Sunday, May 20, 2012

Tyranny of Liberalism: The marginalization of traditional institutions

One step in the process of instituting the Liberal Regime of Mandatory Tolerance is to marginalize those institutions inconsistent with the totalitarian liberal social order. After instituting government programs that make Christian charity redundant and after evacuating the culture of all religious, cultural, or sexual standards, we, of course, get all the social maladies we have today, including high rates of teen pregnancy and high rates of divorce. Both of these, of course, only heighten the need in people's minds for the very things that brought them about: problems which liberalism brought about are championed as things liberalism can solve.

Once again, here is James Kalb, from The Tyranny of Liberalism: Administered Freedom, Industrial Tolerances, and Equality by Command, on how liberalism has marginalized traditional human institutions in favor of formal liberal institutions, all of which it has done in the name of freedom and equality. Only problem is, they are not really free and equal:
Only rational formal institutions remain functional and authoritative. What were once traditional social institutions with definite form, function, and authority become personal pursuits that each can make of what he wishes so long as all others remain free to participate or abstain as they will. [Note the difference between these institutions, now voluntary, with liberal ones, which become increasingly mandatory] Marriage and family are replaced by "relationships" and "living together"; religion becomes a freeform pursuit of individual fulfillment; and inherited culture becomes an optional consumer good, a matter of personal style or group assertiveness. 
Such tendencies make it impossible to deal reasonably on their own terms with issues of identity, such as sex, kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Those distinctions play no role in the liberal understanding of rational social functioning, so they are understood as pure principles of irrational opposition and hatred: absolute, unbridgeable, and impossible to reconcile with a peaceful, just, and efficient social order. The consequence is that they must effectively be abolished--trivialized, conceptually dissolved, canceled through reverse discrimination, or kept from entering into thought at all.  
Under the regime of liberalism, the way in which people have traditionally understood themselves and others now can have no bearing on their relations to each other, at least to the extent that those relations have substantive consequences. Who you are can have no connection to how things are with you, except to the extent that "who you are" refers to your relation to institutions liberalism accepts as authoritative. A man and woman have to be the same, but a Harvard and state-university graduate can be different. The result is the forcible imposition on everyone of a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes the connections and distinctions by which human beings have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position. Factually considered, that new order is unequal and unfree, but it is able to pass itself off as an indisputable application of neutral principles to which no sane and moral person could possibly object.
And even saying such a thing will make you a target of charges of insanity and immorality. Cue the comments: three, two, one ...

5 comments:

KyCobb said...

Martin,

"we, of course, get all the social maladies we have today, including high rates of teen pregnancy"

You can have your own beliefs, but you don't get your own facts. The reality is that teen pregnancy is at an all-time low. Its a little damaging to your credibility when you are this wrong about one of the "facts" you rely on to prove how much worse society is now than it was in the "good ole days."

Martin Cothran said...

KyCobb,

I was referring to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which is still rising. It's my fault that I didn't specify that, but obviously married teens having babies is not a problem.

But even if I had been referring to teen pregnancy, the fact that it is low relative to previous years doesn't mean it's not high in absolute sense. The U.S. continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world.

KyCobb said...

Martin,

"The U.S. continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world."

You mean the developed world. In the third world, where teen marriage rates are still high, so are teen pregnancy rates. Strangely, the much more secularized nations of Europe, and the non-christian developed nations of Asia have even lower teen pregnancy rates than the US, which doesn't seem to support your and Kalb's thesis very well.

Art said...

The reality is that teen pregnancy is at an all-time low.

Kycobb, you must remember that Martin views the world with some pretty focused blinders. One of the "traditional institutions" that he pines for, that them nasty liberals have disencouraged, is the 13 year old bride. Martin undoubtedly considers these girls to be other than teenaged when it comes to having children.

Let's not be confusing "traditional institutions" for anything that is morally or ethically proper.

Singring said...

'It's my fault that I didn't specify that, but obviously married teens having babies is not a problem.'

Obviously.