Via ‘A Dose Of Theodore Dalrymple‘: ‘The Socialist Wasteland‘
‘Marxism, Dalrymple explains, answers several needs:
- ‘It has its arcana, which persuade believers that they have penetrated to secrets veiled from others, who are possessed of false consciousness.
- It appeals to the strongest of all political passions, hatred, and justifies it.
- It provides a highly intellectualised rationalisation of a discreditable but almost universal and ineradicable emotion: envy.
- It forever puts the blame elsewhere, making self-examination unnecessary and self-knowledge impossible.
- It explains everything.
- It persuades believers that they have a special destiny in the world. For disgruntled intellectuals, nothing could be more gratifying.’
Aside from the radical doctrines, it’s apparent that many in the West have placed their hopes and aspirations into various flavors of political idealism. Man’s nature is assumed to be fundamentally good, for the most part, merely in need of liberation from previous traditions, injustices and illegitimate claims to authority.
It’s often taken for granted that such post-Enlightenment ideals have room for ever more individuals (or collectives/categories of individuals). All that’s required is working towards particular ends, usually against common enemies (salvation through individual Romantic conceptions of Nature, shared communally, for example, or the oft confused relation between Scientific truth/method and social/political goods).
For many political idealists in the modern world, the moral goods are good enough, the universal truths sufficiently universal, in justifying their own actions at any given time (the properly balanced ideal State has room for competing factions of political idealists, mind you, as many idealists believe the knowledge is available to design such systems from the top-down).
The below links are to whom I’m indebted in cobbling such posts together on alas…a blog:
-Thomas Sowell discusses his constrained/unconstrained formulation from a Conflict Of Visions.
–William F. Buckley And Kenneth Minogue Discuss Ideology…as thorough an exploration of ideology and doctrines of radical liberation as I’ve come across.
A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…
How might this relate to the Heglian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’
Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’
Anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian socialist and sometime blind supporter of lefty causes: Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…
New liberty away from Hobbes…toward Hayek…but can you see Locke from there?: Repost-From Public Reason: A Discussion Of Gerald Gaus’s Book ‘The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom And Morality In A Diverse And Bounded World’
Richard Rorty tried to tie postmodernism and trendy leftist solidarity to liberalism more broadly: Repost: Another Take On J.S. Mill From “Liberal England”