#1217
by ThreeFlangedJavis » Fri Apr 09, 2021 4:24 am
Anyone see any similarities with today's moral giants? Are the liberals of today any less blind to what they're acquiescing to? The parallels are amazing. And our precious rainbow-haired revolutionaries think they're so special and unprecedented with their shiny new dawn.
The Landmarks contributors mention a second characteristic of intelligents: their devotion to a special set of manners, including dress, hygiene (deliberately poor), hair style (the famous “short-haired lady nihilists”), prescribed and taboo expressions, and a set of sexual practices that the Landmarks contributors describe as puritanical dissoluteness
Reminiscent of Orwell's description of the British socialist intelligentsia.
Still worse, intelligentsia “science” entailed an assertion that the world worked by blind, purposeless force and yet, as if guided by providence, was guaranteed to progress in human terms and reach moral perfection. (As people say today, the arc of history bends toward justice.)
If everything is political, then the cruelest means are not only permitted but obligatory. What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them. The argument that comes naturally to liberal-minded people—what if the shoe were on the other foot?—was rejected in principle. For an intelligent, there is no other foot.
Russia’s greatest contribution to world culture—the literary tradition of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov—could not have existed had these writers written to political formula. On the contrary, the Russian novel of ideas critically examined everything the intelligentsia stood for—the simplicity of human psychology, the easy division of people into good and evil, the supposition that life’s meaning is already known, and the reduction of ethics to politics—and showed how mistaken and dangerous such ideologies are.
Interesting how J.Peterson refers so often to the great Russian authors and how much the modern intelligentsia hate him.
Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual commitments.
Educated society knew that one could not just abolish the police, as the anarchists demanded, and that socialism would not instantly cure all ills, but they assured themselves that progressive opinion must be right
[quote=Keating post_id=502318 time=1617946596 user_id=1243]
Worth reading about the lead up to the Russian Revolution and the parallels that are around today:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
[/quote]
Anyone see any similarities with today's moral giants? Are the liberals of today any less blind to what they're acquiescing to? The parallels are amazing. And our precious rainbow-haired revolutionaries think they're so special and unprecedented with their shiny new dawn.
[quote]The Landmarks contributors mention a second characteristic of intelligents: their devotion to a special set of manners, including dress, hygiene (deliberately poor), hair style (the famous “short-haired lady nihilists”), prescribed and taboo expressions, and a set of sexual practices that the Landmarks contributors describe as puritanical dissoluteness[/quote]
Reminiscent of Orwell's description of the British socialist intelligentsia.
[quote]Still worse, intelligentsia “science” entailed an assertion that the world worked by blind, purposeless force and yet, as if guided by providence, was guaranteed to progress in human terms and reach moral perfection. (As people say today, the arc of history bends toward justice.)[/quote]
[quote]
If everything is political, then the cruelest means are not only permitted but obligatory. What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them. The argument that comes naturally to liberal-minded people—what if the shoe were on the other foot?—was rejected in principle. For an intelligent, there is no other foot.[/quote]
[quote]Russia’s greatest contribution to world culture—the literary tradition of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov—could not have existed had these writers written to political formula. On the contrary, the Russian novel of ideas critically examined everything the intelligentsia stood for—the simplicity of human psychology, the easy division of people into good and evil, the supposition that life’s meaning is already known, and the reduction of ethics to politics—and showed how mistaken and dangerous such ideologies are.[/quote]
Interesting how J.Peterson refers so often to the great Russian authors and how much the modern intelligentsia hate him.
[quote]Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual commitments.[/quote]
[quote][b]Educated society knew that one could not just abolish the police, as the anarchists demanded, and that socialism would not instantly cure all ills, but they assured themselves that progressive opinion must be right[/b][/quote]