Posted on 07/21/2009 7:45:44 PM PDT by lbryce
Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership.
But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.
These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.
Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself. This is an depth overview on the life of a man referred to as "The Godfather of American Liberalism", one that has thankfully changed my perspective on the books, movies, I shall henceforth forever avoid.
I thought Algore invented Liberalism /sarc
Wells’ greatest influence on American thought was probably thru his Outline of History, which while generally forgotten today, was enormously influential during the 20s.
It’s actually still quite readable, although its leftist slant is easily detectable if you pay attention.
Wells was not really a Marxist type socialist, much less a Leninist. He was a Fabian.
Welles seems more like a Nazi with his notions of “undesireables” and a ruling class of so-called intellectuals.
Great read!
parsy, who wishes he had an Eloi girl, naive and trusting, and...oh forget it.
As far as avoiding the SF novels are concerned, your point is well-taken. Using Wagner as an apt analogy, notwithstanding the logic you profess separating the artist from the ideologue, Wagner's music was banned by the Israel Philharmonic for over fifty years until long time, conductor, director Zubin Mehta put an end to it.
..one that has thankfully changed my perspective on the books, movies, I shall henceforth forever avoid.
What I was going to forever avoid was the perspective of seeing H.G. Wells with the undiminished admiration, respect I had towards him prior to reading the article.
You need to keep in mind that this strain of thought was extremely common among leftist intellectuals in the later 19th and early 20th. Jack London, for instance, generally considered a leftist, wrote some short stories that could have been written by Hitler, or Goebbels, anyway.
These memes were utterly discredited when a genuine attempt was made under the Nazis to put them into practice. All their earlier proponents, on the Left and the Right, pretended they had never shared them.
I’m not an enormous fan of democracy, but all the alternatives do seem to be a good deal worse.
There was never really an official ban of Wagner’s music in Israel. It was just an unspoken rule out of courtesy.
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