A corrective theory of everything
When you're informed the universal is but a human construct, embrace the play!
“There is a thought that stops thought. And that is the only thought that ought to be stopped” — GK Chesterton, debunking the idea that classical liberalism must contain the seeds of its own deconstruction.
When free speech-absolutist David French paints the spectacle of trannies twerking for toddlers a “blessing of liberty” — as a grand and glorious paean to the righteousness of Enlightenment thought distilled to its perfect essence — he is happily, and he believes properly, exploiting the paradox in classical liberalism that seems to justify its implied mandate that any and all ideas be accepted in the intellectual marketplace. Failure to follow such a rule is to run afoul of the implied universalism inherent to that philosophical paradigm. It is impure. And so ungodly.
This isn’t so.
Classical liberalism being but a master narrative, as the left likes to remind us, it is thus a human construct — albeit one that hopes to best capture the universal presence of natural rights and human values that are at play beyond language. What leftists cast as an imperative necessitating deconstruction of discourse through inevitable play of language is but a rule they follow. It is their animating paradox to which they — like French and his fellow travelers — are wed.
We are not bound to either of these worldviews, however. The discourse of classical liberalism is an articulable — and intentionally adopted — way for man to affect and prescribe the worldview under which he lives, as our founding and framing prove. One need not *personally* believe in God or even natural law to participate; but one must ACCEPT THAT THE BELIEF IN NATURE OR NATURE’S GOD — REPRESENTING A POWER BEYOND MAN— IS THE BELIEF THAT SECURES THE COMPACT, AND IS THEREFORE FUNDAMENTAL TO IT.
That is to say, to participate in American governance is to accept its foundational premises. Those unwilling to accept these premises as structural imperatives of the country should be deported from it, should they not have the good manners to willingly flee what it is they so despise.
We don’t need to oblige our own destruction. When an idea at odds with our structural imperative meant to undermine it and replace it with its authoritarian opposite — which is what the Marxist project in all its iterations seeks to do — is welcomed in because some rule within our “philosophy” demands it, we change that rule. Because when all is said and done, we are in charge of defending the structural imperatives of a propositional nation — OUR propositional nation.
The Frenchian idea that we welcome materialist poison into our universalist fields as some kind of nurturing intellectual fertilizer — essential to the health of our crops — is wholly arrogant. This glittering fraud wishes to claim our philosophy is pure and perfect and capable of defeating even those ideas specifically intended to introduce paradox into the system — to destroy it from within using its own machinations and conceits as the impetus.
That’s a game of chicken we need not play.
When I argue — as I have for a couple decades now in public writing — that the collectivist, identitarian, and equity-based ideas foundational to leftism are *fundamentally incompatible* with the propositional nation in which we live and to whose framing we adhere, I have been restating Chesterton’s thesis, though it wasn’t until long after my thought proved consonant with his that I discovered the quotation cited at the top of this essay.
In language, what stops the infinite process that says every decoding of a text is another encoding, which taken to its extreme commits one to believe meaning can never be truly reached — that it is open to infinite future play.
Nonsense. Sophistry.
Humans are in charge of language. To constrain it requires only a few propositional agreements: in communicative activities, we first privilege the original signifying agency as the primary locus of textual meaning. So when we interpret, we first ask, what is the author trying to signal?
Beyond that, a cultural stop to “unlimited semiosis” is “habit” or “convention.” Just because we can keep going doesn’t mean we must.
Stop playing the lefts games. Once you reject their premises and feel secure in the righteousness of your own, they lose.
— which is why they spend so much of their time attacking the righteousness of our country and it’s founding and framing.
The left’s insistence that language is a human construct referring only to itself is a liberating observation.
It allows humans to determine human rules. The United States is such a construct — one that our Founders and Framers believed best secured what exists beyond the power of both man and his imperfect attempts to define what that is.
We agree to live under the propositions that are universal and unyielding inasmuch as they are foundational to that proposition; to deny or subvert them is to destroy the proposition, and so to destroy our claim to self rule.
The idea itself is in a strict sense anti-American.
We aren’t required to allow it to pester us in perpetuity.
Once we understand all this, the friction is removed from the machinery. And that’s what allows the machinery to last.
Nothing in classical liberalism requires one to view all cultures and ideas as having equal value. Cultures compete, and some are better than others.
Ok, agree that we can and should opt out of progressive language games. But what about Classical Liberalism’s devotion to “individualism”? How do we draw a limit around that, as it seems to buttress much of the progressive agenda?