We all know how pointless it is to argue with self-proclaimed 'progressives' - their conceit is impenetrable because it is the whole of their being. Although they proclaim the preeminence of reason, they lack a rational core that might be reached by evidence that contradicts their world-view.
In a word, they are stupid. Anyone who surrenders mental autonomy probably possessed very little intellectual curiosity in the first place. They can only reiterate the few 'certainties' without which life would be intolerable to them.
In a recent City Journal article, Theodore Dalrymple points out that the late John Kenneth Galbraith essentially wrote the same book fifty times, shamelessly recycling the same shallow pool of ideas to become the foremost 'progressive' intellectual of his time.
I don't know why the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Galbraith are referred to as economists: they were philosophers. Any philosophical exegesis must be based on a concept of the nature and purpose of humanity. Theirs was that the undifferentiated mass of humanity needed detailed regulation by a handful of self-selecting superior beings like themselves.
Hello Lenin and, ultimately, hello Plato.
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Well, Plato tried that out in Sicily, didn't he? And ended up in the mines! Plotinus is my man, a gentler and 'more progressive'(sic) soul. And his soul lives on, if somewhat adumbrated and diluted, in the English Romantic poets and in the English Church (the illegitimate children of St.Benedict!)And in the visions of Teilhard de Chardin S.J.
ReplyDeleteTeilhard? I cannot claim to remember much of what I read by him, long ago, but I do recall a lurking authoritarianism; although maybe that's just guilt by association with the SJ, one of whose Spanish members denounced me violently as a 'heretic' when I was a VSO in Bolivia.
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