A public choice analysis of public choice analysis
by vimothy
Although liberalism makes a big deal about having eliminated prejudice, this isn’t really the case. Not only in the sense that older prejudices are still here, but also in that liberalism adds some of its own; against conservatives, against the past–against anybody who isn’t already a liberal, basically.
That’s because it’s almost impossible for people not to form some common ideas about the world as such, and so, despite its protests, liberalism privileges particular values, just like all the other belief systems.
What’s different about liberalism is that if it’s not rational, it has to go. This gives it a claim to objectivity, but also a kind of inhuman, cyborg quality.
Looked at rationally, people in the middle of society should vote left or liberal and not conservative, because their interests are better served by the liberal-left. And since rationality is the highest standard of knowledge, this is a definitive judgement—i.e., it’s not wishy-washy subjective knowledge, it’s a fact, the kind of thing academics can sign-off against. All of which makes the behaviour of the people in the middle seem bizarre and inexplicable. Don’t they get it? They must be stupid or vindictive or something.
But the desirability of rationalism and rule by experts is itself a subjective judgement; it can’t be gotten from logic or verified by controlled experiment. Even though, rationally speaking, people may be better off under liberalism according to some metric; they may still prefer to live in a more traditional society, with shared values and norms.
In the past, homosexuality was a criminal offence (although the actual number of people who went to jail is not large). But the fact that homosexuality was criminalised is not the whole story of society’s views of homosexuality. In the past, there was a common view about morality, and homosexuality was thought to lie outside it. There was a collective opinion about the wrongness of homosexuality.
From the perspective of modern liberalism, this collective opinion looks arbitrary, judgemental and unnecessary—which, of course, it is. So, we did away with it, or tried to. Lots of other things looked arbitrary, judgemental and unnecessary, so we did away with them too. Now everyone can say for themselves what’s right and wrong, and nobody’s individual preferences are any better than anyone else’s.
But it just so happens that shared values, norms, understandings, affiliations, ideas about right and wrong, the good and the true, are what makes people a community, and not just an aggregate of consumption units sharing only a commitment to self-definition and a post-code. So we ended up abolishing our society altogether, because it didn’t make rational sense. Woops. On the other hand, who would complain? Only a Nazi or a Daily Mail reader, and we can ignore them. Plus, we’ve got all this nice shit and we can do whatever we want with it. We win!
"we carry death out of the village" 
The polemical thrust of your anti-liberal critique is distorting your analysis. You need to distinguish between rationalism and liberalism. Is it the cool application of the principles of reason which compels ”society” to abandon ”arbitrary, judgmental and unnecessary” principles, or something else? With respect to the queers, it seems to me that the changed political equation produced by the gains of a counter-culture was decisive… not an idea about what is rational… Plainly, society continues to operate on (collectively) arbitrary, judgmental and unnecessary lines… because society is the aggregate of millions of individuals pursuing self-interested ends… what is different about liberalism is only the rhetoric of self-justification, as produced and disseminated through the media and other ISAs…. But the connection between this rhetoric and the ”real” operation of society remains mysterious…
My definition of “liberalism” is expansive. I’m not critiquing liberalism as opposed to conservatism; I’m critiquing “liberalism” as an expedient placeholder for whatever it is that describes the ideology of the present day. Obviously, this includes nominal liberals (hence my use of “liberal”), but it also includes nominal conservatives, nominal socialists, nominal anarchists, and so on.
It seems to me that, given “liberal” principles, certain things follow logically; for instance, gay rights. Is it a conincidence that gay rights follow temporally as well? I think not. Am I wrong to think this?
BTW, of course I’m not claiming that society really does function along strictly rational lines, or that history functions along strictly rational lines. That would be conceding the argument to “liberalism” (whatever you want to call it) from the outset. Instead, it’s the idea that society can and should be made to function along rational lines that motivates liberalism.
You are defining ”liberalism” an expedient placeholder for whatever it is that describes the ideology of the present day” and then describing certain features of the present day (like gay rights) as following from ”liberal” principles… But what are these principles? What is your expansive definition of liberalism necessarily committed to? What is at the heart of the ideology of the present day (the contemporary ideology?) Is it ”the attempt to derive moral and social order from maximum preference satisfaction.” Is this, in fact, an ideology? If it is, then what are the competing ideologies? The attempt to derive moral and social order from a code of honor? You still have a metaphysical/transcendent image, no matter how you try and spin it. You can’t say that liberalism abolishes society, rather, it creates a consumer society, organized around the principles of consumption, all kinds of consumption, ideological consumption, mediatic consumption…
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I dispute the idea that ”the idea that society can and should be made to function along rational lines [is what] motivates liberalism, whatever liberalism is… This is a technocratic/modernist ideology, which you could theoretically find attached to/underpinning many different kinds of politics, depending on the (metaphysical?) image of reason which the ideologues adopt (so the rational lines are the survival of the fittest, or the theory of surplus value, or Nazi race laws, or whatever…) I don’t know know if you ever find this kind of spirit of technocracy in a pure form… Even neoliberalism is constructed around a ethical commitment to freedom (free to choose) rather than pure reason…
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What are you calling for, if not a society organized around reason?
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_otbie-british-riots.html
Do you mean to imply that you’ve studied the history of philosophy? Really? And you thought that, after so much studying and thinking, you were ready to let the world know the profound conclusions you had reached?
Is this addressed to me? If so: no, I don’t mean to imply any of those things.