What I am not

Some clarification on my personal state of political ideas.

I do not hold any universal notion of political justice to be valid. In this aspect I am a relativist. I believe justice to be a product of cultural circumstances, and only within a context of this nature any claim of justice is intelligible, and hence warranted. This is the reason why I do not hold the basic philosophical assumptions of human rights and their kindred ideologies. This is not to say that I reject many of the basic rights that this tradition (in its classical expression at least) holds, but that I reject that there is anything inherent to all of humanity in them. This procedure allows us to respect other cultures' notions as running parallel to ours.

From the previous assumption it follows that I do not hold any particular form of government to be better than others if taken out of context. More importantly to our contemporary condition, I do not think parliamentary democracy and federalism to be models to be successfully copied by all other cultures. Parliamentary democracy and federalism themselves are idiosyncratic aspects of a particular civilization, i.e. the Western civilization. Also within the context of the West's previous forms of political organization are not to be judged according to contemporary ideas, because the context is not only cultural, but also temporal. There is a time for every form of government adjusted to its respective notion of justice. Its deviance from the respective notion of justice set by the historical moment, determines the injustice and unfairness of particular forms of government. There is no other way to judge a particular regime if it is not by the current notions of justice available at the time of the existence of that regime.

It follows that I cannot hold any progressive vision of history without contradiction. I take the discourse of progress, in its Western form (the only form that I am aware of at least), to be one of the fantastic and mythological aspects of our civilization in its final stages. Instead, by virtue of my cultural relativism, I hold the "decline" discourse, that tragically accepts decline and collapse as the inevitable outcome of every civilization. I interpret contemporary history, and post-industrial capitalism in general, to be the final stage of the Western civilization before its disappearance. How it is going to happen no one can precisely tell, but it will happen. I can think of some future outcomes, but they are more of a fantastic character than reasonable statements. E.g. a nuclear holocaust. In this context almost all forms of arguments that stress the necessity of human action to shape history in a positive course toward some abstract normative goals seem to me tragically naive.

These might be the most important reasons why I cannot be labelled a "liberal" in the American context of that vocabulary.