Clearly we have entered an age where the trivial, the superficial, and the picayune are regarded as bright shiny wonders for squawking, democratic magpies of all variety. As a nation we have dwindled to morally shallow, intellectually stunted pomeranians. The consequence to us all is the loss of genuine conversation, such as you see in this video featuring Mortimer Adler:
Notice how the interviewer corrects himself? He does not attack Adler. He measures his own understanding against what Adler is saying. (Some of us are old enough to have experienced that sort of thing!)
Compare that conversation to Ann Coulter's appearance on the View:
Whoopi says to Ann, "That's your act." In that single phrase, Whoopi confesses she has never done any genuine thinking in the 50+ years she has been breathing. Her world is a wrinkled, mottled fruit, not a bold, full-blooded examination of life. She simply isn't capable of thought. Hence, she isn't capable of talking to Ann, even if she had genuine intellectual acumen -- which she doesn't. Instead of measuring herself, she resorts to personal attack: "Are you married?"
That's how the "progressive" attacks. I know, because I've been held hostage to these truncated, perverse evasions of truth my entire life by Warm, Fuzzy Liberals. I wouldn't have posted The View video if I didn't think it represented about 60-70% of our population.
By the end of World War II it was clear to wiser minds that we were shifting from a country of citizens to a country of consumers. 1952 was the year Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler persuaded Encyclopedia Britannica and a very impressive list of individuals, community associations, and businesses to back the idea of a set of the Great Books of the Western Tradition. The reason is as simple as it is profound: you can gorge a human being on facts and notions and experiences, but that does not make him or her wise! It only makes them gorged. And dangerous.
If you want to know what a true liberal looks and acts like, here's Exhibit A: Mortimer Adler being interviewed by Mike Wallace.
The Mike Wallace-Mortimer Adler Interview, September, 1958
The key ingredient in this interview is something you hardly ever hear reference to anymore: the Idea of Man. When, at the center of your thinking, you believe, as John Locke did, that a human child is not your property, but the property of God, so to speak, you have a different idea of what your responsibilities are. Instead of trying to coerce or manipulate a person, you try to be just. As Aristotle put it:
Clearly as a civilization we have moved from the exaltation of man as a child of God to a mechanism that has no central moral bearing, a democratic mechanism in which "interests" prevail over the individual. In such a place you will encounter hostility any time you utter these words: honor, morality, principle, virtue, humility. In other words, barbarism is ascending. Love and honor will be ground under its boots while mindless, spineless minions assist it in its growth because they know no better.
Here is how Hutchins phrased it:
Allan Bloom dissected the "open" democratic man in his unequalled classic, the Closing of the American Mind:
Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled. It is historicism's ruse to remove all resistance to history, which in our day means public opinion, a day when public opinion already rules. How often have I heard the abandonment of requirements to learn language or philosophy or science lauded as a progress of openness. Here is where the two kinds of openness clash. To be open to knowing, there are certain kinds of things one must know which most people don't want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant. Even the life of reason is often unappealing; and useless knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is not obviously useful for a career, has no place in the student's vision of the curriculum. So the university that stands intransigently for humane learning must necessarily look closed and rigid. If openness means to "go with the flow", it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it. True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.
Aristotle pointed out that we learn from, or through, pain. What Whoopi couldn't grasp in Ann Coulter's observation was that a society which rejects virtue encounters pain: in this case, the pain of sundered families and a rising crime rate. Just think how interesting that interview might have been if Whoopi . . . you know. Had a brain.
It is in this moral and spiritual vacuum that we see the development of something I first encountered in the 90s: for conservatives, a president is a chief executive officer, no more. For "liberals", a president is a referendum on life itself: what to believe, when to believe it, and how. This is how and why "liberals" believe conservatives take their "orders" from Rush Limbaugh. We're talking about people who cannot think about or deal with principles. They see "leaders" as people who manipulate. It is this moral and spiritual vacuum that encourages subservience.
Andrew Thomas touched upon this growing menace in Do Liberals Crave a Master?
In most conservative writing (Thomas Sowell, Ayn Rand, and more recently Mark Levin) the common theme is the sanctity of individual freedom and liberty. The conservative is an individualist and an independent thinker, as opposed to those who primarily identify themselves as members of a group. The term "conservative" is a misnomer for this philosophy, as it connotes a preservation of the status quo, or even a "regressive" yin to the "Progressive" yang. This is why I believe a more appropriate label for conservative philosophy is "individualist", and I will refer to it in this manner for the remainder of this article.
Next, a pop-psychology primer: individualists gravitate toward existential thinking, or a view of the world where individuals have complete freedom of choice and take full responsibility for the results of those choices. This mandates that choices must be made with a logical evaluation to determine the potential consequences. The impartial evaluation of phenomena to determine the truth is an offshoot of existentialism known as phenomenology. The phenomenologist is rational and emotionally detached from the subject of analysis, eliminating judgment and perception. Once the perceptions of reality are stripped away as much as possible, the phenomenologist then attempts to perform an insightful analysis of the object to determine what is real or "true". I believe that many individualists tend to be effective phenomenologists due to their ability to separate themselves from group-think and emotional judgment. Therefore, let's use the phenomenological process to analyze the "Neolib as masochist" theory.
My problem with Rush Limbaugh is similar to what I've described above: true conservatism means restoring man to man's place. Markets and politics and personality are, by operation of Law, subservient to those principles which are recovered through the process of building character, one painful step at a time. In other words, defending markets isn't enough; justifying corporate behaviors isn't enough. We have to dig deeper than that.
And we'd best dig fast.
I hold no hope for the present generation. Much pain is in store.
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