An image that just popped into my head is that we are flickering flames, where the “wax” from which we emerge is the actual principles which inform our actions. Most people have two reasons for doing things (this insight is not original to me, by the way): the reason they give, and the actual reason. The actual reason is who you really are, which may be quite different than the face you offer to the world.
I spend a lot of time pondering the nature of self and identity, since our answer to those questions cannot be separated from our political commitments. Conservatives view “politics” as a means of preserving a way of life that already exists. If you ask them what they want for the future, that is an easy question to answer: the same as today, except that we implement our core historical ideals even better than we have to this point.
Leftists have a much larger problem. So much of their “doctrine” is actually praxis. Their “orthopraxis”, if I might be permitted that word here, is the rhetorical rejection of injustice, within which is enfolded inequality. Their orthopraxis consists in an effort to achieve rhetorical and then political dominance over anyone who disputes their leveling narratives.
Yet one searches in vain for actual positive principles by means of which they define themselves. Obviously, they are not racists, sexists, “adultists” (an amusing word I did not make up), elitists, homophobes, Christo-cenric, ethnocentric, or classist. What, then, are they?
Logically, if no differences are permitted in how we view different groups, however, they might be constituted, then the movement is necessarily in the direction of homogeneity. This flows from the ineluctable conclusions that I can’t priviledge me and mine, simply because that is what has always been done, and because those are the people I feel closest to.
For now, various cultural “others” are permitted their identities. For the purposes of western leftists, the current dichotomy between Us and Them in our own cultural system–which is to say the Politically Correct versus everyone else–is sufficient to let pass the racisms and sexisms of other nations and cultures. They presume such cultures are on their side, since they are speaking AGAINST the posited oppressions of the people–the non-PC–in our own culture who have “hurt” them.
It is an undifferentiated ocean of rhetoric backed by praxis, but unbacked by articulated or articulable principles. Why should difference be eradicated and not negotiated, for example? To take a concrete example, how is it that leftists can be so plainly bigoted against white Christian males that they refuse to accept their mere existence, and yet claim to be enlightened?
The key, here, is not what they think, but what they DO. Action is the point of propaganda, not coherence. In fact, mutability is a primary intended outcome of propaganda, since the needs of the Party change.
All of this matters because when you look at, say, the outcomes of the World Bank, which was founded by Leftists, you see they have been appalling. Yes, rich white men have played their part and made their fortunes. But on balance, the INTENT of the thing was to build a Communist world–also an invention of rich white men, I might add–which looks like 1930’s America, but forever and with an infinite array of surveillance gadgets to keep the people thereby “saved” from ever mounting an effective resistance.
How do people seek these things? How do they fail, after decades and generations of potential learning, to learn the lessons?
One can only explain this by positing that for leftists their belief system is an article of faith. If they do as they are told to do, if they repeat the mantras they are given, they are rescued from the tyranny of freedom. They don’t have to think about who they are, and what to do.
In a culture in which traditional values survived–take as an example any intact culture which the Left wants to “protect”, say South Vietnam before it was invaded by the North, or Sudan–these questions would have been answered for them. Gender roles, social roles, cultural patterns, all would have been assigned.
In the modern world, though, so much of what we took for granted has been destroyed. Space has been cleared for a “New World”, but no one knows what it might look like. Marx never spoke to it, and in neglecting morality, discouraged consideration of it as more important than impersonal historical and economic forces.
Yet as Emerson rightly said, history, proper, is biography. There is no history outside the concrete decisions of individuals, as leaders and in groups. We CANNOT build a positive future without the cultivation of good decisions, which themselves depend on coherent moral codes.
One tends, in studying history, to think of groups as relatively static in their motivations. One tends, as an example, to think of the Federal Reserve and IMF as composed of people who cannot be swayed from the conviction that what they do is acceptable. Yet, people do wake up, at times. A good example is Whittaker Chambers, who outed a whole spy ring in Washington, although he was ignored by FDR and Truman for some years.
Such things are possible. People can reach new decisions, based on perceptions that are new to them. One never knows how things will play out, but, again, it helps a lot if you have a means for making decisions, and a plan.