Dialectical Liberalism

Dad29 sends an article built around the concept that Liberalism failed by succeeding. 

If Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn’t make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. “Liberalism has failed,” Deneen writes, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” In other words, liberalism “has failed because it has succeeded."...

To put it simply, it’s not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to “limit” freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others....

Pope Leo argues that if we concentrate on seeing the truth more clearly, we will be less prone to “short circuit” human rights by proliferating falsehoods that promise freedom but don’t deliver:

The right to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and even the right to life are being restricted in the name of other so-called new rights, with the result that the very framework of human rights is losing its vitality and creating space for force and oppression. This occurs when each right becomes self-referential, and especially when it becomes disconnected from reality, nature, and truth.

This 250th anniversary of our nation is an opportune time to reexamine any qualms we might have with political liberalism. For if we suspect that liberalism has “failed” because it has allowed us to be too free, we should consider the possibility that it is we who have failed because we have lost sight of the crucial truths that our Founders considered self-evident. 

There are a lot more specific examples in the article which I won't cite here; you can read them if you like. You can also read reviews of both books widely; here's one from the LA Review of Books which, as you can imagine from the home of Hollywood, isn't a fan. The reviewer cautions that "the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence" -- the date of the review is 2023, the height of the Biden Administration. The shadow of Dark Authoritarianism is always rising in LA. 

These authors all seem to think that the choice is between the Old Way and the New Way. What strikes me immediately is that the conflict fits neatly into the dialectic. In the dialectic, a thesis is rejected and an opposing antithesis appears; but eventually people figure out that neither is quite right, and work out the good things that each side had. This is called the synthesis. 

Dialectical political theories have a bad history: both Hegel and Marx were champions of them. The error, though, lies in thinking that the logic of the dialectic is a pure logic that can therefore be worked out in advance. Marxists have been writing for more than a century (almost two!) on the inevitable workings of the logic of economic history, only to find their predictions always falsified.

As we very often discuss here, the physical world isn't logical but analogical. All analogies always break; part of the work is figuring out where the break is going to happen. This is the I.3 point that I kept returning us to during the reading of the EN: it's a category error to attempt to apply strict logic to ethics or politics, as if you could provide proofs for them.

Still, the core idea that we are working towards a synthesis of the Old Way and the New Way is very likely true. We should be looking back at the Old Way to see what was good about it, as we also look at the New Way to identify what were genuine improvements we'd like to protect in the synthesis. On such terms, the task isn't "reactionary" but progress -- just progress in an orthogonal direction from the way in which "progress" has been defined by the New Way for so long. 

"Your President is mad"

I'm not sure exactly how it went when the Marines retrieved the U.S. flag from WHO headquarters, but I'm thinking of this scene from The Wind and the Lion:

On Rights: Religion, Philosophy, History

We've had an interesting discussion for the last few days on the nature of rights. This is not the first: the Hall also had a significant debate on the subject in 2007. It's collected on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," and is well-worth reading through on your own because we are likely to tread the same ground again. A series of the posts are by Joel Leggett, who is both a lawyer and Marine -- retired from the latter, I think, these days -- on how to interpret the relative influence of faith, philosophy, and history on the rights we enjoy.

To summarize (unwisely, no doubt; I'll surely miss something from that debate in trying to frame it in a few paragraphs), religion gave us Natural Law. Really, the concept originates as so much with the Ancient Greeks. We have a couple of later mentions before the Middle Ages on record, such as from Cicero. The Medieval Scholastic philosophers became very interested in it. St. Thomas Aquinas formalized an Aristotelian understanding of Natural Law, but as a subordinate to the Eternal Law of God. Yet Natural Law remains superior to Human Law, which has some power but is mutable unlike either of the higher laws. He also distinguishes all this from what he calls the Old Law, in which he found things of quality but that were gladly replaced with the Law of the Gospel, which you will notice is not the same as the Eternal Law (nor could it be, since it didn't once exist and now does). If you follow the link under 'Ancient Greeks' above you'll find similar traditions in other religions, but they are not our tradition: it was not informed by them, and indeed only recently have Western scholars become aware that such traditions existed. 

Natural Law, in any case, does not necessarily give us natural rights. The Church did not come up with the idea of the right to keep and bear arms; nor freedom of speech in any sort of sense similar to our own; and while it does teach a kind of freedom of conscience, it has sharp limits and is bounded by error and heresy. One hears Catholics (especially Jesuits) and other Christian leaders talking of human rights, but they are not the source of them: they have simply applied religious and scriptural justifications backwards onto an inheritance for which religion was not responsible. 

Natural rights are, in the sense of 'rights existing as concepts' rather than 'rights that actually exist,' a creation of philosophy. The line of thinking runs from Aristotle (remember all the different sorts of 'equality' in the EN) through the Stoics (who deepened this idea of human equality) through Cicero. As you'll see, and as you would expect given that philosophy was almost exclusively taught within the Church during the Middle Ages, theologians were often involved. Yet we really find the first expressions of what would become the American notion of rights in John Locke, even if the roots are deeper.

17th-century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life, liberty, and estate (property)", and argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. Preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property was claimed as justification for the rebellion of the American colonies. As George Mason stated in his draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, "all men are born equally free", and hold "certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity." Another 17th-century Englishman, John Lilburne (known as Freeborn John), who came into conflict with both the monarchy of King Charles I and the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, argued for level human basic rights he called "freeborn rights" which he defined as being rights that every human being is born with, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or by human law.

The distinction between alienable and unalienable rights was introduced by Francis Hutcheson. In his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson foreshadowed the Declaration of Independence, stating: "For wherever any Invasion is made upon unalienable Rights, there must arise either a perfect, or external Right to Resistance. ... Unalienable Rights are essential Limitations in all Governments." Hutcheson, however, placed clear limits on his notion of unalienable rights, declaring that "there can be no Right, or Limitation of Right, inconsistent with, or opposite to the greatest public Good."

But again, even if these foreshadowed our rights, they weren't actual rights that anyone enjoyed. To find the roots of those things coming to be, we have to look at neither religion nor philosophy but history.

In much of Europe, the nobility and knighthood remained a separate and special class. Not so in England:

When William the Conqueror took possession of the English crown he organized it as a complete feudal state. But England had a large population of freemen in addition to the mass of the unfree and the Norman kings never made any legal distinction between knights and other freemen. The freedoms which were inherent in feudal vassalage went to all freemen as vassals, direct or indirect, of the king...

The right of all freemen to the privileges of vassals was clearly accepted in England from the Conquest, but found its first clear expression in the Magna Carta. This document was stated to apply to all freemen. It also contained in specific form a statement of the most basic of all liberties -- the right to due process of law.

Thus in England as the unfree became free they acquired the same legal status as knights of the feudal world. Individual liberty was part of the fundamental law.

He goes on to point out some exceptions to his general thesis: for example, no one had the right to 'freedom of religion' until after the Reformation; freedom of the press is likewise a much later invention (and indeed, there was no printing press in 1066).

The English kings went on to further conquests in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and so forth; thus they spread this idea abroad.

The right to keep and bear arms comes from this, even though it can be philosophically defended (as I have written about extensively myself, especially here). So too the right to trial by a jury of your peers. So too habeas corpus. So too did the idea of franchise, which the Normans applied to the Thanes they came to call 'franklins,' i.e., 'a little Frank' rather than a proper one like themselves. In spite of their disdain for the Thanes, they recognized the danger of suppressing them and the wisdom of granting them knightly rights in order to maintain their consent to be governed. 

The right of freedom of religion came out of the exhaustion with the religious wars, not philosophy or religion -- though you can formulate either a religious or a philosophical justification for it. Freedom of speech as we have it in America came from the Anarchists, as we recently explored: it existed in a much more restricted form from the 1st Amendment, but the form we have came from a series of lawsuits defending kinds of speech that the government felt free to ban and to punish as late as Woodrow Wilson. Freedom of the press likewise: just publishing a pamphlet describing how to use a condom was cause for arrest and prosecution until those same lawsuits brought about our current right.

Empirically you can see that real rights, actual rights, need a practical defense. They need, as I have been arguing for a couple of days now, a community, a people, who have them as values and will defend them with blood (or, in the case of the Anarchists, with effective lawsuits -- a point important to Mr. Hines). 

As I said the other day, "[t]he idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible." You will not have rights without that, regardless of whether or not you are entitled to them. Obviously I think that philosophical and religious defenses of rights are worth spending time on, since I have spent so much time on them myself. However, if you really want to have the right, you must fight for it -- and you must find people who will fight alongside you. That is the concept of frith, which was important to the 2007 debate: frith is a cognate of both friend and freedom. 

Raising citizens

From "The Salt-Box House," a proofing project at Gutenberg, a 1929 sketch of pre-Revolutionary War New England by Jane de Forest Shelton:

[A]ll feats of skill and daring were welcomed. Fear was not cultivated. To be brave, to be skilful in whatever one set a hand to, to accomplish everything undertaken, to surmount difficulty, gave life a perpetual goal. Nothing was more clearly demonstrated in the later conflict with disciplined armies than that he that had been faithful in little would be faithful also in much. That the hour of emergency must be the hour of triumph is one of the great underlying principles for the success of a venture or a country.

A Disappointing Turn

I've been very disappointed with the Trump administration on the 2nd Amendment, although here as in so many other cases I am much more pleased with his administration than I would have been with President Harris'. I never really expected him to be a crusader on the topic -- he's from New York City, after all, which prosecutes even transportation of unloaded and locked firearms to a shocking degree. However, he talked a good game and hired some legitimate figures, so I had some hopes. 

These hopes have not exactly proven justified. This latest thing out of DC is just another example. 

Pirro didn't walk back her statement that anyone bringing a gun into the District will go to jail, as well as her insistence that permit-holders from jurisdictions outside the District of Columbia would face charges for carrying in D.C., but she did try to clarify those remarks. 

The 'clarification' amounts to explaining that what she said is just DC law, as indeed it is. But as Cam Edwards (a journalist with very solid pro-2A credentials over decades) goes on to point out, she's already established that she won't enforce DC law for DC residents; this is just one step beyond that.

Pirro has already declared that, in her view, D.C.'s ban on openly carried long guns and possession of "large capacity" magazines violates the Second Amendment and violations by lawful D.C. gun owners won't be prosecuted. If Pirro is willing to make a judgment call about the constitutionality of those statutes, then it stands to reason that she can do the same with D.C.'s lack of reciprocity... as well as its gun registration requirements. 

And if Pirro wants to charge someone with a valid Virginia or Maryland carry permit simply for carrying an "unregistered" gun and ammunition in D.C., that suggests that she finds those statutes 2A-compliant; a position that puts her at odds with the 2A community and even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who has suggested that a lack of reciprocity violates the Second Amendment.  

Laws repugnant to the Constitution are null and void, someone once wrote. Prosecutorial discretion is a tool very widely abused, but a tool all the same. They don't want armed citizens near the seats of power, though, not Republican politicians and not Democratic ones. 

An Outlaw's Prayer

Ammon Bundy, who led an armed standoff of a Federal wildlife refuge against Federal agents in 2016, has like his father always been pretty good on Constitutional and historical arguments. He also has thoughts on Scripture, as those things apply to the issue of illegal immigration and the whole business around ICE.

The Constitutional case is defensible; the historic arguments are pretty good at establishing a custom and tradition grounding; the 'making up for the sins and mistakes of our history' is not persuasive to me as all such arguments generally are not. For example, here's a post from fifteen years ago called "Against Human Rights." The idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible. If you want to join the polity or community, well, you have to start with respecting their norms, culture, mores, rules, and maybe -- maybe -- their laws. 

Likewise, not to accuse him of liberalism except in the broadest, Classical Liberal sense of the word, but this is an area where liberalism is insufficient. There is a genuine human universal that liberalism cannot see or explain, and has no answers for in play here. There's a reason Amelia is so instantly popular, and it isn't racism or meanness: it's that universal that liberalism (nor capitalism) has any way to defend. 

Still, I am in the mode of advancing interesting and sincere arguments whether or not I agree with them. This one is strong in places; I'll leave the Scriptural arguments to the readers, some of whom are much more deeply engaged in that than I am. 

In honor of the gentleman, Mr. Bundy, a Johnny Paycheck song. This is from the album that partly got him sent to prison; the title, "Armed & Crazy," at least didn't help his defense on the charges of having shot a man in the head while high on cocaine. Which, you know, was true -- that didn't help either. 

Snowbound

This has been a busy few days. The official total from the weather report in Sylva, which is thirty miles away and about 2000 feet lower, was 12 inches. They didn't come up into the mountains to measure (nor, very quickly, could they have; nor could they yet!). Here's my last measurement before I gave up, midday sometime:

I still can't get to the road except on foot, but the temperature has broken freezing. Up til now, the only melting has been from direct sunlight, plus some sublimation. Now we might actually see some progress. The roads will refreeze tonight when it gets back down below freezing, though.

NCDOT issued an order mid-day that no chemical/salt treatments of roads were to be done except in response to a direct need by emergency services. Naturally that meant that, when an emergency occurred, there was a good chance the treatment was too late to do much good. There was a two-alarm fire over to Cashiers/Sapphire; it sounds like they had a very interesting time getting fire engines to it. 

The power was out for quite some time, but the blessed and honorable linemen got it on very early Monday. I take it that means that the state highway was cleared enough to let them access the power station and maybe clear some downed lines. 

It's been quite an adventure. 

A Two-Fire Night

Even Conan wanted in when it hit -4 with wind chill. I have a fire in the wood burning furnace and another in this beautiful fireplace that I don’t use often enough. Today’s the day, though. 

UPDATE:

To Raven's point.

The Face of Happiness

Conan is so delighted by the snow. The cat is noticeably less delighted. 

Obstruction, Catharsis, Etc.

I really expected to catch some flack for What Are the Obstructionists Fighting For? and am a bit surprised that I haven't -- although the weekend is just beginning, so maybe everyone is loading magazines right now.

With that and Who Are "We the People"? I was of course engaging some things Grim said, but it wasn't meant just for him. My attitude about this whole blogging thing is that the regulars here are intelligent and all have experiences and knowledge I don't. So, when I throw something like that out, what I'm really interested in is disagreement. If you disagree with something I've posted and can explain why, that is a gift. It helps me refine my own thoughts and maybe even change them, and I'm better for that.

This topic seems to have brought out Grim's desire to slow down and work through the issues well. I respect that, but at the same time, I wrote those two posts because I should be writing a historiographical essay on the shift from medieval virtue ethics to early modern deontology and how that influenced blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. Blah blah blah. 

But I couldn't get this topic out of my head, so I decided to just get it out here in writing. It was cathartic, and these are the best explanations I have right now, although I know I must be wrong about some things because I'm human. So, have at it. I'm just trying to understand what's going on and how to deal with it all productively.

Ammunition

So it’s emblematic of my life that my first email today was about establishing a new ammunition company in Central Asia. I don’t think I will help with this, though I easily could. It’s a couple of phone calls for me. 

How did I get here? I just want to ride motorcycles. 9/11, I guess; it retasked my entire life. The people who did that don’t deserve this level of influence over my entire life. I need to try to pull it back into my control. 

After… yeah, I get it now. That’s how I ended up here. 

Hey

A number of the most serious questions of all are coming up all at once. I'm trying to get you to think seriously about them, and I'm greatly encouraged to see that Thomas &c. are trying to do so. This is good. Be patient with each other as we do it. These decisions are critical, and we only get one shot at them. Let's talk about them, as we have been, in mutual respect and due honor. It's a hard moment. You're all doing well. Even if we get it right it may all go wrong. Strength and honor.

What Are the Obstructionists Fighting For?

What are the goals of the obstructionists* in Minneapolis? 

1. Prevent the removal of illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes in the US as well as all other illegal aliens
2. Hold onto illegitimate political power in the House and Electoral College
3. Protect the ability to fund Democrat causes through defrauding federal programs
4. Protect the ability to gain political power through election fraud
5. Provide a testing and training ground for further nation-wide organizing and obstruction
6. As much as possible, reverse the elections of 2024 and obstruct the will of the people of the United States until Democrats can retake Congress and the Presidency
7. Ultimately, in the long term, to gain power over the US through whatever means necessary (mainly fraud), strip us of our rights, and rule us similarly to the way the UK is currently ruled. This means disarming the people, eliminating genuine free speech via "hate speech" laws that punish their critics, guaranteeing access to abortions and to gender transition treatments to children, and eliminating freedom of conscience and religion by mandating religious organizations and individuals subordinate their consciences to progressive moral codes (e.g., being arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, the Little Sisters of the Poor being forced to provide abortion coverage, no right for doctors to refuse to perform an abortion, no parental right to prevent gender transition by schools, etc.).

Those are the things the obstructionists in Minneapolis are fighting for. It may also be clarifying to note a few things for which they are not fighting.

What are the obstructionists NOT fighting for?

1. Natural rights: They don't believe in natural rights and frequently infringe on the rights of their fellow citizens, forcing drivers to pull over and prove they don't work with ICE, demanding patriotic clothing be removed in order to avoid harm from a mob, ramming ICE and BP vehicles, invading a church during services, destroying the property of hotels that host ICE and BP agents, etc.
2. American ideals: They believe the Founding Fathers were evil men who set up an evil system to maintain their own power and privilege and oppress the poor, non-whites, women, etc. They want to replace the Constitution, or at least re-interpret away every bit of it they don't like.
3. Popular sovereignty: They don't care about the will of the people; they believe themselves engaged in  the highest moral crusade and anyone who opposes them, even if that is a large majority of the people, not only can but should be trod under on the road to achieving their moral vision. They feel fully justified rigging elections, assassinating opponents, and doing whatever else is necessary to win the power to achieve their goals.

I feel sorry for the obstructionists. They have bought into a worldview based on a pack of lies. As they constantly remind us, they firmly believe they are the good guys and the rest of us are fascists. They are sincere, but they are wrong, and empathy for them is suicidal. They are the foot soldiers of tyranny, much closer to being fascists than the rest of us, and they must be resisted.

Any backing away from immigration operations in Minneapolis will be taken as a victory and will give a tremendous boost to similar obstruction operations across the blue cities in blue states. Their victory in Minneapolis would be another step toward our eventual enslavement. With the UK's sad slide into tyranny, the US has been able to stand up and at least give the British people venues to hear the truth and to express it. If the US falls to a UK-like tyranny, there will be no one to save us.

###

* Why "obstructionist"? I'm using "obstructionist" to differentiate those actively obstructing federal law enforcement from peaceful protestors who are lawfully exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and speech. Grim and another source I respect have objected to calling them insurgents, so although I do think this is the early stages of an insurgency, I will refrain from labelling them that until I've considered this more thoroughly. Maybe insurrectionist would be better? I need to think about it.