Stephen Rittenberg has a wonderful post up at Horsefeathers in which he discusses the dangers posed by “wordsmith intellectuals,” as he calls them. He draws a line from the intellectuals of the 19th Century, through Stalin/Hitler apologist H.G. Wells, right up to today’s apologists for muslim fanatics. Here are a couple of particularly trenchant passages:
Our wordsmith utopians disavow their own aggression. They feel, they care, they empathize, they are concerned about the children. They understand other cultures and wouldn’t think of using force to defend ours. They’d deploy overvalued, magically invested words to resolve all conflicts. Their own sense of identity is sentimental. They weep, they deeply sympathize, they admire themselves for being virtuous. When utopian tyrantsâ€â€Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro– behave murderously, it is rationalized as a temporary measure in pursuit of noble goals. Anyway, utopia requires scapegoats to blame for its failure to materialize. Just as Wells trivialized Hitler and Stalin’s violence, so do contemporary leftists minimize jihadi violence and blame Israel.
Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy, a garden of Eden in which painful differences of talent, looks, fortune, do not exist, an egalitarian paradise where sexual and aggressive conflicts don’t exist and all problems are solvable with words. As long as human beings feel injured by their very condition, their own mortality, their own vulnerability, as long as reality includes blows to one’s sense of childhood grandiosity and entitlement, the fantasy of socialist paradise will persist.
Read the whole thing, as someone once said.
Citation?
Arthur Schlesinger, almost a half century ago, called them doughfaces
He pointed out: “Problems are much simpler when viewed from the office of a liberal weekly than when viewed in terms of what will actually happen when certain ideologically attractive steps are taken.”
And that: “Thus the expiatory role of resolutions [blog postings? anti-war protests?] in progressive meetings. A telegram of protest to a foreign chancellery gives the satisfaction of a job well done and a night’s rest well earned. The Doughfaces differ from Mr. Churchill: dreams, they find, are better than facts.
“Progressive dreams [or those of “doubtful conservatives” as well] are tinged with a brave purity, a rich sentiment and a noble defiance. But, like most dreams, they are notable for the distortion of facts by desire.”
Everything old is new again.
SMG
Nut graf:
I liked what Jean-Francois Revel said in How Democracies Perish: “So long as there is a single rock in all the world’s oceans without socialism, there will be boat people.”
Whoa!
I am a musician who occasionally hears a song that I really wish that I had written.
I read this, and am now kicking my own butt for never having found the right words to say EXACTLY (where did “italics go?”) what this post says. A knife to the heart of our lefter side, even though their ears are plugged.
The New Millenium. Quite a pisser, huh?
“Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy,”
Which is why wolfowitz got that job at the world bank.
Explain that, would you, actus?
““Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy,â€Â
Which is why wolfowitz got that job at the world bank.”
I got that one. Because of the mounds of earth and the balloons. Geeze. EVERYONE knows that.
Well that’s some crap.
The analyst should know better than to take the patient’s word for it when he says what he desires.
Means exist. Ends do not.
[etc.]
But if it makes you feel better…
psy, I think he’s saying you need a hug.
<thwap!>
Bad Pablo!
Be vewwy quiet. We’re hunting twolls.
Creativity does come from emotional imbalance. That’s why so many geniuses die young.
And incidentally, since I didn’t die when I was twenty seven, I knew I was never meant to be a rock star. And I haven’t been able to write a song since I got sober – I just don’t feel whiny enough.
“Kill my devils, kill my angels”. I don’t remember who said it, but about as true as it can be.
The main problem now is that I never made any plans for being older than twenty seven, and my whole life has been an ad-lib since then. Sort of like a thirty (+) year panic attack…
Oh well. Capitalism has treated me better than my “Bro’s” in Africa.
OH SHIT! Am I gonna be called a racist now?
Hey, how bout them Rockies?
Brilliant.. An excellent find.. Thank you CraigC..
It always amazes me when other people are able to take the thoughts ricocheting around inside my skull, distill them down and write them out more clearly than I’m able to..
Me? Whatever. Socialism bad. It doesn’t take Homer.
This is a good example of why I call myself a libertarian (or classical liberal) and not a conservative. That man can be made better through the intercession of imagination is something I find more compelling that the suggestion that such a thing is only possible after death. To dream of things that never were and say, ‘why not?’ is a tool that can be wielded either by the unimaginative to justify tyranny or by the passion of those who have been responsible for, well, all the damn knowledge that humanity has acquired. If humanity were to simply accept our collective lot with a stiff upper lip and be done with it, we’d still be in the fucking stone age. The question should not be, “is it foolish to employ creativity to better our plight?” but rather, “through what mechanism should we employ our creativity to better our plight?”
Damn. Used the wrong strikethrough markup. The blockquote should have read:
Thanks to all for the generous and interesting comments.
Steve
“Creativity does come from emotional imbalance. That’s why so many geniuses die young.”
Looking for a way out, perhaps. Bleeding off the pressure, in other words. Too bad there are so few geniuses compared to the numbers of emotionally unbalanced people.
What? How dare you diss America’s favorite cartoon philosopher!? Donuts aren’t the answer but they’ll do until something better comes along.