, is undermined.  In trade, barriers to influx of imports are torn down.  The integrity of the nation state ( once the liberal successor to the conservative empire) is undermined.  Even normative sexuality and then gender are overturned in the name of liberation.  As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has argued, the final stage of liberation will be from human nature itself and it is likely that such a “liberation” will be played out with technology, artificial intelligence and even, at the risk of sounding melodramatic (which is difficult in a culture where gender is no longer considered a real general category) – the cyborg.