One Big Homegenous Family
By Mitch Berg
On the odd Saturday night, I can be found sitting in on Marty Owings’ show, “Radio Free Nation, on BlogTalkRadio. One of the occasional callers is a fellow from Detroit – also a BlogTalkRadio host – who usually hits two talking (or, more accurately, bellowing and slurring) points:
- “I favor unity. Americans need to be united! I want to lead Americans to unity!”
- “I’m not using any Republican ideas. Republican ideas are all bool-shee-yut”.
In other words, “let’s have unity; everyone agree with me”.
I was reminded of the caller when I read this bit – an interview with French lefty philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy – last week.
It’s a reminder of the big reason I bailed out on the left over 20 years ago – because so much of what The Left believes is just so utterly awful.
Lévy
Why Obama should be chosen, in my opinion: No. 1, because it would mean really the end — and the complete victory of the battle begun in the ’60s. No. 2, because it will mean the end of a new American evil, which is the dividing, the Balkanization of American society. This is another counter-effect of a great idea, which was tolerance. You so much tolerate that you tolerate the American society to be in separate bubbles having their own peculiarities, and so on.
Obama must stamp out “peculiarities”?
The first time I read this, I thought perhaps it was an artifact of the translation from French to German (the piece originally appeared in Spiegel) and thence to English.
No such luck:
Obama as president will mean all these bubbles submitted to a real ideal of citizenship.
The “real ideal of citizenship?”
Lévy is part of the intelligentsia – which seems to be a union gig in France – but to me the “real ideals of citizenship” in America are:
- To exist as part of a free association of equals – not a cog in a “unified” machine.
- To pull like hell for what I believe until the election is over, and then support – at least as a matter of principle – the results, as a member of a representative Republic.
Not, might I point out, falling in mutely line behind an elected leader’s idea of “unity” just for the sake of stomping out Lévy’s “bubbles”. Especially when that elected leader’s ideas are so patently awful.
And I think I was right to begin with; there is a loss in translation. Not so much between languages, but between worldviews. Lévy – and Obama – seems to believe that “unity”, a lack of “bubbles”, is a useful end in and of itself.
Indeed, the more of the piece you read, the less it seems Lévy understands of America, or the small-l liberal ideals that this country has, in its better moments, always espoused:
And No. 3, you have another ideal in the America of today, which I call the competition of victims. Competition of memories. If you are in favor of the Jews, you cannot be in favor of the blacks. If you remember the suffering of slavery, you cannot remember too much the suffering of the Holocaust, and so on and so on. The human heart has not space enough for all the sufferings. This is what some people say. Obama says the contrary. It will mean the end of this stupid topic, which is competition of victimhood.
And to believe otherwise is apparently racist.
Read the whole depressing thing.
October 28th, 2008 at 7:28 am
We’re dealing with a fundamental difference in the understanding of freedom. Hayek described it, long ago:
F.A. Hayek, “The Constitution of Liberty”:
What we have called the “British tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet, are the best-known representatives. […]
Though these two groups are now commonly lumped together as the ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches led has recently been well put, as follows: “One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose”; and “one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern.” It is the second view, as J.L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from different conceptions of how society works. In this respect the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:22 am
jdedge-
A great comment!
I’m not sure if it reinforces the argument of Hayek, but Chesterton maintained that a great difference between the English and the French was that in France the Aristocrats were eccentric and the commoners conformist while in England it was the other way ’round.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:01 am
The French have a solid history of dealing with divisivness over the last two and a half centuries. Generally resulting in one group having their heads divided from their bodies.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Ah-oh, now you’ve gone and done it. The snoring you hear is coming from AssClown and PIGenma. And I crushed their crayons……. look at my shoes!
October 28th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Oh no, now you’ve done it. The snoring you hear is AssClown and PIGenma.You know these guys write with crayons and talk like this goes over their heads, come on!
October 28th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Who is this French guy, and why does he want to undermine Obama?