Issue 6: The Active Conservatism of Threatened Conservatism
In the above article, the underbelly of Emeriti largess is apparent, but so is their insistence that their liberalization is a justification for it's inverse. Here Dubai stands, self-righteously, as the exception to global capitalism's ability to spread other freedoms, where than tenuous thread connecting free capital and free people breaks. It also stands opposed to the Hitchensian dialectic of a Free(ing) West(ernization) and an illiterate violent religious Middle East.
Why? Both these models are excessively reductive, sure, but both are legitimate expressions of dynamics. However 1) We are facing an illiberal geographically located threat nourished on dangerous ideals like blood-loyalty, racialism, anti-secularism, etc. and 2) Traditionalism, a state antithetical to human experience, requires the capture of money through capital market interference in order to pay for that action, while the spread of ideas and identities has been commodified to the point where the exercise of money-spending is a political act (whether this is the ideal or acceptable situation, it is our current one.) just as the exercise of money control always has been. Here, I think an answer lies in a Dubai that is transformed into our cartoonish mirror. The depressing underclasses are hidden, the political radicals are sated with enough money to demand minimal (and ultimately crypto-traditionalist) reform, the state is adopting measures once opposed to western values in order to preserve them, but their attachments to wealth are predicated on an outward hatred, therefore fear of a looming other that must be subdued in slavery or killed. It's very difficult to analyze this situation without becoming another crypto-traditional moralist, and so I draw no conclusion from this other than the contradictory nature of these two dialectics when they reside in the United States or Dubai have related material processes somewhere in their genealogy. But here we are again: why? How can the measures of liberal secularism be so entwined with their opposite?
I propose four theses. First, liberal secularism has not been adopted by the west. Second, outward expressions of liberal secularism exist in order to prevent it from occurring. Third, these same expressions exist in order to prevent the worse unknown future from occurring. Fourth, the complicity for this runs throughout the critiques of Islam, the West, Capitalism, and Modernity that supposedly manifest some higher form of liberalism, not bound to the political realities in which it is currently manifest (cf. Kant, Marx).
First Thesis:
Liberal Secularism evades description, intentionally. While its theoretical underpinnings may be more explicit, they are the product of illiberal ages and thus muted or distorted by those ages. As the underpinnings had consequences and more liberal societies were produced, new areas for liberalization opened, and the ephemeral dream was realized beyond the point established by the philosophical designers. Race is the obvious example, where nearly all proponents of liberalism were racists, yet the principle of racial equality is foundational to any contemporary notion of a fair society. More importantly, the premise of liberalism is necessarily outside the state. While the bourgeoisie claimed to better inhabit the post of King, to enact state power more efficiently, those who framed secular liberalism were carefully attacking state power itself, not paving the way for populism. The principles of a state limited to exact its moralistic revenge on its own citizens, prevented from establishing social unities that are as powerful as police state, if sometimes less physically painful. This principle has never been established, inasmuch as a participating state is not enough in the face of a counter-equal economic system, and the state's obvious role in resettling that equality interferes with individuals.
Second Thesis:
Here the claims to liberal secularism become weapons against its existence. Its ties to capitalism's bourgeois freedoms and commitments to human equality create dialectics without propulsion, Masters without Slaves, where the arguments for liberalism's dissolution become as equally justified as the claims to liberalism. Dubai models this claim: liberalism is set against itself, not to stagnate into a conservatism or propel itself toward the Bavarian Nation State, but to cynically manipulate that instinct spoken so beautifully, naively, whiggishly by Martin Luther King, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." They're biding their time, content to allow the future to realize the liberalism that is unachievable now, content to satisfy liberalism's claim on the intellect with their PhD's, capitalism, liberalism's tolerance for outsiders, but only because this tolerance can be traded away in order to satisfy immediate needs.
Third Thesis:
The trading of these freedoms is justified by a liberal theology of the infinite value of human life. The spectre of the terrorist becomes the mechanism that Dubai employs in order to reduce liberal democratic reform, though they presume their behavior to be preventing the collapse of liberalism's advance itself. So-called Western societies are aware of these three thesis and employ them more expertly than their recently indoctrinated Emirati brethren; they accept that Liberalism is headed toward a goal, and that therefore liberalism's advances must be preserved. They accept that their relative levels of liberalism give them a bank account of freedoms to spend on reducing freedom. For instance, the United States claims the greatest level of free speech (by criticising Islamic countries for their lack of freedoms) only in order to justify the less liberal elements of its regime. The Emirati are claiming that their greater level of liberal freedoms is exactly that which allows them to limit their liberal freedoms.
Fourth Thesis:
Critique is, by virtue of Kant's definitively liberal character, the ultimate in liberalism. It is the point at which the individual escapes the unnecessary moralized reality being peddled by the State when the social values that brought it to power are failing to remain instinctive. The tool of the state is always some notion of cultural essence, the "true" form of a national value-, aesthetic- or political-forms. The problem with liberalism is that since the bourgeoisie insisted on a teleological history to their virtues, critique was distracted to exactly that same conservatism of platonic thought-forms, and critique became of the existent in comparison to the not-existent, the critique of the failure of democracy to live up to an absolute purity, the critique of capitalism as never capitalistic enough, the critique of the equality never finally accomplished, etc. This critique causes the logic of the third thesis to become inevitable, that liberal traditions exist, they are also flawed and tradeable (after all, who could give away perfection?) in return for other tradable goods (either literally in neo-market capitalism or Stalinism, or figuratively in the body-bag state of Saudi Arabia). Simultaneously, critique presumes that it is challenging the conservatism of the contemporary by pointing out the failure to achieve itself. While it does so under the signs of truly conservative absolutes, more terrible is the inevitable conclusion that liberalism unrealized is liberalism under attack by reality. The recipient of the critique is then left with a fractured liberalism that can be salvaged only by sloughing off the less important elements to preserve the body, manufacturing the raison d'être at conservatism's empty bottom.
Why? Both these models are excessively reductive, sure, but both are legitimate expressions of dynamics. However 1) We are facing an illiberal geographically located threat nourished on dangerous ideals like blood-loyalty, racialism, anti-secularism, etc. and 2) Traditionalism, a state antithetical to human experience, requires the capture of money through capital market interference in order to pay for that action, while the spread of ideas and identities has been commodified to the point where the exercise of money-spending is a political act (whether this is the ideal or acceptable situation, it is our current one.) just as the exercise of money control always has been. Here, I think an answer lies in a Dubai that is transformed into our cartoonish mirror. The depressing underclasses are hidden, the political radicals are sated with enough money to demand minimal (and ultimately crypto-traditionalist) reform, the state is adopting measures once opposed to western values in order to preserve them, but their attachments to wealth are predicated on an outward hatred, therefore fear of a looming other that must be subdued in slavery or killed. It's very difficult to analyze this situation without becoming another crypto-traditional moralist, and so I draw no conclusion from this other than the contradictory nature of these two dialectics when they reside in the United States or Dubai have related material processes somewhere in their genealogy. But here we are again: why? How can the measures of liberal secularism be so entwined with their opposite?
I propose four theses. First, liberal secularism has not been adopted by the west. Second, outward expressions of liberal secularism exist in order to prevent it from occurring. Third, these same expressions exist in order to prevent the worse unknown future from occurring. Fourth, the complicity for this runs throughout the critiques of Islam, the West, Capitalism, and Modernity that supposedly manifest some higher form of liberalism, not bound to the political realities in which it is currently manifest (cf. Kant, Marx).
First Thesis:
Liberal Secularism evades description, intentionally. While its theoretical underpinnings may be more explicit, they are the product of illiberal ages and thus muted or distorted by those ages. As the underpinnings had consequences and more liberal societies were produced, new areas for liberalization opened, and the ephemeral dream was realized beyond the point established by the philosophical designers. Race is the obvious example, where nearly all proponents of liberalism were racists, yet the principle of racial equality is foundational to any contemporary notion of a fair society. More importantly, the premise of liberalism is necessarily outside the state. While the bourgeoisie claimed to better inhabit the post of King, to enact state power more efficiently, those who framed secular liberalism were carefully attacking state power itself, not paving the way for populism. The principles of a state limited to exact its moralistic revenge on its own citizens, prevented from establishing social unities that are as powerful as police state, if sometimes less physically painful. This principle has never been established, inasmuch as a participating state is not enough in the face of a counter-equal economic system, and the state's obvious role in resettling that equality interferes with individuals.
Second Thesis:
Here the claims to liberal secularism become weapons against its existence. Its ties to capitalism's bourgeois freedoms and commitments to human equality create dialectics without propulsion, Masters without Slaves, where the arguments for liberalism's dissolution become as equally justified as the claims to liberalism. Dubai models this claim: liberalism is set against itself, not to stagnate into a conservatism or propel itself toward the Bavarian Nation State, but to cynically manipulate that instinct spoken so beautifully, naively, whiggishly by Martin Luther King, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." They're biding their time, content to allow the future to realize the liberalism that is unachievable now, content to satisfy liberalism's claim on the intellect with their PhD's, capitalism, liberalism's tolerance for outsiders, but only because this tolerance can be traded away in order to satisfy immediate needs.
Third Thesis:
The trading of these freedoms is justified by a liberal theology of the infinite value of human life. The spectre of the terrorist becomes the mechanism that Dubai employs in order to reduce liberal democratic reform, though they presume their behavior to be preventing the collapse of liberalism's advance itself. So-called Western societies are aware of these three thesis and employ them more expertly than their recently indoctrinated Emirati brethren; they accept that Liberalism is headed toward a goal, and that therefore liberalism's advances must be preserved. They accept that their relative levels of liberalism give them a bank account of freedoms to spend on reducing freedom. For instance, the United States claims the greatest level of free speech (by criticising Islamic countries for their lack of freedoms) only in order to justify the less liberal elements of its regime. The Emirati are claiming that their greater level of liberal freedoms is exactly that which allows them to limit their liberal freedoms.
Fourth Thesis:
Critique is, by virtue of Kant's definitively liberal character, the ultimate in liberalism. It is the point at which the individual escapes the unnecessary moralized reality being peddled by the State when the social values that brought it to power are failing to remain instinctive. The tool of the state is always some notion of cultural essence, the "true" form of a national value-, aesthetic- or political-forms. The problem with liberalism is that since the bourgeoisie insisted on a teleological history to their virtues, critique was distracted to exactly that same conservatism of platonic thought-forms, and critique became of the existent in comparison to the not-existent, the critique of the failure of democracy to live up to an absolute purity, the critique of capitalism as never capitalistic enough, the critique of the equality never finally accomplished, etc. This critique causes the logic of the third thesis to become inevitable, that liberal traditions exist, they are also flawed and tradeable (after all, who could give away perfection?) in return for other tradable goods (either literally in neo-market capitalism or Stalinism, or figuratively in the body-bag state of Saudi Arabia). Simultaneously, critique presumes that it is challenging the conservatism of the contemporary by pointing out the failure to achieve itself. While it does so under the signs of truly conservative absolutes, more terrible is the inevitable conclusion that liberalism unrealized is liberalism under attack by reality. The recipient of the critique is then left with a fractured liberalism that can be salvaged only by sloughing off the less important elements to preserve the body, manufacturing the raison d'être at conservatism's empty bottom.
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