Is There a ‘Universal Man’? – Part I
Some define liberalism as being founded on a belief in a ‘universal man’, some common essential which, unless obscured by its refusal, is present in all persons. On this ground, liberalism asserts, no actual difference is discernable between Englishmen, Pakistanis, Texans, Columbians, and Nigerians. They are completely fungible; alter the environment in which the Pakistani exists, and he will be an Englishman instantly. The native peoples of the West have resisted this paradigm and revolted against the New Englishmen (the New Americans), pointing to both cultural differences (such as language) and ethical differences (such as their concern for others while driving or tendency to rape people (England; Sweden)). Liberals, viewing this aberration, can only conclude that the native peoples have proved themselves fundamentally deviant and evil, have by refusing to recognize the undoubtable (presupposed) development of the New Countrymen into legitimate countrymen shown themselves perversely and irrationally prejudiced.
Seeing this mess grown from the doctrine of a universal man, some (such as Carl Benjamin) have asserted man is entirely contingent. Perhaps this language is meant to apply in a restricted sense, meaning that man is contingent in the areas the universal man theory of liberalism holds man to be noncontingent and universal. The question, however, is worth answering: is there a universal man? If so, who is he?
Is There a Universal Man? Yes #1
Language, thought, and philosophy require us to admit the existence of some form of ‘universal man.’ If man were entirely specific and particular, the category of ‘man’ would be meaningless. The trap here is the trap of nominalism, with its inability to justify or establish categories (universals).
All men, in order to qualify as men, must share some basic attributes which justify calling them ‘men.’ If this were not so, the word ‘man’ could properly include, with equal cogency and plausibility: a dog, a lamppost, the number zero, your mother, my left pinky-toe’s nail, the history of Zimbabwe, the last word the nearest Satanist said, how old your relatives are in aggregate, Adam’s metatarsal, Adam, and God. That last, incidentally, would be possible blasphemy (making God out to be a creature), except that the hypothetical rests on making the word ‘man’ literally meaningless, a gibberish ordering of letters or sounds. By implication, possibly, ‘God’ would also be meaningless. The result is a complete abolition of language.
Because we can speak the word ‘man’ (or its translations, its synonyms) and be understood, because some existences are ‘man’ and some are not, the universal man must exist. We must have for ‘man’ a minimum set of attributes (which can be positive traits, relationships with other defined existence, etc., and which must include a specific genre of relationship with God, within which all the relationships of man with God fall).
Is There a Universal Man? No #1
The modern conception of the ‘universal man,’ as presented for demolition by anti-liberals like Carl Benjamin,[1] is high-grade nonsense. Liberalism believes that all men share a universal character. This character is more than the ‘universal nature’ that the above section demonstrated. The fundamental assertion of liberalism is that history does not exist and that insofar as it does exist, it shouldn’t. The product of this assertion- or its root, depending on formulation- is the belief that any person can be substituted for any other person without altering the overall results.
Liberal immigration policies rest heavily upon this presumption. ‘If we bring in all these men from Pakistan or Columbia or Nigeria or India,’ they say, ‘they will be, in the instant of immigration, identical to us in all ways which matter.’ This immigration accomplished, the problems start, because people don’t come without their histories, and people who grew up Pakistani (Muslim) or Nigerian (pagan, Muslim) or even Columbian (Catholic, pagan, atheist) will, regardless if they keep the religion or the trappings individually, as a group tend to keep the mindset, culture, and morals of their original countries, particularly when coming en masse, with their compatriots to reinforce their positions and grant cover. (Welfare politics are no help, of course.)
This situation creates a problem for liberals. Take, for instance, the skyrocketing rates of rape in Britian under mass legal immigration (LINK). Liberalism cannot conceive of this being the case. After all, the British environment, operating on the ‘universal men’ (British people) already living there, produced a certain, relatively low rate of rape. By this fact and through their assumption, the liberal knows that the newly imported ‘universal men’ (Afghanis) must, once they enter Britain, settle at that same, relatively low rate. Possibly even lower, given the inherent evil of a native population (see below). This certain knowledge clashes with the facts as common folk see them, admittedly, but the liberal’s presupposition (his religion) is dearer to him than his perception. It is an article of faith that all men are identical, detached from their histories; evidence to the contrary is dismissed on faith.[2]
Some differences, however, are less difficult for the liberal to accept. Rape is hard to spin as a good thing, at least in the current environment (though individuals have tried (Chicago)). What about less immediately repulsive cultural differences, things Western liberalism hasn’t maintained an aesthetic[3] disgust for? Foreign dress, foreign cuisine, foreign manners, foreign languages. These are things which the New Imports have brought from their home countries. The liberal, however, must forget that the history of any man has an effect on his present; these customs cannot be imports, because the people in question, regardless of their recent importation, live here now. What they do now, because they have no relevant past, must be a result of where they are now. The problem, of course, is that these customs are not the customs of the native population, those not recently imported.
The liberal response is to assume that these customs are in fact the genuine products of the universal man’s reaction to the situation he is in. The process can be summed in an equation: add 1 to 2 and get 3; add universal man to Britain and get somebody whose only language is Bengali or Swahili or Albanian. The immigrant is the true result of the country, not the native. He is truer than the native. The liberal regards the foreigner, therefore, as an example and paragon, not a deviation.[4]
Why is the foreigner given priority over the native? If man is universal, unaffected by history, then the native’s response to his circumstance should be just as paradigmatic as the foreigner’s. Well, the problem is that we simply cannot forget reality, not easily. The liberal is uncomfortably aware of history; he knows that something originated him and everybody else. The ruthless criticism of all that exists[5] is chasing an impossible goal and cannot ever remove everything. Further, the history which the liberal best knows is his own people’s history. He knows it not just by being taught it, for men may ignore or evade learning their own people’s history, but by living it, for he remembers yesterday, remembers last year, remembers his childhood, how his own people then existed. To him, therefore, the foreigner is less historic because his history is more hidden (and the liberal disdains to look for history as truly relevant[6]).
Besides this, we must recognize that men who rebel against God, when presented with two choices, will prefer the more immoral option, the option which desecrates more. Preferring the native as standard has the virtue of at least superficially holding loyalty with those it is proper to have some loyalty to. Preferring the foreigner as the standard, by contrast, involves the immediate repudiation of all which should be homely and lovely to a man. This second option is particularly appealing in the West, whose different cultures are to a one able to trace their formation to Christian influences.
Under this doctrine of a universal man, the foreigner is the actual standard of proper humanity. The native’s choice to act according to native customs, the native’s preference for his of culture’s morality, the native’s choice to point out how the foreigner transgresses even liberal moral standards, these are evidences not of a difference rising from the two people’s different histories but of derangement. Liberalism is basically true, after all, and all men are the universal man. To fail to act as the universal man acts (as the foreigner or the liberal acts) is therefore an act of evil, insofar as liberalism recognizes the idea.[7]
More accurately, the refusal or failure is a sign of insanity, of derangement, of broken humanity. He who does not act like the universal man must not be an intact man; he is broken, sick, in need of fixing. Or perhaps he is not human at all (and therefore he must be put down).
This same reduction of people to a universal ‘historiless’ man is evident also in the idea of transsexuality. Transsexuality denies the history of the self and of gender, spiritual and biological, in order to assert not merely a change but a complete erasure of the prior, making the prior a falsity. The present denies the past, and no reason may be admitted why what was (the male body) may not be what is (the female body, in assertion, no matter the fact).
This idea also appears in how narrative replaces truth in postmodernism, which is the mature form of liberalism, the last great step before mere suicide.
In sum, then, this false universal man is a man whose past does not exist, a cipher entirely contingent upon his present environment.[9] One can be put in the place of another because, without a past, no differentiation is possible. All is [man]+[environment]=[output], where any man can be that first term and so long as the second term is held constant, the output will not change. If it does change, that’s your lying eyes.
God tells us to honor and recognize the past, even to rely on it. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” He introduces Himself (Ex. 20:2). Thus His history (as our model (Gen. 1:16; Eph. 5:1) and the history of those He speaks to are both integral to the understanding of the world He presents to us. The New Testament continues this perspective and model: “Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus…” (1 Cor. 1:1).
The universal man of liberalism is false. Men are historied and historical, not mere contingencies upon their environment. In this senses, no universal man exists, and men are not universal.
[1] Who (accurately) terms himself a postmodern traditionalist on his X profile.
[2] Note that evil men tend to accuse the righteous more of the kinds of evil with which the evil men are personally familiar.
[3] Yes, some of the disgust is moral, but more of it is aesthetic, a remnant of the Christian culture liberalism is still working to shed, which it has degraded from ethic to aesthetic (from doing right to looking right) but not yet abolished entirely.
[4] Deviation is not an inherently moral term; it is a recognition of statistical realities. Americans are a deviation in Calcutta.
[5] Marx
[6] History can inform, but history cannot be truly part of a present realit’s character. There is a great dividing wall between past and present, the breaching of which is sacrilege, in the most literal sense.
[7] Liberalism has no room for ‘evil’ in the Christian sense, but man instinctively recognizes that evil exists, so nearly every worldview finds place for it, even Nietzsche’s or Stirner’s.
[8] Contra Benjamin, liberalism absolutely believes that men are contingent; it just believes that the history of a man has no relevance to him. Whether liberalism believes in a noncontingent core of humanity, I am unsure; if Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is to be believed, it likely does not.
