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Open Society (II)

In discussion at WWWTW  that has followed my earlier post, my remarks about the “open society” were challenged.  Where I was talking about the ideology of post-war managerial liberal democracy, Eurocracy and Soros’ Open Society Institute–the sorts of things championed by those who consider themselves “Popperians”–to one of my colleagues at the group blog I seemed to be […]

In discussion at WWWTW  that has followed my earlier post, my remarks about the “open society” were challenged.  Where I was talking about the ideology of post-war managerial liberal democracy, Eurocracy and Soros’ Open Society Institute–the sorts of things championed by those who consider themselves “Popperians”–to one of my colleagues at the group blog I seemed to be attributing their views, flaws and policies to the politics of Karl Popper.  This was not the case, and if anything the views and policies advanced by these people are virtually the exact opposite of Popper’s intelligent, humane rightish liberalism.  It is rather like the difference between Strauss and some of his more ridiculous disciples running around nowadays: they claim the master’s mantle and his name, but they may have no necessary relation to his view of things. 

Popper came out of the early 20th century Viennese context.  He was politically idiosyncratic, a scientist and philosopher of mathematics and science, an ex-communist turned social democrat turned anticommunist liberal, and a friend of Fredrich von Hayek.  His dabbling with communist politics, his experience of interwar Austrian politics and his flight from Austria on the eve of the Anschluss all shaped his attitude towards ideologies that invoked teleological, progressive histories that justified their crimes by referring to future utopias.  His Poverty of Historicism is worth reading, especially as an antidote to all of the prating West Coast Straussians do about historicism.  Not that they would understand this, but according to his definition they are the historicists and the enemies of his idea of the open society.  As a scientist, Popper was horrified by the inflexibility and certainty of ideologies, and he was similarly averse to all attempts at domestic social engineering projects that presumed to be able to handle human society as if it were a laboratory experiment.  Real scientific understanding always inculcates  genuine humility about what man is able to know, and Popper was a prime example of this willingness to admit the limits of human knowledge.  These experiences and ideas eventually led to his theorising about the opposition between the open society (tolerant, pluralistic, democratic) and its enemies, whence came his major work by that name. 

He located totalitarian impulses in Plato, Hegel and Marx.  One of his biographers, Malachi Hacohen, does a fairly good job showing that Popper’s understanding of all three was not always terribly accurate or sophisticated; he knew Marx best of all, because of his former politics, but Plato and Hegel he really rendered into caricatures.  Some of these caricatures of Hegel as bootlicking authoritarian lackey and the forerunner to modern totalitarian thought, have survived or been repeated by others, but these caricatures survive only because very few people have ever bothered to read Hegel’s political treatises.  Hegel’s vision of a liberal constitutional monarchy is very frightening, I suppose, if you don’t like that sort of thing.  Popper was one of many then and now to retroject the struggles of the mid-20th century into 5th century B.C. Greece and see Athens as the embodiment of Western values and Sparta as the embodiment of the totalitarian impulse.  The politics of all of the great Athens-based philosophers put a bit of a damper on Popper’s theory of Athens as democratic paradise, and the preference of more than a few of them for elements  of the Spartan regime was one of those complexities that the simple dualism of virtuous democracy and vicious dictatorship/authoritarian state was never going to handle very well.

If there is one thing in Popper’s original vision that remains intact among today’s defenders of the “open society,” it is his incredibly simple, dangerous confidence in democracy as a type of regime.  Unlike Kolnai, his Hungarian contemporary and also an exile from the world of the former Habsburg Empire, he never could develop much appreciation for monarchy, so far as I know.  Also unlike Kolnai, he did not become really conservative.  Kolnai converted  to Catholicism and finally settled in Quebec, both of which had to have had some effect on his outlook.  Kolnai offers a good corrective to some of Popper’s enthusiasms, though he is not free of some of the same biases.

The great trick of “open society” defenders is to make people believe that they actually live in an open, free society in which debate is wide-ranging and basically uncensored, where divergent ideas are tolerated and political diversity is encouraged.  The picture of Western societies as being such open societies is untrue to a significant degree, and today’s “open society” men would like to make it even more untrue in practice. 

This is the “open society” that preaches freedom of speech, but bans the Vlaams Blok (now reconstituted as the Vlaams Belang), puts Orianna Fallaci on trial, whips up the crowd into intense hatred of Pim Fortuyn, jails David Irving, and smears dissidents from the consensus line on fundamental economic, social and foreign policy questions.  These are the preachers of tolerance who work to root out every last vestige of Christian influence in public and most private institutions, implement speech codes on campus and classify what is often nothing more than political disagreement as “hate speech.”  The most impressive part of the scam is the commitment to democracy, which lasts only so long as the public backs one of the pre-approved parties that espouse all of the “correct” positions on any matter, but especially those pertaining to cultural identity and immigration.  Those that take a different line are systematically vilified, demonised and marginalised from the process.  Regardless of how many millions of voters a party may represent, its ideological conformity with the demands of the consensus is the key. 

The purpose of all this is clear: control.  The “open society” wants to create as much cultural and political homogeneity and uniformity as it can in every country, the better to eliminate nation-states and the cultures of the nations therein.  The stated goal may well be to eliminate discrimination, hatred, racism, and so forth, while the real goal is to break those institutions and bonds of social solidarity that might be used to mobilise against elites, whether they are national or transnational elites.  Consolidation of power and the elimination of rival sources of authority and rival objects of loyalty are also part of the project. 

The “open society” provides the ideological and cultural matrix for the pursuit of policies of “openness” with respect to trade and immigration, and these policies help to reinforce the ideology of the “open society.”  It is the intellectual (if that’s the right word for it) underpinning of globalisation, and consequently the enemy of conservatives everywhere.  The “open society” is the society as left-liberals around the world believe society should be, and necessarily conservatives are its enemies.  Also among its enemies are all those who would actually prefer a free society in which dissent is not muzzled, stifled, marginalised, punished or repressed.

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