Rousseau, the left, and Islamist terrorism
[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a post that first appeared in December of 2006.]
Make no mistake about it: if those leftists who defend Islamist terrorists and the regimes that sponsor them and deplore US efforts to stop them had their way, the other side (Islamist totalitarianism) might get its way and become victorious in its goal of a worldwide caliphate. Then not only would there be no sites left like this, but such people would find their own freedom curtailed so forcefully that they would no longer be able to be trolls on conservative blogs. And that would be the least of their (and our) worries.
I’ve often wondered about the failure of the Left to understand this very simple fact. Surely, they are interested in the Enlightenment values of reason, human rights (such as for homosexuals and for women) and individual freedom? Surely they understand what sharia law is all about? Surely they understand that these people are quite serious?
But no; a rather large segment of the left attributes all third-world violence and ills to the always-dastardly doings of those twin repositories of all that’s really evil: the Great and Little Satans, the US and Israel. Yes, yes, yes, of course; it’s the corruption of the US and Israel that is the cause of all the flaws of the Arab world, and if those things went away all the other problems would magically go away—(or perhaps “wither away,” in the old Marxist phrase).
What’s going on here? I believe that at least part of the answer lies in the philosophical underpinnings of Leftist thought. One of these days I hope to write a long post on its origins in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had a similar reductionist theory of human nature and history (a while back I waded through this book on the subject, which I highly recommend).
To Rousseau, civilization and society (and reason itself, to a certain extent) were corrupting influences, and must be reformed to better reflect the condition of pre-civilized humanity—supposedly a happy state of nature in which people were at peace and non-exploitative towards each other. Civilization led to power inequities and private property (very important to Rousseau, as well as to his heirs, the Jacobins, the Left, and the Communists) and all sorts of unfairness that needed redressing by a state that was not afraid to use Draconian measures and subordinate the people to its will.
In Rousseau’s seminal Social Contract (which, along with Hobbes’ Leviathan, we were made to read in public high school; somehow I doubt whether that’s still the case) he writes [my emphasis]:
…whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body [the public and the state]; this means merely that he will be forced to be free…[if the leaders of the state say to the citizen] “it is expedient for the state that you should die,” he should die.
So the resemblance of the Left to Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism isn’t such a stretch after all. The similarity is their profound dislike of modernism, jettisoning of individual freedom for a sort of mythical collective freedom that will be expressed in the general will, the embrace of violent methods for achieving this heaven on earth, and the glorification of feeling over reason. It’s all there in the left’s hero, Rousseau–whether they’ve read him or not.
I entirely agree as to Rousseau’s influence. But René Descartes leads directly to Rousseau.
René Descartes
It is Descartes “mechanical philosophy” that leads directly to Rousseau and arguably, Rousseau leads to Marx.
*Descartes sees humanity as biological machines.
your ignoring the big fish that matter more (cause the big fish are scarier than the islamic noise makers)
If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight.
Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.”
Beijing and Manila both claim Scarborough Shoal. But, in June 2013, Chinese ships swarmed and chased off a fleet of Filipino fishing boats and naval vessels. The Filipinos never came back.
And now that China has converted Fiery Cross Reef and Mischief Reef into artificial islands with docks and air bases, Beijing seems about to do the same with Scarborough Shoal.
the fat is in the fire. And as the Chinese are adamant about their claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands and virtually all the atolls, rocks and reefs in the South China Sea, and are reinforcing their claims by creating artificial islands and bases, the U.S. and China are headed for a collision.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
gonna be fun when china says, no more products go to the west for 1 year…
in case anyone remembers, it was very hard to get german imports in 1938
Art,
China’s militarization is clearly preparation for its future bid to be the alpha dog. But neither Obama nor a Pres. Hillary Clinton will militarily confront China. And the Chinese KNOW it.
IF Trump is elected and IF Trump rebuilds and modernizes our military and cuts off all technological transfer to China BEFORE he confronts them, then China may be neutralized.
I’m doubtful however that China will deny the West imports, since its economy is dependent upon exports.
China is living on borrowed time, robotics and A.I. will within 20 years, eliminate China’s labor advantage.
Finally, the Leftist internal threat in the West is by far the greatest threat. As it is what is preventing the West from effectively meeting the external threats and, it is the Left’s philosophical premises that hold a majority of the West’s citizens blind to those external threats.
The worth of an individual human soul: we don’t even consciously think about the idea because it’s so integrated into traditional Western culture. But it’s a rarity outside of that culture. You need to be able to say that a person has worth in a way that a fish or a rock doesn’t, and that worth is his personal property, which can only be taken from him in special circumstances. To believe that, you need a cosmology that supports it. Most don’t.
It surprises me how consistent people are. I never thought they were. I figured that we could lose sight of some of our core principles and keep shuffling along. But as we sell off some of them, people seem to really think through the implications. I’ve seen it really in the sexual liberation of the past 50 years, where I expected people to approve of their own kinks but draw the line at other people’s kinks. But they’ve thought it through and really committed to non-judgment. Who knew that we took our philosophies seriously?
Not to deprive anyone of a sale
… but the author himself offers the PDF and an audiobook for free. Which I found by reading the reviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQcNjHNXnEE&list=PL2Hjf0Xpq6F4QiJGbsz8Xlr3lMbX2mNMx
“Make no mistake about it: if those leftists who defend Islamist terrorists and the regimes that sponsor them and deplore US efforts to stop them had their way, the other side (Islamist totalitarianism) might get its way and become victorious in its goal of a worldwide caliphate. Then not only would there be no sites left like this, but such people would find their own freedom curtailed so forcefully that they would no longer be able to be trolls on conservative blogs.”
They don’t believe it will happen. They are far more concerned about the danger of oppression by the Methodist lady down the street..or the Southern Baptists down in Georgia..than about any threat by radical Islamists. See my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/50624.html
When Louis Gerstner became CEO of IBM, he observed that IBM’ers tended to be much more concerned and emotional about competition with other people and groups within the company than about competition with any external competitors.
Being a very experienced executive, Gerstner was surely no stranger to fierce internal competition, but evidently he was seeing a much more extreme focus on the internal versus the external competitive orientation than at other companies where he had worked. Something similar has happened to America.
David – You’re talking about a failure of imagination. It’s always easy to say that all pain is equal and unfair, when you’ve got a hangnail. When you get to bone cancer, then you become aware that there really are gradations of pain. When you feel victimized by differing opinions on the college campus, you feel like it’s the principle of the thing, and that your comfort is worth fighting for. When you get gang-raped and can’t tell your family about it because they’d kill you for being impure, you develop a better understanding of scale.
IMO,Rousseau and other collectivist thinkers are still under the sway of our instinct for tribalism.
In the typical hunter gatherer tribe, the tribal members were all acutely aware that the survival of the tribe was supreme. The individual was always subservient to the needs of the tribe.
An example: Old people who were no longer able to be productive and were a burden for the tribe were expected to leave the protection of the tribe and die. In some cases the tribe would execute them as a kinder fate than starvation or being savagely killed by predators. Cripples who couldn’t carry their weight were not also subject to expulsion from tribal protection or execution.
The best book I have ever read about tribal life is “The Human Cycle” by Colin Turnbull. Turnbull spent time living with paleo lithic tribes in the Amazon, Africa, New Guinea, and the Philippines. That said, I don’t agree with Turnbull’s conclusions that collectivist, tribal-like ways are the solution to our modern problems.
The key for successful tribes was carefully educating the children. Teaching them all the customs, rules, religious tenets, and skills they needed to know to become productive members of the tribe. Hunting and gathering territories were aggressively protected and conflict with intruders was an ever present issue. Some tribes (an example would be the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon) cultivated a particularly fierce and warlike culture to protect their territory from intruders. These arrangements, where the collective was more important than the individual, worked very well in these small homogenous groups of people for over 100,000 years. We don’t know how many tribes disappeared/failed because they chose the wrong leaders, made bad decisions about where to hunt/gather, climate change that wasn’t adapted to, were unable to repel intruders, etc. We can only surmise there were many.
The rise of individualism plodded slowly forward from the Greeks to the Romans to Medieval Europe to the Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution. So individual rights and the importance of the individual are fairly recent developments as far as mankind goes. IMO, there is an instinctual longing for the days of unified collective effort by all members of society. It sounds good, but we are no longer homogenous, we are no longer carefully educating our children to become productive members of society, and we have found Adam Smith’s discovery that free markets among individuals create more prosperity for the larger number of people than centrally planned collectivist efforts.
I cannot prove any of this, but it’s my theory of the tenacity of tribal/collectivist movements.
J.J.-
Yeah, paleolithic tribalism is known for its contributions to human progress. That’s why they still live and grope for roots in places like New Guinea.
Neo your analysis of Enlightenment thinkers is diving too deep.
To almost all Leftists the world is viewed through the Marxist Oppressor/Oppressed prism. The West is the Oppressor everyone else (including the Islamist) are the Oppressed. End of story. Dogma and emotion short-circuit any logical thought.
Also, they are assured victory as surely as Christians are assured Christ will reign triumphant.
The Left sees things as:
1. Destroy Western/Capitalist Oppressors
2. ????
3. Utopia.
Item #2 is to be glossed over as we rush along the right side of history to Utopia.
“IMO, there is an instinctual longing for the days of unified collective effort by all members of society”
And many of the people who long for this most fervently are precisely those who would do worst in a more collectivized society.
I think in many cases, the longing for a “community” based around the State is strongest in those people who desire personal connections but have not been very good at establishing them.
To use the terms rather loosely: today’s Leftists seek to turn Gemeinschafts into Gesllschafts and Gesellschafts into Gemeinschafts.
The relationships within a family, or between boyfriend and girlfriend, or within a small town, are to be rigidly controlled by extensive rules promulgated from distant bureaucrats. At the same time, the (necessarily) impersonal state is to be personalized, to act as a center for personal emotions.
That is an interesting observation and becoming an overwhelmingly inescapable conclusion even for those who don’t generally think deeply about these matters.
A slogan concerning the personal as the political emerges from the past in its full cultural Marxist post modernist bloom, and appears on stage as morally axiomatic. The “false” distinction between the polity and the society being done away with, a false consciousness of base and superstructure done away with, there is nothing left but for the unlimited state re-conceived as the unmediated boundless organ of social desire to abolish alienation and pain by interjecting itself into every social transaction, in order to adjudicate, to validate, and to ensure that the self-esteem needs of the powerless are met as a priority.
There is no separate formal realm of delimited state, no society recognized as mere associative relations per se, no recognition of community as relative, objective-interest based, or local.
Love, love, government as pervasive agent of the world as we dream it, love.
What can freedom mean in the face of a neurotic and lunatic craving like that?
DNW,
Descartes was indeed a duelist. I think it likely that he would have been appalled by Marxism. But the lineage that leads to Marx, starts with Descartes. Rousseau, Hobbs and Hume are merely some of the side stops along the way.
Geoffrey Britain:
Actually, I believe Descartes was a dualist 🙂 .
No, my dear Gaston, these are the duellists
Seriously Geoff, as I have no doubt mentioned before, if you have not seen this movie you have to, simply because it is beautiful; if for no other reason.
The cinematography of the last 70 seconds is almost stupefying, and if I recall, was a bit of a filmmaking fluke or luck, like the snowfall at the close of Fahrenheit 451, or the timing of the wicker man’s fall across the sunset at the end of The Wicker Man.
neo-neocon Says:
May 24th, 2016 at 3:29 pm
Geoffrey Britain:
Actually, I believe Descartes was a dualist 🙂 .
You stepped on my line before I could get it out.
This mishmash of differing philosophies can be simplified and reconciled and understood by pondering the common denominator of the world’s great religions – we are immortal souls who fall on one side or the other of the demarcation between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
The forces of light cherish the uniqueness and value of each soul whilst the forces of darkness find variety intolerable. This is why the Satanic seek to discredit any religion which teaches a personal responsibility for our behavior and happiness. They seek to reduce our souls to machines which are perfectible, perfection of course meaning do it my way.
There is a great duelling scene in Allen’s Love and Death, which I was also referencing with my “Gaston” remark. But I cannot in good conscience link to it because he’s a perv.
We really, really didn’t read Rousseau and Hobbes in high school, 30+ years ago.
neo and DNW,
LOL 😉
This is why many people hate learning English!
Though we all know that a difference in philosophy has led to duels and given the time period, it’s entirely possible that Descartes in his youth engaged in one.
DNW, I haven’t seen the movie and will correct that oversight.
BTW, the greatest ‘duel’ in cinema I have ever seen is with Danny Kaye in the movie “the Court Jester”, Kaye effortlessly and seamlessly moves back and forth from bumbling incompetent to masterful swordsman in the blink of an eye.
I consider Kaye far more talented in variety; actor, comedian, dancer… than many of those he inspired, reportedly Robin Williams was a big fan. Talent recognizes talent, even if now unappreciated by many.
Neo, DNW,
Can any of these duels compare with the competition with Death in “De Diva”? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2QmLWWxq4
De Duva; thank you, autocorrect.
Geoffrey Britain:
On “The Court Jester.”
Geoffrey Britain Says:
May 24th, 2016 at 10:36 am
I entirely agree as to Rousseau’s influence. But René Descartes leads directly to Rousseau.
René Descartes
“Dubbed the father of modern western philosophy, much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings,[10][11] which are studied closely to this day.”
It is Descartes “mechanical philosophy” that leads directly to Rousseau and arguably, Rousseau leads to Marx.
“”I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s* organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.” (Descartes, Treatise on Man, p.108)”
*Descartes sees humanity as biological machines.
&&&&&
And so did Taylor.
It is Taylorism that operates on the fevered minds of the Progressive Left unto this hour.
Frederick Winslow Taylor came from a completely independent path — Time and Motion Studies — to arrive at the same train station of thought.
It was TAYLOR’s micro-world view — a Bottom UP analysis — that drove him to conclude that machinists — the high tech workers of his era — ought to be treated as production cogs.
This led — almost directly — to the moving assembly line.
( Invented by the Dodge Brothers, not Henry Ford, BTW. They were co-owners of Ford Motor Company at the time, now you know why. )
Assembly lines had long existed. Interchangeable parts started with the American Civil War and the Springfield Armory, IIRC. (It took a long time to perfect, BTW.)
The Dodge Brothers pulled moving + assembly + interchangeable parts into the 1912 miracle $5 per day work force.
That seized the imaginations of EVERYONE.
Prior to that quantum leap, no-one in economic history had doubled wages in a single bound.
&&&
Then Dewey took Taylorism to the classroom.
Stalin took Taylorism to heart — and a vicious, dark heart he had.
It was Taylorist ‘logic’ (more towards belief) that slothful production was wilful betrayal of the employer by the guild’s men. ( Or production line workers, as the case may be. )
With that rationale, Stalin felt no compunction about whipping his serfs// slaves// prisoners to death to met production quotas pulled out of his ear — and worse.
If one should wonder how mighty Pharaoh built his toys — one need look no further than Peter the Great and Stalin, murderous bastards, both.
Saint Petersberg // Leningrad — not a city but a graveyard.
What Stalin had blemished — became an international frenzy during WWII in Europe. Everywhere one turned it was forced labor, whips, beatings, and exponential production demands.
I should say that Foxconn ( Taipei ) has taken Taylorism to the limit… For now the ‘cogs’ are being replaced by robots.
&&&
We are entering a perilous transition.
A society that has structured ALL upon the 40-hour work week and human output MUST transition to a society that really can’t use most of humanity in any productive way.
This is glaringly true in the Third World, where lack of metal agility and memory meets Neolithic values and rapacious skill sets. ( ‘Tis better to steal than to produce. cf Somalia, Yemen, KSA, and the rest of the parasitic ummah.)
neo,
I introduced my daughter to “The Court Jester” when she was a child and even now @30, she adores it. Made as a tongue in cheek satire of the old swashbuckling movies, it transcends its modest ambitions and attains inclusion in the classics. So far in sophistication above what today passes for comedy, that it arguably has become a sad commentary on the decline in American art.
blert,
Robotics, A.I. and the future societal implications for human labor. Thoughts?
Recently saw an article about the fast food chain Wendy’s plans to replace human order takers with self-service kiosks in its 6000 locations. Google the automatic hamburger machine that has a capacity of 400 CUSTOM burgers per hour…
The problem is utopianist politics; the problem is perfectionist politics:
Utopianist and perfectionist politics within a context that is devoid of God, which context appears to be necessary even if one is skeptical about God’s existence (given the necessity for a) acknowledging Human frailties, b) the always present possibility of God’s forgiveness, and c) the entire notion of love, loyalty, crime, punishment, morality and redemption as deriving from a divine source).
One’s mileage may, of course, vary.
Moreover, one might well object to the all-too-frequent phenomenon of utopianist and perfectionist politics that exist precisely within a religious context…. to which one may retort that if such is the case, then the perpetrators have a most unsatisfactory understanding of the divine in whose name they act….)
Politics must be the art of the possible, not perfection:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/202804/henry-roth-meets-bernie-sanders
GB…
Scan this:
Paul Rosenberg elaborates on my squib.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-25/system-wont-survive-robots
The idiots clamoring for $15.00 are so retro….
The REAL clamor ought to be for totally closed borders.
ONLY during such periods have the ‘bottoms’ moved up into the ‘middle.’
BTW, the American welfare state gives these aliens FAR more of a leg up than it does those born natively. It’s not even close.
This MUST STOP.
It’s breaking the piggy bank — and our national culture.
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Surely, they are interested in the Enlightenment values of reason, human rights (such as for homosexuals and for women) and individual freedom?
Surely zombies are not interested.
Which is why they are winning in the US, when people try to fight an enemy they do not understand.