I’ve been reading Johnson’s profiles of Western “intellectuals” like Rousseau and Marx, and what comes away with is that most of these individuals are profoundly unhappy, supremely egotistical to the point of utter lack of empathy or regard and who hate actual people and compensate for this lack of love by CLAIMING to love all of humanity.
Rousseau is the father of totalitarianism and was an utterly wicked man who abandoned all of his children to early death, stole and lied about his life. Marx lied about his cites in his books, never stepped outside of his library to get a sense of what life was like for the ‘workers’ or anyone else and basically had a poetic eschatological vision that he then went out to support with his works of ‘philosophy’ that were nothing but an expression of his love of domination and violence and the hope that after the revolution HE would rule.
What you take away is that there is a ‘vision’ and all of their service and labor is dedicated to that vision (whatever it may be, not always the stereotypically Marxist) and all other human beings are worthy of contempt outside of the role they can play in enacting this drama upon all of human civilization.
It’s like Juan Williams on Fox saying in response to the assertion that tax breaks were simply about people keeping more of Their money: “it’s all our money!”
We will always have a difficult time with the will to power in which the human ego and self-crafted ideals and morals place each solipsistic soul at the heart of their own metaphysical drama. And make no mistake, they can call themselves libertarian socialists or anarchists, they power they assume over the lives and decisions of others always manifests in state power or murderous chaos.
You can never really rationally debate these folks. You can only hope to teach their followers who may or may not be well-intentioned but poorly informed or need a building up of humility and of a moral compass.
So what’s the response? This will to power and magical thinking will not just go away because of history and it hasn’t thus far. Millenarian tyrants and their religions will be with us for some time. They typically are not defeated at the ballot box but by terrible bloodshed or by a sapping of all belief in their bankrupt notions of “human unity and progress.” Sapping that belief is difficult when it is not practiced first. There goes the dilemma!
Is there a FR “intellectual” ping list because essays like this should be required reading. I love Steyn but he’s a polemicist foremost. I enjoy reading essays with a slightly more dispassionate and academic approach as well. For too long, we’ve let the Left corner that market in what really have only amounted to screeds with a gloss of academic jargon (usually crit. theory.)
Conservative Academic Ping!
The commies were all for Equality. Equal pay for everyone. Stalin changed that around 1930, when he started paying workers more, who produced more. So, they got a stifling, horrific communist tyranny AND the same old economic inequality, along with a New Class of bureaucrats, who got rich off having power.
We're there already with the Obama Administration. Rules Laws don't apply to the politically connected. Geithner and the all the others, who didn't pay their taxes and they had nothing happen to them. Don't try that at home.
These people are utter fools. They're depraved.
From the article...
The second objection is philosophical and was voiced in 1850 by Frédéric Bastiat when his philosophy of liberty was attacked by Alphonse de Lamartine because it did not include equality, and so, Lamartine argued, could not proceed to fraternity. Bastiat replied that the second part of such a program would always destroy the first, making the third impossible.
BUMP!
Be sure to check out the reviews in Commentary and National Review.
One reviewer conjured up a picture of Wolfe having filled all these index cards with observations and struggling to form a book out of them.
So, for example, he has a lot of information about Carl Schmitt and a lot of observations about Rousseau and Kant, but doesn't succeed in applying them to today's politics without forcing things.
Plus, the "good liberal" "bad conservative" dualism limits his ability to make use of the knowledge and insights he does have.