{"id":144821,"date":"2022-08-28T09:11:51","date_gmt":"2022-08-28T17:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=144821"},"modified":"2022-11-27T17:47:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T01:47:28","slug":"conservative-claims-of-cultural-oppression-the-nature-and-origins-of-conservaphobia-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=144821","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are highlights from this work in progress<\/a> by philosopher Rony Guldmann<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* The populist conservatives of the Tea Party movement are to be celebrated, not for the accuracy of their assertions, the cogency of their arguments, or the wisdom of their prescriptions, but for the kind of people they are, ornery Americans. To critique Tea Party conservatism intellectually is therefore to commit a category error. These conservatives\u2019 anger is not ultimately \u201cdriven by intellectual arguments\u201d and therefore \u201ccannot be brought to an end through intellectual arguments.\u201d83 Their objections to this or that federal program may be less than cogent. But the \u201cthe ostensible issues,\u201d says Harris, \u201care always secondary,\u201d84 merely the accidental mediums through which something more fundamental is being asserted. And this is the anarchic will of free men, which the elites are hell bent on extirpating but which the populist conservative will defend at all costs.<\/p>\n

* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression resent, not modern society per se\u2014whose comforts and conveniences they do not, as Harris notes, really care to repudiate\u2014but rather the organized affect structure that emerges out of it, the properly ordered sociability of the buffered identity. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives express their longing for a mode of experience that is less compromised by this sociability\u2019s demands\u2014less rationalized, intellectualized, and disengaged\u2014a yearning for what they intuit to be human nature\u2019s default, and hence authentic, form of consciousness.<\/p>\n

* Like the elites of old, today\u2019s liberals insist that the lower orders be \u201cnot left as they are, but badgered bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled, and organized to abandon their lax and disordered folkways and conform to one or another feature of civil behavior.\u201d Seen in the context of the mutation counter-narrative, the E.P.A. and other liberal institutions are merely carrying forth this longstanding tradition. Conservatives understand their conservatism as their resistance to the badgering and bullying, and this is why they cannot be see liberals as tyrants and usurpers, cryptofascists who are always scheming to undermine the natural liberty of the conservative. Liberalism has become ascendant, not by providing compelling solutions to discrete problems, but by suppressing and discrediting the free human nature that the conservative strives to retain.<\/p>\n

* The difference between liberals and conservatives is not the difference between secularism and religion, but a difference in the degree to which the latter has been compressed into the former. Conservatives can decry a \u201creligion of secularism\u201d or a \u201creligion of secular humanism\u201d where liberals see only the histrionic posturing of populist rabble-rousers because where liberals see the categorical subtraction of religion, bare secularism, conservatives see what Taylor describes as the compression of the religious and the secular into a \u201cspiritual-secular whole.\u201d That is, they discern the religious origins of what liberals accept as liberated human nature\u2014which they themselves do not experience as liberating. This compression also explains how conservatives can casually oscillate between accusing liberals of moral subjectivism, relativism, or nihilism and accusing them of insufferable moralistic zealotry. The compression qualifies as nihilistic when viewed from the side of the religious\u2014e.g., the loss of traditional values\u2014and morally puritanical when viewed from that of the secular\u2014e.g., liberals\u2019 totalitarian will to impose their politically correct utopias. Both characterizations ultimately refer us to the same phenomenon seen from different angles, each of which articulates how a more pre-modern consciousness must process a more modern one. Conservative claims of cultural oppression are not contrived because they are, properly understood, logically derivable from what is a clash of cosmological orientations.<\/p>\n

* If conservatives will not permit themselves to be intimidated by liberal intellectualism and instead adopt an anthropological stance that treats this intellectualism as a mere cultural parochialism, this is because their deeper, instinctive \u201cways of knowing\u201d apprise them of this meta-truth, which cannot be allowed to be overshadowed the ordinary truths upon which liberals rest their arguments. To the extent conservatives are anti-intellectual, this is because they follow feminism in engaging in what Anne Philips calls a \u201cpolitics of presence\u201d rather than a \u201cpolitics of ideas.\u201d Whereas the latter detaches ideas from basic human experience, the former emphasizes the interrelationship between ideas and experience in order to permit \u201ca more exploratory notion of possibilities so far silenced.\u201d<\/p>\n

* For the naturalization of the buffered identity and the erection of entire social order on that basis cannot but leave its enemies with only a vague and inchoate sense of what might lie beyond it.<\/p>\n

* Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control \u201cwants our lives to be bound by rules,\u201d manliness \u201cis dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.\u201d While rational control \u201cwants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,\u201d manliness \u201cfavors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,\u201d107 Manliness \u201cseeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.\u201d108 It \u201ctends to be insistent and intolerant,\u201d109 just as it is \u201csteadfast\u2026taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one\u2019s context, not being adaptive or flexible.\u201d110 Manliness must \u201cmust prove itself and do so before an audience.\u201d It seeks \u201cto be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.\u201d By contrast, rational control \u201cprefers routine and doesn\u2019t like getting excited\u201d and must therefore seek to keep manliness \u201cunemployed by
\nmeans of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.\u201d111<\/p>\n

Manliness thus conceived is the antithesis of the buffered distance, the repudiation of its ordering impulses. The defense of manliness is at its deepest level a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, a rationality that is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these embodied, however they are now expressed.<\/p>\n

* The market has come to represent the anti-structure suppressed by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, man\u2019s submersion in forces he does not control and whose unpredictable logic he cannot fathom, his openness to something that transcends his will and can upset all of his designs.<\/p>\n

* “The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and \u201cseriousness.\u201d In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation.<\/p>\n

Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.”<\/p>\n

* Conservatives\u2019 reservations about educational meritocracy, their disposition to elevate the entrepreneur above the recipients of prestigious diplomas, awards, and posts, reflects, not raw antiintellectualism, as liberals believe, but the perception that meritocracy implies the inauthentic repudiation of anti-structure to which conservatives are prepared to expose themselves, and that this repudiation is the origin of liberals\u2019 surreptitious authoritarianism and parochialism.<\/p>\n

* What George Will condemns as liberal condescension toward \u201cmasses making messes\u201d and Goldberg condemns as the
\nNew Dealers\u2019 \u201ccontempt for the \u2018disorganized\u2019 character of capitalism\u201d122 are the economic expression of the buffered identity\u2019s ordering impulses, which the ordinary American naturally resents.<\/p>\n

* modern intellectuals are the legacies of the aristocrat and the priest. Having inherited the leisurely playfulness of the former and the truth-seeking piety of the latter, they have also inherited the egalitarian animus which these qualities have historically provoked.123 But where liberals see intellectual freedom and truth-seeking, conservative claimants of cultural oppression must, as the pre-modern outsiders looking in, perceive the peculiarly courtly rationality. Hence Kahane\u2019s accusation that liberals can \u201c[a]t a drop of a Rolodex\u2026come with a rotating hit squad of well-placed academics ready to pounce and opine upon just about anything having to do with you.\u201d Its \u201cpeople are trained practically from birth as an instant-response team, the weaklings and the physical cowards who sought the safety of a sinecure instead of the mortal combat of life but who still get the thrill of shooting inarticulate fish in a barrel.\u201d124 Liberals will dismiss this as an empty ad hominem, as an obscure and illdirected grievance and frustration. But what is the \u201csinecure\u201d enjoyed by liberal academics but a contemporary iteration of the royal pension that an absolutist monarch might have deigned to bestow upon courtly supplicants, emasculated warriors-turned-courtiers? If academics are competent to discredit conservative claims of cultural oppression as easily as one \u201cshoot[s] inarticulate fish in a barrel,\u201d do they not owe their superior eloquence to the conditions that first generated it? These conditions are the rituals of courtly supplication and manipulation that, as Elias says, came to constitute \u201cthe basic stock of models of conduct\u201d that gradually spread \u201cto ever-wider circles of functions\u201d\u2014including those that can be found on the liberal Rolodex.<\/p>\n

* Ingraham warns that \u201c[p]arents would be disturbed to know that it is common practice among pediatricians these days to tell the moms and dads to leave the room so the \u2018professional\u2019 can have private chats with children\u2014chats that involve controversial topics like abortion, premarital sex, masturbation, and birth control.\u201d The basic presumption, whether at work in doctor\u2019s offices, schools, or government, is that the \u201c\u2018experts\u2019 know best\u201d and that \u201c[p]arents are too ignorant, too \u2018traditional,\u2019 and too incompetent to be left \u2018unsupervised\u2019 to direct the lives of their own children.\u201d Though conservative claims of cultural oppression are often seen as concerned solely with the defense of traditionalism against the secular modernism of the elites, this struggle is intertwined with another one centered on defending individual self-reliance and common sense against the claims of expertise and professionalism.<\/p>\n

* Christina Hoff Sommers argues that our culture\u2019s contemporary \u201ctherapism\u201d emerged with the waning of traditional religion129 and is premised on the proposition that \u201cvulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche\u2026and that a diffident, anguished and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the trials of everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Whether it be through the admonitions of the family doctor, the solicitude of therapists, the decisions of credentialing agencies, or the disciplinary specialization of universities, the basic message is that ordinary Americans must be supervised by liberals, who are acting in their capacity as liberals even as they profess to be only committed professionals just trying to get the job done.<\/p>\n

* conservative claimants of cultural oppression are animated by the visceral conviction that the modern liberal identity is as Taylor says \u201cone historically constructed understanding of agency among others\u201d\u2014and not essential liberated human nature.<\/p>\n

* Liberalism is not the transcendence of all herosystems, but merely the deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry of that transcendence. Liberals believe that they offer only hard-nosed critiques of anachronistic prejudices. But conservatives suspect, with Gouldner, that \u201cthe negativity of intellectuals embodies a disguised set of claims advancing their own candidacy as a new elite\u201d and that this negativity is therefore but \u201cthe opening move in the replacement of the old by a new class, and of an old tradition and hierarchy by a new one.\u201d146 Irreducible to bare critique\u2014as in \u201creservations about past and present policies\u201d\u2014the negativity of intellectuals is also the expression of a particular hero-system, a particular ideal of the overall human make-up, the buffered self. This is the liberal elites\u2019 \u201cdisguised set of claims,\u201d which is usually disguised for the elites themselves, who can therefore see nothing beyond their good intentions.<\/p>\n

* It is often said that political discourse in America is now plagued by ever-increasing incivility, by
\nan alarming unwillingness to approach opposing views\u2019 with any modicum of open-mindedness and a correlative indulgence in ad hominem rhetoric. This, it is held, is a destructive trend that, in impeding our ability to intelligently debate \u201cthe real issues,\u201d poses a danger to the health of democracy itself. Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson lament that \u201ccitizens do not reason together so much as they reason against one another\u201d when they \u201creflexively attack persons instead of policies, looking for what is behind policies rather than what is in them.\u201d147 The theoretical irrelevance of ad hominem attacks is axiomatic among sophisticated thinkers. But on another level, what may seem like raw incivility constitutes a special kind of lucidity into the existentially deepest stakes of the debate. The ad hominems of conservatives are attempts to impugn, not the surreptitiously ignoble motivations of liberals, but the basic categories through which liberals make sense of themselves. Beyond imputing generic vices like arrogance to liberals, these attacks seek to describe a particular identity which liberals cannot recognize as such. The trope of the emaciated, pointy-headed intellectual is indeed a caricature. But it is a caricature that expresses conservatives\u2019 sense that liberals are oblivious to the buffered identity as an identity, and therefore to the fact that liberalism imposes what is a particular way of being on unwilling others. This is what lies \u201cbehind\u201d policies rather than \u201cin\u201d them, and what conservative claims of cultural oppression endeavor to bring to the forefront.<\/p>\n

* Honor and chastity are both atavisms in a modern society, at best regarded \u201cas ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.\u201d150 Whereas insult to honor was one judged to be a serious social, and possibly legal, offense, someone who now sought to defend his honor will be judged neurotic, abnormally sensitive, or hopelessly provincial.151 These judgments are now the received wisdom. And this is what permits liberals to dismiss \u201ctraditional values\u201d as so much empty bluster, the product of emotional conflict and intellectual confliction.<\/p>\n

* The problem for the conservative is that he still clings to a world of honor, whether this be through the
\nCode of the Gentleman, the preternaturally clean-cut look of conservative think tank interns, the patriotism of Sarah Palin rally attendees, or any number of other ways. And this is the ultimate source of liberal animus.<\/p>\n

* The man of seriousness is serious because he refuses to recognize the meanings which he projects upon the world as projections. Confounding the objective world with the human meaning with which he has laden it, he disingenuously treats values as what Sartre calls \u201ctranscendent givens independent of human subjectivity.\u201d154 The spirit of seriousness is a refusal to recognize one\u2019s hero-system as a hero-system and to see oneself as the origin of that hero-system. The man of seriousness hides his own agency from himself, in order to escape the anguished recognition of his own freedom. Seen from this perspective, what the Gentleman holds out as his steely conviction and unwavering determination is in fact his teleological libertinism, merely his passivity before meanings for which he will not assume responsibility.<\/p>\n

The man of seriousness, writes Sartre, \u201cmakes himself such that he is waited for by all the tasks placed along the way,\u201d responding to these tasks as \u201cmute demands\u201d and experiencing himself as \u201cthe passive obedience to these demands.\u201d155 The imperatives of the Code, however lofty, are just such tasks, mute demands by means of which the Gentleman perseveres in a trance that sacrifices true individuality on the altar of identity.<\/p>\n

Conservatives are culturally oppressed because they live under the cloud of such judgments. And they respond in kind, by recasting what liberals uphold as courage and critical intelligence as a set of inherited cultural dispositions that are no less reflexive and unthinking, no less heteronomous, than their own have been judged to be.<\/p>\n

* The Bobos understand themselves as enacting internally-imposed codes rather than heteronomously submitting to external ones. Unlike evangelical Christians, they do not accept that sexuality exists to serve God\u2019s transcendent purposes. Nevertheless, Bobo sex \u201ccan\u2019t be just a fun thing between the sheets\u201d but must also be \u201ca profound thing between the ears,\u201d must be something \u201csafe, responsible, and socially constructive.\u201d And the result is that the \u201cmost animalistic activities are now enshrouded with guidebooks, how-to videos, and magazine articles written by people with advanced degrees.\u201d163 The Bobos aren\u2019t ultimately any more libertarian than evangelical Christians. The difference is that their sexual strictures originate in a more thorough internalization of the buffered identity, which creates its own compulsions. For what was formerly understood as the transcendent purpose of sex has become compressed into sexuality itself, rendering it compulsively purposive.<\/p>\n

* Mike Gallagher believes that liberals despise the \u201cpower and thrust\u201d of gas-guzzling V-8 engines, and that in urging environmentally-friendly but relatively impotent electric cars upon the public liberals are asking us \u201cto stop hitting the accelerator\u2014on our cars, on our ambitions, on our appetites, on everything.\u201d Here as elsewhere, what may seem like just an empty ad hominem is in fact anything but that. For what is the \u201cpower and thrust\u201d celebrated by Gallagher if not a symbol of the unrestrained and un-subdued affective-instinctual structure of the pre-modern self? What is liberals\u2019 break on the accelerator but the muting and subduing of that structure within the buffered identity? This is how conservatism \u201cmakes medievalism modern\u201d!\u2014by projecting onto the contemporary scene the basic structure of the conflicts through which the modern emerged out of the medieval.<\/p>\n

* Ad hominem reasoning cannot be neatly distinguished from reasoning about the \u201cissues\u201d because the issues express the conceptual entailments generated out of the self-understandings of cultural antagonists. In conflicting against each other, these entailments necessarily grate against the selfconceptions of which they are the theoretical articulations\u2014giving rise to resentment and ad hominem reasoning. That is why the subtext of the arguments marshaled for or against the existence of the relevant rights and obligations is always to charge ideological opponents with a deficit of self-transparency. This is what makes the ad hominems theoretically relevant. They are not directly concerned with ideas, but they offer us windows into structures of the interlocutors\u2019 self-understanding, which are the conceptual and existential backdrop against which the ideas are articulated and understood. Ad hominem rhetoric is not an intellectual distraction, but an attempt to articulate an ontology of the human condition, which is what conservative claims of cultural oppression seek to do.<\/p>\n

* That is why egalitarians and communitarians will perceive environmental danger more readily than free-market individualists, because regulating that danger is fully congruous with regulating the \u201ccommercial activities that generate inequality and legitimize the unconstrained pursuit of individual self-interest.\u201d The individualists, by contrast, will be slower to perceive environmental danger precisely because \u201cthey cherish [the] markets and private orderings\u201d that will be disrupted by their regulation, and will instead worry \u201cthat excessive gun control will render individuals unable to defend themselves, a belief congenial to the association of guns with individualist virtues such as self-reliance, courage, and martial prowess.\u201d<\/p>\n

* \u201cwe naturally view behavior that denigrates our moral norms as endangering public health, undermining civil order, and impeding the accumulation of societal wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Most people are not scientific specialists and cannot readily assess the opposing science that is constantly laid before the public. And so their own reliance on science\u2014the decision to trust one expert or study rather than another\u2014is necessarily guided by something other than science, their moral\/cultural worldviews.<\/p>\n

* Being assuring that the social meanings to which our pseudopods have become attached will be validated by the state, we will achieve the emotional equanimity to become more detached from them, and so recognize their springs in our own psychological needs, awareness of which can only function to further fortify our commitment to expressive moderation.<\/p>\n

* Much of the new conservative phrenology is summarized in science writer Chris Mooney\u2019s The Republican Brain, which offers an intriguing physiological explanation for why conservatives may be less well-disposed than liberals toward \u201cexpressive moderation.\u201d Mooney reports that magnetic resonance imaging reveals that whereas conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, the evolutionarily more ancient part of the brain that generates immediate flight or fight responses to threatening stimuli, liberals tend to possess more gray matter in the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), the evolutionarily newer system that suspends such automatic responses in order to assess facts and detect errors.33 While conservatives tend to be more instinctive and given to immediate reflex actions, liberals are more reflective and cognitive, able to suspend automatic fear responses in order to undertake a more careful evaluation of the facts. The ideology of conservatives, says Mooney, is \u201creflected in their physiology.\u201d Every human, just like every animal, possesses a \u201cfear system\u201d capable of \u201crapid-fire defensive reactions.\u201d But that system appears to be stronger, more predominant among conservatives.<\/p>\n

* alcohol shifts us to the right politically, as blood alcohol level was correlated with the expression of more conservative views among self-described liberals and conservatives alike.35 The explanation, one researcher suggested, was that \u201cpeople\u2019s cognitive architecture is more consistent with conservative ideology, because that\u2019s the way brains are built.\u201d36 Conservatism, then, may represent the more \u201cnatural\u201d human (and animal) state which has for whatever reasons become comparatively suppressed among liberals\u2014with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol temporarily resetting the latter closer to the default setting in which evolutionarily older rapid-fire reactions overwhelm the ACC…<\/p>\n

* This \u201camygdala theory of conservatism\u201d was also supported by a University of Nebraska study, which discovered that tough-on-crime, strongly pro-military conservatives \u201chave a more pronounced startle reflex, measured by eye-blink strength after hearing a sudden loud noise.\u201d Conservatives also exhibited greater \u201cskin conductance\u201d\u2014a moistening of sweat glands indicating sympathetic nervous system arousal\u2014when shown threatening images like maggots in an open wound or a large spider on someone\u2019s face.37 By contrast, \u201c[i]ndividuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control.\u201d<\/p>\n

* A large body of studies across many countries has revealed that \u201cconservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals.\u201d …Given its \u201chigh need for closure,\u201d this personality-type will tend to \u201cseize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or uncertainty, and then freeze, refusing to admit or consider new information.\u201d42 This is why so many conservatives could have believed against all the evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were collaborators, \u201cfinding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.\u201d43 It is also why
\nconservatives tend to \u201cselect themselves into belief-affirming information streams\u201d like Fox News or rightwing
\ntalk radio,44 through which they shield themselves against the \u201cbelief challenges\u201d leveled by what they dismiss as the liberal media.45 Conservatives\u2019 angry defensiveness before inconvenient truths is the predictable consequence of their particular neurological make-up. With their strong amygdalas pressing for immediate reactions and their comparatively weak ACCs incapable of restraining that impulse, conservatives are less able to suspend judgment. But being more tolerant of ambiguity and capable of integrative complexity, the Open personality of liberals is \u201cmuch more accepting of change and new ideas,\u201d much more prepared to suspend judgment in the absence of evidence or to alter their judgment with the arrival of new evidence.<\/p>\n

* Liberal ideologies do not generate large followings because the Left\u2019s psychology of disobedience and anti-authoritarianism ensures that those who make empirically unsupported claims \u201cwill be challenged, sometimes quite
\nvigorously or even viciously.\u201d48 Whereas conservative elites indulge their followers\u2019 motivated cognition, their liberal counterparts can be counted upon to condemn whatever hokum grows out of their own ranks.49 This is rarer among conservatives, whose \u201cpro-authority biases\u201d drive them to be \u201cmore unified and supportive of their political \u2018team.\u2019\u201d Conservatives are \u201cless willing to pick a fight with their friends, less likely to issue a corrective when they need to issue one, less motivated to step out of rank and call out bogus assertions.\u201d50 By contrast, liberals care little for obedience and group solidarity.51 Being \u201cchildren of the Enlightenment,\u201d they \u201cdon\u2019t bow to authority, or pledge allegiance to a team.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Enlightenment heritage is why even the most ideological and emotional of liberals \u201cremain allied with scientists, who just aren\u2019t going to put up with any nonsense in their fields of expertise.\u201d Liberals and scientists are usually on the same side of the issues because liberals\u2019 Open personality, with its curiosity, tolerance, and flexibility naturally disposes them toward the scientific method, compelling a respect for scientists that is less common among conservatives.53 Whereas conservatives routinely dismiss science and expertise, it is \u201chard, psychologically,\u201d says Mooney \u201cfor liberals to buck what scientists say, and to withstand the intellectual beating that is sure to follow if they do.\u201d54 On the other hand, conservatives\u2019 Closed personalities lands them in overwhelming conflict with the conclusions of modern science on a wide range of issues.55 Hence what is a very wide \u201cexpertise gap\u201d between liberals and conservatives in the modern world.56
\nSeeking to close this gap, conservatives now foster their own \u201ccounterexpertise to thwart mainstream knowledge.\u201d57 Sustained by think tanks and other institutions, this counterexpertise is charged with maintaining \u201can alternative reality on the right\u201d through which conservatives are provided with the \u201cevidence\u201d and \u201carguments\u201d needed to fuel their ideologically motivated cognition.58 Having seceded from the common reality occupied by liberals and independents, conservatives have \u201ctheir own \u2018truth,\u2019 their own experts to spout it, and their own communication channels\u2014newspapers, cable networks, talk radio shows, blogs, encyclopedias, think tanks, even universities\u2014to broad- and narrowcast it.\u201d59 All these operate in the service of the \u201cbelief affirmation and ideological activation\u201d that ultimately drives conservatives, legitimating the promptings of their amygdalas as rational responses to bedrock truth.<\/p>\n

* Against all the evidence, liberals persist in the na\u00efve faith in the rationality, or potential rationality, of conservatives, believing that the right, properly formulated argument will somehow, someday bring the conservative around. While this hope has been dashed time and again, many liberals continue to retain it. For they have, as children of the Enlightenment, projected what is a culturally specific dispensation\u2014the demand for reasons, arguments, and evidence\u2014onto human nature as such, including the conservatives in whom this faculty has yet to be liberated.<\/p>\n

* Embracing the mythic, metaphorical, and emotional aspects of politics, they constructed a language that actively framed particular policy choices in accordance with Strict Father morality, promoting, not only the particular policy prescriptions at issue, but also the frameworks of metaphor into which new issues will be
\nautomatically subsumed.65 Hence slogans like \u201ctax relief,\u201d which in evoking the plight of the beleaguered \u201cmodel citizen\u201d discourage taxpayers from viewing themselves as nurturers whose tax dollars contribute to the public good.66 Hence too the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d which in activating a fear response also activated the broader conservative worldview by alluding to the need for a strong authority figure and protector.67 Conservatives have known how to skillfully deploy a set of ideas, images, and symbols that activate the conservative disposition by increasing the \u201csynaptic strength of the neurons in the circuitry characterizing conservative thought\u201d while inhibiting progressivism by correspondingly weakening the progressive synaptic circuitry. In doing so, they have made it easier and easier for Strict Father morality to become \u201cneurally bound\u201d with specific issues,68 often exploiting traumatic events like 9\/11 in whose aftermath the synaptic connections of human beings are more susceptible to reconditioning.<\/p>\n

* Our political attitudes emerge out of synaptically encoded moral narratives, which possess a dramatic structure comprised of heroes, villains, victims, helpers, and so forth.<\/p>\n

* Amy Wax writes: “Those who think culture matters are partial to a view of human motivation, choice, personality, and moral life that makes “enlightened” intellectuals uneasy. The rich picture of human motivation
\nembraced by conservative traditionalists like Oakeshott and Burke necessarily resists systematic description. These thinkers challenge a materialist view that sees persons as “rational actors” who are motivated by self-interest and who operate through reasoned calculation. Rather, they observe that people are often moved by values, emotions, ideologies, moral expectations, and group identity, and sometimes take decisions that appear self-defeating, unpredictable, and at odds with rational deliberation.”<\/p>\n

* the buffered identity emerges from out of the porous one through the suppression of the wilder instinctual and affective oscillations of the pre-modern identity, with its immediate fear responses to an uncertain, often hostile environment. And conservatives\u2019 greater \u201cskin conductance\u201d and more pronounced \u201cstartle reflexes\u201d can be understood as the modern residue of this pre-modern personality structure, a personality structure that, responding to what Elias calls \u201cthe incurable unrest, the perpetual proximity of danger, the whole atmosphere of this unpredictable and insecure life,\u201d was very often in the grip of immediate fear responses. The amygdala theory of conservatism therefore reveals the biological substratum, not only of conservative (and liberal) thinking, but also of the historical changes in the overall human make-up chronicled by the mutation counternarrative.<\/p>\n

* If liberals are quick to dismiss the charge that they are engaged in an \u201cassault\u201d against conservatives and their values, this can only be because they remain under the spell of the Old Enlightenment, imagining that beliefs are \u201csuspended above us in the ether\u201d and therefore immune from assault. Frank writes that when conservatives complain of their \u201cpersecution\u201d by liberals, what they actually mean here is \u201cnot imprisonment or
\nexcommunication or disenfranchisement, but criticism,\u201d like editorials expressing disagreement with them.96 But understood naturalistically, this \u201ccriticism\u201d can be a rather intrusive thing, an endless pricking away at the selves of conservatives. If Lakoff is to be believed, it consists in nothing less than an attempt to erode the synaptic strength of the neural connections that underpin Strict Father morality. And this surely qualifies as a kind of \u201cassault.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Even if happy conservatives are there to be found today, the victory of liberalism would mean the unraveling of the social structures that support conservatives\u2019 synaptic make-ups. And to deactivate the latter is also to deactivate those persons who are constituted from out of them, conservatives. This may not be tantamount to imprisonment or disenfranchisement. But understood naturalistically, it is an attack on the very foundations of the self. And this cannot make for a happy conservative. Liberals may not actively contemplate the misery of conservatives. But their project of synaptic rewiring has that misery as its corollary, as a hopeful sign that the synaptic networks of conservatives are becoming devitalized.<\/p>\n

* Ernest Becker observes:
\n“Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish. Food is not the primary nourishment of man, strange as that may sound to some ethological faddists.
\n[S]hort of natural catastrophe, the only time life grinds to a halt or explodes in anarchy and chaos, is when a culture falls down on its job of constructing a meaningful hero-system for its members. The depopulation of Melanesia earlier in this century, as well as the loss of interest by the Marquesan Islanders in having children, did not puzzle anthropologists: in the face of inroads from white traders and missionaries upon everything that gave them a sense of value, the islanders simply gave up.”<\/p>\n

* Mooney writes:
\nIf we have strong emotional convictions about something, then these convictions must be thought of as an actual physical part of our brains, residing not in any individual brain cell (or neuron) but rather in the complex connections between them, and the pattern of neural activation that has occurred so many times before, and will occur again. The more we activate a particular series of connections, the more powerful it becomes. It grows more and more a part of us, like the ability to play guitar or juggle a soccer ball.100<\/p>\n

This neural activation is why conservative claims of cultural oppression are sincere rather than contrived. For what liberals would dismiss as conservatives\u2019 \u201cvague premonitions of erosion or unraveling\u201d of some ethereal social fiber is, translated into non-anthropocentric terms, the gradual unraveling of a neurologically encoded heroic narrative, the erosion of its synaptic strength at the hands of a hostile cultural environment that fails to activate, and may consistently work to de-activate, the synaptic connections that underpin conservatives\u2019 identities and hero-system, which are as much a part of them as are their limbs and organs.<\/p>\n

* [Conservatives’] ad hominem temper reflects conservatives\u2019 intuitive appreciation for the physiological embeddedness of political ideologies.<\/p>\n

* Every animal, writes Nietzsche, \u201cinstinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power.\u201d And every animal \u201cabhors, just as instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is \u2018higher than all reason,\u2019 every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum.\u201d107 This is the underlying symmetry to which conservatives but not liberals are viscerally attuned, the root of the \u201cliberal hypocrisy\u201d that is an ever-present fact for conservatives.<\/p>\n

* Given their less \u201cadvanced\u201d position along the civilizing process, conservatives are animated by a more visceral appreciation for the continuities between the animal and the human and accordingly process the human world in more animalistic terms. And given their more \u201cadvanced\u201d position along that process, liberals are more disposed to deny the animal.<\/p>\n

* Liberals conceptualize a worldview as \u201cin the head\u201d\u2014as a set of ideas, opinions, convictions, and so forth. But being more naturalistic and animalistic, conservatives experience what they may call a \u201cworldview\u201d as \u201cthe ways we function bodily in the physical and social world.\u201d<\/p>\n

* liberals\u2019 \u201cartificial\u201d conception of harm\u2014which discounts psychic and communal harm\u2014functions to conceal real injuries and marginalize some conceptions of the good life.<\/p>\n

* What if the [the harm] question refer[s], not to any easily describable courses of action to be potentially traversed by clearly identifiable individuals, but to the more obscure \u201cneurological tracks\u201d that might be traversed within the brains of those individuals? It might then turn out that a liberal social order is abrogating the liberty of conservatives, not because they are prevented from attending church or saluting the flag, but because it inhibits the neurological activity that would render these and other activities fully meaningful. If the liberal elites\u2019 conception of harm is \u201cartificial,\u201d this is because a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of human neurology might ambiguate what liberals imagine is a fairly clear line between mere hurts and genuine harms. What can be verbally dismissed as a mere hurt\u2014including political, social, and cultural hurts\u2014could well constitute a serious impediment to our entire interest network thus understood. Our
\narticulated assessments of what does and does not meaningfully abrogate the liberty of individuals may very poorly track the conditions of neurological liberty. But these are, for physiologically embodied agents such as we are, as important as anything could be.<\/p>\n

* Describing the basic sensibilities of the Enlightenment, Carl Becker\u2019s famous The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers explains:
\n“They are citizens of the world, the emancipated ones, looking out upon a universe seemingly brand new because so freshly flooded with light, a universe in which everything worth attending to is visible, and everything visible is seen to be unblurred and wonderfully simple after all, and evidently intelligible to the human mind\u2014the mind of Philosophers.125
\nThey were out for the cold facts, out to spoil the game of the mystery-mongers. That species of enthusiasm was indeed to be banned; but only to be replaced by an enthusiasm, however well concealed beneath an outward calm, for the simple truth of things. Knowing beforehand that the truth would make them free, they were on the lookout for a special brand of truth, a truth that would be on their side, a truth they could make use of in their business. Some sure instinct warned them that it would be dangerous to know too much, that \u201cto comprehend all is to pardon all.\u201d They were too recently emancipated from errors to regard error with detachment, too eager to
\nspread the light to enjoy the indolent luxury of the suspended judgment.”<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s liberals are, as in the Eighteenth Century, \u201cout to spoil the game of the mystery-mongers.\u201d But as \u201cchildren of the Enlightenment\u201d they are warned by \u201csome sure instinct\u201d that \u201cit would be dangerous to know too much.\u201d To take naturalism to its logical conclusion is to acknowledge the layer of human experience that dissolves liberalism\u2019s dichotomy between the \u201cmerely symbolic\u201d and our \u201csubstantive interests,\u201d or between \u201ccultural grievances\u201d and \u201ctangible issues.\u201d But this liberals refuse to see. To \u201ccomprehend all is to pardon all,\u201d and as liberals have no interest in pardoning conservative claims of cultural oppression, neither can they afford to comprehend them. Like the philosophers of the 18th Century, they are \u201con the lookout for a special brand of truth, a truth that would be on their side.\u201d And this is a truth that would vindicate a hero-system, vindicate the buffered distance, which is why liberals must position conservatives as benighted people who, having become mystified by the \u201cmerely symbolic,\u201d cannot distinguish between mere hurts and actual harms. But notwithstanding this special brand of truth, naturalism taken to its logical conclusion reveals that nothing is merely symbolic.<\/p>\n

* Westen reports an experiment at the University of Michigan comparing male college students from Northern and Southern states in which an associate of the researcher would \u201caccidentally\u201d bump into the subjects and then walk off into another room without apology, half the time calling out an expletive as well. Northerners displayed virtually no physiological reaction to the incident, but both cortisol and testosterone levels jumped dramatically in the Southern men.127 Was the offense here purely symbolic, or did the experiment reveal it to be substantive? Offense to honor might seem like a mere \u201churt,\u201d the artifice of a merely metaphorical Strict Father morality (or the Code of the Gentleman), and so like a highly intangible self-indulgence for whose costs the \u201cvictim\u201d bears full responsibility. As the saying goes, sticks and stones may break our bones but words (and one should add, mere unatoned bumps) will never hurt us. But this piece of common sense psychology is less the product of any genuinely hard-nosed empiricism than of liberalism\u2019s need to preemptively dissolves potential conflict\u2014the 18th century philosophers\u2019 concealed enthusiasm for the \u201csimple truth of things,\u201d their conviction that \u201ceverything worth attending to is visible\u201d and that everything visible is \u201cunburned and wonderfully simple
\nafter all.\u201d By contrast, the New Enlightenment tells us that much of what is worth attending to is not visible, and this must place what seems like the paranoia and conspiracism of some conservatives in a new light.<\/p>\n

* things like gay marriage, flag-burning, licentious Hollywood movies, a multilateralist foreign policy, and the welfare state do not have an obvious psychologically paralyzing effect upon most conservatives, who notwithstanding their cultural oppression still manage to go about their day-to-day lives and make their way in the world. This is why Macedo can assure us that while the ultimate aims of transformative liberalism, the transformation of people, may seem illiberal, its methods are \u201cgentle rather than oppressive, influencing people\u2019s deeply held beliefs without coercion or force.\u201d133 But the distinction between the gentle and the coercive may\u2014just like Feinberg\u2019s distinction between hurts and harms\u2014carry less cash value on the neurological level than in the context of everyday \u201ccommon sense.\u201d If some people are deeply recalcitrant to liberalism\u2019s transformative project\u2014that is, to the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity\u2014then we should expect that the kind of gentleness advocated by Macedo will give rise to a certain diffuse, unappeasable resentment that feels itself eminently justified notwithstanding that it has grave difficulties explaining itself. The ultimate source of the aggrievement is not any unambiguous cases of flagrantly illiberal coercion\u2014the fundamentalist interpretation of conservative claims of cultural oppression\u2014but the cumulative neurological impact of liberal
\n\u201cgentleness,\u201d none of whose precipitants are egregiously illiberal or particularly consequential when considered individually. This diffuse resentment is precisely what animates conservative claims of cultural oppression, which must exaggerate, distort, caricature, and sometimes falsify in order to generate tangible symbolic reference points for grievances which would otherwise lack any linguistic medium whatsoever.<\/p>\n

* When Ben Shapiro charges that conservatives are being \u201cbullied\u201d by liberals, this is in the same sense that women are bullied by patriarchy. Feminists who protest patriarchy are not necessarily alleging the existence of any calculated backroom conspiracies to keep women down.<\/p>\n

* Liberals\u2019 descriptive claims about what qualifies as a \u201creal\u201d harm disguise what are surreptitiously prescriptive claims in defense of the kind of person for whom the descriptive claims hold true\u2014progressive beings who, possessing more gray matter in the ACC and smaller amygdalas, could never be seriously perturbed by things like the decay of traditional values. If these harms do not qualify as \u201creal,\u201d this is because those who suffer them have been accorded a lower social reality as relics of a barbarian past whose existence cannot be permitted to muddy the clear blue waters of liberalism.<\/p>\n

* the issue is not the epistemological subject but what lies underneath it, not dogma but dopamine, the activation of the neural circuitry that sustains us in our hero-systems.<\/p>\n

* Stanley Fish remarks that religious traditionalists must seek, not to reach an accommodation with liberalism, but to \u201crout it from the field.\u201d By contrast, liberals need not be so aggressive. For \u201cthe field, as it is presently demarcated, is already theirs.\u201d And so liberals need only be \u201cpassive-aggressive.<\/p>\n

* Presenting itself as a rejection of anthropocentric hero-systems, the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity seems to exude a certain passivity, the selfrestraint to not impose any purely subjective meanings upon our common social world. But given that this ethos is a hero-system in its own right, the passivity is concomitantly an act of aggression, part and parcel of an attempt to elevate and impose one particular human make-up. This is what makes liberalism a sublimated, intellectualized, and etherealized hero-system, a hero-system that disguises its status as a hero-system.<\/p>\n

* Premodern porousness being human nature\u2019s default setting, it is like a cancer that may be in remission but
\ncan spread again anytime with any loosening of the inhibitions that make liberalism possible. Liberals sense this danger intuitively and experience \u201cvague premonitions or erosion or unraveling\u201d in response, which in turn spurs on liberalism\u2019s inquisitorial tendencies, the imperative to expose and reform whatever human impulses might prove recalcitrant to liberalism\u2019s universalistic consciousness.<\/p>\n

* John McWhorter decries the African-American Teacher\u2019s Association of New York for refusing to condemn the anti-intellectualism of disruptive inner-city black students and instead idealizing them as \u201chigh-spirited nonconformists\u201d resisting the repression of white middle-class values.178 Not every liberal will go so far as to exalt academic misbehavior as some kind of political statement. But most liberals will insist that whatever criticisms one issues here be sensitive to the historical inequalities that form the broader context of these students\u2019 alienation, which cannot be reduced to bare delinquency and malice.<\/p>\n

Facing no realistic alternative to inner city life and the racism that created it, these youths do what they
\nmust to retain their self-respect under the conditions at hand, even if this means behavior that seems
\ncounterproductive. Conservatives may attribute inner city problems to cultural dysfunction. But this dysfunction is itself a product of historical inequalities that live on in the present, which is exactly what moralistic attacks on the pathologies of the \u201cblack culture\u201d obscure.<\/p>\n

But conservatives can make a similar kind of argument in defense of the conservative culture. For the mutation counter-narrative is the record of the historical inequalities between liberals and conservatives. And if liberals insist that the personal and social malformations of some minority groups be understood in their total context, rather than artificially uprooted from it as self-explanatory problems, then intellectual consistency requires that the \u201croot causes\u201d of conservative claims of cultural oppression be similarly acknowledged. If understanding the travails of African-Americans requires that we look beyond present crime statistics toward the beginnings of African slavery in America, then we can also step back just a bit further in time to examine the rise of the modern from out of the pre-modern and the new hierarchies it spawned. From this perspective, we can see that conservative claimants of cultural oppression are no mere delinquents, but rather \u201chigh-spirited nonconformists\u201d in revolt against the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity. Whatever their irrationalities, these originate in this resistance, in what is a political struggle against the liberal culture.<\/p>\n

* Liberals will classify as pure pathology whatever does not conform to their preferred basket of liberal values. But these pathologies can also be understood as just the byproducts of liberal domination, of the ascendancy of a historically constructed understanding of human agency with which liberals are privileged to identify. For it is this that creates the inequalities to which conservative claims of cultural oppression are the response. The liberalism of liberals is circumscribed by the buffered identity, by a hero-system, and this is what prevents the extension of their liberalism to conservatives.<\/p>\n

* In just the way that some inner-city black youth feel they cannot be good students because this would be to \u201cact white\u201d and thereby acquiesce in white supremacy, so some conservatives may feel that they cannot celebrate
\nintellectualism without endorsing the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, without endorsing their own cultural oppression. In both case, the obstinacy originates in the group\u2019s subordination before a dominant dispensation.<\/p>\n

* while the populist conservative may be mistaken to reject the theory of evolution, he is nevertheless virtuous in his refusal to believe anything which he cannot genuinely understand for himself\u2014unlike the rest of us who repeat the theory that we are descended from monkeys \u201cby rote as if we were descended from parrots.\u201d187 The scientists may be right. But given that only very few of us will ever have the time, patience, and background to grapple with the technical minutiae of evolutionary theory, the deference which the scientists as a matter of fact receive originates in the cultural prestige of the scientific outlook within the liberal culture. To attack that prestige is therefore to resist the liberal culture and its disciplines. And this is what conservative antiintellectualism is designed to do. We are, writes Harris, \u201cbetter off for having in our midst a large segment of the population who refuses to act intelligently,\u201d people \u201cwho won\u2019t listen to what the scientists tell them even when the scientists are right,\u201d because this \u201cirrational resistance to a scientific outlook on life\u201d is the only way to \u201cprevent a world in which no other outlook is conceivable.\u201d188 The liberal, unlike the
\npopulist conservative, \u201cacts intelligently.\u201d And acting is indeed the operative word, because it signifies
\nconservatives\u2019 intuitive awareness that liberalism has been built atop a historically constructed identity,
\na hero-system that is always being acted out in social life.<\/p>\n

* Traditional hero-systems are predicated the instantiation of some broader cosmic order. But with the buffered distance having overthrown all traditional teleologies, its heroism must be defined through distance rather than instantiation, through a contrast between those who are aware and those who are not, between who have realized the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity and those who remain mired in their unreflective folkways. Inasmuch as those folkways disappear in the wake of liberalism\u2019s triumphs, the concrete content of the buffered distance must be suitably reconfigured so that a new set of practices and attitudes may become identified with the unreflective mores of a benighted past.<\/p>\n

* Why not instead view laws that implicate smoking, gun ownership, and motorcycle riding as targeting particular classes of individuals and single traits of persons and view laws that implicate homosexuality as targeting behaviors and only derivatively those who undertake them? There are, after all, plenty of gun owners who see gun ownership as integral to their identities, a source of human dignity no less important that the right to have an
\nabortion or marry a member of the same sex. If the Court would not adopt this perspective, this is because those kinds of identities are not compatible with the buffered distance.<\/p>\n

* The Coloradans who wanted the right to fire homosexual employees wanted the right to regulate these social meanings in their workplaces, something that the liberal elites and their \u201claw-school view of what \u2018prejudices\u2019 must be stamped out\u201d are already privileged to do.<\/p>\n

* Lawrence Lessig argues that some traditional women have opposed abortion because it has become associated with women\u2019s right to full and equal participation in the workplace. When staying at home to raise children was thought to be a woman\u2019s natural role, the decision to do so carried no social costs. But with the \u201cprofessional model\u201d for women having become established as legitimate, it necessarily challenges the appropriateness of choosing a traditional life. With the latter having become something that needs to be explained and defended, traditional, domestically-inclined women are confronted with a justificatory burden that was formerly non-existent. At best, the professional model creates a new onus because traditional motherhood is no longer considered unambiguously appropriate. At worst, it inflicts a new social stigma to the extent traditional motherhood becomes suspect as a surrender to patriarchy. If some women oppose abortion, this is as a \u201cdefensive construction\u201d of social meaning. Their opposition is an attempt to preserve the unquestioned naturalness and inevitability of the traditional role of women as child-bearers against developments that would dissolve that naturalness and create unwanted psychological burdens.
\nLessig\u2019s analysis of traditionalist motivations falls in line with the feminist narrative, and also the
\nbroader liberal narrative, according to which women who oppose feminism do so because feminism threatens the psychological safety provided by traditional gender roles.<\/p>\n

* Where the Left stands for truth, the Right stands for identity, on whose altar truth and awareness are sacrificed. To be liberal is to be psychologically liberated, open to experience and given to reflection. To be traditional is to be psychologically confined, fearful of the unknown and untried. But seeing symmetry where liberals see asymmetry, conservatives believe that feminism is driven by its own identitarian motivations, its own quest for identity, of which the denigration of traditional women as fearful and disappointed is one feature. Feminism is one more tentacle of the liberal culture, whose false universalism is always the pretext for a continuing assault on conservative identities.<\/p>\n

* Liberalized divorce laws, explains Graglia, were an effort \u201cto instill in women distrust of their husbands and reluctance to leave the work force for fear of financial privation in the event of their divorces that \u2018reform\u2019 made more likely.\u201d100 In leveling this threat, divorce reform \u201cwarned women to adopt the feminist perspective
\nand replace homemaking with a full-time career.\u201d<\/p>\n

* …feminists have waged a largely victorious \u201cwar against the housewife,\u201d employing any and all means to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.103 Hence Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s and Betty Friedan\u2019s repeated references to the housewife as a \u201cparasite,\u201d which remind Graglia of Hitler\u2019s tirades against the Jews.104 While feminists have attempted to ride \u201cpiggyback\u201d on the civil rights movement, their willingness to perpetuate false stereotypes about, and mete out undisguised contempt toward, the traditional housewife proves that feminism is nothing like the struggle for black equality.105 On the contrary, women\u2019s liberation is an Orwellian sleight of hand, because what feminists uphold as liberation could never have succeeded without the establishment of new social stigmas to denigrate dissenters and keep women within the fold of feminism. These stigmas had no counterparts in the civil rights movement, whose demands did not involve a project of social engineering by a small elite. The civil rights movement helped give freedom to those who wanted it. But far from liberating women to do what they were all along inclined to do, feminists have sought to generate the specific social and cultural conditions under which women will be propelled toward feminism.<\/p>\n

Central to this effort is feminism\u2019s celebration of casual, meaningless sex. This kind of sex, observes Graglia, is fully compatible with women\u2019s participation in the market. By contrast, \u201cthe meaningful sex that overwhelms, that transforms\u201d threatens to make domestic roles more appealing to women.106 Feminists therefore sought to strip sexuality of any higher metaphysical meaning, reducing sexual intercourse to \u201cthe physical assuaging of a genital itch.\u201d107 While feminism represented itself as liberating women from antiquated sexual ideologies that subordinate them to patriarchy, it was in fact instituting a new sexual ideology the purpose of which was to subordinate women to feminism itself. And this new ideology has served reconfigure gender relations in a way that socially corroborates the feminist worldview. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism has always endeavored to promote. By cultivating a dissatisfaction that it would then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the machinations that have gone into generating the perception of feminism as obviously enlightened and liberating.<\/p>\n

“Today, well-educated professional women, who are embarrassed to defend the unsophisticated concepts of virginity and chastity, are less competent to control men\u2019s sexual advances than high school girls were in the 1940s. One result is the invention of concepts like \u201cdate rape\u201d and an expansive law of sexual harassment in an attempt to provide the protection for women against seduction they once felt completely confident in securing for themselves with a graceful\u2014and, we sometimes thought, even elegant\u2014refusal.”<\/p>\n

Whereas feminism interprets date rape and sexual harassment as lingering remnants of a patriarchy that was once unresisted and unabashed, Graglia sees these as the side-effects of feminist victories, which are now being exploited to secure further such victories. For the helplessness that some women may feel before male sexual imperiousness is the natural consequence of the erosion of traditional values at the hands of feminism. In reducing sex to the \u201cphysical assuaging of a genital itch,\u201d feminism deprived women of any basis for refusing sex beyond bare disinclination. Not being grounded in transcendent values as are chastity and virginity, that disinclination cannot but seem arbitrary, something that might be overcome through male persistence. Liberals would ground the refusal of sex in autonomous choice. But autonomous choices can change and be changed by other people. And so feminism must plunge many women into perpetual sexual confusion and ambivalence, further inviting the male persistence for which expansive definitions of rape and sexual harassment are then offered as solutions. If there is a \u201crape culture,\u201d this is a social construction of feminism itself, the natural consequence of the psychic conflicts that it necessarily inculcates. Having eviscerated the social understandings that would allow women to refuse sex confidently, feminism then represents the ambivalence and confusion that ensues as the subtle, psychologically coercive machinations of omnipresent patriarchal power, thus further galvanizing feminist consciousness and the desire for a far-off utopia in which genuine female agency will for the first time be conceivable. Only then will women finally rest assured that their ostensible desires are truly their own, and feminism holds itself out as the only path to this transformed world and state of being. But this never ending journey has in fact been necessitated by feminism itself, which has deprived many women of any other sources of human meaning. Here as elsewhere, the critical theory of the Right tells us that the dominant dispensation has succeeded in creating the conditions for its own social vindication, conditions under which it can recast its effects as its rational justification.<\/p>\n

* feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the \u201clax and disorganized folkways\u201d of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependency presupposed by the buffered distance and implicitly acknowledged by the career-minded woman.<\/p>\n

* The disenchantment of sexuality by feminism was, just like the disenchantment of the world generally, promoted in order to cultivate a disciplined and productive citizenry. For this is what the career woman exalted by feminism symbolizes, the milquetoast technocratic egalitarianism of the liberal culture, in whose service every last vestige of traditionalist sentiment must be uprooted. If feminism originated in the imperiousness of elite cadres bent on stigmatizing the housewife, this is just part and parcel of the civilizing process, whose norms always spread outward from elite circles through the badgering, bullying, and scolding of the unwashed masses, whose capitulation will then be paraded as liberation. Whereas liberals locate the meaning of feminism in the supersession of certain historic inequalities and the prejudices that sustained them, conservatives locate it in the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, for which feminism is a vehicle. And this is why they refuse to accept feminism at face value, why they believe that \u201cwomen\u2019s equality\u201d describes feminism in \u201cinnocently thin terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

* article in The New Yorker on the ultraorthodox Hasidic women of Brooklyn in which the writer expressed her astonishment that what she expected would be \u201cself-effacing drudges\u201d worn down by a patriarchal family system turned out to be a \u201cremarkably energetic, mutually supportive community of women, an almost Amazonian society\u201d with strong families and large thriving marriages. These women \u201csped around like intergalactic missiles\u201d and \u201cseemed\u2026to be as occupied with worthy projects as Eleanor Roosevelt, as hospitable as Welcome Wagoneers.\u201d113 If the writer expected to encounter only self-effacing drudges, this was because her implicit embrace of the subtraction account of modernity compelled her to understand traditionalist institutions as mere confinements rather than sources of meaning, to see the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, not as one source of value among others, but as the sine qua non of all value. Feminism defines freedom as the freedom to be a feminist, and so it must dismiss all who refuse that freedom as deficient in the basic human agency powers that only feminism can liberate.<\/p>\n

* Students are being sensitized, not to some supra-personal \u201cMoral Order\u201d with its illusory hierarchies, but to the concrete \u201cexperiential\u201d realities around them, which serve to anchor progressive values in bona fide human flourishing. Conservative moralism seeks to uphold God, Country, and Family. But the liberal virtues would seem to consist in meta-values whose appeal does not rest on any such parochial allegiances.<\/p>\n

* To be \u201caware\u201d is to be aware of one\u2019s distance from a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, to be aware of the spiritual and secular as having been compressed into one another, and therefore to endorse policies, attitudes, and preferences which bespeak that compression.<\/p>\n

* The censoriousness of the Right is a comparatively primitive technology, a hard stone wall which can in principle be resisted. By contrast, the meta-censoriousness of liberals is a more sophisticated instrument, a pool of quicksand into which one risks sinking deeper and deeper with every act of protest. For liberals\u2019 claims to higher consciousness provokes the very hostility that then seems to validate those claims socially. Political correctness\u201d is thus a self-fulfilling prophesy, a vision that creates its own truth, as conservatives who resent liberalism\u2019s disciplinary impulses are driven further and further into the reactionary positions that would appear to justify those impulses.<\/p>\n

* …the liberal judge stands accused of ignoring the original understanding of the Constitution, not simply to satisfy his personal philosophical leanings, but to propagate a parochial cultural vision. \u201cJudicial activism\u201d is undemocratic, not only in substituting the will of a few judges for that of the majority, but also in entrenching the parochial cultural sensibilities of one social class, the liberal elites, at the expense of the voiceless ordinary American. Bork describes the Supreme Court as an institution \u201cwhose pronouncements are significantly guided not by the historical meaning of the Constitution but by the values of the class that is dominant in the culture.\u201d1 Having become colonized by what Bork calls the \u201cparochial morality of an arrogant intellectual class,\u201d2 the courts surreptitiously elevate what is a specific cultural ethos into a hegemonic narrative about the meaning of American ideals, all under the guise of thoughtfulness, enlightenment, progress, and so forth. Much as Lochner era jurisprudence was driven by the economic interests of the then-dominant capitalist class, so contemporary liberal jurisprudence is driven by the cultural interests of the now-dominant verbal class, the anointed or liberal elites.<\/p>\n

* The secular cannot represent neutrality as between theism and atheism for the pre-modern consciousness because the secular assumes a theistic or atheistic meaning according to whether its relation to the religious or eternal is recognized, and the secularization of the Christmas season undermines just this recognition. As Taylor puts it, tracts of secular time were for premoderns \u201ccoloured by their placing in relation to higher times,\u201d82 which \u201cgathered, assembled, reordered, punctuated profane, ordinary time.\u201d83 And this gathering and assembling is precisely what liberal neutrality preempts, because approaching the secular as a self-contained realm is of the very essence of irreligion within the pre-modern understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular.<\/p>\n

* What liberals see as the conservative contradiction of dismissing the secular as an alien orthodoxy while engaging in secular activities without inhibition is in the eye of the liberal beholder, because what seems like inconsistent conduct is in fact the consistent application of a pre-modern understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular.<\/p>\n

* Liberalism offers neutrality between the religious and the secular within the modern understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular. But the only neutrality that might satisfy the claimants is neutrality between the modern and pre-modern understandings of this relationship. And this liberalism always withholds.<\/p>\n

* Religion is the fulcrum of human self-consciousness because it provides people with the \u201cpermission\u201d to develop a level of interiority that does not exist naturally. God is, in a sense, the mirror image of our own consciousness. God does not just allow us to explain what we could not otherwise explain; he also allows us to be what we could not otherwise be. Religion is not just a set of beliefs about the universe, but a form of training for what we have come to recognize as the distinctively human. Hence Hegel\u2019s claim that understood philosophically God is simply the \u201cIdea of freedom.\u201d106 God is the idea of freedom because it is the idea of God as it progressively unfolded through Western history that permitted the development of the modern liberal identity and its disengaged innerness. We can only understand the mind by understanding the process of its
\ndevelopment. But the development of the mind is concomitantly the development of religion, which
\nsymbolically articulates an initially unconscious yearning to transcend our merely animal immersion in
\nnature, cultivating this aspiration by cultivating the idea of God as an absolute transcendence.<\/p>\n

* Puritanism is the forbearer of modern secularism. For it was the work of Religious Reform that first
\ncultivated the kind of consciousness that made secularism possible, the buffered identity no longer beholden to an enchanted world of spirit forces\u2014which Justice Brennan was fearing could be undermined the nativity scene and its mystical promptings. The immanent frame first developed as a religious aspiration, a way of paying homage to the true God. And what liberals uphold as religion neutrality exacts an analogous form of homage when it promotes a cosmological orientation that first developed through Religious Reform.<\/p>\n

* Judaism portrays itself as the overcoming of Near Eastern paganism by God\u2019s chosen nation; Christianity is the overcoming of Jewish ritualism and narcissism, bringing salvation to all nations; Protestantism is the overcoming of the \u201cwhore of Babylon,\u201d which perpetuated pagan tendencies within the community of the faithful; Islam is the overcoming of infidelity to the only God and his prophet. We are not \u201creligion,\u201d says each of the biblical faiths: we are truth.<\/p>\n

* Just as the transcendence of a God of Israel was too qualified for Christianity, because too invested in Israel, so the transcendence of the God of the Catholic Church was too qualified for Protestantism, because too
\ninvested in that very Church. Judaism and Catholicism are deficient from the Protestant perspective because they have in the process of freeing themselves from the investments of pagans, articulated this freedom through hierarchies, laws, rituals, ethnic identifications etc., in which they subsequently became reinvested, thereby slipping back into the very blindness from which true monotheism was intended to liberate us.<\/p>\n

* It is a feature of the whole modern period\u2026 that social elites become detached from, even hostile to, much of popular culture, and attempt to make it over. One of the things they have frequently imposed is disenchantment, the suppression of \u201cmagic\u201d and unofficial religion\u2026.
\nElites can often have tremendous power to impose these changes; their very secession from the popular forms can destabilize them. It is in the very nature of religion in an enchanted world, as I have just mentioned, that it defines the practice not simply or even primarily of individuals, but of whole societies.
\nA religion of this kind is uniquely vulnerable to the defection of elites, since they are often in a position severely to restrict, if not to put an end altogether to the central collective rituals. If the king himself will no longer play his role, what can one do? Or if relics and statues of saints are burned, how go on drawing their power?
\nReform from on top can thus put a brutal end to a great deal of popular religion, without necessarily putting anything in its place for many of the people concerned. And this was not only an end de facto, it could also be seen as a kind of refutation. For those who believed in the influences and forces residing in certain places and things, the very fact that they could be destroyed without terrible retribution seemed to indicate that their power had fled. In this way, the reformers carried on a practice which had already been used time and again to spread the faith. When St. Boniface felled the sacred oak groves of the pagan Germans, just this demonstration of effect was what was intended. And the missionaries who followed the Conquistadores in Mexico hastened to destroy the temples and cultures of the natives, with the same intention, and similar results.<\/p>\n

* The opposition between religious conservatives and secular liberals is a reprise of what was originally an opposition between pre-modern and modern religion, between the more enfleshed religious orientation of non-elites and the more excarnated one of religious reformers. And this can in turn be seen as recapitulating an as yet older opposition between paganism and monotheistic hostility to idolatry. Seen in this light, religious conservatives have thus been thrust in the role of conquered pagan tribes being compelled to relinquish their charged objects (and events) to supervising missionaries\u2014i.e., the secular liberals of the ACLU.<\/p>\n

* It is very important for students of man to be clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is the
\n\u201creligion\u201d that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a long time students of society liked to think in terms of \u201csacred\u201d versus \u201cprofane\u201d aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men. As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense \u201csupernatural,\u201d and all systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.<\/p>\n

* Religion protects the believer from the tremendum through doctrine and ritual. These devices work to create what James Breech has termed a \u201cholding mode\u201d of consciousness that functions by allowing the believer to anchor herself to what she sees as a stable and comprehensible God. By substituting doctrine and ritual for a naked encounter with the tremendum she is able to construct a sense of order and security that effectively hides the tremendum. The religious belief system, in essence, provides a psychological defense against overwhelming feelings of insignificance and chaos…<\/p>\n

* To uphold the constitutionality of the Satmars\u2019 school district could then have been viewed, not as a case of religious favoritism, but, on the contrary, as a secular-minded and scientifically-motivated indifference to what religious believers see as distinctive about their religion. For that religion will have been approached naturalistically, in wholly secular terms, as an evolutionarily adaptive system of meaning-production and behavior-coordination toward whose ultimate metaphysical status the state must remain agnostic and indifferent.<\/p>\n

* Students with strong religious upbringings may appear \u201ccloistered,\u201d as Gey says. But a fully naturalistic understanding of human agency reveals that we are all cloistered by synaptically encrypted identities and the social physiologies from which they are derived. Gey speaks of the \u201cintellectual muscles\u201d instilled by a secular education and stunted by a religious one, but a fully neurologized political science reveals that the intellectual muscles of believers and nonbelievers alike operate according to a logic that is less flexible and open-ended than is suggested by grand talk of a \u201cspirit of independence\u201d\u2014which bespeaks an outdated \u201cOld Enlightenment\u201d view of human nature. Whether religious or secular, we are all \u201cneurally bound\u201d to our worldviews, as Lakoff says\u2014or all \u201ccemented\u201d as Justice Stevens says. Once again, liberalism refuses to take its naturalism to its logical conclusion, to where it might reveal the symmetries that conservatives sense intuitively.<\/p>\n

* “Many Americans may have a bad conscience about their rejection of the traditional views of Judaism and Christianity. They know deep down that something vital and true springs from those roots, and still moves them. On the other hand, they have \u2018modernized\u2019 in certain parts of their mind, and they do not know how to put this modernization together with their traditional longings. They hate those who exacerbate this tension in their own souls.
\nYou will note, for instance, the difference between American and European atheists. The Americans who reject religion do so with a kind of emotional violence, and the same time are quick to boast about their own moral superiority\u2026By contrast, the European atheist is much more selfassured, and often manifests the sly smile of the complete cynic and nihilist, who happily believes in nothing at all.”<\/p>\n

* Just as homophobia may be driven by an inner conflict with one\u2019s own homosexual inclinations, which are disingenuously externalized and then opposed as an alien force, so the anti-religious hostility of liberals arises out of the buffered self\u2019s need to deny its own underlying porousness\u2014which anti-religious hostility allows it to project onto conservatives.<\/p>\n

* “Success has bred complacency. The success is real: contemporary liberal democracies have managed to accommodate religion without setting off sectarian violence or encouraging theocracy, which is a historic achievement. But accommodation is not understanding. Though Britain and the United States can pride themselves on having cultivated the ideas of toleration, freedom of conscience, and a formal separation of church and state, their success has depended on a wholly unique experience with Protestant sectarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Anglo-American liberal tradition lacks a vocabulary for describing the full psychological complexity of its own religious life, let alone for understanding the relation between faith and politics in other parts of the world.”<\/p>\n

* If the counterculture of the Left called for sexual liberation, so the counterculture of the Right now calls for teleological liberation, for the right to relate to the world in a pre-modern fashion without legal penalty or social stigma. For those standing outside the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, secular liberalism is necessarily experienced as a narrow-minded Puritanism that maliciously targets our natural impulses toward teleological thought and feeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are highlights from this work in progress by philosopher Rony Guldmann: * The populist conservatives of the Tea Party movement are to be celebrated, not for the accuracy of their assertions, the cogency of their arguments, or the wisdom … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42816,21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-lite","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t