Lend your listening to Tutor's speakING
At
Wealth Bondage comments.
"The classical liberalism I am defending is right out of civics 101. We failed it, not the other way around. Sure, human rights in Greece, Rome, London, America were once restricted, and that was a failure of those who expounded the ideals of universal human rights, not a failure of the ideal of universal human rights. An attack of "universals," or the very concept of rights, or the Constitution as the product of dead white males and proprietors does strike me as unhelpful. Because once universals are demolished into societally constituted "differences," in the name of what do we object to ruthless power, that "socially constitutes" its own hegemonic ideology, WB personified? We have the high ground in the Constitution and its Englightenment ideals, why abandon that high ground for paltry positions, that have no real intellectual substance, like anarchism, which in the end is what? A gesture? A snubbing of the nose, an atitude, a posture? "You can't make me," as adolescents say when confronted with authority, or sometimes with reason.
Rather than my defending this as a theorist, let me just say that for me the tradition of Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Isaiah Berlin has fused with the parallel neoclassical literary tradition of Horace, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay, and say Wilde. To me as I live it, all that is one living breathig tradition, of which I am the product, proponent and idiot-evangelist. What I am saying and have said consistently is that the liberalism, diffidence, good manners, triagulation and compromise are a poor and debased version of the virile liberal tradition. Add back in the satirists mentioned and you have a tradition that is as well able to wound as it is to cure. That tradition is, as I have experienced it or absorbed it, more Anglo-American than Continental, though, you could add out of date humanists to it, like Santayana, Camus or Satre. And you could add Englightenment figures like Voltaire and Diderot, and I am sure many others. But the tradition by which I was formed, before my mind closed, and I found myself in a Dumpster is the tradition of my native language. I recognize the liability from a fashionable intellectual standpoint, but I must say that anyone leading from Zizek, say, Marx, French Freud, or Derrida, will never be elected Sheriff, much less President, whereas to lead from the founding fathers and their Enlightenment sources, and classical sources, is nothing more than to awaken America to her own muse or angel. I fully - believe me - recognize how limited I am, but I would ask that people give thought to the depth and consistency of my position, since it operates in two strands, moral/political/theoretical and also literary. I am claiming not to be "right," but to have rediscovered and laid bare the foundations of our ruined city, and am saying that here we might build again. That is my colossal arrogance. If I were still a teacher, I would sit you down with David Hume open before you and also Swift or Pope and would show you sentence by sentence that both are Augustans, writing the same English, often using the same tropes, and that both are virile writers, who use satire to drive home moral as well as intellectual points. If liberalism in the broadest sense is to thrive again, we need to reawken the language, as well as the logic, that the ideals might live, contested and victorious."
