Posted on 08/15/2006 11:45:47 AM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
“Why is it there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses?” G. Gordon Liddy.
Your point about the difference being the absence of conservatism is well made and truely the root difference between the American Enlightenment and the French.
Those interested may want to pick up Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Road to Modernity, the French, English and American Enlightenments which has a great analysis.
It shows how the English Enlightenment, vastly rooted in Scottish thinking, was the inspiration for the American and the French Enlightenment and what diverse paths they took.
Chapter Four of the Constitution of Liberty by Hayek is great on this subject as well.
Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once its advantages were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom and, for that purpose, to inquire how a free society worked. This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not.At least the author points out that besides the rationalism of the enlightment making the connection to the irrationality of the islamists difficult, we do have the centralization, revolution for revolution's sake, and the general will issues of the French Enlightenment actually fostering the islamist thinking of today rather than being totally at odds with it.As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic –the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.
This distinction is obscured by the fact that what we have called the “French tradition” of liberty arose largely from an attempt to interpret British institutions and that the conceptions which other countries formed of British institutions were based mainly on their descriptions by French writers. The two traditions became finally confused when they merged in the liberal movement of the nineteenth century and when even leading British liberals drew as much on the French as on the British tradition. It was, in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference which in more recent years has reappeared as the conflict between liberal democracy and “social” or totalitarian democracy.
This difference was better understood a hundred years ago than it is today.
The vision of Adimajad and Lenin are fairly similar.
What a fanciful, romantic PC idea that trerrorism is not done for profit.
Terrorism is the oldest profession LOL!
No, the ideology is the tool of the terrorists.
Perhaps the Enlightenment can be blamed for the present PC inablility to recognize even such an obvious basic quality of man as greed.
"We are always inclined to seek an alternative explanation: There is a cause — our policies — there is an effect — their anger — and there is a solution — our change of policy. " should be recognized by even the PC infected as another of man's great basic qualities: his cowardice. Um, it's why terrorism is such a profitable business.
What a waste of mental effort PC causes.
It is no coincidence that Islamic terror finds its most accommodating European quarters in France. (The recent riots were, I suspect, a demonstrable objection against the PACE at which the takeover proceeds, not a declaration that it wasn't proceeding.) France welcomes the kind of totalitarianism incumbent in Islam's version of fascism, the subordination of all individual desires to the collective. The Terror was known -- even by its devout champions -- to be laying waste to France's intelligentsia, its philosophes, even its revolutionaries. (How many of the Jacobins perished on the same scaffold as Louis XVI?) But the sheer momentum of the movement, the fear of asserting any idea different than that of the moment's collective, propelled idealists to become, if not participants, at least silent bystanders in a horror that painted the gutters red with blood.
It is that same fear of individuality the paralyzes France -- and to a lesser extent, England -- today. And it will leave this country vulnerable as well, if we let it.
We need the courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done, the PC collective be damned!
What a fanciful, romantic PC idea that terrorism is not done for profit. Terrorism is the oldest profession LOL! No, the ideology is the tool of the terrorists.
Nice inversion. Tolstoy in War and Peace illustrated that leaders are constrained by what is happening with the masses. Or put another way, leaders make opportunistic use of the tendencies of the masses.
We can admire the Russian people in 1812 executing the scorched Earth policy (a form of terror since it exploded civilized rules of law and war) as an act of patriotic will saving Europe from Napoleon, a usurper.
But we must utterly reject Islamist terror while recognizing it has some of the same characteristics.
You said greed. I conflate that with the will to dominate. The terror masters USE for their "greedy" purposes, the Islamist ideology. They induce "patriotic" (but barbarous) acts which the individual terrorists can be recruited to perform. That is evil.
The inversion was by the author. I corrected it.
You make my point yourself: the ideology helps to recruit, and supplies political cover, for the terrorism. Russia's scorched earth policy is a weak example of terrorism though saving the country was obviously to the Russians' profit.
Terrorism is business. Columbus didn't terrorize the indians for religious reasons.
Ironically, the Aztecs probably debated the ideological nuances of Cortez' attack upon them. I can understand their superstitious belief in the exceptionalism of Cortez' terrorism.
The PC attitude of "there are no bad boys" distorts not just our view of enemies but of ourselves. And it does it to great effect when this subject is addressed.
You might be interested in the Pope's take on that subject of relativism. He traces it to Nietche.
The only response to your rant is, speak for yourself. You way exaggerte the denial of western culture in a sick attempt to achieve moral equivalency. Of course, you ignore history, too. You appear so completely ignoranct and ill-informed you should avoid this subject.
The inversion was by the author. I corrected it. You make my point yourself: the ideology helps to recruit...
Yes, my "nice inversion" was not ironic. Your points were good. But I am not prepared to say the author was entirely wrong. Which is the tool of which? The ideology, that the world should exist in total Islam, does have a momentum of its own. But I am more to your way of thinking.
There is civilization wide craziness in the modern world, but it is the left within the west that is afflicted by it. And no, they are not seriously part of the civilization I am a part of. They are not my allies in a common front against Islamic fascists, and they weren't my allies in a common front against Asian communists.
And atthis point, if the Islamic nutjobs ate them all for breakfast, I'd stand up on my chair and cheer.
I believe Rousseau and Voltaire died in 78 and Diderot in 84. Condorcet was the only one of great note still alive to die in the Terror.
Of course, Montesquieu was gone long before the revolution as well ('55) but he is more commonly viewed as outside the French tradition and an inspiration to our own.
Himmelfarb's greatest impact on my understanding was her quotations pointing out how much the French figures were proponents of enlightened monarchal power, and easy transfer to dictators or central power in general. There were few French proponents of democratic institutions and much distain for the common man.
The point is that French Revolutionary zeal became a juggernaut that could not be contained by the very Reason it purported to serve.
This very item, pointed out by Burke at the time, is what conservatives alone understand. Leftists, liberals and I am afraid even libertarians, fail to understand that a full revolution, attempting to form society anew, always leads to that without the continuity of institutions.
The USA and Costa Rica are the only two 'rebellions' that kept that understanding in place and thereby charted their own success.
Precisely. An indepth study of the constraining factors of the French and American revolutions would go far toward making a blueprint for successful political renovation.
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