Wednesday 1 December 2010

The Rule of Gearwork. — No art or skill can ever be fulfilled to the utmost merely by the following of rules and mechanical procedures. An art or skill behoves judgement, practical wisdom, know-how, understanding, a feel for the never-to-be-repeated circumstances, and so forth. It is for this reason that liberalism is so life-clumsy, unwise, and soul-crushingly wretched: its managers and administrators — never statesmen of the old art, let alone kings or lords — are but stopgap-helpmeets of rules and mechanical procedures. If one of them brings his judgement or wisdom to bear, he thereby steps outside the field of what liberalism holds as strictly rightful: he steps into the human field wherein liberalism sees only whim and arbitrariness; he steps away from the hallowed rule of law towards the loathed rule of men. I say “stopgap”, for there has yet to be found a way to replace men wholly with technical process, although it is that to which liberalism tends by its misthought of rightfulness (no man to rule over another; same freedom for all; no privileges; and so forth), and hence it must brook the intervention of men into the bureau-technocratic process, it must brook this slight rule of men, this thin willfulness, this depressed exercise of human judgement, reason, and wisdom, so long as it is scattered across tens of thousands to lessen the personal aspect; but it does so with gritted teeth, as it were, and narrowed eyes. Every personal intervention into the management of human affairs is a sign that a process truly neutral to sundry human values, perfectly “fair” to all cases, indifferent to wilful turns, is not yet fulfilled, that the process still contains personal elements out of which personal interests can arise to upset the dispensing of the perfect “justice” of neutral indifference. Liberalism awaits the day when all men will be overthrown. Kings and athelings were merely the first.

3 comments:

Alrenous said...

Liberalism awaits the day when all men appear overthrown, that it might rule unopposed from the shadows, all the while condemning the cruder oppressions of past ages.

Deogolwulf said...

That is not liberalism; that is machination.

Ilíon said...

"That is not liberalism; that is machination."

There is a conflict between the two?

Neither "the State" nor "the Law" exist in any concrete sense. Rather, both are reifications of fictional persons, in just the way that a business corporation is.

"The State" (or "the Law") is that fictional person who tells all actual persons under its power what they must or must not do. BUT, as "the State" is not a real person, there is always a group of real persons who control it (whether or not they claim personally to own it) and tell it what to command of the real persons under its power.