Posted by
Andrews on Sunday, August 03, 2008 10:43:18 AM
I have often accused liberals of arrogance, but in reality that is not quite fair. Arrogance is characteristic of one type of liberal, but not all liberals. The problem is that the arrogant type of liberal is most often the one who goes into politics, so I tend to think of them alone. However, in reality, arrogance is not an essential characteristic of liberals.
If not arrogance, then what defines liberals? The answer is pessimism, specifically pessimism about man. Where the founding fathers and most of the thinkers of the age of reason thought that, left to his own devices, man would eventually adopt the best course of action, liberalism is characterized by the belief that man is inherently doomed. Whether it is A.J.P. Taylor's belief that man is largely stupid or Kurt Vonnegut's chemical/biological determinism, the basis of all liberal thought is that man cannot be trusted to handle his own affairs.
There are two possible responses to this view of man. There is the one adopted by politicians (and Edmund Burke), the belief that man can be constrained by laws and forced to behave, and there is the one adopted by environmentalists and some liberal intellectuals (as well as Twain in some of his blacker moods), embracing an attitude of resignation, believing that man is simply doomed.
Now, of necessity, the first solution has a degree of arrogance involved. After all, if man is inherently too stupid to run his own affairs, then there would be no way to constrain him, otherwise he would not be hopeless. So to postulate that man can be constrained, they have to also postulate, either explicitly or implicitly that there are those who can see the problems and resolve them, in other words, an elite. Which is why I have so often said political liberals are arrogant. All of their policies are predicated upon both the incompetence of the great mass of humanity and the superiority of a small group who should rule.
This arrogance can appear among the second type of liberals but it is not necessary. Those who believe man is destined for a bad end, or that he simply cannot be controlled often do not postulate such an elite, or else think themselves the sole member of such an elite, the single man capable of seeing how foolish mankind is. Others, such as the hard-core anti-man wing of the environmentalists, imagine an elite exists, but not one strong enough to restrain man's destructive impulses. As a result, they rarely have much in the way of political philosophy, and the few who do tend to adopt the nihilism of the most pessimistic environmentalists.
So, I was actually wrong and right in describing liberals as arrogant. All liberals have some arrogance in believing they can see the stupidity of humankind which is hidden from everyone else, but the truly arrogant political position I was describing is limited to the more optimistic liberals, those who believe they can reshape man into something better, while there are others who, being less optimistic about our fate, tend to lack that particular conceit.