FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS -- Liberalism's Desperate Attempt To Restore Illusory Childhood Eden!

Once long long ago, liberalism was a fact based system of ideas which took into account reality and acknowledged human nature's flaws and imperfections. Its aims were not utopian but pragmatic. However, since the 1960's, liberalism (like many individuals) has undergone a regression to childhood modes of thinking, and now constitutes a utopian ideology having more in common with totalitarian Islam than with the mature philosophy it once represented. It has an infantile quality, as anyone who reads Maureen Dowd can attest. Its rage is the rage of a frustrated young child, as any reader of the left's websites knows.

Its self flattery and compensatory scorn for its 'stupid' opponents is reminiscent of nothing so much as the behavior of children in a sandbox. It requires scapegoats for the failure of perfection, usually Jews, Zionists or their functional equivalent -- George Bush......

This is hardly surprising. It is the primary philosophical/ideological conflict in Western civilization since the late eighteenth century: the conflict between traditionalist culture and Romantic culture. It is one of the things I highlight in my Literature course.

All ideologies or philosophies are based on assumptions. Even the most basic logical structures (the syllogism: If A=B & B=C then A=C) depend on premises for their conclusions. Go back far enough in the logical process, and the premises have to be assumed, rather than proved. This tends to be one of the bases for the evolution vs. creationism arguments... the premises that they start from makes any agreement on conclusions impossible.

For most of the history of the West, certain premises about the fundamental nature of human beings have prevailed. Traditional culture began from the basic belief that humanity is born in sin, or fundamentally flawed with the capacity for evil. Part of this assumption is based on Judeo-Christian religious values (see "original sin"). When you assume this about humanity, certain attitudes and beliefs MUST follow. If humanity is fallen, then the job of parents becomes one of training children to be proper adults (restricting their natural "evil" impulses), and the job of society is to protect its citizens from the harm that may inflict upon each other. The Founding Fathers subscribed to this view, as they based our government on the belief that no one could be trust with power... that we are all imperfect and flawed beings.

However, starting with Jean Jacques Rousseau, and finding a powerful voice through poets and philosophers in Europe, another culture grew to challenge traditionalist culture. It started from the basic assumption that man was a tabula rasa, a clean slate, and that a child represented true innocence. Once you assume this, you must then logically progress to views that hold (as did Rousseau) that it was adults (who had been unfortunately warped by their maturation) and the society that they built that robs children of their innocence (hence the "noble" savage of Romantic literature... unwarped by "modern" culture). So, unlike the traditionalist who sees the primary purpose of childhood to be to prepare the child for his life as an adult, the Romantic saw childhood as a time of innocence that every person should aspire to return to.

Or, in brief, to call a liberal (the lineal descendants of the Romantics) child-like is a compliment to them... they see children as being the purest of beings. This is why emotion is so important to them, as it is the primary decision-making tool of a child. And it is why we constantly look at liberals and want to tell them to "grow up"...

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