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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: What Is Wrong–And Right–With the Alt-Right Prior to Hillary Clinton’s attack on it in her acceptance speech at the Democratic Party Convention last year, few Americans had heard of the alt- right. Hillary’s dramatic disquisition tried to conjure up nightmarish specters of radical anti-Semites, goose-stepping neo-Nazis, Klansmen in white robes, and of course the closet white supremacists at Breitbart.com. While the alt- right has attracted a few disreputable characters, the white nationalism defended by, say, Richard Spencer who coined the term alt-right, strikes me (if I may say so without the roof caving in) as somewhat more modest. As I understand the basic idea, the alt-right takes the view that whites (especially white males — maybe more specifically, straight white Christian males) have been deprived of their identity by the identity politics industry of the Left that emanates from academia and permeates our political moment. The alt-right wants an identity politics for white people (white males, straight white males, etc.). Whites are entitled to their “safe spaces”; they, like black students with their own cultural centers, Harvard graduations, etc., should be able to associate only with other white people if that is their choice. The alt-right opposes multiculturalism is an unworkable recipe for cultural chaos. Contrary to the campus cliché, diversity is not our strength. Look at the conflicts that have erupted on campuses where the church of diversity has established its rituals and erected its altars. Prevailing ideas about open borders, moreover, or economists’ dogma that free migration is “good for the economy,” are open to dispute. Look at the chaos sweeping parts of Europe in the wake of mass migrations of unassimilable migrants from the Middle East and Africa. There is thus more to the alt-right than just its defense of an identity politics for people with white skin. Steve Bannon once self-identified as an economic nationalist, and there is good reason to believe Donald Trump’s original America First proposals derived from this same sentiment. The world is not, and should not be transformed into, a single borderless marketplace woven together with multilateral “free trade” agreements. This notion actually has appeal across the political spectrum. Many who supported Bernie Sanders would agree. On this point, their views were closer to Trump’s and Bannon’s than to those of Clinton (who was “for” the Trans-Pacific Partnership before she was “against” it). What should be clear: the alt-right represents pushback against two tendencies: the increasingly open anti-white tenor of much intellectual conversation, and the globalizing, cosmopolitan forces that have placed much of the white working class at a disadvantage. As for the first, what are we to say when a tenured professor at a major university speaks of wanting “white genocide” for Christmas and then insists he was only being satirical? Be this as it may, according to the view I shall develop, is that what is wrong with the alt-right is that it wants an identity politics for white people (straight white males, perhaps) instead of asking whether identity politics itself is a good idea. Surely its goodness or rightness is not self-evident. Perhaps — gasp! — we shouldn’t have an identity-politics for anyone! On the other hand, what is right with the alt-right is its suggestion, however uncomfortable in our administratively integrated, cosmopolitan, globalized times, that freedom of association is desirable. Might it not be worth asking — dare we ask it and risk being demonized? — if we wouldn’t all be better off with the mere possibility of full freedom of association? Yes: full, unconditional freedom of association means freedom to associate or not associate — for those who want such freedom. This means the freedom of a group of whatever identity to exclude and even to separate if that is their choice — a choice already made, at least in part, by universities who establish black-only facilities and graduation ceremonies. To the Left, this is of course heresy! It’s racist!Xenophobic!White supremacist!To a gulag, you! Leftists, when they deign to be polite, will scold us about how “white men have power” (look how much of Congress is white and male, or how many CEOS are white men). The Left’s conception of racism combines racial animus and superiority with the presumed political- economic and cultural power of the majority group, which explains the otherwise inexplicable belief that blacks cannot be racists even when suggesting that white people be killed. We are not supposed to ask snarky questions about how much “white privilege” has been required for the decline of a significant percentage of the white working class into poverty, substance abuse, and suicide, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. I will thus add, as quickly as possible: my suggestion for freedom of association does not entail segregation, is not a general recommendation I would see imposed on peoples as new (or old) policy: multi-ethnic interactions and associations can be good for those involved. But I will argue what would be obvious from history if facts truly mattered: they cannot be forced on peoples with wills, habits, and cultures of their own. Freedom of choice therefore should trump the blunt instruments of administrative-state policy. Hopefully our diagnosis and multi-layered recommendations will shed some light on what might fix our present unhappy state of affairs, however great the unlikelihood they will ever be allowed voluntarily. The recommendations here will call on readers to step outside their philosophical boxes. We need, first of all, a short journey through the history of ideas. I know this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But there are no easy ways into this. I. We may divide modern Western philosophical thought, beginning shortly after the start of the scientific revolution (16th and 17th centuries), into three loose and overlapping epochs: early modern philosophy, late modern philosophy, and contemporary philosophy (much of which could be labeled antiphilosophy). Early modern philosophy began with French rationalist René Descartes (1596 – 1650) and British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679). Descartes, aware of the diversity of beliefs and ideas uncovered around the world during the early Age of Exploration, sought a new grounding for knowledge that would apply universally — a premise of the main sequence of Western thought going back at least to Plato. He contended he had found it in the celebrated cogito (“I think, therefore I am”). Hobbes set about justifying the state as the locus of power in civil society, apart from which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He claimed to have found that in — what else? — the British monarchy. Early modern philosophy’s final two major spokesmen were British philosophers David Hume (1711 – 1776) and Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), the latter better known for founding classical economics based on the market’s “invisible hand” although prior to The Wealth of Nations he’d penned a treatise on ethics. Despite vast differences of detail, early modern philosophers had one thing in common: what we might call a presumption of transparency about experience and/or reason as a source of knowledge and judge of truth. Without worrying about the technicalities: what you see (or conclude by reason), allowing for our capacity to correct errors, is what you get (wysiwyg). For the British empiricists — Hobbes, John Locke (1632 – 1704), Hume, and Smith being examples — the human mind is a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) on which experience writes. This was too simple, and by Hume’s time, was encountering difficulties, e.g., we have no sense experience of a God or the moral dimensions of actions and events — problems that were weightier in the 1700s than they are today. There were others besides. Hume became famous — or infamous — for his claim that inferences about cause and effect are habits of thought. We don’t experience a “power” (his term) called causality in the world. All we observe is a constant association between the cause and the effect leading to a psychological expectation that when we see the one the other will follow. To a scientist, e.g., working in Newtonian physics, this made no sense. Hume may have not ever have accidentally touched a hot burner. But surely something had gone wrong. German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) was the pivotal figure leading from early to late modern philosophy by attempting an answer to Hume. Again leaving the technicalities aside (all 2,000 pages of them!), what Kant did was throw cold water on early modern philosophy’s presumption of transparency. The mind, said Kant, is not a “blank slate.” It is structured, active, and employs a matrix of categories (Kategorien). He introduced what I will call a presumption of mediation. Experience is mediated by categories of the understanding. This is how reason actually works, and it works the same for all persons since we all use logic. Whatever exists “prior to” the categories is a Ding-an-Sich (thing-in- itself) about which we can say nothing. The categories are a priori “lenses” through which we view the world. The job of the philosopher is to work out the details. Bottom line, though: what you see is not necessarily what you get (wysiwyg goes out the window)! It was this, by the way, that drew upon Kant the undying wrath of philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982). She accused him of “divorcing reason from reality” and portrayed him as the primary intellectual villain of modern times. Miss Rand held out for a presumption of transparency in our sense of that phrase. In terms of objective reality, egoist self, and skyscraper-building capitalism, wysiwyg. Be that as it may, after Kant late modern philosophy fragmented in multiple directions — sometimes over different interpretations of exactly what he said, what it meant, and what the mediators of experience were. There wasn’t really a single “late modern philosophy” but several of them, and as decades passed they had less and less in common. Some stuck close to science; others recoiled from it. Kant had penned a classic statement: “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). He called for a universal subjection of dogma, especially church dogma, to the microscope of critical thinking and analysis — for the human race to grow into a cognitive adulthood of logical self- reliance instead of dependence on authority, especially ecclesiastical. By the mid-1800s Kant’s philosophical descendants — on this point, at least — would settle on science as the mediator of knowledge, truth, and proper method. Thus arose the strain of Enlightenment thought gave us modernity in a broad sense: science as arbiter of truth, technology as applied science, commerce dispensing the fruits of our achievements, free public education for the next generation, the administrative or bureaucratic institutions of government providing systems of law and regulation within which commerce could thrive and people would be protected, and a presumption of universal progress holding that knowledge would continue expanding, technology would continue improving the human condition, and economic growth would continue bringing material benefits to all who were willing to work to achieve them: “bourgeois civilization” in a broad sense. Arguably, modernity became self-aware with the Law of Three Stages formulated by French sociologist-philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857). According to Comte, within Western civilization we had seen progress through three stages or states or conditions, the religious or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract (or “philosophical”), and the scientific or positive. Positivism proposed to light the way to a shining city on a hill — a city enshrining science and technique as its unofficial theologies. Neither scientists nor scientific philosophers worried overly about Kantian mediators. Their attitude was pragmatic. Science and technology worked, in the sense of solving human problems. Commercial capitalism came as part of this package. It also solved problems, while creating levels of wealth never before seen, even by royalty. Comte, a socialist, would not have approved, but commercial men didn’t ask him. The train of modernity accelerated, and the standard of living increased by leaps and bounds. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
White people need to survive. The world needs us.
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