Horsefeathers - STICK A FORK IN IT, IT'S DONE: THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM

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October 01, 2006

STICK A FORK IN IT, IT'S DONE: THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM

Horsefeathers has been fascinated by the decline of Liberalism. Perhaps this is because its rise and fall has occurred over the course of his own lifetime. It sometimes strikes us that all the people, now departed, whose opinions mattered most to us were liberals. While they are gone, Liberalism itself lingers, sick unto death, an almost moribund version of its once lively self. Liberalism was a part of the world of ideas in which we lived, part of what we admired in the older generation. It was the air we breathed and the way we thought of ourselves: we were Liberals, and proud of it. And now it is no more.

How did a once robust philosophy devolve into a childish set of insular, self- flattering beliefs? How and why did the requirement for reasoned self-criticism, so vital to Liberalism as we knew it, give way to a whiny, feminized set of politically correct sentiments articulated with all the intelligence of a bumper sticker? How did feelings come to assume primacy over thought, while victim status became more sought after than real achievement? Finally, how did Liberalism come to reject reason itself, in favor of politically correct stances and naïve fantasies about human nature? We suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that ideas, like the individuals holding them, can regress, becoming less mature and more primitive. Liberalism has regressively assumed the attributes of a primitive system of shared beliefs having more in common with backward cult-religions like Islam, than advanced ones like modern Christianity. Like Islam, Liberalism has become the dogma of a community of true believers who scorn non-believers as dangerous, unenlightened and malevolent, although it hasn’t quite reached the point of calling for death to the neo-Con infidels. Practitioners of both creeds are grandiosely self-righteous. Each is constantly frustrated and enraged at the failure to attain a perfect world, hence scapegoats are needed. For each it’s the Jews---more openly in Muslim madrassas---more deviously in the fashionable liberal disdain for the neo-Cons, Zionism, and the “Israel lobby”. Contemporary Christian faith, as Pope Benedikt XVI recently made clear, requires a God constrained by reason, one who cannot employ violently barbaric means to promote the faith. The God of Islam, as we learned from reactions of the faithful to his speech, is not constrained by reason, nor by any human considerations at all. Allah can, and does, urge violent jihad to subdue the non-believers. True believers support Islam by beheading infidels, shooting nuns in the back, burning churches, calling for murder of the Pope, and celebrating homicidal ‘martyrdom’. Murderous Jew hatred is more openly expressed every day by mullahs than it was by Nazis. Where Hitler tried to conceal his Final Solution, the jihadis openly boast that they will finish the job. Reason is nowhere to be found in madrassas and mosques.

Reason has also been pretty much banished from the precincts of Liberalism. Notice how pronouncements by the likes of Ayman al Zawahari sound like talking points composed by the DNC. In fact, the repudiation of reason is a defining symptom of contemporary Liberalism, whose daily tantrums manifest all the rationality of frustrated, angry 4 year olds. Even the causes liberals claim to believe in- minority rights, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of artistic expression- are quickly set aside when it comes to Islamo-fascists who treat women like cattle, homosexuality as a capital offense, and regularly destroy art (the Bamayan Buddhas) while pronouncing and carrying out fatwas on offending artists. To get a real sense of the regressive nature of modern Liberalism, compare the daily invective hurled at President Bush, with the deafening silence from the same people when jihadis go on a rampage in reaction to a carefully reasoned philosophical enquiry by the Pope. Better not stir up the savages by suggesting our values are superior to theirs.

What has happened to Liberalism to transform it from a coherent philosophy, clear-eyed and politically unafraid, into a cowardly and childish utopianism? The first direct and repeated diagnostic warnings came from the great liberal critic, Lionel Trilling. As early as the 1950’s he exposed the philosophical and psychological weakness at the core of Liberalism. It is Liberalism’s conception of human nature. Liberalism assumes that human nature is inherently good and only corrupted by malign social forces, ranging from the family to the social structures of capitalist democracies. Such a view of human nature leads inevitably to the utopian fantasy that human conflict can be abolished, by sound social policies and/or by psychotherapy. It explains why liberals have been fellow travelers of Communism and sympathetic to the likes of Stalin, Mao and Castro. It accounts for the self-satisfaction and condescension of liberals: they are on the side of the good, the noble, the ideal. It accounts for their role in creating a feel good, therapeutic culture where non-judgmental multicultural tolerance is enforced in the name of liberal ideals. The history of our times, however, confirms Winston Churchill’s remark: “No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism”.

In his Freud lecture at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1956, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, Trilling admiringly cited the classical psychoanalytic view of human nature as being eternally conflicted and not changeable through schemes of social engineering. He discerned in Freud’s writings, particularly in Civilization and its Discontents a stoic classicism. He believed this could serve as a corrective to the utopianism that regards human nature as infinitely malleable. Unfortunately, in the years that followed, Trilling’s voice was drowned out by the rise of the New Left. Freud’s stoicism did not fit well with the temper of the times. Revolution was in the air and quick fixes, behavior modification, psycho-babbling charlatans selling transcendence prevailed. Within psychoanalysis itself, Freud’s dark, tragic realism was rejected as too pessimistic. A new sunnier, feel good therapeutic approach was preferred. Writers from Wilhelm Reich to R. D. Laing, to Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse argued that neurotic unhappiness was produced by "surplus repression" imposed by capitalism. "Getting in touch" with those repressed feelings became the cant of the age and made fortunes for many a psychopath. Change the family and society, they claimed, and human nature would follow. Come the revolution and egalitarian happiness will prevail as inhibitions and differences wither away. Marcuse’s vision of a world free of repression and inhibition animated the campus radicals of the 1960’s and Trilling became a prime target of their adolescent rage against repressive authority.

Samuel Johnson, in the 18th century wrote, “How small of all that human hearts endure/that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Liberals disagreed. Trilling presciently understood what might happen should Liberalism become unhinged from the tragic realities of human existence. It could proceed down the same utopian path that produced the horrors of Hitler’s pursuit of perfect ‘Aryan’ man or Stalin’s genocidal effort to create the “new Soviet man”, or Mao’s slaughter of millions in pursuit of an egalitarian utopia, or Pol Pot’s mass killing of those who stood in the way of a perfect world. To this day there is a nostalgic romanticism amongst many liberals for Communism’s ‘noble experiment’. Trilling articulated his critique from within Liberalism in books like The Liberal Imagination and in many essays, especially the Freud lecture mentioned above, and in the last chapter of Sincerity and Authenticity wherein he exposed the dangerous inanities of what has come to be known as the “therapeutic culture”.

Trilling was a literary critic, but he did write one important novel, The Middle Of The Journey. It was a political novel, in which he presented the ideas mentioned above through the novel’s characters. The central figure, John Laskell, an intelligent, secular man of the left at midlife, goes through a physical and spiritual/psychological crisis. It leads him to question his own, as well as his friends’ sympathy for Communism. His illness forces him to confront death--the actual, biological limitations of human existence. He comes to understand the utopian ideas underlying liberal sympathy for radical leftist totalitarians. He grapples with his own conflicted feelings about Communism and eventually comes to an understanding of its anti-human qualities. He recovers his physical and psychological health, breaking with his circle of friends who remain in thrall to the ideology of left utopianism. Lakell’s Liberalism comes to be informed by a realistic sense of the limited human condition, a deep understanding of conflicted human nature. Trilling’s novel thus presents a fictionalized argument for the stoic freedom derived from genuine self knowledge, as opposed to liberal self flattery. The Middle Of The Journey can be said to be hopeful about the still, small voice of reason’s power to prevail over irrationalism.

We’ve come a long way from the Liberalism of Trilling, from the Democratic party of Truman, JFK, Henry Jackson, and Daniel Moynihan. Now we see one of the last survivors of that bygone political world, Joe Lieberman (see Roger Simon’s interview here) targeted for vile anti-Jewish abuse by the leftists who’ve taken over the Democratic party. The fall of Communism would seem to have constituted a final blow to the utopian fantasists of the left, but that hasn’t occurred. The liberal wordsmith class, the former campus radicals of the 1960’s made sure of that. Unlike Trilling’s John Laskell, these folks have always overvalued words. They were the glib children who avoided physical challenges and were rewarded by teachers for their ‘creativity’. Joseph Conrad, in his great novel dealing with utopian politics, Under Western Eyes, had his narrator, a teacher of languages remark: “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”, and so liberal wordsmiths on campus and in the mainstream media, deploy words to cover up, obscure and even deny the reality of totalitarian violence. President Bush is hated by liberals for many reasons but one of them is traceable to a speech soon after 9-11 in which he directly linked Islamist jihadis with 20th century totalitarian ideologies:

“...we have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

A call to arms? How crude! How arrogant! Doesn’t Bush recognize the beautiful ideals expressed by those utopian, 20th century ideologies? If only we had a President who would humbly sit down and talk, use words to convey our empathy and our Western guilt in a therapeutically sensitive manner. If he did so we could at last realize the noble dream of the 1960s to make love not war.

        Another way to measure how far we’ve come since Trilling’s critique is by contrasting Middle Of The Journey with a recent political novel, Saturday, by Ian Mac’Ewan. If he wasn’t consciously writing with The Middle Of The Journey in mind, Mac’Ewan nevertheless addresses a number of the same issues, arriving at starkly different and ultimately dispiriting answers. Briefly stated, his characters, faced with barbarism, choose appeasement. The central figure, Henry Perowne, is an accomplished neurosurgeon at midlife. He is a man of action and of few words. He saves lives, is very skilled and is untroubled by self-reflection. He has a good marriage and two young adult children whom he loves but doesn’t understand. They are both creative artists, the son a musician, the daughter a poet. Perowne is not a contemplative man, and he is impatient with art, preferring the hard truths of science and the active physical life---his prime recreation is tennis. We are led to believe that his idealistic anti-Iraq war daughter, by virtue of her devotion to poetry and politics, is a psychologically deeper person than Perowne. She has an ample measure of adolescent scorn for her stereotypical surgeon father. His well ordered life is shadowed by terror in post 9-11 London, and he lacks the finer empathic virtues of the artist who might ‘understand’ the grievances of our enemies. At first Perowne seems clear when he argues that the ‘idealistic’ anti-war position of his daughter, is in reality pro-Saddam. However, this argument is the high point of Perowne’s moral clarity and confidence. Mac’Ewan cleverly dramatizes Perowne’s real life confrontation with savagery when, during an anti-Iraq war demonstration, he is set upon by a mugger. Perowne escapes the initial encounter but, lacking the finer human touch, he unknowingly humiliates the young attacker. The mugger returns with his friends, invading the surgeon’s home, threatening to rape and kill his wife and daughter and terrorizing the family. Before they arrive, the surgeon’s son tells his father that he dangerously humiliated the thugs and provoked them. (Think Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.) Perowne and his family survive, intact. And what saves them? Why it’s poetry! Perowne’s anti-war poet daughter recites Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach to the mugger, who is instantly overwhelmed by its beauty and lays down his knife! Bring art and empathy, not force, to the barbarians and peace will prevail!
        This is the utopian message of Saturday. Does Mac’Ewan really believe this, or is he simply reporting the symptoms of a grave illness ravaging the body of liberalism? He seems to believe it, because he stacks the deck to have the surgeon proceed from ignorance to understanding. Saved by art, his consciousness now raised, the good Doctor rushes to the hospital to perform a life saving operation on the mugger who nearly destroyed his family. Talk about liberal guilt! Mac’Ewan’s surgeon makes reparations for his affluent life and his failure to appreciate the plight of underclass, the ‘other’. There is little doubt Mac”Ewan wants us to equate the surgeon’s situation with that of the secular West, threatened by utopian Islamic jihadis. Dealing forcefully with these threats, Mac’Ewan’s surgeon learns, inflicts ‘humiliation’ on our enemies and makes them angrier and more dangerous. Saturday is a reverse image of The Middle Of The Journey. The initially healthy-minded surgeon abandons his own hard won knowledge of the truths of the body, in favor of wishful, narcissistically flattering fantasies subsumed under the rubric of ‘art’.
        The setting of the novel, in London during the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, makes the parable clear. How should the West deal with nihilistic threats from suicidal Islamists? Mc’Ewen’s neurosurgeon responds aggressively to the mugger’s threats, only to have things get much worse as a result. Furthermore, from the outset he is depicted as lacking in psychological nuance and depth. He is not interested in deep understanding of himself or others. In short, a caricature of the surgeon as man of action, a technician uninterested in emotions. We are meant to think of Western political leaders impulsively striking back at savage foes. Perowne ia a pragmatist who, for all his exceptional surgical skill, lacks any appreciation for the deeper truths of literature and philosophy. The reader is flattered to feel superior to such a man, one who is impatient with fiction and poetry. Mac’Ewan’s portrait verges on absurdity as when his poet daughter is discussing the poet (Matthew) “Arnold” and he wonders “Arnold who?” The choice of Dover Beach as the poem that soothes the savage beast and saves the surgeon’s life is crucial to the novel. Trilling wrote his first book about Matthew Arnold but we doubt he ever thought Arnold’s words had the power to magically seduce and disarm dangerous killers. Beautiful and touching as the poem is, it is one of resignation and passive yielding. It is certainly not a rousing call to arms against the foe. It is the perfect poem for tender hearted appeasers. The world is one of hopeless moral equivalence where ‘ignorant armies’ war on each other. It is about loss of faith, failure, and resignation tempered by despairing love. It is a beautiful depressive lament and in the context of Mac’Ewan’s Saturday, suggests it is hopeless to fight the barbarians who are already inside the gates.

“…Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Between Trilling’s The Middle Of The Journey and Mac’Ewan’s Saturday we can chart the steady regressive weakening of the Liberal mind. In truth, liberalism has had a pretty long run as our dominant ideology. Now it is a hollowed out shell of its former self, a practically moribund ideology. Someone ought to step forward, pull the plug, sign the death warrant and bury the corpse. The stench will soon be getting strong.

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Steven, absolutely brilliant essay. I never read anything better in Commentary or First Things. As soon as I write this I shall read it again. I mean this as the highest compliment. Trilling of course was almost the last of the honest, cultivated FDR liberals, the kind of people who applauded Churchill's Nobel Prize for literature in the 1950's. I know him via my father, who was an English and French teacher by training and who was an avid reader of the AMERICAN SCHOLAR, COMMENTARY, OPERA NEWS, THE NEW YORK TIMES and the THE ECONOMIST. My father, Thomas Munro, Jr. (1st Lt US Army 1942-1946 war service; USAR 1946-1953) I am sure read ten times as much Trilling as I ever did -I have only a few books bearing his name. (such as the Portable Mathew Arnold; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia preface by Trilling PROBABLY the first thing I ever read by Trilling, Short Stories of John O'Hara and the Oxford Anthology of English Literature). But I familiar with his literary criticism,essays and stories though I did not know his works concerning Freud. Freud, you must understand, was somewhat of an anti-Christ or heretic to me and I read him with extreme distrust as I read Neitzsche or Marx. I remember Thomas Mann, who ought to have known, said that to read Neitzche was extremely dangerous as it was, with Marx, the taproot of Nazism and modern Fascist-Totalitarianism. I am quite sure however that via my father I read numerous articles by Trilling. My father frequently made 'cuttings' of his Trillings articles or book reviews and placed them in strategic books. I read many of them and some I am sure I still have tucked away in a Dicken's biography ( I love Dickens) or in an Oxford anthology. Alas, due to a flood in Livingston, New Jersey in the early part of this century, many of these books and the collections of his cuttings have been destroyed! I feel myself fortunate that I was able to preserve a fragment of my father's library myself though of course my library is much weaker in English literature than it should be. My father's library of French, Greek, German and Latin literature -he read them all in the original- I have never seen surpassed in any private library. It is not without exaggeration that I say he had a MA level knowledge in many cultural languages of the world plus a very strong historical, political and economic knowledge. Of course, except as a stint in the New York Public schools as a substitute French and English teacher and as a TA at Brooklyn College for Dr. Grabanya (I think I spelled that right) he never taught formally but instead spent most of his life as a citizen soldier and man of business. My father was a great but not uncritical admirer of Trilling. I think the reason for this, of course, is the Kim Philby- Willie Gallacher- Adam Ferguson-Scottish Highlander-Thin Red Line-Argyll Trench Wisdom effect. Kim Philby and Willie Gallacher were Communists whose paths crossed with my family in Ireland, Scotland , the USA and Lebanon. (I wrote an article about Philby for Military History that has been published in the McGraw Hill anthology.) My family of course lived amidst the cleared remnants of embittered Highlanders and Irishmen who dwelled in the Red Clyde circa 1890-1927 many of who embraced big S Socialism and quite a few Communism. I often wondered why my Auld Pop never began a full fledged Communist -he was a strong big S Socialists but he broke with his pro-Communist friends in the 1920's and definitely by 1936 Moscow trials. Of course my father's mentor in Brooklyn College was a cryto-Communist Big Liberal but never convinced my father of Communism's Big Lie either. At Brooklyn College, 1933-1937, my father had lots of chances; several of his classmates volunteered to fight in Spain for the Spanish (Left) Republicans and one was killed. My father had a romantic streak -so did my Auld Pop. They were men of course but they were Highlanders and they were men of tears and strong sentiment. The were generous and loving men and loyal men but they had a peculiar Scottish canniness. There was always the memory of survival and hardship. Of Scotland's disastrous history. From Cromwell’s invasion to the Glen Coe Massacre and the bloody aftermath of Culloden, Scotland experienced on disaster after another including internecine religious strife. Scotland suffered great hunger, poverty and humiliation. For those who survived there was a mark. Worlds could be smashed and forests laid low to the last stump. The Highland Clearances, had begun. "I remember the day I left my home, I had no choice I had to go , o Fuadach na Gaidheal-scattering of the Gael am goirt agus searbh –the pain and the bitterness -but the blood is strong and the heart is Highland. The brig Caledonia lies stormbound on the Lawrence awaiting God’s hand to see her free. Slowly gliding river widening her final journey homeward {to Scotland} without me. Slan leibh Alba gu brath! Fare ye well forever my Scotland! The heart of the Scottish Highlands bled deep flowing out into to sea like a river never to return, and it was Lochaber No more for many a heart! . Smollet has written -as Tom Paine reminded American patriots in the 1770's- ...immediately after the decisive action at Culloden {April 16, 1746} the Duke of Cumberland{a German} took possession of Inverness; where six and thirty six deserters...were ordered to be executed...he set off detachments on all hands to hunt down the fugitives and lay waste the country with first and sword. The castles of Glengary and Lochiel were plundered and burned; every house, hut or habitation met with the same fate without distinction and all the cattle and provisions were carried off; the men were either shot upon the mountains like wild beasts or put to death in cold blood without form of trial; the women after having seen their husbands and their fathers murdered were subjected to brutal violation and then turned out naked with their children to starve on the barren heaths. One whole family was enclosed in a barn and consumed in ashes. Those ministers of vengeance were so alert in the execution of their office that in a few days there was neither house cottage man nor beast to be seen within the compass of fifty miles. All was ruin, silence and desolation. Aye, Prince Charlie was gone and he would not come back again. "Burned are our homes exile and death, scattered the loyal men." This was the fate of many Scots in the 19th and 20th century. Courage was not enough to conquer the power of economic and social forces they scarcely understood except to know they were destroying and laying waste to everything they loved. They came to America with only two things: a strong faith and a stronger desire to follow fame of their ancestors and REMAIN BYDAND FREE (SAORSA GU BRATH...FOREVER FREE). The men of Munro I knew were proud that they never had been slaves of anyone. Not the Romans, not the Vikings, not the Picts, not the Normans, not the French, not the English and not the Germans. Honor, heritage and freedom were they bywords not the pursuit of empty materialism. As I have said they were not Lowlanders nor followers of Adam Smith nor Marx. Jesus, the Son of Mary, was still, to them, the Great Teacher and his book the Auld Book and the greatest book -that great Gift of the Jews. Biodh eagal Dhe oirre was their motto REVERENCE UNTO GOD (DREAD GOD) and CASTEAL FOLAIS NA THEINE their slogan FOULIS CASTLE ABLAZE...if there is trouble we are coming. DILIS GU BRATH....LEAL (loyal) til death on land and on sea to the cause of true honor -family, comrades, homeland,freedom and God. Aye, my father and Auld Pop and the Scots of their generation I knew were of a deep discerning caution and prudence as many mature people are but with a difference. When one was with them on a hike or walking in a iffy neighborhood in New York or rowing a boat in storm, or at the firing range or carrying ten thousand dollars cash to the bank one just knew they, in the expression of one of my father's Jewish friends, that they "pissed ice-water". They were steady and sure with an unruffled spirit despite circumstances that might elicit agitation and fear. This is what I would call manly virtue something almost totally lost and unknown to modernists and wimp Euro-New York-Paris Pacifists. (the Jet-setting smug effete New Democrats). They had the ability to concentrate and display utmost seriousness and strength and I daresay almost a subdued ferocity. Just one look at my Auld Pop's brawny and scarred hands one just knew he was a man who had held men's lives in his very hands and -this was quite true -he had ended men's lives with his very hands. He and Johnny Robertson and another Argyll had killed to the last -exterminated might be a better word an entire German column in one savage fight that lasted less than 20 minutes in the no man's land round Ypres in 1915. But Pop made no big deal of it. He was almost ashamed. Outside of the officer and sergeant they had been merely boys no older than 15 or 16 years olds. But he was a realist. He said, "It was killed or be killed. There was no question of surrender. We wad nae surrender to Kaiser Bill's batallions. Not in Belgium. Not at Ypres. Not in France. They would never smell the channel nor see the green of Scotland. No, sir!" Both my father and Auld Pop had come up from poverty and want. Both were combat veterans and were both were sons and grandsons and nephews of decorated soldiers. Both had killed men in war but were not violent men; on the contrary they were among the gentlest men I have ever known, happiest watching the Dodgers or listening to music or reciting bardic poetry. I think it important to mention they deeply admired FDR and voted for him EVERY TIME they could (they became US citizens in 1936). They were lifelong Democrats. But they never were Big Liberals. They had no hestation to cross over to vote for Ike or La Guardia and they admired Churchill because they admired INTEGRTITY AND COURAGE. They despised the corrupt Democratic machine of Brooklyn and they despised the corrupt pro-communist Labour party of Glasgow. Yes, they were REALISTS. They knew the world was often cruel and callous and full of malice. This world they tried to keep out of their family circle; as I said they 'pissed ice-water" and never would let the women and children of the house worry for no purpose. But they had no illusions that the world was wonderful and forgiving. Their ancestors saw their world crushed beneath the wheel of well-heeled lowlanders and Englishmen; they had seen the British Empire and the Clyde Shipyards go smash. They had seen the Highlands and showed it to me. Glen Coe, Ulva, Ferindonald. Empty, desolate, sad places many uninhabitated since 1692, 1746 or 1920. The only Brigadoon was in Burns country and there of course, all of Burns's descendants, ALL OF THEM, had emigrated to Canada and the USA in the 19th century. ALL OF THEM. They had experienced the Great Depression made slightly less so due to my Auld Pop's habit of taking ALL HIS PAY IN SILVER DOLLARS and burying and hiding his stashes while others saw their savings in the uninsured Bank of the United States get wiped out. I have often thought that without this stash my father may never have finished Brooklyn College. He always said to me "NEVER SPEND YOUR BO'UM DOLLAR" (bottum dollar). Point of fact, I still have some siliver dollars Auld Pop earned in the 1920's. He bequeathed all of his silver dollars in equal measure to all his grandchildren. Not a large treasure to be sure -no more than 50$ each face value- but a good wee investment. And they did not believe in Utopias. Dad always said -one of his favorite expressions- I vote yes but it is TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. He said this of heaven and he said this of Communism which he called the Lust for the Bold State -that expression I believe he derived from Hayek and Churchill. Auld Pop and his friend Johnny Robertson were sitting in the Park Bar in Glasgow in late 1919 when they came recruiting for the Black and Tans. They turned their backs on the mercenary temptation the same way they turned their back on Willie Gallacher their erstwhile friend now Labour MP (and on the take from Stalin we now know). They had had enough of fighting and were deciding where to get work for their families. South Africa or America? They nearly took an offer -a very good one to go to South Africa - but they read up on South Africa at the Carnegie Library in Elder Park -I have been there and decided in 1919 that America even without any sure job prospects was the best choice. The deciding factor was that they discussed the possibility that the move would lead to permanent emigration if the situation did not improve in Scotland. My Auld Pop -whose cousin and eldest brother were killed in South Africa in the Boer War serving in the Argylls- decided that he would not want to chance emigration to Africa. He often said -in the 1930's and 1950's that he thought there would be nothing be trouble there for his grandchildren. For him South Africa would have been the most comfortable and surest choice but Auld Pop always thought of his wife and families's happiness and security first. He was a realist with a tender heart for those he loved but in the end he was a canny Scot and a survivor. You don't survive eight years before the mast as a boy apprentice and five years in the infantry in WWI without being a survivor. Modern liberalism is for wimps -that's why I despise it. Bold State Big Government Solutions are a chimera. Liberalism today has almost lost all is meaning of LOVE OF LIBERTY. It means instead PC Dogma and red-tape. Information by itself is not power, though many liberals think it is. It seems incapable of the knowledge that Socialism is the sly enemy of FREEDOM and PROSPERITY FOR THE LONG HAUL. Information is no substitute for TRUE PRACTICAL WISDOM, the kind of CANNY WISDOM my Auld Pop and Father and their generation of tough, realistic immgrants had. Lawyers, academics and scientists manipulate information for their own purposes, bending and twisting the truth for their own interests and benefit until it is unrecognizable even to themselves. This is not wisdom but merely its peversion. Vain pseudo-knowledge like so much ephemeral academic clap-trap. Real wisdom, real knowledge, real SOPHIA is married to PHRONENIS (practical common sense wisdom). Real wisdom is the marriage of thought, COURAGE, clear thinking, experience and DEEP PASSION FOR THE TRUTH. By applying only the critical intellect and neglecting the heart and the well-springs of faith's humble depth- the lawyers, the academics, the technicians and the ideologues wrap themselves in a blinding, suffocating plastic bandage, misguidedly thinking they CAN SOLVE ALL THE ILLS OF MANKIND BY CALCULATION and WILL and sometimes WISHFUL THINKING. They think of course that man is good when we know perfectly well he is not. He has a dark side, a selfish side, a sinful side. He is the descendant of cannibals and killers. He bears the mark of Cain -no Highlander can every forget that the memory and the feeling of the MIR-CATH (the battle frenzy; the blood lust; the "Irish" blood) is too strong for that. The reality is the broken heart it kens no second spring again tho' the waeful may not cease frae their greetin' (weepinng). Yes, the Kim Philby- Willie Gallacher- Adam Ferguson-Lionell Trillling-George Orwell-Johnny Robertson-Thomas Edison-Thin Red Line-Argyll Trench Wisdom effect can still be noted. We are practical, we speak the English, the langauge of the banks and the long-range guns. But we respect tradition and try to keep alive a sense of community even in this difficult, often hostile or indifferent cold, unfeeling world. But the Great Teacher teaches us instead about our continual need to struggle for what is right while not forgetting to proclaim only God can accomplish it. "Except for the Lord...the watchman waketh in vain." As we search for knowledge we must have awe for the mystery of our existence -it is just a brief moment in time as Mairi MacInnes sings-. We must have awe for the mystery of the cosmos above and about us and of day and night and time and the great mystery of creation and of death and what comes after too! God demands a proper reverence for divine transcendence and an abundant hope for divine nearness. "NOW THE EVENING'S COME AT LAST, O SON OF MARY! THERE IS PEACE ON EVERY HILL O SON OF MARY! I WILL PUT MY HOUSE IN ORDER AS I SET TO CROSS THE BORDER, THOU ART NEAR AND IN MY HEART O SON OF MARY!" (Ancient Highland Charm sung September 27, 2003 and June 9, 1963 after which the pipes played LORD LOVAT'S LAMENT, HIGHLAND LADDIE and the MIST COVERED MOUNTAINS OF HOME.) NO Amazing Grace. AUld Pop said."Yon's a cheesy tune and over done to be sure....and you ken...it's TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE but dinna tell yer mither I said so......"
Posted by at October 3, 2006 01:20 AM

Posted by: Richard "Ricardo" Munro at October 3, 2006 01:22 AM

Spendid essay. I would like to remark that I have read Conrad's complete works. Like Cervantes and Shakespeare and Dickens and Churchill I never tire to re-read his works. THE SHADOWLINE.

NOSTROMO, THE SECRET AGENT, LORD JIM, UNDER WESTERN EYES are among the createst classics of Western Literature only to be matched for MASCULINE VIGOR AND PHILOSOPHIC WISDOM by the best Hemingway (FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS the best book ever written on the Spanish Civil War ),Pasternak, Thomas Mann, TS Elliot, Solzhenitisyn.

There is not a single American writer OF IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE who can hold a candle to any of these titans.

We are living in a tarnished SLIVER AGE in these days I fear, of the LATER REPUBLIC. The age of chaos, death, destruction and famine and the age of the dictator hurries towards us.

Let us hope that the legions of old hold for a while yet so that our Adrianople and our Manizkert may not come. Please God not for my children at least. Grant them some measure of peace and freedom.
Grant them a decent measure of life and love.

In the meantime,
PRAISE THE LORD
and PASS THE AMMUNITION

Posted by: Richard "Ricardo" Munro at October 3, 2006 02:02 AM

Great essay. However as long as The New York Times and the alphabet networks still exist - liberalism will always be a danger.

Can you recommend a good laymens book about Freud and his theories for me?

Posted by: Ripper at October 3, 2006 09:00 AM

Good essay, Stephen. Though I must agree with Mr. Munro in his distrust of Freud. I still remember a sentence in "Civilization and its Discontents" -something to the effect of ". . . the greatest single wound to the human psyche being the taboo against incest." That along with other nonsense about a lone primitive pissing on the camp fire to show his disdain for the conventions of others. I see much liberal confusion about sexuality buttressed by Freudian assumptions.

Posted by: Mark_Belt at October 3, 2006 10:30 PM

Good essay Horse,
although I agree with Ripper: it is sick, bloated, oozing puss, and drooling acid, but it is not dead. It still has life in it's academic fingers and pushes the buttons on the education of our kids. It has not just faculty postions, but Dean, Provost, and University president postions all over the country, and it hasn't reached the top of that arc. The appeal to idealism can turn and educated adult into a frothing child in a heartbeat, and, unfortunetly, frothing children have immense power, even if they are close to blacking out, and don't forget they have gained numbers (in their minds) in their alliance with the victims of western crusades.

Posted by: Brad at October 4, 2006 06:26 PM

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October 01, 2006

STICK A FORK IN IT, IT'S DONE: THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM

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