{"id":76,"date":"2003-05-07T20:20:48","date_gmt":"2003-05-07T20:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:53","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:53","slug":"the_battle_over_liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"The Battle Over Liberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe weighs in with a commentary below<\/a> on Michael Totten’s column<\/a> on liberalism, which has prompted a lot of discussion around the blogs.<\/p>\n

Well, as the designated liberal here, I’d better weigh in, or I’ll lose all my street cred.<\/p>\n

[JK:<\/b> A.L. has added an excellent update to the earlier verison of this post! The last line is a bit of a stunner, but I won’t spoil the surprise…]<\/i>While I think a lot of Michael, and see some things in his post that can lead us some places, I have to agree with Kieran Healey<\/a> that what we have is some observations in search of an argument. Now that is a charge that I’m all too aware of, given that many of my own posts tend to do the same things.<\/p>\n

But in the background, I’ve been struggling toward an argument on liberalism that will both account for what I (and many others) see as the problems with it, and what I believe is essential about it.<\/p>\n

And while I think Michael missed the 10-ring, I think he got his shot onto the target, and I want to look at what he did and see if I can set out the beginning of an argument that builds on what he suggested.<\/p>\n

He said:<\/p>\n

Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Close, but not quite.<\/p>\n

I’ve been talking for a long time about Romanticism, and about the roots in Romantic thought of much of modern radicalism and even terrorism.<\/p>\n

Romanticism, to try and boil a definition down to a sentence, stands on two legs: an unwillingness to be shaped by the world around us, and a desire to remake to world to fit our image of it.<\/p>\n

At its most extreme, it leads to the kind of suicidal megalomania that we saw on 9\/11.<\/p>\n

But it also attaches us to ideals, and makes us willing to fight for them, even when inertia suggests that we would be better off tending our gardens. <\/p>\n

When Totten points out that his liberal acquaintances don’t know much about history or about current affairs, I’ll suggest that it is because much of modern liberalism has become an exploration of the internal landscape of our ideas, without the connection to an external world.<\/p>\n

In opposition to Romanticism, I’ll suggest that we have Classicism, which I’ll define for this purpose as “knowing one’s place”. Part of that is an inherent willingness to accept authority, and another part has to do with a willingness to accept the concrete reality of place\u2026to accept facts as they are.<\/p>\n

Pirsig talked about this in slightly different terms in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. He actually goes deeper into it in ‘The Cruising Blues’.<\/p>\n

Liberalism\u2026classical Liberalism and again contemporary liberalism as I’m trying to redefine it\u2026was a masterstroke because it found a path between the two movements above, which have defined the poles of social thought for as long as people have been writing about it. It simultaneously created a ‘place’ where people stood, and made that place one that they could control.<\/p>\n

I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ll toss this out as a starting point for discussion.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Here are two good quotes from Robert Pirsig’s article ‘The Cruising Blues and Their Cure’<\/a>, from Esquire.<\/p>\n

An alternative – and better – definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components …air…sunlight…wind…water…the motion of waves…the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike twentieth-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory life-styles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to. <\/p>\n

If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have got their understanding of both sailing and reality completely backwards. Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the terms I discuss above, sailing is not Romantic, it is Classical. It is about accepting concrete reality, not willing a new one into being.<\/p>\n

We call sailing romantic, because it is an escape from what we in the industrialized West see as our ‘reality’, which is one of offices, bureaucracy, and the other manifestations of civilization. But like many of the disciplines I have enjoyed in my life, rockclimbing, sailing, and racing motorcycles, it relies above all on a clear-eyed acceptance of what is real.<\/p>\n

That acceptance is not without moral qualities. Pirsig discusses virtue: <\/p>\n

Now, however, with a boat of my own and some time at sea, I begin to see the learning of virtue another way. It has something to do with the way the sea and sun and wind and sky go on and on day after day, week after week, and the boat and you have to go on with it. You must take the helm and change the sails and take sights of the stars and work out their reductions and sleep and cook and eat and repair things as they break and do most of these things in stormy weather as well as fair, depressed as well as elated, because there’s no choice. You get used to it; it becomes habit-forming and produces a certain change in values. Old gear that has been through a storm or two without failure becomes more precious than it was when you bought it because you know you can trust it. The same becomes true of fellow crewmen and ultimately becomes true of things about yourself. Good first appearances count for less than they ever did, and real virtue – which comes from an ability to separate what merely looks good from what lasts and the acquisition of those characteristics in one’s self – is strengthened.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And to me, these virtues\u2026getting up and going on, steadfastness\u2026are the root of real virtue.<\/p>\n

When Totten talks about “Building” and “Preserving”, I want to shift the focus to “Imagining” and “Accepting”. Now this construction is overly simple and in some ways clearly untrue (liberals have some grounding in reality and conservatives have imagination); but I think that it can serve as an organizing metaphor to understand what I’m getting at. Liberals center their values around imagining<\/I>, and they want to fashion social worlds that enable them to manifest their imaginings, to materialize the moral good that they can envision. Conservatives center their around accepting<\/I>, and they want to fashion social worlds that are stable.<\/p>\n

Without liberal imagination, we would still be in thrall (literally!!) to kings. Without conservative acceptance of reality we would be \u2013 like the B’aath regieme, like Pol Pot \u2013 whipping our people to implement the fevered imaginations of our leaders, and struggling with leaders who must have more and more power in order to be able to will their imaginings into reality.<\/p>\n

What works is a tension between the two things; a tension within each of us as people, within our politics as a society.<\/p>\n

Looking at this, I begin to get a new way of parsing contemporary politics, and an explanation of why the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe weighs in with a commentary below on Michael Totten’s column on liberalism, which has prompted a lot of discussion around the blogs. Well, as the designated liberal here, I’d better weigh in, or I’ll lose all my street cred. [JK: A.L. has added an excellent update to the earlier verison of this post! The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}