“Someone”? To Plauche, I am apparently he-who-must-not-be-named: he periodically references something I have just written without naming me or linking to my post.

He then proceeds to quote me out of context and, as seems to be his wont, give it just about the most uncharitable interpretation possible — all the better to set that straw man on fire, I suppose. Ironically, in the process he fails to link to the post in which I address his in more detail. Tit-for-tat? Or perhaps he was pressed for time or simply forgot or didn’t want to cause embarrassment (no, that’s not it) or wants to make a broader point without getting mired in an inevitably uncivil “debate” that would accomplish nothing productive (no, that’s not it either).

This is a favorite netwit tactic: When someone makes a comparison between A and B, the netwit comes back with: “So, you think A is the same as B!” …

What in [my post] could even remotely be taken to read “libertarians are no different than statists”? …

Humans and flies can both fail to notice danger in their environment, but does pointing that out mean that I think humans are “no different than” flies? Anyone who would suggest that it does is either an idiot or intellectually dishonest… and Plauche is no idiot.

Well, at least Callahan respects my intelligence… Too bad it’s only to make a characteristically uncivil and spurious smear of my character.

In Callahan’s original post, he claims Hayek’s insight in the referenced quote not only applies to statists but also to libertarians (i.e., libertarians are no different than statists in this regard; hence, the title of my blogpost to which I was alluding here). If Callahan had read my post, or put any effort at all in attempting to read my above comment charitably, he wouldn’t characterize my argument as being that he claimed there are no differences between libertarians and statists at all.

What the post claims is that there is a certain error, which Hayek called “constructivist rationalism,” which one may commit, regardless of whether one is a libertarian, a liberal, a socialist, a conservative, or whatever.

This is precisely what I disagreed with in the post Callahan seems to have overlooked: “Are Libertarians No Different Than Statists?” Follow the link to see my argument against Callahan’s claim that libertarians are also (in danger of being) constructivist rationalists in their attempts to “force” free trade and unregulated labor markets on “society.”

To my observation that he has a bad habit of tossing around brief quotations, in lieu of an actual argument, as if they were devastating criticisms of libertarianism, he responds:

Apparently, Plauche’s world is all arguments all the time, so anything you post is an argument.

Uh, yeah, that’s the most likely implication of my observation. Suuuure…

Sometimes… no, most often… I post things just because I find them interesting.

Uh huh, sure, that’s the only reason. I don’t buy it. Go back and read the sorts of Callahan posts to which I am referring (they saturate his blog) and see for yourself if it does or doesn’t look like Callahan takes the quotes he posts to encapsulate devastating criticisms of libertarianism.

They aren’t an “argument” for anything at all. Now, the quote itself my be part of an argument found in its source… but if you want to engage that argument, dig up the source!

Well, good that he recognizes that simply quoting unsupported claims doesn’t constitute an argument, but this is compatible with my observation above. That he wants us to dig up the sources and contend with the allegedly wonderful arguments therein suggests he doesn’t post the quotes just because he finds them interesting. But since he’s the one posting the quotes to bring these supposedly brilliant criticisms to our attention (else why post them publicly on the internet?), perhaps instead of hurling potshots toward random, unspecified libertarians, he should dig up the source himself and provide a little more context and support for those isolated quotes. The burden is on him.

But how much nicer for your cause if you can cast someone who posts an interesting quotation now and then as an idiot who doesn’t know what an argument is!

This strikes me as a classic case of projection, given that Callahan takes great offense at the slightest of perceived slights, goes out of his way to quote his interlocutors out of context, interpret them as uncharitably as possible, and make unprovoked personal attacks.

Gene,

It’s amusing how you slyly (and falsely) suggest that I never read Voegelin. Here’s a question: did *you* bother to read the article that you just linked — which, incidentally, is reasonably critical in tone — to prove that I’m “babbling nonsense?” If you had, you surely would have noticed that the main gist of it was: “well, if Voegelin was alive today then he would seriously rethink what he said about Gnosticism, because it was obviously wrong, plus he kinda did rethink it in the 1970s anyway, so he corrected his mistake after all” (ed. note: even if it took him a couple decades to do s0) .

Maybe so; maybe not. Either way, it’s hardly a devastating rebuttal to the substance of my post. But perhaps you thought it sufficient to post a link, hoping that no one would call your buff by clicking it.

BTW, the Nag Hammadi was discovered well before Voegelin published on Gnosticism. So even if he may have recanted later on, that doesn’t change the fact that he was publishing abject nonsense for years with no good excuse. Honestly, this is getting desperate. If someone like Rothbard had made such an egregious error as this, I have serious doubts that you would ever let it go.

Of course, it’s true that there’s nothing special about Hoeller, that he is a biased source (who isn’t?), and that I grabbed his article because it was convenient to do so; he is simply one of the many voices highlighting serious problems in Voegelin’s work. I do not feel the slightest need to cite world-class scholarly sources for the purpose of belaboring the obvious, noncontroversial and almost universally recognized point that Voegelin was clueless about historical gnosticism.

Frankly, this is getting embarrassing. Just admit it: Voegelin had no clue what he was talking about re: Gnosticism. Now, it’s perfectly valid to argue that while he was ignorant of gnosticism, that doesn’t necessarily refute his arguments about political philosophy. And I grant that that is a perfectly logical point. But please, leave western hermeticism and esoterica to serious scholars like Gershom Scholem. This is not a subject for dilettantes and dabblers.

Lastly, I am most understanding and sympathetic to the fact that, as this is not your blog, it must be extremely frustrating for you not to be able to censor and delete cogent critiques of your arguments, as you customarily do on Crash Landing. Nevertheless, I kindly request that you refrain from expressing that frustration in an ungentlemanly way by advancing false accusations and making false assumptions about me.

Best,

Elisha

Voegelin accurately traced the source of all of these movements to the Enlightenment project and the search for secular salvation. If he is “bizarre” in this sense, then so is John Gray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, and every Pope who has ever written on social issues, and… you get the idea.

The fact that these movements have the same historical source certainly does NOT mean that there are no important distinctions between them. Voegelin far preferred liberalism to communism and fascism… as do I. Liberalism had halted at a far earlier point on the road to civilizational destruction than had the latter pair.

Voegelin certainly did think there was universal truth in ethics and politics. (Parts of) this truth had been discovered by the classical and Christian thinkers. He rejected libertarian rights because they are based on a denial of those universal truths (and are not “objective” either).

Because some people continue carrying around his corpse does not mean the patient is not dead.

But… atheism. I get it now. “One cannot deny God and retain reason.”

You could have addressed Voegelin’s actual arguments. That you didn’t says either that you are unaware of them, or you were not honest enough to address the real argument, but preferred to make one up you could more easily refute. I prefer to think that the former is the case. … Go engage the source material!

What part of “I addressed Voegelin’s own criteria for gnosticism” and “the subject of my dissertation was not Veogelin vs. liberalism/libertarianism” did you not understand? Maybe if Voegelin hadn’t concisely spelled out his criteria and I was writing my dissertation specifically on this subject, I would have devoted several hundred pages to picking apart Voegelin’s tortured attempt to lump liberalism/libertarianism into the same category as totalitarian, mass murdering political movements on account of a confused notion of gnosticism and then dismiss them on that account. But alas, he was kind enough to concisely state just what makes a political movement gnostic and the purpose of my dissertation was to lay out my conception of a (neo-)Aristotelian form of liberalism/libertarianism. What a missed opportunity!

Not only is it interesting that apparently Voegelin’s own criteria do not count as his “real argument” but I should have written my dissertation on a different subject merely because I dared to briefly address a charge one of my committee members (prominent Voegelinian Ellis Sandoz) was likely to make against the dissertation that I in fact had written.

But think what you prefer. You speak of intellectual honesty and scholarship when you make it a habit to take others out of context, interpret them uncharitably, utter logical fallacy after logical fallacy, and make personal attacks against those you know little or nothing at all about, in pursuit of this strange, bitter vendetta you have against a political philosophy (and those who still believe it) to which you once adhered.

At which point, I’m sorry, I am not going to type Voegelin’s seven-volume history of political thought and five-volume order and history into your comment boxes.

Come now. This is a copout. It is not necessary to type up all of that in order to address particular arguments I’ve made. If you don’t have the time, that’s fine. I’m rather busy myself these days. But don’t pretend you’ve managed to refute my arguments by claiming I’m dishonest and telling me to read 12 volumes of his collected works. Is that about half or a third of the series, by the way? I forget what volume they’re up to now on the entire thing.

Elisha is again talking nonsense. Here is an actual scholarly paper:
http://faculty.washington.edu/ewebb/EVgnost.pdf

That makes it very clear that Voegelin was up with the scholarship that existed on Gnosticism at the time he was using the term. Elisha is calling into question Voegelin’s scholarship because *he could not foresee the future*! In fact, Voegelin himself stopped using the term, and by the 1970s was saying that he would then have chosen a different term. Hoeller, meanwhile, is a member of a modern gnostic church and the theosophical society, and hardly an objective source for what gnosticism means. Elisha just grabbed the first text off the Internet criticising Voegelin he could find and plopped it here. He has no clue whether Hoeller, Voegelin, or neither is correct here.

“I did have my doubts about applying a concept that originated with a theistic movement to both it and non-theistic political movements.”

You do know that Rothbard did the same thing in his analysis of Marxism, don’t you?

Utter nonsense? No. I think perhaps you do not understand Voegelin as well as you think and have a tendency to read others uncharitably.

For example, maybe you and Elisha simply have different standards for what counts as a “meaningful distinction.” But to make such a big deal about gnosticism and reject liberalism on the same grounds as Marxism, fascism, communism, and the like is just bizarre, and shows misplaced priorities and a distorted view of the world, however you slice it.

Even if it were true that liberalism is a gnostic political movement (is, Gene, sorry; it isn’t dead yet any more than socialism is), the other political movements listed should be rejected more on the grounds of their meaningful distinctions from liberalism than on their supposedly shared characteristic.

But liberalism is not a monolithic political movement, as you should know. Even if it were true that some liberals/libertarians are or were gnostic, this is not true of all of them. I do not think it is true of the philosophy and movement in general.

As for universal truth, I believe what Elisha wrote was “the Voegelin-ite objects to any conception of universal truth in ethics or politics,” not necessarily universal truth per se. Voegelin certainly opposed universal and objective principles in ethics and politics such as libertarian rights, did he not? I’m well aware of the importance of the divine ground of being in Voegelin’s thought when it comes to philosophical truth pe se but sadly this did not translate so well into his ethics and politics.

(Ellis Sandoz mistakenly thinks that my atheism precludes me from recognizing and accepting any universal truths, despite my obvious libertarianism to the contrary, because he equates the logical structure of reality with the divine ground of being with the Christian God. That’s denial of reality if I’ve ever seen it.)

And by “rejecting systematic thought” I think Elisha meant Voegelin’s opposition to philosophical systems. It is true that Voegelin opposed them. But perhaps I am misreading Elisha. I’ll note again though that Elisha specifically wrote that about the Voegelin-ite; but I wouldn’t be surprised if he imputes this back to Voegelin himself as well.

And I really don’t care if Voegelin thought liberalism was dead. It plainly is not. It’s generally not wise to declare philosophies and political movements dead.