Music to read by:
“The big, bad world doesn’t owe you a thing...I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass.”
The Left is to human welfare as prostitution is to love.
The various forms the Leftist
ideology has adopted — Marxism, Socialism, Neo-liberalism — are rarely
the result of initially spontaneous mass movements. Rather, such
eruptions are usually triggered by one or all of three classes of
people: theory-ridden intellectuals for whom exalted but impractical
ideas substitute for the real world of refractory human beings, ruthless
opportunists intent on seizing power, and wealthy socialites and media
types who like to play with forces they do not understand, expressing,
in the words of Victor Davis Hanson,
“a pathetic projection of their own elite tastes and guilty desires.”
The damage they do is immeasurable but the detritus they leave in their
wake has never deterred them from wreaking further havoc. For the
political Left assumes that it represents the next step in human
evolution. In reality, it embodies the next stage in civilizational
decline.
This “new” state of affairs will often manifest as a condition of
reversion, whether to an idealized vision of the past, as in Rousseau’s
natural state of man, or to a more primitive, tribal-like mode of
communal association predicated on an ostensible harmony among its
members. It’s a compelling and destructive dream world. This is not to
disparage those men and women whose sacrifice and commitment are
genuine. But the suspicion remains that the majority are unaware of
their true motives, which may have more to do with a sense of
inadequacy, self-reproach, and inner lack, however overlaid by a varnish
of self-satisfaction, than with a presumed nobility of purpose.
With its manufactured emphasis on peace, brotherhood, and dialogue,
its generic sympathy for the poor, the oppressed, the fugitive, and the
marginalized, and its mainstreaming of social and sexual deviance as a
species of cultural sophistication, the Left as we know it today manages
chiefly to assuage its own bad conscience. For the most potent
advocates of the contemporary Left, especially the Liberal Left, are
generally privileged people — politicians, academics, newspaper editors,
Hollywood actors and TV personalities, intellectual mandarins, the
parvenu rich, social patricians — who feel they have a debt to pay for
enjoying their own prosperity, exemptions, and perquisites. They are
like an extant version of that fossilized aberration known as Siphusauctum gregarium,
aka the stomach-on-a-stick, which resembles a tulip on the outside but
conceals a bulbous gut within. They rightfully belong in the Cambrian,
but are regrettably with us still.
Uneasy or embarrassed by favored status and determined to present
themselves as lofty egalitarians, they will do everything they can to
mobilize those whom they regard as the disenfranchised — the young, the
working classes, the destitute, the “undocumented,” the “different” —
while refusing to surrender their own prerogatives. They will treat
enemies as friends so as not to have to deal with obstacles to their
need for absolution. Inwardly crippled, they will feign magnanimity.
They will labor to change the world, not from the ground up but from the
top down. And in so doing, they will bleed other people’s blood.
Clearly, then, the empathy they profess for the socially
disadvantaged and the strangers in their midst is almost entirely
fraudulent. There is a deep lesion between the rhetoric and the reality.
They will embrace Rousseau’s argument in A Discourse on Inequality
that “the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to
nobody”; in actual fact, they generally evince a distinct hankering for
the fruits of the earth, which they guard jealously, and dispose of the
earth as they see fit. Such is the operative “dialectic” of the
socialist elite. Meanwhile, the dream must be protected in defiance of
both concrete practice and ensuing results.
Thus, the poor are kept at a distance in order not to depress
property values. Peace is bought at the expense of appeasement, social
tensions, and future conflict. The Humanities curriculum in the
universities is devoted to the ephemeral, the fashionable, the deviant,
the radical, and a host of social clichés, while the rigors of classical
scholarship as well as the archive of the larger and sustaining culture
are cast aside as colonial excrescences. Traditional wisdom is
anathema. The pursuit of “social justice” on which the Left prides
itself is just another cold platitude that the conduct and lifestyles of
its adherents demonstrably invalidate. They promote the global warming
and anti-oil hysteria under the pretence of mending the planet, a
program that facilitates the progressive transfer of power to the
hypertrophic State while profiting the petrocracies of the Middle East.
The plenary human rights agenda that offers asylum to jihadists and
terrorists who plot our destruction is entrenched as a pillar of moral
supremacy — which, as UK rights barrister Paul Diamond points out,
amounts to nothing less than a national suicide pact. And all this in
the name of improving the human lot by creating man and the world anew,
as if by fiat or a secular “Let there be.” The Left is consumed by the
fervor of coercive genesis.
Gradual social progress is both possible and desirable — what Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies
called “piecemeal social engineering” — but a revolution of the human
sensibility is an idea whose time will always be deferred. Society is
susceptible of adjustments and modifications and the human condition can
be little by little ameliorated through the agencies of prudent public
legislation and technological and scientific development. Change by
judicious increments over time may lead to progress in human well-being.
But radical upheavals and massive structural transformations in the
political, economic, and social life of peoples are usually doomed to
failure.
The reason is, or should be, obvious. Man himself does not change in
his essential being: envy, sloth, selfishness, cupidity, resentment, and
deception are as much a part of the human genome as charity, love and
imagination. The “vices,” however, invariably trump or impede the
“virtues,” as is evident both from the course of history and the
maculate and dishevelled lives of many of humanity’s supposed
benefactors. As J.B. Bury mordantly wrote in The Idea of Progress, a
hymn to the march of human reason, “the belief that our race is
travelling towards earthly happiness was propagated by some eminent
thinkers,” yet many of these “high-priests and incense-burners” were
“some not very fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their
hands.”
Bury felt that “a satisfactory social order [may emerge] by the
impersonal work of successive generations.” Still, this does not alter
the fact that the deepest gradients of the human psyche are
distressingly permanent. Nicoló Machiavelli was probably right when, in
his seminal treatise The Prince,
he posited the immutability of human nature, arguing that men “have and
always had the same passions, and therefore of necessity the effects
must be the same.” Words of provable wisdom, which our socialist
reformers, with their belief in the infinite malleability of human
substance and their conviction that natural givens are merely social
“constructs,” have neglected to everyone else’s cost. University of
Ottawa scholar Janice Fiamengo put it well in an article for the American Review of Canadian Studies:
“social hierarchies can be changed by human institutions, but hierarchy
itself, stemming from human nature, is probably ineradicable, whatever
the triumphalist prophets of progress might declare.”
In short, what the Left has never been able to come to terms with is
the Gordian knot of human nature. It will not be unravelled, resisting
every effort to separate its strands. As David Horowitz said in a recent speech at the University of North Carolina:
The obstacle to the realization of all progressive utopias is human nature. You can read all of the Marxist and leftist texts ever written and never encounter a consideration of…why it is so difficult to produce a society of human beings that is fundamentally different from the way human beings have lived since the beginning of recorded time.
Therefore, confronted with an intractable dilemma, leftist thinkers
and political activists must have recourse to what is known as the
“Alexandrian solution,” that is, rather than acknowledge an insoluble
complexity, they take a sword to the knot and, like Alexander the Great
in Phrygia, slice it in half. This is not a solution but an act of
violence and a kind of cheating which does not resolve the problem but
merely exacerbates it, creating in the long run more suffering than it
purports to redeem.
The Gordian knot of human nature will not be untangled. The Left does
not possess the magic touch of Shakespeare’s Henry V, who “Turn him to
any cause of policy,/The Gordian knot of it he will unloose.” Nor, as
those of a conservative bent understand, does anyone. The desire to cut
through the recalcitrant coil of man’s character leads only to eventual
harm and mutilation, to which the demise of every socialist experiment
on record abundantly attests. There is no such creature as the “New
Man.” No matter. Our socialist utopians are convinced they will
ultimately succeed and so continue to interpret every disaster they have
inflicted upon their victims as a sign of inevitable future success.
To adapt an aphorism from Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes,
the Left is to human welfare as prostitution is to love. An episodic
satisfaction is inexorably followed by human degradation masking as
social enlightenment. This is, of course, as good as it gets for the
ideological Left. This is as bad as it gets for the rest of us.
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