This essay is about enhancing liberty through cultural speciation. Many discussions posted to the Internet during 1995-97 centered around what was loosely termed, “Two American Traditions.” One, a northern industrial, money-centered tradition; the other, a southern agrarian, family-centered tradition. Another way of characterizing these moral orders was “disembodied ideology” versus “embodied reason.”

​It was generally agreed that the money-centered tradition had supplanted the family-centered tradition in democratic politics and this hadn’t been a good thing for the preservation of liberty in general. Many questions about how to reinforce the family-centered tradition were brought up as well as historical analysis of how the money-centered tradition had come to prevail. I posted quite of bit of quotes from Oswald Spengler and George Santayana, along with my own commentary, because of how early and penetrating their insights were on the democratic process and cultural speciation. Sections include:

The Decline of the West. Vol. I: Form and Actuality. Vol. II: Perspectives of World-History by Oswald Spengler (One Volume Edition 1932, originally published 1918-1922)
  • Democratic Moral Orders of the Free Market
  • Religious and Secular Moral Orders of Truth and Power

Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society and Government by George Santayana (1951)
  • Discussion of Moral Authority in terms of Circumstances, what we’re calling Embodiment, or the Form of Living that values Reason as pointing to Truth
  • The shift from Embodied Reason to Disembodied Ideology
  • Disembodied Ideology as the Paradise of Anarchy, the continuation of the French Revolution
  • Disembodied Ideology as Pernicious Gradualism, eating away the Embodied Reason tradition through government as the tool to achieve a Unanimous Utopia
  • The way out of this mess through Poetry and Common Rare Achievements

Democratic Moral Orders of the Free Market

Economics are always subsidiary to the moral orders, in the case under discussion, the American “free market” is not absolutely free, it is under a constitutional moral order. The Constitution is a piece of paper only brought into life by individuals in the executive, the legislative and especially the judicial branch. These individuals are humans existing once and uniquely under the moral orders of the day. The Constitution itself is under a pre-existing moral order of unalienable rights (particularly of free speech and freedom of association) granted by our Creator: the marketplace of ideas and values. Spengler writes: “It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.” In a later quote, he talks of how theory is all but absent from our intellectual lives now.
The sentiments, the popular aim, the abstract ideals that characterize all genuine party politics, dissolve and are supplanted by private politics, the unchecked will-to-power of the... few. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. For us, too - let there be no mistake about it - the age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor.
Spengler forecasts the far future, when the urban-money-and-tension moral order completely dominates the rural agrarian moral order that existed at our nation’s founding. It is not a pretty picture, he sees primarily struggles for power between individual strong personalities within countries and between countries.
It is the world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves.... It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Caesarism the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.
Many of Spengler’s quotes bear on the question of how “We the People” can enforce the original order, the order in place at our founding.
Only experience has ever taught the lesson... that the rights of the people and the influence of the people are two different things. The more nearly universal a franchise is, the less becomes the power of the electorate. But, meantime, that other democratic quantity lost no time in making its appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of constitutional rights only when one has money. That a franchise should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the electors (in its interest) to the extent that its available money permits. Finally the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties. For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control, through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual’s opinions as they please above the parties, and, on the other, through their patronage, influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of whole-hearted supporters (the “Caucus”) which excludes the rest and induces in it a vote-apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great crises.
The misapplied ideal of “equality” has driven the expansion of the franchise in America for years, to the point that now one party wants convicted felons to have the vote (I suppose illegal aliens are next). And yet, voter apathy is at an all-time high, just as Spengler called it a century ago.
Man does not speak to man; the press and its associate, the electrical news-service, keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence. Now the press campaign appears as the prolongation - or the preparation - of war by other means... Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. Democracy has by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of the people. The book-world, with its profusion of standpoints that compelled thought to select and criticize, is now a real possession only for a few.
This tendency has accelerated since Bill Clinton’s presidency. The profusion of graphics and soundbites on TV and on the Net supplants even the catchphrases of Spengler’s earlier era. The elites have decided that people who used to think-to-order are better controlled when they feel-to-order. Hence the importance of TV broadcast images in setting foreign policy.
What the dynamism of our Press wants is permanent effectiveness. It must keep men’s minds continuously under its influence. Its arguments are overthrown as soon as the advantage of financial power passes over the counter-arguments and brings these still oftener to men’s eyes and ears. At that moment the needle of public opinion swings round to the stronger pole. Everybody convinces himself at once of the new truth, and regards himself awakened out of error. With the political press is bound up the need of universal school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element - quite unconscious - of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the newspaper’s power-area.
This is a very early acknowledgement of the organic link between public education and the media. They go hand in hand. This is why no true reform of the public education system can occur, it is not in the media’s interest for it to occur.
The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty. And the other side of this belated freedom - it is permitted to everyone to say what he pleases, but the Press is free to take notice of what he says or not. In lieu of stake and faggots there is the great silence. The dictature of party leaders supports itself upon that of the Press. The competitors strive by means of money to detach readers - nay, peoples - en masse from the hostile allegiance and to bring them under their own mind-training. And all that they learn in this mind-training, is what it is considered that they should know - a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them. This is the end of Democracy.
It is to be hoped that the New Media and the Net can help alleviate the new version of “stake and faggots,” although the centralizing of power even here is accelerating. Only a handful of giant media/entertainment conglomerates control half the Net traffic in 1995.

I find this to be an amazingly accurate picture of our modern-day unholy trinity of politics, media, and education. It is difficult to believe this was written a century ago. One may ask, how can the people enforce the rural agrarian moral order? They can’t outspend the existing moral order of urban money and tension’s politics-media-education trinity. So what options does that leave? Find a sugar-daddy within the existing order to become a player on their terms, and hope for scraps from their table afterwards? Go into a guerilla-war mode, harry the enemy in hit-and-run tactics while training new cadres in the old moral order, hoping for an emergence into light one day? Wait for a Messiah to show up and pour out apocalyptic writings onto the Internet to soften people up in preparation?
[T]he more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely is it delivered into the hands of the... party leaders, who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend; and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle, is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and further on the road to suicide.
Just read the papers and watch the news to see this in action!

“Caesar grasped the fact that on the soil of a democracy constitutional rights signify nothing without money and everything with it. Amongst these means, besides money, was influence upon the courts.”

The law can be purchased! Is purchased! “Constitutional rights signify nothing without money” is dead right on the money (so to speak). Judicial activism is symptomatic of our democracy committing suicide.

“The young politician began his career by indicting and if possible annihilating some great personage.”

Newt Gingrich and Jim Wright re-enacting Roman history? And they were just the beginning...
Extortion and corruption were the usual charges. As in those days these things were identical with politics, and the judges and plaintiffs had acted precisely in the same way as the defendants, the art consisted in using the forms of a well-acted ethical passion to cover a party speech, of which the real import was only comprehensible to the initiated.
The Bork and Thomas nominations? All the special investigations from Nixon to Iran-Contra to Whitewater? Packwood and Gingrich? It’s Rome all over again...
The ‘people’ would be very much astonished to see party opponents, after delivering wild speeches in the chamber (for the reporters) chatting together in the lobbies, or to be told how a party passionately champions a proposal after it has made certain by agreement with the other side that it will not be passed. In Rome, too, the judgment was not the important thing in these ‘trials’; it was enough if a defendant voluntarily left the city and so retired from the occupancy of, or candidature for, office.
This last quote, describing the goings on in a political system from 2,000 years ago, is so totally close to the overall atmosphere of Washington, D.C. of today that it is downright spooky! Great Caesar’s Ghost!
[T]he sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality... it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live - he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births.
What I see amidst the dying embers of Western Civilization, is exactly that life itself has become questionable. Hence, the Unabomber, the Earth First!ers, the Paul Ehrlich’s, the Zero Population Growth, the UN Depopulation Conference, NARAL, etc. The moral order has truly shifted from the agrarian family-centered tradition (the “culture of life”) to the urban money-centered tradition (the “culture of death”).

Religious and Secular Moral Orders of Truth and Power

One of my favorite passages in Spengler:
But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: “What is truth?”... lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness.

Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion - What is actuality? For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history. My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him.
It is critical to keep this tension between truth and power before us. The state tends to desire the eradication of the transcendent because it is only from within a transcendent order that the state can be judged truly. All other judgments are simply vying for power, just as the compost-modernists maintain.
No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order, in the structure of which the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. Religion is metaphysic and nothing else - Credo quia absurdum - and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic - that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. “My kingdom is not of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence - like the whole civilized West, which can only think about distributing, never renouncing - elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations - of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?
How many times have I heard the miseducated students aimlessly shuffling out of our educational system spout nonsense along the lines of “Jesus was the first communist!” or “Jesus was a socialist!” Outcome Based Education seems to specialize in what Spengler would call “blasphemy.”

Discussion of Moral Authority in terms of Circumstances, what we’re calling Embodiment, or the Form of Living that values Reason as pointing to Truth

First in the discussion of Santayana’s passages, a critical distinction between legitimate and illegitimate Freedom, something that must be accounted for as we try to undo the damage that the greasers (those who are greasing the skids to world tyranny) have done when they changed the bumper sticker ‘Question Authority’ to ‘Deny Authority’.
Facts and logic may well be outraged by tradition, but at least tradition articulates manners, defines the arts, and renders social types clear and dramatic. Freedom is legitimate when it does not usurp authority; and a radical critic of current follies is likely to betray his own, and to prove odious rather than persuasive.
Freedom that has usurped authority becomes its antithesis, Necessity. The so-called Pro-Choicers are ultimately leading us to a utopia where no choices are possible because they deny all authority but their own infantile desires.
When, then, has a political movement or institution rational authority? When is it ‘right’? What, then, apart from the celestial assistance that may have been secured by contract, can determine the rightness or wrongness of a ruler’s policy?
The celestial assistance secured by contract is what I term ‘higher authority’. Higher authority was destroyed by the Enlightenment, taking with it human dignity arising in the chain-of-command between leaders and followers committed to the noble task of overcoming nature’s catastrophes, and external challenges that would threaten a people’s internal spirituality. So what replaces the vanished ‘higher authority’?
We are not concerned now with this self-judged rightness of all actions, but only with the rational justification of some against the folly of others. And the first answer suggested by primal Will itself to this question, when faced by some immovable obstacle or by some horrible unintended result, is this: that which makes an action rational is the material possibility of carrying it out successfully. In a word, Circumstances render one action rational and another irrational.
The question is, how can we know in advance which reasons, and which assertions will be selected for, when, in evolutionary terms, selection is only recognized after the fact?
This first answer at once suggests but corrects a maxim decried by moralists but for ever reasserted by natural Will: namely, that Might is Right. In identifying authority with the favor of Circumstances, we deny all intrinsic rightness or wrongness to any form of Will or action. The difference lies only in the suitability of that impulse to the world in which it arises. You have a right to be what you are and to become what you can become. So far, the willful man who says that Might is Right is a true man, and rational; yet he would be mindless in the highest degree if he meant that all initiatives are equally fortunate. He may always do as he likes, but he will seldom get what he wants. He will prove himself a fool, in little things and in great, if he persistently pursues what Circumstances deny him. Rightness, then, in action or opinion, in so far as it depends on sagacious conformity with Circumstances, can never be complete in any case, nor can it be summed up adequately in any maxim, since Circumstances are variable.
So there’s the source of authority, now, how does authority come to be attributed?
Fact or Power, taken absolutely, contain no authority. Authority is a relation; and it accrues to a fact, a power, or an idea when any one of these is found to confront, or inwardly to control, the satisfaction of primal Will. The rationality of such an acknowledgment of authority depends on the reality of this alleged confronting power or mysterious control; and in the absence of genuine science and sharp criticism, imagination, custom, and superstition naturally play a leading part in the attribution of authority. Yet the errors involved are intellectual rather than moral. The great moral error is not to admit authority at all.
The greasers have committed this great moral error in spades! The grease on Perdition Trail leading to barbarism has accumulated to astounding levels because of this error.
In so far as Circumstances are truly conceived, in their relation to the life of the psyche, and the real demands and possibilities of that psyche are fairly recognized, authority is rationally placed. And this respect due to authority is well expressed by attributing it simply to the will of God; for God is normally conceived to be the power governing the universe of Circumstances, and at the same time is felt to be the secret fountain of all true virtue and joy within the soul.
Here we are trying to reclaim the idea of ‘higher authority’ but without the sacred contract.
A recognized public authority, a chieftain, or a tradition vested in priests or elders, diffuses in society a moral peace, a refuge from vain sorrows and vain doubts and vain family quarrels. This authority is religious rather than political, but religion would only be another problem, another enemy, if it were not established by custom and not sanctioned by superstitious awe and a sense of invisible but unavoidable perils. Where such an established authority fails, moral society is dissolved; so that the autocratic voice of religion, echoing from the night of time, and supported by the daily suasion of a living society, is needed to save that society from moral anarchy and political sedition.
Well, well, here we have a concise description of the state of our American civilization: moral anarchy and political sedition. So which individuals have moral authority in America today? Where will such authority arise in the future?

The shift from Embodied Reason to Disembodied Ideology

Now for some discussion of the shift from the agrarian tradition to what I referred to as the values of urban-tension-and-money.
The traditional parties owe at bottom no other allegiance than allegiance to money, diplomatically called the national interest; the only internal question being in what proportion the money shall be distributed at home between various classes. It would be an error to suppose that, like certain other nations, they set their heart ultimately on the liberties or glories talked about by their orators; these unrealities are exchangeable, provisional, and only means to the great end, prosperity.
Our liberties are to be traded for prosperity, but prosperity for whom? Prosperity in Santayana’s terminology is roughly analogous to what Jacques Ellul calls Efficiency. Speaking of Efficiency, let’s look at progress and technology:
There is only one philosopher, Aristotle, who seems to me to have placed progress where it is at once morally real and physically possible. He did not call it progress, because he was not thinking of evils to be escaped, but of perfections to be achieved. In each phase of life and art a different perfection may be approached.... I think it is not possible, impartially or rationally, to establish any moral progress in the forms of being. It is perhaps only in transmissible arts that human progress can be maintained or recognized. But in developing themselves and developing human nature these arts shift their ground; and in proportion as the ground is shifted, and human nature itself is transformed, the criterion of progress ceases to be moral to become only physical, a question of increased complexity or bulk or power. We all feel at this time the moral ambiguity of mechanical progress. It seems to multiply opportunity, but it destroys the possibility of simple, rural, or independent life. It lavishes information, but it abolishes mastery except in trivial or mechanical proficiency. We learn many languages, but degrade our own. Our philosophy is highly critical and thinks itself enlightened, but it is a Babel of mutually unintelligible artificial tongues.
Moral ambiguity, indeed! Are our choices increasing or decreasing? One thing that is not ambiguous at all, is the multiplication of the worms and brutes in society coupled with their ability to get their hands on some awesomely destructive technology.
Shakespeare’s theater (not to speak of the Spanish) is a living monument to the mentality of chivalry. In contrast with that freedom and richness we can see to what a shocking degradation modern society has condemned the spirit. There can be no doubt of it: chivalry is now thoroughly dead. Our one preoccupation is to be safe. We don’t know what we love, or if we do we don’t dare mention it. We are willing to become anything, to be turned into any sort of worm, by the will of the majority. We are afraid of starving, of standing alone; above all we are afraid of having to fight. And when nevertheless we are forced to fight, we do so without chivalry. We do not talk of justice, but of interests. Meantime our society has lost its own soul. The landscape of Christendom is being covered with lava; a great eruption and inundation of brute humanity threatens to overwhelm all the treasures that artful humanity has created. Brute humanity has the power to destroy polite humanity, because it retains the material equipment of modern industry which has recently grown upon man like fresh hide, horns, and claws. Armed with this prodigious mechanism, any hand at headquarters can spread death and ruin over the earth.
The turn from the older tradition to the newer tradition may, in fact, be a turn back to an even older tradition. The turn is from the newness of ‘brotherly democracy’, which is synonymous with the free enterprise system, to the current governmental form of the ‘democracy of crowds’ which is synonymous with socialism guided by experts.
Brotherly democracy also makes its appearance at certain moments in the lives of pioneers. There may be some semblance to blades of grass in their individual independence and apparent freedom from all ties, possessions, or prejudices. Yet nothing brotherly, no common memories of affections, appear in their respective ambitions; they are not met to help one another, but each is there to help himself and to help himself to the largest possible portion. This mate, who today may be an independent ally, tomorrow will be your rival. You will be good neighbors so long as it pays; but you make no vows of eternal friendship with any casual neighbor. You may find yourself shooting him the day after tomorrow. Such a vigilant, casual society, to become a political democracy, requires the absence or suppression of willful, ignorant, or frantic individuals who cannot feel the grave need of order and equality in a common plight. At close quarters in a ticklish predicament unanimity is imperative in action, no matter how absent it may be in thought. Hence the contrast, notorious in the middle of the twentieth century, between a democracy formed by a concourse of adventurers migrating separately into a new and relatively empty world and democracy of crowds, accustomed to troop in armies or in gangs of workingmen, like flocks of sheep scientifically guided by expert shepherds and their well-trained sheep-dogs.
The intractable problem for libertarianism, or anarcho-capitalism, is what to do with the fact that ‘willful, ignorant, or frantic individuals’ who care little for order or equality are ever-present in any population. Short of exile or extermination, both of which negate the ideals of free enterprise, some authorized whomping-on is called for, with all the future dangers inherent in such delegated authority.

Disembodied Ideology as the Paradise of Anarchy, the continuation of the French Revolution

Santayana gives an outstanding analysis of the essential attributes of Disembodied Ideology. The ideal of abstract, vacant freedom turns out to be extraordinarily constrained every which way a poor Übermensch might turn.
But the French Revolution and the whole movement, still not quite spent, which proceeded from it, was not liberal except verbally and by accident. The world was to be freed from Christianity and feudalism; it was not to be free to become Christian and feudal again. These were not regarded as normal episodes in human history, as forms of civilization as legitimate as any others; they were regarded as fiendish inventions foisted by tyrants on human helplessness and ignorance. That incubus removed, all mankind was expected to found a heroic, fearless, unchallengeable republic, composed by Catos, Brutuses, and Cincinnatuses. This rigid form of liberty being established, no other form of liberty would be permitted.
I really like the idea of a ‘rigid liberty’ because I see where the kooky neo-Puritan multiculturalists come up with ideas like; it is evil to smoke, nicotine that is, marijuana is fine. In Allan Bloom’s terms, all we get from them is ‘openness to closedness’ and a ‘diversity of perversity’.
What the Revolution was really making for, though hardly expressed with frankness before Nietzsche, was liberty absolute and forever empty; liberty without foundations in nature or history, but resident in a sort of prophetic commotion. Custom, law, privilege, and religion were not to command allegiance, but to be themes only for criticism and invective. Hence the mortal hatred of any view that recognized realities, or built upon them. A truth, a fact, a past, a future, if definite and knowable, would abolish pure liberty, and it was essential, if this liberty were to be preserved, that nobody should build anything on it. If you settled something or made something, you would have become the slave of your action or of your work. A free soul inhabits the paradise of anarchy.
So truth is unacceptable. Here we see all the historical revisionism, and all the cultural relativism that just keeps piling up the grease on the skids. All in the name of pure liberty. John Stuart Mill must have made it down the greased skids in record time. The Paradise of Anarchy recurs endlessly in brave young minds and purblind scientists, ever denying the existence of morality or of any purpose or value in the universe.
A great motive invoked by the modern mind has been the love of liberty; but this love, when we examine it, appears to be three fourths hatred. There is the passionate, secret, accumulated hatred towards religion, wealth, and government; and there is the hatred of all the ills that flesh is heir to, easily attributed to the wickedness and folly of other men. Mankind has always been unhappy, more unhappy perhaps when submissive and pious than when rebellious. The rebel is proud of himself and hopeful; these are inspiriting sentiments, and in protesting against his misery he has half vanquished it. Sometimes the love of liberty becomes open hatred of every independent thing limiting one’s own fancy: hatred of tradition, of greatness, of inequality, of truth, and even of matter.... There nature has deeply engraved the eternal law of liberty: THINK AS YOU LIKE, SAY WHAT YOU THINK, DO WHAT YOU CHOOSE. There is a possible difficulty here, which I will mention in passing: that if in the free mind there were nothing but this law of freedom, the law would remain inapplicable, because that empty mind would never know what to like or what to think. Theoretically, this difficulty is fatal to libertarianism; there must be given motives, given organs, given objects, before liberty can exist or can begin to move. Liberty is not a source but a confluence and a harmony.
Libertarianism definitely leans to the Disembodied Ideology tradition, not the Embodied Reason tradition. Now for a very widely quoted passage on liberty.
In order to be truly and happily free you must be safe. Liberty requires peace. War would impose the most terrible slavery, and you would never be free if you were always compelled to fight for your freedom. This circumstance is ominous: by it the whole sky of liberty is at once clouded over. We are drawn away violently from irresponsible play to a painful study of facts and to the endless labor of coping with probable enemies. Yet that is not the worst of it. If liberty demands peace, peace does not merely demand that other people should not meddle with us; it demands equally that we should not meddle with them. But if we are not free to break any head or any heart or any bounds, what sort of liberty remains to us? Liberty to follow the golden rule: whereby our free hearts are at once sobered and transfixed in their inmost affections. What a surprise, when we had proclaimed our complete freedom, to find ourselves condemned by it to eternal vigilance and to the most drastic discipline and reversal of our natural Will! The superman sees himself committed by his supermanhood to the morality of the slave.
Poor, poor Übermensch, can’t get a break! It turns out that Embodied Reason is the tradition that we must, in the end, turn to. It may be an evolved reason, after moral progress is made, but it still must be Embodied, submitting to the authority of Circumstances and social custom. Disembodied Ideology, and the desire for vacant freedom, are puerile.

Disembodied Ideology as Pernicious Gradualism, eating away the Embodied Reason tradition through government as the tool to achieve a Unanimous Utopia

With the rise of Disembodied Ideology, we have lost our moral unity and this has led to an irrational, artless government open wide to politicians of the social engineering variety; the anointed, the experts, the elites, the scientific shepherds.
When the nation or the territory to be governed has never had moral unity or has lost it, the government cannot be rational; it can never be an art; for the country supplies no guiding purpose to its rulers. They must live from hand to mouth in the midst of traditional and revolutionary currents; and unless a political prophet can impose a faith of his own, government must be by politicians.... Rational government is an art, requiring the widest knowledge and the most perfect disinterestedness. It should be steady and traditional, yet open to continual readjustments with the natural shifts of customs, passions, and aspirations in the world. Reason cannot define or codify human nature: that is the error of militant sects and factions.
These shepherds preach tolerance and egalitarianism in condescending, hushed cadences designed to fool the sheep by seeming reasonable, and peaceful. The truth is that the shepherds are not very smart, not very nice and unboundedly hypocritical.
...Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost. But alas! this [liberal] wish to reform a decaying civilization is itself singularly naive; it is fundamentally ignorant, under all the plumes and furbelows of a superficial omniscience. They do not see that the peace they demand was secured by the discipline and the sacrifices that they deplore, that the wealth they possess was amassed by appropriating lands and conducting enterprises in the high-handed manner which they denounce, and that the fine arts and refined luxuries they revel in arise in the service of superstitions that they deride and despotisms that they abhor.
The following passage points directly to the prevalence of nihilism in our society in order to secure peace, notwithstanding that it is only the peace of the graveyard that equality leads to.
Liberty habitually exercised presupposes peace; but the price of peace, as men are actually constituted, is the suppression of almost all their liberties. The individual expected to be morally emancipated; he panted to live in the paradise of anarchy. But this paradise is metaphysical only; to enter it you must love war and peril and change and irresponsibility and the mystic joys of mere being. Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction. Between two nothings there is eternal peace; but between two somethings if they come within range of each other, there is always danger of war.
The scientific shepherds, with ever-increasing knowledge of human intentionality, perception, memory and learning, pose a direct and increasing threat to all of our volitional freedom.
...When the statistical psychologists find out what strings and wires move the human psyche, they will have all those strings and wires in their hands and, being legally commissioned to pull them, will have to do so. And then the truly political question will arise for them: To what end should the race be scientifically caused to act, to think, and to vote? Have they all a similar primal Will? Are they all capable of the same ultimate virtues?
The anointed know how to use gradualism, through hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations, in order to stay on top by enforcing these arbitrarily and capriciously against those who would replace them.
Government is a modification of war, a means of using compulsion without shedding so much blood. Of course this relative bloodlessness of government comes from the aversion to war felt by the person who is coerced, a war in which he might be the only combatant on his side. Save for that apprehension he would resist the police, the tax-gatherer, and the recruiting sergeant. All government is therefore potential war; and if this threat and the ability to use force disappear, government ceases. Every government is essentially an army carrying on a perpetual campaign in its own territory; it is always up in arms against actual or possible faction - called illegality or crime. The almost universal sense of the badness of the contemporary government has, however, a deeper cause than the vices of the governing person or party; discontent with any government is inevitable, because any real government that does not let things merely drift must impose sacrifices, some severe and some universal. The sacrifices that are most felt are those that are obvious, like taxes and conscription. It is therefore good politics, though not necessarily good government, that taxes should be indirect and military service voluntary and professional. Obvious sacrifices are least resented when they are habitual, not excessive, and equally distributed.
This gradualism, this hidden oppression, is also the result of the loss of moral unity leading to ‘prodigiously complex legislation’ arising from incessant worldview warfare. Our loss of vital liberty is exactly analogous to the frog in a boiling pot.
Thus, like the hidden fires of a volcano, ignorant energy, convinced of its own rightness, will burst spasmodically into civil and rational life. In modern philosophy it has been largely dominant, and is called Egotism. This is the radical source of hostility to all alien forces and authorities, and especially in politics to the government, of whatever kind or party it may be. It is also the source of crime against individuals by other individuals whom the government arrests and imprisons; and sometimes it causes the most ardent haters of government to appeal to government against the agents of the government itself. So all modern parties and ideologies savour of protestation, hatred, and rebellion against government as it exists. And as each reforming party pushes its way, by denunciation, to power and by denunciation is presently destroyed, a prodigiously complex legislation and organization, every part inspired by a grievance, imprisons vital liberty and condemns it to perpetual forced labor. This perpetuity of civil war, crime, conspiracy, and latent insurrection does not contradict the initial need of government and its continued utility.

The way out of this mess through Poetry and Common Rare Achievements

Aesthetics is the foundation to civilization-building, or civilization-renewing.
Constitutional democracy, on the contrary, is only a means to an end; it has no occasion to frame a moral philosophy, either sublime or absurd. It recommends and practices frequent appeals to public opinion, to control the easily deranged mechanism of administration and lawgiving. It counts on this method to secure public acquiescence and to diminish the friction involved in maintaining order in a society which should be highly differentiated, since it means to be vitally free and traditionally continuous. A clear test of the distinction between democracy as a means to liberty and democracy as a means to equality may be seen in the demand for unanimity. But in each individual, and in each species or institution, egotism inevitably reigns, until it is corrected or rather transcended by the disinterested imagination of the poet in man.
I have experienced the unanimity of liberal biased group-think (LBGT) or political correctness (PC) all too often, the stifling pain of it is rarely mitigated. Next we have that phrase, so current, and so over-used, “void in the heart”, except this is from 1951. We’ve been slipping down the greasy slope for a long time.
The liberty that [a radical liberalism] would leave to the private mind would be a derisive liberty. For we should be invited to make our own way through the uncharted spaces of vacant possibility; yet in reality, unless we participate in some specific human enterprise, we shall be simply drinking the winds. To drink alone and to talk when nobody listens is a doubtful privilege. Liberal society is therefore compelled to form all manner of voluntary private societies to replenish the human vacuity of its political life; but these private societies, being without power or material roots, remain ghostly and artificial. Private busybodies cannot fill the void in the heart of the political animal, hungry for friendship, for action, for distinction, for perilous adventures, and for rare accomplishments to be achieved in common.
Ghostly private associations on the Net will never be enough.

Reilly Jones © 2001