Liberalism: a toxic philosophy

By Klaus Rohrich

Saturday, September 8, 2007

It may surprise individuals who consider themselves to be conservatives, that under the classical definition of a liberal, they would fit that mold. That's because liberalism has morphed from its classic definition of favoring personal liberty and small government into a philosophy where government becomes the omnipotent force in everyone's life. The current flavor of liberalism favors a plethora of personal liberties that classical liberals may find unimportant, as they are superficial in nature.

Sometime during the 1960s liberalism appears to have undergone a genomic split into two separate groups, which for argument's sake we will call social and traditional. Traditional liberalism then evolved into what is today's conservatism, while the social liberals evolved into the current brand of liberalism.

Social liberalism favors government involvement in the economy, government regulations on business as well as government social programs that create an equality of outcome, whereas conservatives take the opposite view, advocating limited government involvement in the economy, the sanctity of private property and a list of basic personal freedoms of which the right to publicly misbehave is the least important.

That's why today individuals are freely sampling all the various flavors from the sexual buffet, as liberalism has encouraged them to do so. Other, more basic and more important rights have blithely been taken away by liberal activists, leaving individuals falsely believing they are free. If there is any doubt in anyone's mind about the loss of our freedoms, one need merely make a politically incorrect statement in public and count the moments until one's life is ruined by zealous harpies eager to find and punish racists, sexists, homophobes, smokers and a long list of other "transgressors".

Conservatives stress the importance of family, while liberals seek to dismantle the family and replace it with the government. As well, liberals encourage the suspension of judgment in favor of the acceptance of anything and everything. In the liberals' quest to practice cultural equivalence, they encourage the abandonment of all that is traditional to Western culture in favor of accepting all cultures as equally valid.

A good example of this type of fallacious thinking is the current intellectual calisthenics performed by some liberal academics about the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Recently Professor Janice Boddy, who chairs the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto, inched out on a very thin limb when she made assertions that seemed to support the practice of FGM among some African and Middle Eastern Muslims.

"There are good reasons within the society for the operation to continue, but these are cultural reasons. They are not scientific ones," she recently stated. It's a sad commentary on the state of our education system when department heads of our major universities glibly seem to defend a barbaric practice that inflicts horrible pain upon young women by rationalizing that the practice is "cultural" in nature and is therefore excempt from criticism. One wonders how Ms Boddy feels about the cannibalism once practised by the tribes of Papua New Guinea.

While on the subject of education, that's another societal institution hijacked and laid to waste by liberalism. The concept of "child-centered" education is actually the bastard child of "client-centered" therapy, a psychological approach to the treatment of mental illness that originated in the 1960s. Child centered education holds the basic premise that education doesn't require structure, nor should children be asked to learn all the mundane arcana associated with spelling and grammar, etc. The child will learn on its own if and when it is ready to do so.

Much greater importance has been placed on thinking, creativity and self-esteem. The result of this sorry experiment is now in evidence everywhere with store clerks incapable of giving change without the cash register telling them how much and young people entering the job market sorely unprepared because they earned their high school diploma by way of social promotion. They have difficulty writing, adding or subtracting, but they have enough self-esteem to choke a walrus.

Sure, it looks good for politicians and school systems to brag about the increase in the number of graduates and the decline in the drop-out rate, but in truth this phenomenon is doing no one any favors, as this loss of standards somehow make us all poorer.

The new culture being spawned by liberalism is one that may be found in the anti-utopian works of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. In Huxley's Brave New World romance and love was sacrificed in favor of casual sexual encounters with the admonition that "everyone belongs to everyone else". It is highly likely that today's woefully declining birthrate, our incredibly high divorce rate, the rise of sexually transmitted diseases and the malaise of a generally alienated youth are a direct result of the adoption of the liberal ethos.

Small "c" conservatives need to take a strong stand against liberalism if we are to save our culture and survive as a society. Continued pursuit of the current course will result in our utter and complete annihilation, as our declining birthrate depletes the human capital that once made us great and our acceptance of everything as being on a moral and intellectual equivalence with our own culture serves to lessen the value of our past achievements. There are many symptoms of illness within our society; but the underlying disease is liberalism.