Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
See and this is where I think you and Cliff are either being disingenuous or just have an ideological blindspot when it comes to liberalism because I could say the same for liberalism. Liberalism is more than just a collection of philosophical tenets regarding human rights. There's an economic component to it that could only inevitably lead to poverty, slavery, environmental degradation, expansionism, exploitation, colonialism, etc., and the fact that pretty much every single liberal state has encountered these issues appears to be proof of that, no?
|
I don't necessarily think there
is an economic component to it, it's just that liberal western societies have also been more or less exclusively capitalist. They've gone hand in hand. The extent to which capitalism is a necessary result of liberalism seems to me to be a matter of no one having been able to come up with a better economic system yet that ought to displace capitalism, or at least if they have, people haven't come around to it. To the extent they have, it's merely modified capitalism, which is why we've gradually had elements of socialism mixed in to a larger capitalist framework... But even that doesn't suggest that a non-capitalist liberal society is impossible; there's no logical reason to suppose that's the case.
As for whether liberalism inherently leads to poverty, well, our version of poverty is a hell of a lot better than any other situation a poor person might have found him or herself in human history. As for slavery, that one's an obvious "no"; it's been the case in myriad forms of societies, and liberalism - which as Cliff notes, basically reduces to "more freedom" stands in stark opposition to slavery. Liberal states have stood as the best ameliorant to these problems we've
ever come up with, notwithstanding that they obviously haven't solved them altogether. It's essentially a version of the old Churchill quote; "it's the worst system aside from all of the others that have been tried".
Expansionism and colonialism? That's arguable - how much of that do you think has been ideological (i.e. "we should spread our views about freedom of expression and association around the globe"), and how much has essentially been geopolitical and independent of that ideology (i.e. "our society has gotten itself to the point that we're more powerful than our neighbours, and we can conquer them and take their stuff, so let's")?
Still, you're probably right on that last front. There's an inherent attraction to the obviously hypocritical notion that "if we could just get everyone to accept our values of tolerance for dissent as a touchstone, we'd all stop killing one another and get along, so let's get started killing the people who don't accept those values." That may be an unavoidable human weakness.
Quote:
|
EDIT: That doesn't even get into the business of discussing liberal states and their history of trying to suppress communism both within and outside their borders. Not exactly protecting dissent.
|
Absolutely agree, but again, I would characterize this as a failure of adherence to liberalism. There is no possible way to characterize HUAC and McCarthyism as a liberal project.
If you're doing it properly, you're totally okay with there being a communist party, or an Islamist party, or whatever, you just object to their ideas and then draw the line where they start telling people to engage in violence (which was that line in the sand we were drawing earlier).
I don't think anyone's arguing that there have been a number of dark periods in the history of liberal democracies where they've failed to live up to their own principles - actually, the fact that we regard those as "dark periods" that we don't ever want to go back to says something good about the principles themselves.