Asad Zaman — Defining Islamic Economics

More on pluralism in economics. Traditionalism has something to say to liberalism about both substance and process.

What is Islamic Economics? A paper by Hafas Furqani “Defining Islamic Economics: Scholars’ Approach, Clarifying The Nature, Scope and Subject-Matter of The Discipline” lists more than 21 definitions, citing in addition several authors who state that there is no need for such a definition. Why is there such a variety of definitions, and what can be done to arrive at consensus regarding this matter? The problem is deeper and more complex than it appears on the surface. We list two major obstacles in the path of its solution:

An Islamic Worldview
Defining Islamic Economics
Asad Zaman | Vice Chancellor, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and former Director General, International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University Islamabad

Regarding Western economics, in which he is rigorously trained, Asad Zaman is probably closest to Institutionalism and Post Keynesianism, even though he is an econometrician and statistician.  He has recently been writing on Islamic economics, as well as on economic pedagogy.

Asad Zaman (born 1953) is a Pakistani Professor, Economist and social scientist. He is currently Vice Chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad.[1] Previously he was Director General of International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University, Islamabad. He earned his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1978, MS Statistics from Stanford University in 1976 and BS in Mathematics from MIT in 1974. He is also a member of Monetary Policy Committee of State Bank of Pakistan and Editor of International Econometric Review.[2] He has been appointed as member of Economic Advisory Council formulated by Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Zaman finished high school in Karachi, Pakistan in 1971, and moved to MIT, Boston for higher Education. He finished his BS in Math in 1974. He finished his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in another three years from 1974 to 1977, picking up a Masters in Statistics along the way. He was unique in taking first year graduate sequences at Economics, Mathematics, and Statistics simultaneously. This was because he planned a doctorate in Econometrics, which required knowledge of all three fields.[citation needed]
Zaman did a post-Doctoral year at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium from 1977 to 78. — Wikipedia.

See also

The US Catholic bishops advocate an economics integrated with social democracy and "natural law" as the basis of human rights, human behavior, and human interaction.

 We urge Catholics to use the following ethical framework for economic life as principles for reflection, criteria for judgment and directions for action. These principles are drawn directly from Catholic teaching on economic life.

1. The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy.

2. All economic life should be shaped by moral principles. Economic choices and institutions must be judged by how they protect or undermine the life and dignity of the human person, support the family and serve the common good.

3. A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring.

4. All people have a right to life and to secure the basic necessities of life (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, economic security.)

5. All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, to decent working conditions as well as to organize and join unions or other associations.

6. All people, to the extent they are able, have a corresponding duty to work, a responsibility to provide the needs of their families and an obligation to contribute to the broader society.

7. In economic life, free markets have both clear advantages and limits; government has essential responsibilities and limitations; voluntary groups have irreplaceable roles, but cannot substitute for the proper working of the market and the just policies of the state.

8. Society has a moral obligation, including governmental action where necessary, to assure opportunity, meet basic human needs, and pursue justice in economic life.

9. Workers, owners, managers, stockholders and consumers are moral agents in economic life. By our choices, initiative, creativity and investment, we enhance or diminish economic opportunity, community life and social justice.

10. The global economy has moral dimensions and human consequences. Decisions on investment, trade, aid and development should protect human life and promote human rights, especially for those most in need wherever they might live on this globe.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Catholic Framework for Economic Life

Related

Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. EconomyUnited States Catholic Bishops, 1986

Paul Thagard — Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life

Jordan Peterson is the pop philosopher of greatest interest in the US right now. His thought is of interest for that reason, especially for those who like staying au courant. But his is more important in the large picture for why he is regarded as important, especially in a culture in which philosophy is held in low esteem and Ayn Rand is actually considered a notable thinker by serious people in politics.

I submit that a major reason for Peterson's popularity is his worldview, rather than any of his particular views. The national dialectic in the US now, and to some degree internationally, is the tension between traditionalism and liberalism that came to the fore in the Renaissance with the rise of science and interest in classical literature. Peterson addresses this tension in a popular fashion that a lot of people can relate to.

The liberal wave began its crest in the Enlightenment, when the replacement of dogmatic theology and the alliance between church and state power declined, as theology was being replaced by naturalistic philosophy, and law based on religious dogma was being replaced by positive law based on natural law.

Traditionalism is based on the great chain of being worldview. Liberalism is based on scientific naturalism. The link between them is the understanding of "nature" and "natural" based on the Western intellectual tradition that began with ancient Greek thought.

This rise of liberalism and scientific naturalism resulted not only in an intellectual transformation in cultural worldview, but replacement of the traditional order by the liberal order as feudalism collapsed, sweeping away monarchies and empires, replacing them with democratic republics based on liberalism.

But classical liberalism was bourgeois liberalism based on property ownership. "All men are born equal" — sort of, that is. This "sort of" has lead to many paradoxes of liberalism that add to paradoxes that arise from combining liberalism and traditionalism. These paradoxes appear as contradictions that result in cognitive-affective dissonance.

In dialectical progression in contrast to strictly linear progression, the past is brought along into the present and continues to influence the future in a way that is far more complicated and also complex than physical processes. This is called variously "path dependence," "hysteresis," "historicity" and social and cultural embeddedness." Biological phenomena exhibit this more than purely physical, and social phenomena more than biological, e.g., owing to cultural embeddedness and institutional rigidity.

The result is that many Americans are suffering from a "split personality," torn between traditionalism  and liberalism. This is especially the case with people that are religious (traditional) and also committed to individual freedom (liberal). This is not to say that this affects only Americans, only that Americans have their own characteristic "brand" of it owing to their history.

This results in paradoxes as apparent contradictions. An appeal of a thinker like Jordan Peterson is to offer a worldview in which those paradoxes can be resolved, reducing cognitive-affective dissonance. But in doing so by the route he has set on, Peterson has become a controversial figure.

So the question arises, how sound is his position? Paul Thagard, Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist, responds.

Psychology Today
Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life

Paul Thagard | Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science

See also

The Conversation
Human evolution is still happening – possibly faster than ever

Laurence D. Hurst | Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at The Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath

Cora Currier — Every Right to Be Angry: Two New Books on Women’s Rage Are Timed Perfectly for the Brett Kavanaugh Debacle

This is not going away anytime soon.

One aspect of the new "civil war" between traditionalism and liberalism is emancipation of the repressed with women in front.

"The should know their place" is so 20th century. Women are seeing themselves as the new "Negroes."

On the blogs and in social media, many men are freaking out that their male privilege is under attack by "rabid feminists aka "feminazis." It's mostly right wing men, supported by some right wing women, but hardly exclusively. There are lots of men that consider themselves "liberals" are turning out to be selectively liberal.

The Intercept
Every Right to Be Angry: Two New Books on Women’s Rage Are Timed Perfectly for the Brett Kavanaugh Debacle

Cora Currier

See also

Site moderator rejected submission for Donna Strickland, the first female physics winner in 55 years, in March...

The Guardian
Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry

Leyland Ceccoalso

also

The Texas Trubune

A Texas yard sign depicted a GOP elephant with its trunk up a girl’s skirt. Police seized it.

Kristine Phillips, The Washington Post

Raphael Machado — Native Brazilian Traditions Against Liberal Globalism

Traditionalism versus liberalism.

Fort Russ
Native Brazilian Traditions Against Liberal Globalism

Raphael Machado

Dr. Charles Eastman was the son of a European American father and Native American woman. He was raised as a Native American (Sioux) and subsequently became a physician. He reported on his upbringing and the culture that was native to him. His works are available for download at the Internet Archive. I particularly recommend The Soul of the Indian.

Reuters — Hungarian PM sees shift to illiberal Christian democracy in 2019 European vote

Traditionalism is on the rise and it's taking a bite out of liberalism. This wave is not unique to Hungary.

In an annual speech to ethnic Hungarians in Baile Tusnad in neighboring Romania, Orban portrayed the 2019 European parliamentary vote as decisive for the future of Europe.

He said the Western political “elite” of the EU had failed to protect the bloc from Muslim immigration and it was time for them to go. “The European elite is visibly nervous,” Orban told hundreds of cheering supporters.

“Their big goal to transform Europe, to ship it into a post-Christian era, and into an era when nations disappear - this process could be undermined in the European elections. And it is our elementary interest to stop this transformation.”...

“Christian democracy is not liberal...It is illiberal, if you like,” Orban said....

The historical dialectic chugs along.

Reuters
Hungarian PM sees shift to illiberal Christian democracy in 2019 European vote

Staff

See also

Steve Bannon plans to lead a populist revolt throughout Europe which, if successful, will crush George Soros and his network of open-border NGO's to smithereens, according to the Daily Beast....

Zero Hedge
Bannon Sets Up For EU Showdown With George Soros

Tyler Durden

Phil Hoad — TV's new lesbian Batwoman joins growing numbers of diversity-friendly superheroes

Batwoman and Dreamer join a recent spate of comic book adaptations for cinema and television that has wised up to the fact that today’s most culturally dominant genre has to mirror modern society better. In February, Marvel’s Black Panther film became a landmark event. It was the US’s third highest-grossing film, not only breaking a ceiling for black cinema, but riding on the back of a nuanced understanding of African-American history to become the series’ best yet.

Pop art as leading indicator of cultural change. Pop art follows the money, unlike fine art as "art for arts sake." Economic liberalism in this case is interacting with social liberalism to produce rapid change. This is concerning to many traditionalists, who see the the world as they see it threatened. This is an aspect of the historical dialectic at work.

World Economic Forum
TV's new lesbian Batwoman joins growing numbers of diversity-friendly superheroes

Phil Hoad

Eric Zuesse — Vladimir Putin’s Basic Disagreement with The West

In summary, Putin advocates national sovereignty and opposes liberal internationalism and liberal interventionism based on as another form of imperialism. The West, the reverse.

More broadly, Russia is traditional while the West is liberal.

This basis of the broader conflict between the East and West, Global North and Global South. 

This conflict is dialectical.

The economic basis is capitalism versus socialism.

Both capitalism and socialism are internationalist.

This indicates that the historical dialectic at this point is about the determining the type of globalization in terms of ideological framework and political control.

Will the future be dominated by global capital or something else more along traditional lines.

The present from of capitalism is neoliberalism, which implies neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.

If this is not to become the dominant framework, what is?

I don't see Putin or anyone else very being clear on this. As a Russian Orthodox traditionalist and Westphalian nationalist, he seems to be looking backward rather than forward. 

The Chinese leadership has the most articulated and nuance alternative that combines elements of traditionalism, nationalism, globalism, socialism, and capitalism.

We probably won't know much about this until the fog of war clears and the dust begins to settle.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Vladimir Putin’s Basic Disagreement with The West
Eric Zuesse

See also

As US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin prepare to meet in Helsinki, all eyes are on what generally are regarded as the “usual” political issues that divide the world’s two foremost military powers: Ukraine, Syria, sanctions, claims of election interference, and so forth. This reflects the near-universal but erroneous view that this current, second Cold War is not ideological, as opposed to the first Cold War that pitted atheistic Soviet communism against America’s “in God we trust” capitalism. (Leave aside whether “capitalism,” an anarcho-socialist term popularized by Marxists, is the proper description of contemporary neoliberal corporatism.)…

Such a view totally dismisses the fact that following the demise of communism as a global power bloc there has been an eerie spiritual role reversal between East and West. While it’s true that during original Cold War the nonreligious ruling cliques in Washington and Moscow held basically compatible progressive values, ordinary Christian Americans (mainly Protestants, with a large number of Roman Catholics) perceived communism as a murderous, godless machine of oppression (think of the Knights of Columbus’ campaign to insert “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance). Conversely, today it is western elites who rely upon an ideological imperative of “democracy” and “human rights” promotion to justify a materialist global empire and endless wars, much like the old Soviet nomenklatura depended on Marxism-Leninism both as a working methodology and as a justification for their prerogatives and privileges,. In that regard, promotion of nihilist, post-Christian morality – especially in sexual matters – has become a major item in the West’s toolkit.…

This has a special importance with regard to Russia, where under Putin the Orthodox Church has largely resumed its pre-1917 role as the moral anchor of society. This elicits not only political opposition but a genuine and heartfelt hatred from the postmodern elites of an increasingly post-Christian West, not only for Putin personally and Russia generally but against the Russian Orthodox Church – and by extension against Orthodox Christianity itself....

 The article is longish and somewhat detailed, but it relates to the Zuesse article posted above. Many Americans would likely regard it as somewhat arcane and irrelevant in today's world as they experience it. Well, wait for what's coming in the political tussle over the Donald Trump's nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court.

These issues are already hot-buttons in the US. In the argument over what "religious freedom" means in the text, context and historical intent of the US Constitution, The liberal side argues it means freedom from religion and the traditionalist (conservative) side argues it means freedom to practice one's religion without government interference. Stay tuned.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The two-pronged attack on Orthodoxy and Russia

James George Jatras | Analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadership

See also

More traditionalism vs. liberalism.

The fact that the Catholic Church is strong in Poland makes a difference, because it gives us a mental and spiritual access to ideas and sensibilities that have evaporated in the secular West.…

Is liberalism on a collision course with Christianity as well as Islam?

Zero Hedge
Polish Politician Warns Of Europe's "Degenerate Liberalism"
Tunku Varadarajan, originally published op-ed at The Wall Street Journal

See also

Zero Hedge
The End Is Near? Pope Decries Governments Turning Earth Into Vast Pile Of "Rubble, Deserts, & Refuse"

Tyler Durden

Paul Robinson — Asymmetrical rules

Back in September I presented a paper at a conference in Moscow on the topic of ‘Human Rights Reasoning and Double Standards in the Rules-Based Order.’ In this I pointed out that both Russia and the West claimed to be in favour of a ‘rules-based order’ and that each accused the other of breaking that order. The problem, I conjectured, derives from differing understanding of what the rules are and how they should be applied.

Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which states are equal sovereign entities. The rules apply equally to all of them, regardless of who they are or what they do. States may only take action against other states with the permission of a superior court, in other words the United Nations Security Council. Of course, Russia doesn’t 100% abide by the rules of its own model, but its preferred option remains one of legal symmetry – the same rules apply to all.

By contrast, human rights reasoning has pushed the West in an opposite direction, towards a preference for legal asymmetry. In this model, the just and the unjust, those who respect and those who don’t respect human rights, are not legally or morally equal....

Liberalism as theology.

It's right and just when we do it but wrong when other's do it — because "freedom and democracy."

Irrussianality

Asymmetrical rules

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

See also

Intel Today
Former CIA Director James Woolsey: “US meddles in foreign elections – but only for a very good cause”

Francis Fukuyama and Robert Muggah — Populism is poisoning the global liberal order

The title signals the strong liberal bias of the authors. The dialectic is actually about traditionalism, which appears negatively as authoritarianism to liberals, versus liberalism, which appears as libertinism to traditionalists.

The tell is the admission that the wave of traditionalism is being led by "populism," as in what people actually want.

But what the people actually want is supposed to be the hallmark of liberalism.

The way liberals counter is this is that the majority lacks intelligence and sophistication and therefore need "enlightened" (liberal) leaders.

Thus democracy needs to managed because the people cannot be trusted to act in their real (liberal) interests.

Got that?

Global and Mail — Opinion
Populism is poisoning the global liberal order
Francis Fukuyama and Robert Muggah

See also

The Guardian (26 May 2016)
'It needs more public-spirited pigs': TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm

Alison Flood

Iurie Rosca — Like the Soviet Regime Created a Religion, So Does Western Liberalism

Western liberalism was developed as a secular replacement for the Christian religion that forms one of the four pillars of Western civilization — 1) the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, 2) , and 4) modern science and technology. Western liberalism is an attempt to bring the first three in line with modern science as the latest development. 

Greek thought based on reason and Roman law and organization can be viewed as precursors to the development of modern science. But traditional religion was a fierce opponent of the rise of modern science and stood forcefully in the way of its development and the promulgation of scientific understanding. Whether consciously or not, the Church recognized the threat of challenge and even replacement, which, of course, did eventually happen. Science now has assumed the mantle of the authority that the Church once wore, along with dominance of explanation in the culture based on the success of technology.

Christianity had already bifurcated into the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Byzantine Orthodoxy Church in the East. The two institutions have been diverging for some time and finally split formally in 1054. The Protestant Reformation that began in 1517, split Europe into warring parties, and culminated in the the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Arguably, Protestantism was the beginning of liberalism is the West, since it was aimed at liberalizing the authoritarian Roman Catholic Church as an institution. Protestantism was arguably a factor that led to the rise of capitalism as economic liberalism. 

Political liberalism can be traced to many factors, but the John Locke's Treatise on Government was foundation and served as a blueprint for the American founding fathers. The rise of political liberalism is often traced to the Magna Carta of 1215. The institutions of Western political liberalism are conspicuously English.

What is now regarded as Western liberalism is an 18th century phenomenon that replaced traditional religion with Deism, the belief that the Creator established laws of nature at the beginning and the universe has run like clockwork ever since. This allowed believers to begin to integrate traditional religion with modern science, which was typified by Issac Newton. As a result, scientists became the new priesthood, and science as the explication of "natural law" became the new religion.

The need for Deism ceased when conditions changed enough to permit what was formerly a heresy, namely, secular humanism. At this point, it was safe for liberalism to assume the garb of religion in the sense that it began to replace the social and cultural role of traditional religion.

It was a short step to making economics a science and therefore the elucidator of the natural laws of economics. Where liberals agree with Marx is over the economic infrastructure of a society determining the nature and scope of the social and political superstructure. But whereas Marx viewed this as historical and changing, liberals viewed in a based on natural law, hence, eternally true. This eternal truth could bc captured in formal models characteristic of modern science. This would become the new "theology," with economists the replacing the high priests. Economic liberalism would henceforth ground social and political liberalism.

But Karl Marx and Friedrich Eagles were also in the Western liberal tradition. There are two strains of Western liberalism, bourgeois liberalism and anarchism.

Bourgeois liberalism aimed to replace the feudal system, in which governance was vested in monarchs, aristocrats and landed gentry. with capitalism, with governance by owners of private property in constitutional republics.

Marx and Engels belonged to the anarchist wing, which was opposed to bourgeois liberalism where property owners replace feudal lords. Anarchism as a from of liberalism views the culmination of liberalism as the replacement of the nation state, where rule is based on law and its enforcement, with consensus governance that precludes legalized state violence, as well as intimidation and coercion based on the threat of violence. Anarchists recognized that the so-called rule of law under bourgeois liberalism simply leads to a new privileged class and an oligarchy of property owners.

While bourgeois liberalism came to dominate Western capitalistic countries that were constitutional republics, the anarchist model came to dominance in the East through the Russian and Chinese revolutions. While Western bourgeois liberalism has predictably led to oligarchy plutonomy, "sanctified" by Western political theory based on liberal economics as the discoverer of the natural laws of economics that dominate growth and progress, the communist project foundered in Russia and has been modified in the direction of bourgeois liberalism in China.

Religion has been replaced as a dominant factor in Western bourgeois liberalism, replaced by science, without actually attacking religion, although some Western liberals hold that religion is acting as a drag and should be rejected as superstitious. But under communism, religion was attacked by the state "acting in the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat" as "the opium of the people" that prevented mass consciousness raising.

The problem was that in the East, communism was far less successful in replacing religion, even with suppression, than scientism was in the West, owing to the success of science in improving individuals lives. Communism failed as a replacement for religion in the USSR, although the Chinese Communist Party has not yet given up on it. Nevertheless, President Xi Jinping is now attempting to integrate Confucian tradition with market socialism with Chinese characteristics.

This post by a prominent Moldavian politician is a reaction the Marxist-Leninist revolution in the East on its 100th anniversary, along with its failure and the subsequent rise of Western bourgeois liberalism. In reaction, traditionalism is rising in at least some of these countries. This is going to figure heavily in the march toward globalization that is taking place, so it worth paying attention to as a geopolitical force and factor.

On the occasion of the October Revolution centenary we decided to ask personalities from the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia and western countries the same set of questions. These interviews are intended to represent a modest contribution to the re-evaluation of the events that had an impact in the 20th century. Although 100 years have passed, many misconceptions about the profound causes of this major overturn and the way the „proletarian revolution” is treated by the political elite, the academia and the church hierarchy still remain in the public consciousness of ex-communist countries and of the entire world. We think it is vital to find appropriate answers to questions of this intricacy.

Geopolitika

Like the Soviet Regime Created a Religion, So Does Western Liberalism

Iurie Rosca |  President of the Christian-Democratic People's Party of Moldova

T. M. Lemos — American personhood in the era of Trump

Why is this important? Liberalism is based on equality of personhood, distinguishing individuals, whose qualities differ in degree, with personhood as universal. Owing to universality of personhood, all are equal before the law, for example.

Equality of personhood underlies the key assertion of liberalism in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Rights under liberalism are both civil, that is institutionally guaranteed, and also human, transcending governments and institutions.

This liberal conception of rights rests on the foundation of universal personhood as the basis of equality, not numerical but moral. This concept has been extended globally through the United Nations and its charter as the basis for international relations and law.

This view stands in contrast to the evolutionary traits that humans have inherited from the past, primacy of kinship, dominance and submission in relationships, and might is right.

This article suggests that Donald Trump and his followers represent these raw evolutionary traits and as such are anti-liberal.

Some represent this as a form of "traditionalism," and there is reason to hold that view. However, traditionalism is varies over wide range from the extreme of harkening back to animal origins to the most lofty ideals of perennial wisdom.

For example, the liberal view of personhood is based on the concept of the human "soul" derived from traditionalism. The proximate case with respect to liberalism was Christian doctrine. Liberalism was a secularization of the Western intellectual tradition, which was influenced by Greek thought and culture, the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, Roman law, and the scientific revolution. Liberalism involves the attempt to combine the naturalism of science with the antecedent Western intellectual tradition.

It would be a grave mistake not to make this distinction among different types of traditionalism in approaching traditionalism, just as it is a grave mistake to approach liberalism without distinguishing between individuals, who obviously are different in many respects, from persons that are assumed to be identical in nature.

Liberalism and traditionalism are compatible at one extreme as a result of an exalted level of collective consciousness based on love and incompatible at the other based on evolutionary traits. The historical development of liberalism lies along the range between these extremes in its manifestations to date.

If President Trump should resemble the picture that the author draws, the world may be in trouble.

OUPblog
American personhood in the era of Trump

T. M. Lemos

Christian Robitaille — Why Libertarians And Traditionalists Are Natural Allies

Interesting article that argues for an alliance based on the similarity of right libertarianism aka Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism with traditionalism.

This quote is central to the argument:

Libertarian societies, then, must be hierarchised. Not around democratic or autocratic criteria of course, but on a strictly voluntary basis—i.e., the ungifted, unintelligent, and weak will tend to accept the authority of the gifted, intelligent, and strong because it will often (if not always) be in their interest to do so in order to be employed, to rent an apartment, to live in a safe community, and so forth. Rebels and moral relativists will thus be generally marginalised, ostracised, or not tolerated at all if they pose any threat to the fundamental values on which the libertarian community is based.

In other words, building a sustainable egalitarian or relativistic libertarian society is impossible because individuals are unequal and need to share similar fundamental values in order to interact peacefully and associate with one another.

This alliance would work in the case of Libertarianism and Protestantism, since Protestantism spawned liberalism. This political alliance seems to work in the US, and often it is not a alliance but an overlap. 

I would not look for such an alliance with most expressions of traditionalism, however. Indeed, many traditionalists reject Protestantism as qualifying as a form of traditionalism at all, viewing it as a type of liberalism.

Katehon

Why Libertarians And Traditionalists Are Natural Allies

Christian Robitaille
Original in French

Charlotte Edmond — Justin Trudeau wants to raise his sons as feminists. New research backs him up

Why is this important in economics? First, women now control a signficant slice of the pie, and secondly, women have an increasingly strong political voice to match their growing economic power.

This is chiefly a political battle between liberals and traditionalists. Identity politics is here to stay.

Economics is strong influenced by policy.

On the programme, scientists argue there is no obvious neurological explanation for the gender divide, with no significant difference between male and female brains. Both are highly plastic and largely influenced by childhood experiences.

World Economic Forum
Justin Trudeau wants to raise his sons as feminists. New research backs him up

Charlotte Edmond

Gordon M. Hahn — Putin, Stalin, Orthodoxy, and Russian Traditionalism

Much Western media and many observers of Russian politics are fond of playing up an ostensible revival of Stalin – his ‘rehabilitation’ as it were – under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. This is not just inaccurate — as I have written in the past, the Putin era has seen numerous anti-Stalinist and non-Stalinist state-funded projects including mass audience films, television serials, museums and monuments — but it dangerously distorts our understanding of contemporary Russia. Moreover, many of the same observers are also fond of emphasizing the powerful role of the more traditional – some would say retrograde or reactionary – Russian Orthodox Church. This is often exaggerated, but this is not the most interesting aspect of such a focus. The latter focus is often made by the very same observers who decry Putin’s alleged rehabilitation of Stalin. The more revealing phenomenon is the political tension between these two positions; something that might suggest Putin’s less than dictatorial powers and the syncretic and more inclusive nature of his somewhat moderate Russian traditionalism. Thus, anti-Stalinist, anti-communist, Tsarist, and projects of other ideological, cultural, religious, and ethnic orientations often coexist in Putin’s Russia, with the state giving space, albeit often strictly limited, for their expression. This is a function of a supra-national identity still being in development, Russia’s multi-communal character, and the interplay of various orientations and of those orientations within the state....

The US and Europe are now going through similar conflicts between traditional and liberal views and factions representing them. Every nation's character is a melding of historical forces through the historical dialectic. History is path dependent.

Furthermore, it can be argued that countries like Germany and Russia have dealt more openly and rankly with their unsavory past than countries like the US and Japan.

Russian and Eurasian Politics
Putin, Stalin, Orthodoxy, and Russian Traditionalism
Gordon M. Hahn, analyst and Advisory Board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, member of the Executive Advisory Board at the American Institute of Geostrategy, a contributing expert for Russia Direct, a senior researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Akribis Group, and; and an analyst and consultant for Russia – Other Points of View

Sputnik — Society Should 'Filter' Information Based on Moral Principles - Putin

Putin puts his finger on a key issue without naming explicitly.

This is the classical question about what it means to be a good person in a good society.

Under Anglo-American liberalism, this question is not to be asked because the market is the arbiter of truth and value equates to prices. In this view, culture is based on utilitarianism, with its stimulus-response model of human behavior, and law exists chiefly to provide security and protect private property.

Traditionalism disagrees. In this view, human behavior involves moral responsibility and genuine freedom is impossible without moral responsibility.

Morality is about how people should behave, and law is about how people must and must not behave.

Morality and ethics are evolved culturally, and law is decided institutionally.

Classical conservatism is traditionalist. It looks to tradition for guidance in such matters.

Classical liberalism is rationally based. It looks to reason and evidence for justification.

Classical conservatives generally favor government taking a moral role and exerting moral authority where the need arises owing to conflict of views.

Classical liberals generally hold that this is is not a question for government to answer, although law makers must deal with it in legislating. Reason and evidence should be the guide rather than tradition and custom.

Putin is taking a liberal position for Russia, albeit traditionalist in Western liberal eyes. However, traditionalism and classical conservatism predominate strongly in Russian culture and politics.

Sputnik International
Society Should 'Filter' Information Based on Moral Principles - Putin

Also

It’s up to the creative community to filter tele-and internet content as the government’s influence in this sphere should be reduced to minimum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday at a meeting with participants in the Tavrida educational youth forum, commenting on an idea of establishing a kind of a filter for television and internet content to reduce aggressive and crime-related information that is adversely impacting the younger generation.

"What is prohibited by law must be outlawed everywhere - both in the internet and in television, and in other mass media," he stressed. "But everything else must be done only by one way - through filtering by the creative community. If the community elaborates a system of moral and ethical filters it would be right. The government’s say in this process should be if not excluded, then minimized. But better excluded."

The president called to "think together on the establishment of such mechanisms." He said he is in contacts with the CEOs of Russia’s leading television channels and with those "who influence this or that way what is going on in the internet" and these people, in his words, understand the situation and "are trying to change it for the better." "It is difficult to do it - to filter information torrents - in the present-day world. There are grounds to fear that such filtration could be ideologized and society would be stripped of the possibility to receive reliable, open and direct information," Putin added.

TASS
Putin says government’s say in filtering info content should be reduced to minimum

Levan Vasadze — Challenges of Modern Traditionalism

As professor Dugin rightfully says in many of his lectures and books, the individual subjects or the centers of three mentioned totalitarianisms were each different: liberalism centered on Cartesian individual, which is an artificial concept; Marxism centered on class and Nazism - or fascism - centered on race. The deconstruction of these has happened in the reverse chronology, as we know. Communism dragged down - brought down - and collapsed the idea of supremacy of the race; and then liberalism brought down and collapsed the idea of supremacy of the class; and the oldest one of the three, which was initially invented, has remained as the standing beauty without any alternatives. Now we are entering the era of destroying the liberalism and the supremacy of the individual. I have had the honor and pleasure of discussing on numerous occasions with professor Dugin and the some of you what should be the center of the post liberal paradigm, of the normal society. And we all have different opinions, not necessarily contradictory to each other. For example, professor Dugin tends to gear towards the idea of people - people of the empire if you will - as the carrier and the center of the alternative matrix. I tend to favor more – and again I don’t think we are in contradiction here – the idea of family as the center of the alternative constitution. In Budapest[1] yesterday I said that, in my humble opinion, all 193 constitutions on the planet need to be rewritten. The center of each constitution today is an individual and I am not an individual, I am a component, I am a part – I am a brother, I am a husband, I am a father, I am a son – and when I loose these I become the enemy of humanity. Therefore, it is not the rights of an individual that we should be protecting in these constitutions, it is the obligation of an individual towards the family and the rights of the family that we should be protecting in the constitution.

Geopolitika.ru
Challenges of Modern Traditionalism

Levan Vasadze

Paul Robinson — Leontiev in Donetsk

On ideas and their influence on history. 

Relevant to the present dialectical interplay of nationalism-populism and globalism-elitism socially, politically, and economically, as well as the  dialectical interplay between traditionalism and liberalism.

Irrussianality

Leontiev in Donetsk

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Paul Robinson — From Russia with love – lessons for today from a revolution 100 years ago

In liberal thought, legitimacy derives from elections, the state’s respect for its citizens’ human rights, open and transparent government, a free press and so on. According to these criteria, the provisional government ought to have been more legitimate than the unpopular monarchy it replaced. But it wasn’t. The legitimacy of the state proved to be inseparable from the person of the czar.

To understand why, one must look to an alternative concept of legitimacy. This sees legitimacy as deriving from history, tradition, nationalism and religion, as well as from force rather than from popularity and individual freedoms. Russians had regarded the czar as legitimate because the monarchy embodied centuries of Russian history, a sense of the Russian nation, and the idea of Orthodoxy. The monarchy was also feared. When it was gone, all that was left was an abstract commitment to liberal values. This was not sufficient. The result was the eventual triumph of Bolshevism.

This story continues to be repeated in countries across the globe today: Again and again, regime change leads not to liberal democracy but instead to civil war.

Despite this, many in the West continue to believe in the value of overthrowing what they consider to be corrupt or autocratic regimes, without in many cases taking due regard of the ways in which existing regimes have a form of legitimacy which is not easily replaced.

Too often, a mere public commitment to Western values proves to be an insufficient replacement for power, tradition, religion or nationalism. Unless we can redefine our understanding of legitimacy in order to take such factors into consideration, our efforts to reshape the world are all too likely to continue to end up creating only chaos.

Ottawa Citizen
Robinson: From Russia with love – lessons for today from a revolution 100 years ago
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Alastair Crooke — Letting Russia Be Russia

This is a useful article for correcting misapprehensions about Russia, Putin and Alexander Dugin, on one hand, and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, on the other. 

However, in my view, it is somewhat superficial in that it is written from a modern liberal point of view that fails to understand traditionalist points of view, which are varied and nuanced. Modern liberal points of view are varied and nuanced also. 

This is a bit too complicated for me to summarize in the scope of a comment on this post other than to point out that variation and nuance are critical. Hasty generalization is bound to be misleading.

It is possible to get an idea of what traditionalism is about in contrast to modern liberalism by comparing the Great Chain of Being of various traditionalisms with the modern scientific perspective of  liberalisms that are naturalistic, materialistic and reductionistic.

Alexander Dugin subscribes to the Great Chain of Being in a very traditional Russian Orthodox way. He is a monarchist that assumes the divine right of kings, for example. Vladimir Putin rejects this. It would be nonsense to attribute authoritarianism to either Donald Trump or Steve Bannon on this basis. But there are other similarities, and these similarities are found in various cohorts in Western countries. 

Crooke's analysis is too general and sweeping. The distinction between liberal and traditionalist is becoming increasingly important politically and the variation and nuances are emerging. Jumping to conclusion based on similarities would be unwise without also considering the significant differences.

I am both a traditionalist and a liberal, as are also a great many, and I don't see any contradiction necessarily separating them and making them incompatible. I would venture to say that the majority of people in the West hold some combination of traditionalism and liberalism. 

All that is needed is to drop some of the more extreme assumptions of both positions, although some people do hold the incompatible extremes and suffer from cognitive dissonance for it. 

The points of view of Putin and Bannon are different combinations if liberalism and traditionalism. I am not sure that Trump has thought this though at the level that Bannon has, but he has chosen Bannon as his chief adviser, so I assume he understands the gist of it and agrees.

Crooke's point that Russia is much more traditionalist than the West is well-taken. Failing to understand this and projecting Western ideas and attitudes on Russia is a blunder of the highest magnitude and will almost inevitably result in conflict. The same is true with China, Islamic countries, India, and other chiefly traditionalist nations and cultures, all of which are traditionalist in their own way and are incompatible with internationalistic liberalism based on reductionistic scientism.

Consortium News
Letting Russia Be Russia
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

Adam Garrie — The problem with intellectualising Steve Bannon

Adam Garrie makes the valid point that Steve Bannon has become the focus of the intellectual aspects of Traditionalism but that Bannon himself is not an intellectual, or so his previous life would suggest. Moreover, he has not commented on the various intellectual aspects of Traditionalism other than briefly and in a cursory manner that suggests he is not interested in being a thought leader. Moreover, it is not clear what the primary influences on him may be. 

Therefore, it would be a mistake to view either Bannon or Trump as Traditionalist thought leaders or heavily influenced by Traditionalist thought instead of as chiefly political agents that can be broadly identified as Traditionalist in their analytic and governing approach. 

The Left appears to be making this mistake, or attempting to identify Steve Bannon and Donald Trump as extremists based on flimsy association. Some are making them out to fascists when Fascism is one of the four major political theories along with Liberalism, Marxism, and Traditionalism, and Traditionalism is opposed to Fascism. Instead, the Left needs to put its own house in order if it aims to be taken as more than an opposition.

The Left also needs to wake up to the fact that Traditionalism strongly supports the family rather than the individual and therefore it aligned with "the little people," that is, ordinary workers with no political voice in the present system. The Left wrongly assumes that this is cohort is naturally aligned with the Left but that was not the case in the recent presidential election.

This is not to minimize the significance of the various cohorts of Traditionalism that are in play nationally in the US and internationally among the rising Right. They are part of the Trump-Bannon coalition domestically and potential allies internationally. As such they are part of the political mix as such their views and aspirations will be a factor in politics and policy. But rolling all this into Steven Bannon as a symbol is not supported by evidence, and less so for Donald Trump.

The Duran
The problem with intellectualising Steve Bannon
Adam Garrie