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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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There's a third pillar of Sovereign accountability, and that's intra-national political competition. The nationalist conception of the high and the low versus the middle paints a more historical picture of balance of power than Enlightenment morality and constitutionalism:

The “Jouvenelian model” Bond is referring to, and which his book is opposing to the liberal model, starts from the assumption that “there is in every society a centre of control” (24). What Bond aims to show in his book is that political reality is generated by the struggle of final power centers against intermediate power centers which interfere with the governing imperatives as determined by the final center. Familiar examples would be a medieval king contending with the nobility as he attempts to levy taxes to prosecute a war or some other project; or mid-20th century attempts on the part of America’s federal government to assimilate the recalcitrant Southern states into a fully modern, liberal order...

... all the concepts of liberalism—“equality,” “sovereignty,” the “individual,” “human rights,” and so on—are produced, not by moral advances, theoretical or philosophical inquiries, or “bottom-up” revolts of the oppressed, but, rather, by powerful actors within or close to the heights of state power levying powerless groups against institutions such as the Church, the aristocracy, the paternal authority of the family and, more recently, institutions maintaining law and order, education, business, dependent states, and more

In other words, the rhetoric of Free Market Capitalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-racism, are not some morla enlightenment brought about by Progress. They are the managerial tact of American empire. The move to strike nationalist sentiment is not moral enlightenment reached by individuals freely entering a social contract. It's a political strategy being employed by power actors.

Separate question, but:

What’s going on with that website?

It’s an online journal affiliated with UCLA. There’s an apparent interest in, or at least tolerance for, “other contemporary writers thinking outside of liberal terms.” This particular article was determined to parrot various reactionary talking points. I sampled a few previous issues, most of which were less strident (though it was interesting seeing the phrase “sexual market” in 2012). Each and every article I checked cited one or more works by Eric Gans, the editor.

A brief trawl of Wikipedia suggests that Anthropoetics seems to be the vehicle for “generative anthropology,” the editor’s pet field of postmodernism. The specifics of this theory blur the lines between historical speculation and Christian apologetics. I find it challenging to tell where the rhetorical flourishes end and the actual arguments begin.

Academia truly is a foreign country.

Accountability via internecine conflict strikes me as historically accurate but inherently unstable. If defecting is the corrective mechanism, such a society is going to find itself in a defect-defect equilibrium. Presumably, at that point, the other two pillars of accountability come in and clean up. That’s cold comfort.

The second issue is removal of this pillar. There’s no guarantee that a cohesive opposition forms to a “final” power center. Modern China is perhaps a good example. Xi certainly gets things done; one wonders how accountable or constrained he actually is.

Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns. Voting out the government is a coop-coop resolution to a given dilemma and imposes fewer costs than the defect-defect option. And substituting “consent of the governed” for “consent of the nobles” changes the dynamics of the alternate power centers.

Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns.

That's the key insight. That liberalism has had a competitive advantage in the centralization of power is the reason it is dominant. Not because of flimsy moral premises, like the notion that the individual precedes the web of social obligations, or that there are inalienable "human rights." Those notions and self-justifications are themselves byproducts of these power struggles; such as the colonial subsidiary struggle against the former centers of Power.

We can move from a Whig view of history, from the view of Liberalism as an emergent moral enlightenment in which primordial truths were discovered, to a post-liberal model which recognizes that liberalism was an innovation in the centralization and organization of power.

Understanding liberal ideology as a set of competitive advantages is fundamentally different than understanding it as a moral Enlightenment. It's true that those are not mutually exclusive, but with this model the former is all that matters. Liberal moral presuppositions, like individual will preceding social order, are flimsy and ahistorical.

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