I'm a big fan of liberalism.
So what is it?
liberalism
1.willingness to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; openness to new ideas.
2.
a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
It's an strange and compelling thing that people came up with this idea. If you are in a position with enough power to structure your society, these ideas will not be in your self interest.
But for some reason western culture did adopt these values. They were developed by British philosophers a few hundred years ago and then enshrined inside the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
They placed the sovereign individual at the centre of the structure of society. To do this you need to tolerate the actions and opinions of other sovereign individuals. In doing this two things happen, the best ideas win out and you find the only thing you cannot tolerate is intolerance. And intolerance is built upon prejudice. And predjudice is based upon judging someones character on something apart from their actions or deeds. (like judging them on their race, sex, gender, etc)
This shift in the way we viewed culture and society had some drastic effects. It propelled the US into the position of the most powerful country on Earth. It ended slavery, gave women the vote. made homosexuality legal, raised people out of poverty, raised the life expectancy of many people, ushered in the industrial and technological age we live in now...I could go on, but there is a very strong argument that all of these things had their roots in the shift towards liberalism.
Liberalism has it's roots also in enlightenment rationalism. This is the idea that the best way to elucidate truth is through the scientific method. This itself has it's core values in liberalism as for science to work you need to let the best ideas come to the fore, despite your own prejudices and self interests.
Once you treat everyone as an individual and allow any of these opinions into the cultural sphere suddenly everyone is valued equally and their best ideas rise to the top.
This for me is the very definition of Civilisation.
These ideas are so wound into our culture that we take them for granted. But things happen when you take these simple freedoms away from people. It happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. A free democracy gave away those rights. In the end the world paid a heavy price to fix that situation- 50 million dead!
But this was not the heaviest price that was paid when you move away from liberalism. In Soviet Russia under a different set of ideas, those of Karl Marx, we saw around 60 million people murdered.
In China, under Chairman Mao we saw 45 million killed by famine, possibly 20 million murdered. Under another Marxist, Pol Pot we saw a quarter of the population murdered in Cambodia. And we have a contemporary Marxist state over in North Korea right now.
In North Korea you can be executed for what your grand parents did, and they may have just 'disrespected' their leader Kim Jong Un. In fact in North Korea I, and members of my family, would be executed for what I'm writing now. An slight infringement of the orthodoxy and you will be executed. If you contract AIDS for example, you are executed. Recently an US student, Otto Warmbier, visited North Korea and decided to steal a poster in the hotel he was staying at. He never actually stole it and in the end he simply took the poster down and placed it on the floor. For this he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years hard labour. The US government plea bargained for his return. Eventually he returned but in a vegetative state; he never gained consciousness and died at the age of 22.
In North Korea your speech is controlled. The people of North Korea do not know they aren't free because there is no word for freedom. If you do even discuss anything related to individuality you will be arrested. This includes any personal opinion. The conductor of the North Korean Orchestra privately mentioned he wasn't so keen on a certain performance in a concert they were giving and for this he was executed in front of all the members of his orchestra.
When you are executed in North Korea they smash your teeth out and put a rock in your mouth. This is so you won't shout anything against the regime just before you are killed. You will be killed by a reign of bullets that will literally explode your body. This will be done publically and the those watching will be made to inspect the mush that is left just so they too will learn not question the orthodoxy. There are other ways of being executed however, for example, death by flame thrower.
Why do I mention this? It is because most countries were like this until Liberalism was developed. And as I have shown, Western democracies can fall into this state very easily if they turn against those values.
We must put the rights of the individual over the rights of the group. We must allow free speech, We must not compel speech or ban certain words. We must value the system of science for elucidating truth. We must not put our trust in dogmatic ideologies as a system of governance and most importantly, we must must not believe we are objectively right (Kim Jong Un believes himself to be the ultimate vessel of objective good, which is how he justifies what he does. He is unaware he is a monster)
Recently I have been tracking how the ideas of Hegel, especially his adaption of Kant's idealistic dialectic, and how that was then conflagrated with materialism by Marx, and then how this dialectic has morphed through continental philosphy, becoming what is called Critical Theory which was developed by the Franfurt School:
(from Wikipedia...not the best place to quote from but please do your own research if you want to know more)
Critical theory (also capitalized as Critical Theory)[1] is a Marxist approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[2] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[3]
In sociology and political philosophy, "Critical Theory" means the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Germany in the 1930s and drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, capitalizing Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School.
Based upon what I have been describing this smells a bit funny to me. The enlightenment liberal values that I have been describing merely become another meta-narrative of a power elite trying to maintain that power.
These ideas are now enshrined in Critical Race Theory (CRT)
(again, from Wikipedia)
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.[1] Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.[2][3]
Critical race theory originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams.[1] It emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race.[4] Both critical race theory and critical legal studies are rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[5]
Critical race theory is loosely unified by two common themes: first, that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law;[6] and second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible.[7]
Critics of critical race theory argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.[8][9][10]
And, yes, I am one of those critics who think this ideology 'relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism'
Why?...because it opposes Liberalism. It opposes the truth that comes from science, as these are all meta-narratives created by a white supremacy to maintain their power.
Now I am a Liberal, and I will support the right of any individual to hold these views. I even think there could be some worth in these opinions. But I am opposed to the way these ideas have become the dogmatic, ideological position in our Universities. I am opposed to the way these ideas are now integrated into our schools. I am opposed to the idea that someone questioning these views is somehow a default racist ( a logical conclusion that must follow if you do hold these views)
I therefore am opposed to any legislation that compels what we can or cannot say, that de-humanises anyone with a counter opinion or tries to impose this as a way of governance. Why? because these ideas are illiberal.
And so we arrive at the title of this post...the problem of confused liberals.
How many people out there, not really understanding the philosophical background or what is at stake, have confused the postion that have come from this Marxist/Critical Theory with the liberal ideas that freed the slaves in the US and created the Civil Rights movement in the US?
How many liberals know, when they say they support BLM, they are supporting an organisation that are in some respects, against the 'meta-narrative' of liberal enlightenment values?
WHAT BLM BELIEVE (This was removed from their website)
Lets finish with a quote shall we...
Yeah..right...like the Critical Race Theorists don't do that!?
(again, from Wikipedia)
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.[1] Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.[2][3]
Critical race theory originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams.[1] It emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race.[4] Both critical race theory and critical legal studies are rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[5]
Critical race theory is loosely unified by two common themes: first, that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law;[6] and second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible.[7]
Critics of critical race theory argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.[8][9][10]
And, yes, I am one of those critics who think this ideology 'relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism'
Why?...because it opposes Liberalism. It opposes the truth that comes from science, as these are all meta-narratives created by a white supremacy to maintain their power.
Now I am a Liberal, and I will support the right of any individual to hold these views. I even think there could be some worth in these opinions. But I am opposed to the way these ideas have become the dogmatic, ideological position in our Universities. I am opposed to the way these ideas are now integrated into our schools. I am opposed to the idea that someone questioning these views is somehow a default racist ( a logical conclusion that must follow if you do hold these views)
I therefore am opposed to any legislation that compels what we can or cannot say, that de-humanises anyone with a counter opinion or tries to impose this as a way of governance. Why? because these ideas are illiberal.
And so we arrive at the title of this post...the problem of confused liberals.
How many people out there, not really understanding the philosophical background or what is at stake, have confused the postion that have come from this Marxist/Critical Theory with the liberal ideas that freed the slaves in the US and created the Civil Rights movement in the US?
How many liberals know, when they say they support BLM, they are supporting an organisation that are in some respects, against the 'meta-narrative' of liberal enlightenment values?
WHAT BLM BELIEVE (This was removed from their website)
Lets finish with a quote shall we...
Yeah..right...like the Critical Race Theorists don't do that!?
