Petr
04-20-2006, 05:01 AM
http://degenhart.us/blog/?p=224
The Libertarian Failure
In the face of this, some libertarians have sought to revivify culture and re-establish liberty by returning to the 18th century formulation of the dialiectic. Apart from the difficulty of giving life to a faulty and dying faith, this attempt is doomed to failure in that it fails to see the source of the cultural problem. By its limited although important concern, liberty, it overlooks the basic matter of faith and fails to recognize that the liberty it looks back to was a youthful accident of the humanistic dialectic, of which statism is the essence. On the other hand, more perceptive libertarians have attempted to keep up with the times by recognizing the death of values as such and seeking somehow to draw out a new kind of value from the world of science out of brute factuality. These libertarians attempt to extract, from the great god nature, by means of science in the form of tests, measurements, or natural laws, some results to prove that nature does permit liberty. Thus much has been made of the phycists’ discovery of the principle of indeterminacy, to cite one example, i.e., that most prominently used in this century. But scientific indeterminacy is not much more than chance variation. It is blind, impersonal, and purposeless. Statistical probability is not liberty. Moreover, this procedure merely underscores the sibservience of man and of man’s illusory liberty to nature, a blind force or energy in motion. Furthermore, the essential point is missed, namely, that modern man is not primarily interested in liberty, and often not at all interested in it. Above all else, as Dooyeweerd has stated it, “modern man has lost himself,” and he cannot grieve greatly over other things when faced with this primary loss, and with the sense of the total collapse of all meaning. When man finds himself, to use a characteristic expression of Van Til, on the frightening and vast shore of undifferentiated being, he has no standard by which to value himself or anything else in all creation. Liberty is thus inevitably irrelevant. The average libertarian fails to see this problem because he is often unaware of his own position of relative wealth. Having usually been reared in a Christian home, he lives on unearned increment and steadily lays waste his inherited capital, which he treats as a fact of nature rather than a past Christian victory. He assumes civilization, as Jose Ortega y Gasset said the typical “scientist” does, whom he described in “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation’” as believing “that civilisation is there in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.” This fearful error is reinforced by the myth of evolution, which treats civilization and culture as natural products of man’s evolutionary development in the same basic sense as nest building is a part of the life of birds. Man’s blindness is thus doubly ensured.
The libertarian contribution has been a splendid one in the narrow provinces of literary criticism, and political and economic thought, but it has been oblivious to the larger issue. By avoiding the larger issue, it has been at times both marginal and parasitic; this is apparent in the hope of some libertarians for “another Burke,” i.e. for a man reflecting Christian tradition without being fully a part of it. Its hunger has too often been for God without God. This hope was well expressed in the title of one book, John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930). This purely sociological orthodoxy has its nemesis: since it is without true commitment, it is equally usable to justify statism, as notably in Machiavelli and Reinhold Niebuhr, and it still fails to answer the dialectical tension.”
~R.J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many (1978), pp. 29, 30.
The Libertarian Failure
In the face of this, some libertarians have sought to revivify culture and re-establish liberty by returning to the 18th century formulation of the dialiectic. Apart from the difficulty of giving life to a faulty and dying faith, this attempt is doomed to failure in that it fails to see the source of the cultural problem. By its limited although important concern, liberty, it overlooks the basic matter of faith and fails to recognize that the liberty it looks back to was a youthful accident of the humanistic dialectic, of which statism is the essence. On the other hand, more perceptive libertarians have attempted to keep up with the times by recognizing the death of values as such and seeking somehow to draw out a new kind of value from the world of science out of brute factuality. These libertarians attempt to extract, from the great god nature, by means of science in the form of tests, measurements, or natural laws, some results to prove that nature does permit liberty. Thus much has been made of the phycists’ discovery of the principle of indeterminacy, to cite one example, i.e., that most prominently used in this century. But scientific indeterminacy is not much more than chance variation. It is blind, impersonal, and purposeless. Statistical probability is not liberty. Moreover, this procedure merely underscores the sibservience of man and of man’s illusory liberty to nature, a blind force or energy in motion. Furthermore, the essential point is missed, namely, that modern man is not primarily interested in liberty, and often not at all interested in it. Above all else, as Dooyeweerd has stated it, “modern man has lost himself,” and he cannot grieve greatly over other things when faced with this primary loss, and with the sense of the total collapse of all meaning. When man finds himself, to use a characteristic expression of Van Til, on the frightening and vast shore of undifferentiated being, he has no standard by which to value himself or anything else in all creation. Liberty is thus inevitably irrelevant. The average libertarian fails to see this problem because he is often unaware of his own position of relative wealth. Having usually been reared in a Christian home, he lives on unearned increment and steadily lays waste his inherited capital, which he treats as a fact of nature rather than a past Christian victory. He assumes civilization, as Jose Ortega y Gasset said the typical “scientist” does, whom he described in “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation’” as believing “that civilisation is there in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.” This fearful error is reinforced by the myth of evolution, which treats civilization and culture as natural products of man’s evolutionary development in the same basic sense as nest building is a part of the life of birds. Man’s blindness is thus doubly ensured.
The libertarian contribution has been a splendid one in the narrow provinces of literary criticism, and political and economic thought, but it has been oblivious to the larger issue. By avoiding the larger issue, it has been at times both marginal and parasitic; this is apparent in the hope of some libertarians for “another Burke,” i.e. for a man reflecting Christian tradition without being fully a part of it. Its hunger has too often been for God without God. This hope was well expressed in the title of one book, John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930). This purely sociological orthodoxy has its nemesis: since it is without true commitment, it is equally usable to justify statism, as notably in Machiavelli and Reinhold Niebuhr, and it still fails to answer the dialectical tension.”
~R.J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many (1978), pp. 29, 30.