LEFTISTS ARE BORN THAT WAY



John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)


"Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."

Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."  -- From "Mother Jones", no less.



The best article on Leftism that I have ever read is by George Irbe. Irbe says pretty much what I say about the nature of Leftism but says it with greater brevity and clarity. Irbe's name for Leftists is "Coercive Utopians" and he diagnoses their dismal motivations most persuasively. I liked this epigram: "One will usually discover that behind the Robin Hood image hides just a plain hood." I like his article so much that I have copied it to one of my sites so that it will remain available even if it gets taken down at its original source.

He is strongly of the view that Leftism is an inborn tendency but seems unaware that there is now good evidence from the twin studies by behaviour geneticists such as Martin and others confirming that. The behaviour genetics work is mainly published in obscure and highly technical academic journals (that even I find a bit challenging to follow in detail) rather than being available online but one early summary by Eaves, Martin, Heath, Schieken, Silberg & Corey that IS available online is particularly fascinating. The authors found that your politics in your youth are mainly the product of the social influences around you (school and college indoctrination, for instance) but as you get older your genetically inherited political tendencies come to the fore.

The most striking behaviour genetics finding, however, is the 1999 finding by Eaves et al. showing that conservatism/Leftism is even more hereditary than how tall you are.

And the early (1986) article by Martin & Jardine showed that heredity is a particularly strong influence (around 50% of the variance) in women. Presumably because women tend to take less interest in the details of politics, their political reactions are much more likely to be purely instinctive.

And another article by Martin, Eaves, et al. (1986) showed that data on the transmission of conservative attitudes could in fact be explained by a model which assigned ZERO influence to the social environment and ALL influence to heredity. Putting it another way, the correlation between the conservatism of twins was high but not perfect but what similarity there was could be accounted for entirely by the extent to which the twins shared genes. Shared family environment was of no significance in determining the degree of twin similarity. Putting it yet another way, genetics is one (strong) influence on how conservative you are but your home environment is not. This runs entirely contrary to what the human race has believed for thousands of years but many other variables studied in genetics research also show little influence from family environment and strong influence from genetics. The facts are no respecter of preconceptions and assumptions. If parent and child have similar attitudes or similar personalities, that similarity is due to their shared genes, not to family teaching or indoctrination. Indoctrination from outside the family could however have some influence. All the influences on attitudes and personality have not yet been studied.

Bouchard, Segal, Tellegen, McGue, Keyes, & Krueger (2003) have also reported findings similar to those of Eaves, Martin and their associates.

Finally, there is an article in the 2005 American Political Science Review by John R. Alford, Carolyn L. Funk, and John R. Hibbing under the heading "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?". The whole article is not online but there is a summary of it in the NYT. Excerpt:

"As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences.... Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests."

References

Bouchard, T.J., Segal, N. L., Tellegen, A, McGue, M, Keyes, M. and Krueger, R. (2003) Evidence for the construct validity and heritability of the Wilson-Patterson conservatism scale: a reared-apart twins study of social attitudes. Personality and Individual Differences, 34 (6), April 2003, 959-969.

Eaves L, Martin N, Heath A, Schieken R, Meyer J, Silberg J, Neale M, Corey L. (1997) Age changes in the causes of individual differences in conservatism. Behavior Genetics 1997, 27(2), 121-124.

N. G. MARTIN, L. J. EAVES, A. C. HEATH, ROSEMARY JARDINE, LYNN M. FEINGOLDT, AND H. J. EYSENCK (1986) Transmission of social attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA Vol. 83. pp. 4364-4368.
Martin, N. & Jardine, R. (1986) Eysenck's contribution to behaviour genetics. In: S & C. Modgil (Eds.) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and controversy. Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer
Eaves, L.J., Martin, N.G., Meyer, J.M. & Corey, L.A. (1999) Biological and cultural inheritance of stature and attitudes. In: Cloninger, C.R., Personality and psychopathology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.


A small update:

Renner's 2011 study also showed conservatism as primarily genetically determined. The abstract below just for fun:

Whereas a substantial genetic component of Conservatism and Religiosity is well documented, there is little evidence with respect to the behavior genetics of other aspects of human values. A sample of 157 monozygotic and 74 dizygotic twins reared together received the Austrian Value Questionnaire (AVQ), which measures a broad variety of value domains and their facets, found by the lexical approach in the German language. Family resemblance of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism was best explained by additive or dominance genetic and non-shared environmental effects, whereas the influence of the environment shared by twins was negligible. In contrast, Religiosity was transmitted by additive genetic, shared and non-shared environmental influences. At the level of facets, the Intellectualism and Harmony showed a homogenous etiology while Religiosity, Materialism, and Conservatism were etiologically heterogeneous.

Personality and Individual Differences. In Press, Corrected Proof - doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.09.003

FINIS

POST-MODERNISM AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY


By John Ray (M.A.;Ph.D.)

What is Post-modernism?

Post-modernism is an extreme Leftist "doctrine" that seems to have become particularly influential in literary and artistic circles -- especially, of course, in our universities and colleges. It is also taught by "Continental" philosophers -- who seem to be invariably far-Left. And it seems to be very destructive not only of people's moral anchors but also of most people's enjoyment of both literature and art. I have had no personal contact with it as Postmodernism was not around when I was a student of such things in the '60s so I know it only secondhand but it would seem to be nothing more than a particularly addled form of hatred for most of the modern world. Its central "doctrines" all seem to spring from a denial that there are any rules for anything. So the postmodernists say that "There is no such thing as truth", "Reality is merely a political construction" and "morality is meaningless". They seem oblivious of such simple philosophical retorts as: "If there is no such thing as truth, how do we know that what YOU say is right?". Things that would bother normal people -- such as inconsistency (saying contradictory things) -- obviously do not bother them a bit. And their vacuity about morality is compellingly reminiscent of the psychopath (The old term for psychopaths was "moral imbeciles").

And postmodernists are in fact demonstrably psychopathic in their readiness to lie. "There is no such thing as truth" is an excellent cover for lies. "There is no such thing as truth in what I say" is, after all, a straightforward expansion of the statement. And indeed there is not in many cases. At least as far back as Stalin, lies have always been an essential prop for the Left. An extended account of how present-day Leftist historians use postmodernism to excuse the most barefaced lies about the past can be found here

But that postmodernism is nonetheless a most peculiar refuge for the Left, with their proclaimed devotion to "social justice", George Watson points out succinctly. Watson refers to it as "Subjectivism":

Subjectivism, it is widely believed, means tolerance and openness. Nobody can say you are wrong: it all depends on where you are coming from. It is a cosy place to be -- until, that is, somebody points out that belief in social justice is a judgment; so if all judgments are merely personal, so is that.

Some more comments on just what postmodernism is: Joe Willingham put it this way to me:

"Postmodernists claim that there is no objective truth, that there is only interpretation, and that it all depends on who is in power. According to the postmodernists, we are so biased by our race, class, and gender that knowledge is impossible. The postmodernists allow freedom of speech only for those who share their Leftist political views on issues like feminism, affirmative action, and free enterprise versus socialism. They hire and fire on the basis of ideology rather than scholarship, and they try to prevent speakers of whose views they don't approve from appearing on campus.

The subjectivist epistemology, the idea that power and not reason is the key to the "construction of reality" - all that is classic Fascism. It is no accident that one of the postmodernists' favorite philosophers is the German Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.

.

An interview with Stephen Hicks also seems to give a very clear exposition of what postmodernism is all about. An extract:

"The contradictions they [The postmodernists] embrace are so obvious: "All cultures are equal, but the West is uniquely evil. Values are subjective, but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad, but it's unfair the West has more of it ...... [Post-modernists are] driven not by a desire to discover or advance truth but primarily by the desire to hurt the enemy. If all you want to do is destroy, it doesn't matter to you if the words you use contradict each other."

Classic Leftist stuff. Prof Hicks now has a book out called Explaining postmodernism, which I review here.

Roger Scruton makes a similar point:

Hence, in Rorty, Derrida, and Foucault, we find a shared duplicity of purpose: On the one hand to undermine all claims to absolute truth and on the other hand to uphold the orthodoxies upon which their congregation depends. The very reasoning that sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding and cultural relativism as objectively true

Good old-fashioned Leftist hypocrisy, in short. When Leftism has failed in so many ways in so many places, the hypocrisy still lives on.

Cameron Pritchard sums up the desperation of the modern Left well too. Excerpt:

Capitalism, said Marx, would create its own gravediggers. And yet there is a fascinating irony in the fact that now, at the beginning of this century, the socialist left seems to be actively plunging itself into its own grave. Its advocates define themselves not by what they are for, but what they are against. They have abandoned their former commitment to modernity: to the values of reason, technology, wealth and progress and returned to a brand of openly anti-scientific "utopian socialism" that would make Marx himself turn in his grave.

So post-modernism is what you turn to when the truth becomes just too uncomfortable.

But perhaps the ultimate revelation of the emptiness of postmodernism was the "Sokal hoax". See here and here. Deliberate and incomprehensible nonsense was published by a serious postmodernist academic journal without them realizing that they were being sent up! Give me Warren Buffett's view of the matter any day:

"You're neither right nor wrong because people agree with you. You're right because your facts and your reasoning are right. In the end that's all that counts"

Not profound but look at his results!

And at this point perhaps one small excerpt from a very substantial article on postmodernism would not go astray:

The Post-Modern project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a philosophical cover for its errors to prevent anyone from undercutting the outrage. In this, it is enormously attractive to any party having a gripe against the modern world. Every failed state, every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur, and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern variant of Rousseau's Hydra. Its energetic rise in modern Europe will prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

To most people the ideas of postmodernism -- that truth is nonexistent etc -- simply seem too bizarre to be worth further consideration. Such claims are just a sort of intellectual masturbation for Leftists. Life goes on BECAUSE we recognize some statements as true and others as false. If I ring the WRONG telephone number I will not speak to the person I want to speak to. An article by Simon Blackburn called "In defence of truth" makes a similar point at much greater length and thoroughly dissects the theories of Richard Rorty -- one of the chief postmodernists. Warning though: The first two thirds of the article sets out the postmodernist position. You may want to skip straight to the final third of the article to get to something worth reading.

Simon Blackburn is the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge and appears to be something of a Leftist himself. He is however thoroughly within the tradition of British empiricism in philosophy. The British have always seen the purpose of philosophy as being to clarify and EXPLAIN whereas French philosophers (and France seems to be the prime source of postmodernism) from Descartes, through Sartre to Derrida have always seen being clever as the prime role of philosophy -- and they have generally equated being clever with an ability to CONFUSE any issue they touch on.

In the circumstances, it is no wonder that the Anglo-Saxons are so much more influential in the modern-day world than are the French. Someone recently said that the French are basically a Chihuahua that wants to be a bull-terrier. The Ango-Saxons really are that bull-terrier. And, as a former bull-terrier breeder, I can asssure you that, despite their power, bull-terriers are extremely good natured -- not something that one would often say of either Chihuahuas or the French.

A final comment on what drives the Leftist contempt for truth:

"There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything. They interpret every type of interpersonal transaction as a power struggle. Thus if you calmly try to persuade such a person of the truth of some proposition by appealing to facts and reasoning correctly from them, he will interpret that as nothing but an attempt to dominate him psychologically. Such people are utterly blind to the fact that truth can sometimes be attained by dialectical means. They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move.

There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Compare my comments on Stanley Fish in "Of Truth and Fish". Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything else in terms of it."

(Quote from W.F. Vallicella)

So Leftists are the true Nietzscheans. They see only the power implications of "texts" and deny any truth to them because that reflects their own dismal priorities.


Postmodernism in literature and art

Before going any further here, however, I think we should ask how much it all matters. I think it is pretty obvious that truth matters in history and the sciences but a major redoubt of the postmodernists seems to be in university cultural and literary studies departments -- where it is often referred to simply as "Theory". But is anything that we see and hear in art and cultural studies important? (I have argued elsewhere that they are certainly not useful. See here and here).

Now before anyone points the skinger of forn at me over that question let me add that I myself have always been a pretty literary type: I read almost the entire ancient Greek canon in my teens; I understand that, during my B.A. studies, I got the highest mark awarded for the poetry paper in first-year English -- out of about 1000 students; and I still know large slabs of Chaucer by heart -- in the original Middle English, of course.

But I have never seen my literary proclivities as any great virtue -- which is why I did not continue with literary studies but went into social science instead. To me literature is to be enjoyed, not studied and if you do not enjoy it go and read The Phantom and good luck to you. The high moral tone of The Phantom would certainly leave most of French literature for dead, at least.

So the postmodernists would appear to be doing a good job of destroying literary studies but so what? I think the answer is that they have turned that which should be simply enjoyable into tedious and destructive propaganda and we surely saw enough of that from Stalin, Hitler and their ilk to want no more of it.

Denis Dutton has some good comments on WHY postmodernism has become popular in university English departments:

"First, it has long seemed to me that there is in academic circles, especially among humanists, an odd sort of prestige that attaches to philosophy. Perhaps it is some sense that even if philosophers don't have the final answers, at least they are raising the important issues. Perhaps it is the impressive technical rigor which characterizes some philosophy. Or maybe it is the capacity of philosophy to ask the most amusingly awkward questions about such diverse enterprises as politics, religion, and silence. As a philosopher, I find this awe pretty silly, but there it is: I hold piano virtuosos in reverential awe and my pianist friends tell me that's silly too. Second, it must be admitted that there are intelligent scholars in other fields who, whatever their considerable abilities, have little aptitude for philosophy. No crime in that: talents for mathematics, languages, music, poetry, literary criticism, and other fields are not evenly spread across the academy, and why should it be different with philosophy? Anyway, talent aside, there are only so many hours in the day to permit gaining expertise beyond one's chosen scholarly specialty.

But here we have a possible partial explanation for the popularity of deconstruction in literary and other humanist circles. Deconstruction provides academic folk with the illusion that they are raising big, deep philosophical issues, because they are (courageously, no doubt) "calling into question" or "problematizing" the very foundations of thought, meaning, and value. Intellectually, this is bargain basement stuff, of course: philosophy on the cheap. It stands to real philosophy as the electric organ stands to piano virtuosity. But it seems very exciting - the "heady brew" that so agitated that English professor. And there are other benefits as well. Deconstruction has built into it the usual self-immunizing strategies characteristic of other ersatz sciences, such as astrology or doctrinaire Freudianism. Confronted with any intellectual criticism, the deconstructionist airily waves the speaker away, or gestures knowingly to his fellow believers, as though to say, "Tiresome, isn't it, the way people keep trying to revive the superstitions we have long since transcended!" There is no need, and certainly no demand, for the believing deconstructionist to engage the benighted skeptic in any argument. In fact, the situation for the deconstructionist is ideal: one can have the transcendent exhilaration of seeming to tackle profound philosophical questions without having to actually do any philosophy. And philosophers who object can be ignored, since they are still the unknowing dupes of logocentrism, or something. Finally, while the whole procedure, like a roller coaster, seems dangerous, with that dark talk of radical "subversion" and "scandal" it is virtually risk free. One can be on the correct side, against sexism, racism, or ethnocentrism (a show of hands, please, of those in favor of ethnocentrism), but all from the cozy security of the academy.

This helps to explain both why deconstruction has captivated the imaginations of so many literary scholars who enjoy dabbling in philosophy, and why it has not caught on to anything like the same extent with professional philosophers. In the first place, even those philosophers who take deconstruction seriously are nevertheless interested to consider alternative theories - not just Derrida on, say, essentialist philosophies of language, but thinkers such as Wittgenstein or Quine or Kripke as well. And once one is on this road, the depth and appeal of alternative theories become apparent. (This isn't unique: Christians who take up comparative religion often suffer a similar loss of faith.) Second, philosophers really do listen to arguments, even if they don't always change their minds. If a philosopher presents me with two arguments designed to show that God cannot exist, and I respond by trying to demonstrate how they fail, it is simply not open to my opponent merely to dismiss me with, "What? You mean you believe in God?" In fact, such a response simply spoils the fun. Among philosophers, the rejection of an argument for a position need not entail anything about whether the speaker accepts or rejects that position.

I am talking here not about something that happens now-and-then in philosophical discussions; I am talking about the air philosophy breathes. The point would hardly be worth making, except that this simple respect for your opponent's argument is not encouraged by deconstruction. The way all-too-many deconstructionists play the game, if you object to the deconstructionist account of logocentrism, you are still under the spell of some phonologist superstition. If you suggest that there might be reasons why some literary interpretations are intrinsically better than others, or that authorial intentions cannot be wholly dismissed by criticism, then, you obviously favor making reader and critic subservient to the God-author. If you question the slogan "all interpretation is misinterpretation" you must be one of those people who believe in One Truth. In confronting opposition, the deconstructionist does not move in the realm of claim and counter-argument. This fact is implicitly recognized in the way that, in the popular vocabulary of deconstruction, theories are said not to be refuted but to be displaced by other positions: the language (borrowed here from Freud, but it might as well be Thrasymachus) is not that of argument and evidence, but of hogging space, getting attention, repressing or getting even with some enemy. It's all power and desire.

So once again it all boils down to the unending Leftist pursuit of kudos and power -- to be gained, of course, on the cheap if at all possible.

In what I have so far said, I have had literary studies principally in mind. The situation is at least as bad in art. Have a look at this and this. Both articles are quite brief and tell us what postmodern art is by way of some choice examples. Normal people would simply be be disgusted by it all. AND THAT IS THE POINT. Postmodern art aims to get attention at all costs. I have argued elsewhere that Leftists are basically unoriginal people who are desperate for attention -- and postmoderns are clearly an extreme example of that. They are people driven to desperation by having nothing to say or contribute yet also having a great longing for attention -- and in that situation any attention will do, even if all they manage to do is to disgust people.


So I would argue that, in literary and cultural studies, postmodernism is very self-limiting and largely harmless. Its impact on morality, however, may be another matter.


Moral relativism and the Left

Although not usually under that name, postmodernist ideas have come to be widely taught in the schools. Postmodernism is so pervasively taught in the universities and colleges that almost all school-teachers get heavy exposure to it during their training as teachers. And what they themselves are taught they tend to pass on. So it behooves us to look particularly at how well founded postmodernist moral ideas are and how they can be replied to.

In postmodernism and elsewhere, Leftists make great hay out of the fact that moral absolutism (ethical non-naturalism to be technical) is very hard to defend philosophically. And I agree with them. I too am a moral relativist -- i.e. I believe that there is no timeless and forever fixed right and wrong and that what is right and wrong varies from society to society and has no meaning aside from that. That does NOT mean, however, that all ways to live or all political systems are equally wise -- which is the extension of moral relativism that Leftists usually glide into without people noticing. In other words, some ways of living and some political systems lead to generally desired outcomes and some do not. That is a simple empirical proposition for which there is much evidence. Most people, for instance, desire material prosperity but only some ways of living lead to that. Laziness or Communism, for instance generally do not lead to prosperity so laziness and Communism are generally unwise, or, in shorthand, "bad" or "wrong". So there is no need for the sophomoric philosophical debating points of Leftists to embarrass anybody into abandoning talk of "right" and "wrong". Such terms do have real and important meanings -- even if you are a moral relativist.

And at least from Edmund Burke onwards, conservatives have taken the matter one step further. That some value (or some rule or some way of living and conducting oneself) is merely the custom of a given society is quite dogmatically and automatically taken by Leftists to imply that the value concerned is NOT worthy of respect or continuation. Conservatives think about it more deeply, however, and think that one must draw precisely the opposite conclusion. That some custom or system is the result of trial and error testing of all the wisdom of all our predecessors over a long period of time is seen by conservatives as indicating that it is probably a wise and valuable custom that should not be abandoned except for very strong reasons. The custom may not be "right" in any absolute, immutable or unimprovable sense but it may still be very wise and valuable in enabling a civil and healthy society to function and give its members what they desire -- such as peace, security and prosperity. In that sense, courage, honesty, democracy and the rule of law are "right". Countries where such values are widespread generally have more peace, security, freedom and prosperity than countries where such values are not widespread. Values and standards of behaviour are very important matters indeed.

Amusingly, however, Leftists are very prone to using the language of right and wrong (which they claim not to believe in) when it suits them. They will claim that things like Apartheid or "racism" are WRONG without batting an eyelid. In good psychopathic fashion, the moral relativists suddenly become moralists. They will happily say things that they do not remotely believe in if it suits their ends of gaining power and influence. I did some research into the dishonest Leftist use of moral language which is reported here. And when Leftists do use moralistic language, it is rather fun to use the arguments of moral relativism to show how shallow their arguments are -- as here. They can be "hoist with their own petard" (i.e. blown up with their own bomb). There is a broader coverage of the issues in moral philosophy here.

Perhaps a final comment on the sheer folly and futility of postmodernism is here, speaking of a far-Left Israeli historian: "In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place." Hoist with his own petard indeed.

ADDENDA

AN ACTUAL SPECIMEN OF POSTMODERNISM

I have been content above to quote what people say who have had stomachs strong enough actually to study postmodernism. I would be remiss, however, if I did not offer the reader here at least one specimen of a postmodernist "text" so that readers can judge the worth of postmodernism for themselves. Listen to the painful stuff that Derrida had to say about the 9/11/2001 events in NYC and elsewhere:

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Amusingly, he got it right in his last sentence above. Leftists are often intelligent people. They must at times find it depressing that they have to claim to find wisdom in such an utterly confused and evasive soul as Derrida.



POSTMODERNISTS ARE NOT ALONE IN BEING PSYCHOPATHIC

It is not only the Postmodernists but Leftists generally who seem to be psychopathic (unable to tell right from wrong). Former Leftist, Ron Rosenbaum, spells out the moral imbecility of Leftist activists at some length in his article "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee".

We see the same moral imbecility in the repeated claim by Leftists of "moral equivalence" between very disparate people and groups. For instance, at the height of the Cold War, Leftists would routinely claim that Communist regimes and the economically successful "Western" democracies such as the United States were morally equivalent -- that neither was more blameworthy or praiseworthy than the other. When President Reagan called a spade a spade and described the USSR as an "evil empire", this was regarded as shocking and ignorant by US liberals. How anybody can see any equivalence between systems that murder millions without trial because of their suspected political views (as Stalin did in the USSR and Pol Pot did in "Kampuchea") and countries that either have no death penalty at all or agonize over every such penalty that they inflict (even when the penalty is for the most heinous crimes) defies imagination.

If it shows nothing else, their assertions of moral equivalence show the utter amorality of Leftists. Stalin's heirs are among us. One of them said in 2002 : The disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life". And that was George Galloway, a British Labour Party member of parliament at the time who has since drifted even further Left. And going back further, Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few journalists to report honestly what he saw in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, knew well the British Leftists of his day. He says that members of the Left intelligentsia, like Beatrice Webb, knew of Stalin's vast brutalities against his own people of that time but just didn't care. They were attracted by the Soviet "vision" of a people who were made to do what intellectuals thought was a good thing so that was all that mattered. Mass-murder and suffering were a matter of indifference to them.

Stalin's mass murders certainly appear to this day to be regarded by many Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies as merely awkward from a PR point of view rather than wrong. In psychiatry, amorality is the mark of the psychopath -- the "moral imbecile" who just cannot tell right from wrong and who commits murders and other heinous crimes with a clear conscience as a result. "Moral equivalence" would therefore appear to be reasonably described as psychopathy in politics."

There is an extended treatment of Leftism as sub-clinical psychopathy here


MORE ON THE MEANING OF MORAL LANGUAGE

In what I said above about the meaning of moral language, I did of course brush very lightly over a large philosophical topic. It seems reasonable therefore that I extend my comments a little more for those interested in the philosophy of the matter.

Leftists say that only values exist rather than any abstract properties of rightness or wrongness and I agree with that. Where do we go from there, however? Leftists draw the to-be-expected inconsistent conclusion that describing anything as "wrong" or "evil" is therefore silly unless it it applies to the actions of George W. Bush or other conservatives.

The conclusion I draw is that people use moral language in a variety of ways but they mostly mean something real and important by it that transcends the personal. They are not merely expressing their own preferences or values. They are conveying propositions that do have truth value. This can most clearly be seen in those cases where we feel that we could substitute the word "advantageous" for "good" or "right" with no loss of meaning or little loss of meaning. I take "advantageous" to mean "leading in the long term to a situation that you would prefer". So the saying "killing babies is wrong" translates not to "there is an immutable property of wrongness about killing babies" but to "Killing babies leads in the long term to a situation that you would not prefer over the alternative."

Now, obviously, many people DO want to say that killing babies has nothing to do with preferences and that it would still be wrong even if everyone in the universe said it was right. That is however a mere assertion or expression of personal opinion that is not testable and so has no truth value. I do not argue with such people. They are entitled to their opinion and to their way of using words. I simply want to point out that for many if not most people "advantageous" is either a large part or 100% of what they mean by "right" and that in such cases the statement is capable of being argued for as being either true or false. I could, for instance, argue against the proposition that "Killing babies leads in the long term to a situation that you would not prefer over the alternative" by saying that the ancient Greeks routinely killed babies and that theirs was the most brilliant society and civilization of its times so killing babies does not have consequences that are automatically or on the whole unpleasant. Many people would fault my argument in that respect (by presenting, for instance, reasons why Greece would have been even more brilliant if they had not killed babies) but the argument would be about what leads to what -- a scientific argument, if you like. It would not be a mere assertion of values.

So it is perfectly reasonable, rational, realistic and coherent to see "is right" statements as having truth value -- and Leftists who deny truth value to such statements are distorting or ignoring what many if not most people mean by such statements.


FASCISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Amusing: Richard Wolin's book, The Seduction of Unreason appears to be a good critique of postmodernist irrationality but he makes his book politically correct by noting -- correctly -- that in the 1930s what we now call postmodernism was primarily a Fascist doctrine. So he says that postmodernism is "Rightist" too, you see: It is not only a mental confusion of the Left. The facts that Fascism was a development of Marxism and that Hitler was a socialist seem to be "forgotten" by Wolin. It would indeed be surprising if a Rightist philosophy suddenly became the guiding light of the Left but no such thing has happened. "Postmodern" thinking has ALWAYS been a Leftist escape-hatch from reality. Although both Marxism and Fascism may be long dead in most people's minds, both are variants of socialism and both still flourish among Leftist intellectuals -- not that they are honest about it, of course.



Click here for a list of all John Ray's comments on moral philosophy


2007 ADDENDUM

Some 2007 research by ">Haidt would seem to be of considerable interest in connection with the above. Haidt argues that the basis of morality is instinctive but that conservatives display greater cognitive complexity in dealing with moral questions. Given the frequent Leftist assertion that "there is no such thing as right and wrong", that is not inherently surprising. Although they often use moral talk in an attempt to influence others, Leftists would seem, on their own admission, to have no serious interest in or committment to morality of any kind. That does make the invariable brutalities of Communist regimes rather understandable.

Part of a summary of Haidt's review:

"Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity."


FINIS

RACE, RACISM AND STEREOTYPING


By John Ray (M.A.;Ph.D.)


THE MODERN WORLD'S MOST OFFENSIVE FOUR-LETTER WORD

There is no doubt that the most offensive four-letter word in America and Britain today is "race". I gather that my occasional mentioning of it greatly limits the readership of much that I write. It is my contention, however, that it is mainly the Left that keep it that way -- by going ballistic every time that the word is mentioned. Absurd though it is, the convention that the Left have forced onto American society by their torrents of abuse is that anyone who mentions the word "race" is a "racist". And "racist" is in fact the most potent term of abuse that there is in most of the world today.

And the reason why is no mystery. Hitler's appalling application of the racial hygeine theories that were common among the Leftists of his day have made all good people super-anxious not to have anything to do with such horrors. But because a particularly nasty socialist once used the idea of race to inflict horrors does not mean that there is anything wrong with the concept of race. Atomic bombs are horrible too but the horribleness of the idea of atomic bombs does not make the reality of such bombs go away. Putting it another way, one does not have to want to persecute other races in order to recognize that they exist.

I have always been quite unhesitating in saying that races do exist and that there are differences between them -- and it is my view that anyone who says otherwise is deliberately blind. There is even good evidence from the geneticists saying so (See e.g. here and here) but I do not expect that sort of evidence to be influential with people who cannot even believe what their senses tell them every day.

I am sure that the kneejerk brigade have stopped reading this by now so I presume that I am now talking to those who are capable of acknowledging that there are races and that race can make a difference. The important question now, then, is what USE does the concept have? And my answer to that is: "Not a lot". As a libertarian conservative I believe in the primacy of the individual so I believe that each person should as far as possible be treated on his/her individual merits, regardless of whether he/she is black, white or brindle.

Unfortunately, however, as in Hitler's day, the Left do not do that. They do not treat people as individuals and they do discriminate against people on the basis not only of their race but even on the basis of their skin colour. I refer of course to "affirmative action". They practice racial discrimination without using the word "race" -- generally preferring the term "minorities" instead, which is about as big a distortion as claiming that homosexuals are "gay". Sad homosexuals are apparently not allowed and the minority that suffers most official discrimination against them in America today is undoubtedly white middle class males. Such confusion of speech makes intelligent discussion difficult so I am going to call leftists what they are: Racists. And I am going to call the categories that they use "races" too. If I try to use the deliberately confused terms that Leftists use in this matter, I run the risk of falling into the sort of confused thinking that they display -- the sort of confused thinking that denies that race exists and then proceeds to base vast policies on it.

America has had the most prolonged and vehement debate about racial questions and the racial category that American Leftists most focus on is blacks of African ultimate origin. And by constant repetition over the last 50 years or so they seem to have persuaded lots of white Americans that they should feel guilty about the problems that such blacks tend to have. White feelings of guilt about blacks appear to have been fairly uncommon before World War II. And the principal point I am aiming at for the moment is that whites should NOT feel guilty. I am not responsible for what my ancestors did nor is anybody else. We can only deal with the situation as we have it today and the plain fact is that American blacks are the luckiest of their race in the world today. If people of African ancestry in America have problems, their problems are as nothing compared to the problems of Africans in Africa. Although it was not done with benevolent intentions, the transportation of African slaves into America was in fact the best thing that anybody has ever done for Africans. The descendants of the slaves are infinitely richer and better off in a whole host of ways than are the descendants of those Africans who were not enslaved. And at least one prominent black American has acknowledged that. See also here.

So my point is that if we must use the Leftist practice of basing policy on race, the logic would be that American blacks owe whites something, and not vice versa. The guilt about blacks that many American whites appear to feel is, in other words, a giant Leftist con job. That they have managed to make people feel guilty about something that they also claim does not exist is an abiding wonder, however. If Leftists really did treat people as individuals regardless of their race, neither the guilt nor the affirmative action policies based on it would be possible.


STEREOTYPING

Around 15 years ago, I went to the library at the University of Queensland and looked up their PsycLIT CD-ROM. The CD was published by the American Psychological Association and indexes what has been published in all the world's academic psychology journals. I entered the search terms "racism" and "ethnocentrism" and looked at the authorship of the stream of articles that came out. There was one author who had published far more than any other -- accounting for about a fifth of the articles concerned. So, by normal academic conventions, that author would clearly be the world's leading authority on the psychology of racism. I am that author. See here

No doubt the situation has changed considerably since then. I neither know nor care nor does anybody else. My research generally arrived at conclusions uncongenial to Leftists so has always been thoroughly ignored by my fellow academics and I have therefore long since stopped doing any of it. I mention the matter only to establish that I do know the subject exceptionally well and am not talking through my hat in what I am about to say. And what I am about to say I have set out in more academic terms, complete with references, here and here.

In psychology, a "stereotype" is the word used to refer to a belief that someone has about a particular group of people. A common stereotype would be the belief that blacks are lazy. Stereotypes are therefore in general greatly condemned. The grounds for condemning them are twofold: 1). It is argued that no group has distinct characteristics; and 2). That even if a majority of a group has some characteristic, not all members of the group will have so it is pernicious to judge the individual by the group to which he belongs.

The first claim is simply silly. Of course groups have common characteristics. Most people of African ancestry have dark skin, for instance. Even if there are some or even many exceptions to the rule, the rule still exists. To say that no rule may have any exceptions would exclude most rules we use in life. The second claim is of course correct. To say that a person has a characteristic that he does not is plainly foolish and unjust and any public policy (such as the Jim Crow laws or "affirmative action") that assumes characteristics in an individual because of some group to which he belongs is also therefore foolish and unjust. The United Nations charter says that each person should be treated according to his/her individual merits and that is probably the most uncontroversial pronouncement the UN has ever made. Whether people act on it, however, is another matter.

So there are intellectually compelling reasons why public policy should not take group membership into account. Enquiries can always be made about the characteristics of the individual who might be affected by a policy instead of assuming the characteristics of the individual from some group to which he/she might belong. If a policy is designed to help poor people, for instance, enquiries should be made about the income and assets of each individual concerned before they are helped rather than assuming that because he/she is a member of a generally poor group (such as blacks) he/she should automatically be helped.

Private life, however, is another matter. In private life we very often HAVE to deal with people on the basis of very imperfect knowledge about them. A landlord deciding on whether or not to let his property to someone, for instance, will often know very little about the prospective tenant. He will of course ask for references etc but as crooks often have the best references, that will not get him far. So he will necessarily use very imperfect rules in deciding what to do. If, for instance, he has had repeated bad experiences with (say) Korean tenants, he may well decide not to accept a particular prospective tenant who is Korean. He will undoubtedly make some mistakes in doing so but he will probably make fewer mistakes that way than if he had used no rules at all. But clearly, what he has done is "stereotyped" Koreans as bad tenants. So what is quite improper in public policy may be perfectly proper in a limited-information, day-to-day environment. Circumstances alter cases and to say that stereotyping is ALWAYS undesirable is in fact to stereotype stereotyping.

So the rational conclusion from realities such as those mentioned above is that consideration of group membership should be outlawed in public policy but allowed in private life. Needless to say, Leftists advocate the exact reverse of that.

MORAL?

"But what about the moral dimension?" someone will no doubt want to ask at this stage. Leftists advocate the policies they do to redress wrongs. Should not such wrongs be addressed?

My reply is that governments do not have to be racist to redress wrongs. If there is a desire to provide accomodation for unpopular tenants, for instance, the government could acquire housing suitable for renting out to such people (which is what many governments already do) and that should be the end of the matter. The government will realize that tenants unacceptable to private landlords are probably going to be costly for the government to accomodate but if their voters vote for that, so be it. There will be no need for government to enquire about the race of any of the tenants concerned nor will there be any need to prevent private property-owners from making such enquiries.

Similarly with education: If the government is concerned at the poor secondary school attainments of some people, the answer is not to pretend that those attainment are adequate but rather to offer extra courses -- summer schools, remedial courses or whole years of education -- to such people. Once again, no enquiry about the race of the low-achievers should be needed. And it appears that something like that is now beginning to happen. See here.

FINIS

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in Front Page magazine of September 25, 2003. There is also a supplement giving further evidence in support of the contentions of this article here and a much more broad-ranging paper by a German historian on nationalism, socialism, eugenics and social Darwinism here (PDF).

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EUGENICS AND THE LEFT



John J. Ray

Hitler's American inspiration

Everybody now knows how evil Nazi eugenics were: How all sorts of people were exterminated not because of anything they had done but simply because of the way they had been born. And we have all heard how disastrous were the Nazi efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project. Good Leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course and use their "Hitler was a Rightist" mantra to load those evils onto conservatives. But Hitler was a socialist. As he himself said:

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

So it should come as no surprise that Hitler's eugenics were an intergral part of his socialism and that the great supporters of COMPULSORY eugenics worldwide in Hitler's day were overwhelmingly of the Left. Left-influenced historians commonly blur the distinction between a belief in eugenic or dysgenic processes and actually advocating a State-enforced eugenics program but we can find the facts if we look carefully. And it was American Leftists upon whom Hitler principally drew for his "inspiration" in the eugenics field.

In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". As it says here:

A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement

And as we read further here:

The second stage in the development of the eugenics movement extended from 1905 to 1930, when eugenics entered its period of greatest influence. More and more progressive reformers became convinced that a good proportion of the social ills in the United States lay in hereditary factors....

An educator, biologist, and leader of the American peace movement, Jordan's main contribution as a major architect of American eugenics was to bridge the gap between eugenics and other reform groups. Like other progressives, Jordan subscribed to the Populist-Progressive criticism of laissez-faire capitalism. Jordan had faith in progress and in a new generation. Yet, this optimistic environmentalism of Jordan's contradicted his Darwinian-hereditarian outlook of the world. Ironically, a similar ambivalence - - a "love-hate" attitude toward environmentalism - - ran through most progressive ideology.

For Jordan, the first president of Leland Stanford University, education permitted society's better members to outlive inferior peoples. Jordan believed the twentieth century had no place for the weak, the incompetent, and the uneducated. In addition, Jordan urged an end to indiscriminate and sentimental charity, a major factor he believed in the survival of the unfit. Jordan, like most progressives, viewed the urban setting as detrimental and destructive to human life. He held the general progressive belief in the social goodness of the small town or farm. The progressive's romantic attraction to the countryside can be partly explained by the alien character of the urban population. An increasing number of city dwellers belonged to the "undesirable foreign element".

And who were the Progressives? Here is the same writer's summary of them:

"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"

.

Sound familiar? The Red/Green alliance of today is obviously not new. So Hitler's eugenics were yet another part of Hitler's LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.

Both quotes above are from De Corte (1978). Against all his own evidence, De Corte also claims that the Progressives were "conservative". More Leftist whitewash! Unless it was glaringly obvious that someone was of the Left, just believing in eugenics MADE that person conservative in De Corte's view. Other evidence of their conservatism was not needed or cited. There is a detailed discussion of what the "Progressivism" of the time actually was here. Whatever else it was, it was clearly not conservative.

But the book by Pickens (1968) sets out the connection between the Progressives and eugenics far more throughly than the few quotes here can indicate.

Eugenics, however, was popular science generally in the first half of the 20th century. As a scientific idea it was not confined to Leftists. But note the difference in the IMPLEMENTATION of eugenic ideas (again from De Corte):

Even early social crusaders held similar illiberal views. Josephine Shaw Lowell, a leader in asylum reform, stated in 1884 that "every person born into a civilized community has a right to live, yet the community has the right to say that incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others. Thus, strands of eugenic-style racism not only found their way into conservative philosophy represented by Sumner and other Social Darwinists but so did progressive reform ideals. Consequently, reformers began viewing the criminal, insane, epileptic, retarded and impoverished as more products of their heredity than of their social surroundings.

Whereas Social Darwinists desired to let nature take its course in eliminating the "unfit," eugenicists, on the other hand, felt Social Darwinism had not accomplished the task of guaranteeing the "survival of the fittest" quickly enough. For eugenicists, the "vigorous classes" should be encouraged to have more children, while the "incompetent classes" should be compelled to have fewer. Consequently, eugenicists in their distrust of laissez-faire concluded that "natural selection" must be helped along.

So conservatives, in their usual way, wanted to leave well enough alone. It was the LEFTISTS, in their usual way, who actually wanted to start compulsion in the matter.

And in Britain too the Leftists of the first half of the 20th century were outspokenly in favour of eugenics. As just one instance, that famous philosopher, peacenik and anti-nuclear camapaigner, Bertrand Russell spoke in favour of it. Writing in "Icarus Or the Future of Science" in 1924 he clearly approved of it though he did voice doubts about it falling into the wrong hands. And in a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and "the woman question," he wrote of eugenics in words that could well have been Hitler's -- even echoing Hitler's bad grammar:

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."

(Quoted from here)

Even when Russell came to realize that State-sponsored eugenics could very easily fall into the wrong hands -- a realization he expresses in Icarus he still clearly saw it as desirable at least in theory.

And Russell was not alone in Britain. As it says here:

The fact is that eugenics was popular across the political spectrum for many years, both in England and in North America (e.g., Paul, 1984; Soloway, 1990). In England, many socialists supported eugenics. Even those viewed as critics, such as J. B .S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley were not against eugenics per se, but came to believe that eugenics in capitalist societies was infected with class bias. Even so, some (see Paul, 1984), accepted the idea of upper class genetic superiority.

Not only were R. B. Cattell's eugenic beliefs commonplace in that milieu, but he was influenced by prominent socialists who supported eugenics, men such as Shaw, Wells, Huxley and Haldane, some of whom he knew (Hurt, 1998). Jonathan Harwood (1980) actually cited the example of Cattell to demonstrate that British eugenics was not a right-wing preserve in the inter-war years (although Keith Hurt, 1998, has noted that Harwood later characterised Cattell's 1972 book on Beyondism as a "right-wing eugenic fantasy").

Oppenheim (1982) claimed that American eugenicists were opposed by those in the Progressive Movement, juxtaposing the hereditarian reformism of the former with the environmental reformism of the latter. Actually many progressives were also eugenicists and incorporated the idea of eugenic reforms into their larger agenda (e.g., Burnham, 1977); there was a great deal of cross-over between the two movements (e.g., Pickens, 1968).

The few real critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State".

So, as we see from all the quotes above, the racialist thinking of the eugenic socialists was quite "scientific" and progressive in it's day, much as 'global warming' is seen as scientific and progressive today. And many of the eugenics true believers continued on postwar moving into campaigns for legalised abortion, planned parenthood and population control. In fact some modern-day pro-lifers have highlighted the racist roots of much of the liberal pro-abortion movement.

And eugenics of a sort IS back on the Left: The Zero Population Growth brigade are back with their "people are pollution" attitudes! Only this time they want to HALVE our population! And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960's again -- including Paul Ehrlich. The abject failure of their earlier prophecies -- e.g. that we would all be doomed by the 1970s -- has not dampened them down a bit.


The Feminist connection

And are feminists conservative? Hardly. And feminists are hardly a new phenomenon either. In the person of Margaret Sanger and others, they were very active and prominent in the USA in first half of the 20th century, advocating (for instance) abortion. And Margaret Sanger was warmly praised by Hitler for her energetic championship of eugenics. And the American eugenicists were very racist. They wanted to reduce the black population and they shared Hitler's view that Jews were genetically inferior -- opposing moves to allow into the USA Jews fleeing from Hitler. So if Hitler's eugenics and racial theories were loathsome, it should be acknowledged that his vigorous supporters in the matter at that time were Leftists and feminists, rather than conservatives.


The Greenie connection

As in America, Hitler's eugenics were in fact just one aspect of a larger "Greenie" theme -- a theme that continues, of course, as the Red/Green alliance of today. The Nazis were in fact probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. A good short summary of that has been written by Andrew Bolt. Excerpts:

Hitler's preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who'd been stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.

The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it "efficient", rather than let people make their own decisions.

The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.

The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy people -- was also in fashion, along with a cult of health.

The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the different.

Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals, but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom -- what a relief for the scared!

You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can't say how our society will look by the time we die.

A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies.

Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.

As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal "parliament".....

People need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves -- a family, or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens.

The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part. "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. "Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . .

"This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.

HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.

The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913.

In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.

Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party.

Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals.

We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god.

We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers"....

The "big government" connection

As they do today, the Leftists of the 1920s and 1930s captured most of the intellectuals and much of the educated class of the day and this gave them access to the levers of government power -- which is of course what Leftists want above all. Leftists never tire of finding reasons for big government. But once something gets into the hands of big government, it can turn out to be very destructive indeed. And the American eugenics laws of the first half of the 20th century are a very good example of that. As it says here:

"President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald. Pennsylvania's legislature passed an 'Act for the Prevention of Idiocy,' but the governor vetoed it .... Other states, however, joined the crusade. ... Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There... it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized."

And someone from the past who is still something of a hero to the Left is the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who famously said: "When you pay taxes you buy civilisation". This was quoted approvingly in 2003 by Simon Crean, Federal Parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor party. Crean somehow failed to note that Holmes was also known for ordering compulsory sterilizations of the supposedly mentally ill: Yet another forgotten American inspiration for Adolf.

And California was one of the earliest supporters of Eugenics laws and in fact provided the model for Hitler's laws. -- as it says here:

Under the banner of "national regeneration," tens of thousands, mostly poor women, were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the United States between 1907 and 1940. And untold thousands of women were sterilized without their informed consent after World War II. Under California's 1909 sterilization law, at least 20,000 Californians in state hospitals and prisons had been involuntarily sterilized by 1964. California, according to a recent study, "consistently outdistanced every other state" in terms of the number of eugenic sterilizations....

California not only led the nation in forced sterilizations, but also in providing scientific and educational support for Hitler's regime. In 1935, Sacramento's Charles M. Goethe praised the Human Betterment Foundation for effectively "shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler." In 1936, Goethe acknowledged the United States and Germany as leaders in eugenics ("two stupendous forward movements"), but complained that "even California's quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany." In 1936, California eugenicist Paul Popenoe was asking one of his Nazi counterparts for information about sterilization policies in Germany in order to make sure that "conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented." .....

California's eugenicists could not claim ignorance that Germany's sterilization program was motivated primarily by racial politics. For example, in 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" -- targeted primarily at Jews -- they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates. . Of course the passing of these people should be painless and without warning. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what was coming and never awake."

And a country that is to this day a model and inspiration to Leftists everywhere is Sweden -- with its all-embracing welfare State. So what happened in Sweden? As we read here:

During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to antisemitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilised around 60 000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movements--including demands for sterilisation of people considered unfit--had, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis.

So what exactly did happen in the USA? I am indebted to one of my fellow bloggers for a useful summary of one of the cases. Some extracts:

In the 1920's, the eugenics movement was ... popular. So popular in fact, that mandatory sterilization laws were passed in 34 states from the mid-1920's to mid 30's. Basically, these laws stated that sterilization was mandatory for socially undesirable persons. "The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues)..." [etc]. So basically, if you were hyperactive, promiscuous, an alcoholic or drug addict, had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome, were epileptic, (etc., ad nauseum), or exhibited ANY socially undesirable behavior at all, you were eligible for mandatory sterilization. And not you, nor your parents (if you were a minor) had any right to say "No".

In the mid 1920's, Carrie Buck, at the ripe old age of 17, fought the state of Virginia's mandatory sterilization statute. She was classified as a socially inferior woman, having born a child out of wedlock and her foster parents stated that she was "a handful". Carrie's mother had also been incarcerated in a state institution as a 'promiscuous woman'. And at the age of 7 months, Carrie's child, Vivian, was 'certified' as being 'deficient', based on the 'history' of Carrie and her mother.

Carrie lost her case at the state court level, and it wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1927. The prominent Supreme Court jurist, Oliver Wendel Holmes, wrote the opinion in Buck v. Bell. The decision was 8-1, Justice Butler dissenting. Here's what the majority opinion boiled down to:

"In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."
...

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., (Buck v. Bell, 1927)

Five months after this decision, Carrie was forcibly sterilized. It later came out that her promiscuity was nothing of the sort. She'd been raped by the nephew of her foster parents, himself a violent (unsterilized) little scumbag. And her daughter's school records show that Vivian was a B student, receiving an A in deportment (behavior), and she was on the honor roll. Genetic tests later showed that neither Carrie nor her daughter had any genetic defects.

Conservative eugenics?

I should note that economist Steven Levitt's work suggests that the old Leftist eugenics program of reducing the birth rate (via abortion) among the "lower classes" was not totally misconceived. Levitt's findings seem to show that making VOLUNTARY abortion available to poorer mothers reduces the crime rate years later. He is at pains of course to indicate that his empirical findings are not an endorsement of either eugenics or abortion. Slate featured a 3 day correspondence between him and Steve Sailer dealing with the issue.

Given the traditional conservative regard for individual liberty, it seems to me that the only eugenics programs that conservatives could justify would be voluntary ones -- such as the large material incentives to reproduce that the Singapore government offers to highly educated Singaporean women. Christian conservatives, however, tend to regard all reproduction as God-given so would oppose even voluntary eugenic programs that limited reproduction -- such as the Woodhill Foundation programs that pay crack-addicted mothers to undertake contraception.

Leftists, however, oppose the Woodhill programs because they are voluntary and privately-funded. They like such matters to be in the hands of the State (i.e. under their control).

And the problem of a self-perpetuating and substantially criminal underclass does not need to be addressed by eugenics. It can be addressed by addressing its major causes -- such as the over-generous welfare system that the Leftists have created in their hunger for praise.

And despite everything, there ARE useful and non-coercive Eugenics programs in operation right now. Genetic screening in the U.S. Jewish community has now all but eliminated an awful hereditary disease -- Tay-Sachs -- from that community.


Shifting the blame

Modern-day Leftists hate it when you point out that it was THEY who were the inspiration for Hitler. So what do they do? They try to shift the blame -- to even the most unlikely targets. A recent book has tried to lay the blame for the Leftist eugenicists of the early 20th century at the door of someone who opposed ALL compulsion. As the book reviewer says:

"It has long been open season on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Perhaps because he was the 19th century's most prominent defender of individual liberty and critic of the violence of the state, Spencer has always been the object of hatred and distortion; indeed, it sometimes seems that no accusation is too bizarre to be leveled against him...

What common ground could there be between Spencer and the eugenicists? Both, to be sure, were 'Social Darwinists,' if that means that both thought there were important sociopolitical lessons to be drawn from evolutionary biology. But Spencer and the eugenicists drew opposite lessons. For the eugenicists, the moral of evolutionary biology was that the course of human evolution must be coercively managed and controlled by a centralized, paternalistic technocracy. For Spencer, by contrast, the moral was that coercive, centralized, paternalistic approaches to social problems were counterproductive and so would tend to be eliminated by the spontaneous forces of social evolution ..."

It is a good comment on the dismal minds of Leftists that they think that nothing can be accomplished except through compulsion.


Hitler's Marxist inspiration

It may be objected, however, that comparing Hitler with the fashionable eugenicists among Western Leftists of the 20s and 30s is rather beside the point. Western Leftists surely did not contemplate anything as extreme as Hitler's genocide. Given some of the pitiless utterances of Western Leftists already mentioned, that is a fairly feeble protest but it should be noted that Hitler did not get ALL his ideas from the West of his time. He got some of them from none other than Marx and Engels. And if it can be argued that Western Leftists did not condone genocide, the same cannot be said of Marx and Engels. They in fact vociferously ADVOCATED genocide. Note this quote:

"In January 1849, months before he migrated to London, Karl Marx published an article by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung announcing that in Central Europe only Germans, Hungarians and Poles counted as bearers of progress. The rest must go. "The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

Genocide arose out of Marx's master-theory of history -- feudalism giving place inevitably to capitalism, capitalism to socialism. The lesser races of Europe -- Basques, Serbs, Bretons and others -- being sunk in feudalism, were counter-revolutionary; having failed to develop a bourgeoisie, they would be two steps behind in the historical process. Engels dismissed them as left-overs and ethnic trash (Voelkerabfall), and called for their extinction.

So genocide was born as a doctrine in the German Rhineland in January 1849, in a Europe still reeling from the revolutions of 1848. It was to become the beacon light of socialism, proudly held and proudly proclaimed."

The above is a quote from an article by George Watson -- a literary historian specializing in the early history of socialism (I have an earlier article of his posted here and there is a review of his major book here). The quote is taken from an article in the December 2004 issue of Quadrant, Australia's premier intellectual conservative magazine.

The fact that Hitler's genocidal ideas largely originated with Marx and Engels themselves has of course been hidden from public awareness with almost total success by a Left-dominated media and academe. It would be too embarrassing to admit. But if we look at all the historical materials available to us, there can be no doubt of the Leftist origins of Hitler's genocidal "eugenics".


References:

De Corte, T.L. (1978) Menace of Undesirables: The Eugenics Movement During the Progressive Era. University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Pickens, D. (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Toland, J. (1976) Adolf Hitler Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday.


Epilogue

There is a follow-up to the above article here

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What appears below is an attempt to analyse most aspects of Leftist political thinking and display the psychological and sociological roots of such thinking in an historical context. Such a large subject requires a lot of pages so I have split the story into three parts. The present file summarizes the whole argument and two further files give more detail. See also my main blog for daily updates to the story. What appears below is the product of many updates and expansions. This is the update of September, 2023

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

-- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (pictured below). Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.





"For a hundred years or more the defining division in politics, in Britain and elsewhere, was about the role of the state. Essentially progressives believed in its ability to improve society; Conservatives feared its interference stifled personal liberty.

-- Anthony Blair, Labour Party Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (2006)



"To me, conservative means believing in a minimum amount of government and a maximum amount of freedom -- and keeping government out of people's lives and business -- and leaving people alone,"
-- Lyn Nofziger, long-time U.S. Republican insider (2005)

THE ROOT CAUSES OF POLITICAL LEFTISM



By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)

Introductory summary:

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

As the quotations at the head of this page say, Leftists characteristically use the power of the state to enforce their wishes for control

So that is what Leftists are but what makes them that way? Why do they want to do that? What is the psychology behind that impulse? The basic contention here is that Leftists are chronically angry people and from that all their behaviour follows

So what do we make of the Leftist contention that conservatives are the problem because conservatives are opposed to change and always in favour of the status quo regardless of its merits? Leftists say that they are "progressive" and conservatves are simply a barrier to progress.

That assertion is clearly false. BOTH Leftists and Rightists want to change the status quo (Have you ever heard of a conservative-dominated government that a lacked a legislative agenda?) but the two sides simply want different changes



But to begin from the beginning:

I did my first piece of research into the psychology of politics in 1968. It was my Masters dissertation. I have been studying the subject ever since -- now with many academic publications on it behind me. So it seems reasonable that, over four decades later, I should look back and say what I have learned in the intervening years. And the prime thing I have learned is that you cannot understand Leftism without understanding its emotional roots. And once you understand that, all the rest is detail.

What IS Leftism?

It follows from my definition of Leftism above that the essential feature of all Leftism is the desire to stop other people from doing various things they want to do and make them do various things that they do not want to do (via taxation, regulation, mass murder etc.) When (on October 30, 2008) Obama spoke of his intention to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography. He was talking about transforming what American people can and must do.

So that is the first and perhaps the most important thing about Leftism: It is intrinsically authoritarian. It is also fundamentally egotistical. Where do they think they get the right to tell other people what to do? They have to believe that they are better, wiser, more caring etc. Their wise and noble intentions are the justification for their authoritarianism. Thinking highly of themselves and being authoritarian are two sides of the same coin

Leftists are not alone in desiring to regulate others, however, so to complete the definition, we have to look at other things that characterize them.

The first remaining thing to say about them is that Leftism is emotional. The second is to say that the emotion is negative and the third thing to say is that the negative emotion (anger/hate/rage) is directed at the world about the Leftist, at the status quo if you like. The Leftist is nothing if he is not a critic, though usually a very poorly-informed critic. And the criticisms tend to be both pervasive and deeply felt.

Orwell of course understood Leftism exceptionally well so it is revealing that in 1943 he wrote an essay called "Can Socialists Be Happy?" His answer was that they can't even imagine it.



What is routinely overlooked in most discussions of ideology is that conservatives don't like the status quo either -- but they don't hate it and they rarely get burned up about it. Ask almost any conservative and he will give you a long list of things he would like to see changed in the world about him. It is only a misleading Leftist caricature to say that conservatives support the status quo. And iconic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were undoubtedly great agents of change.

So Left and Right do indeed differ in their response to the status quo but not in the simplistic "for and against" way that Leftists claim. The obvious difference is in depth of feeling and in the changes desired. Leftists want change passionately and feel very righteous about the changes they want. Conservatives can see fault and conservative leaders do quite regularly work towards the changes that they and their voters think desirable -- but most conservatives just want to get on with their own lives. The typical conservative does not simmer if his wishes for change are not implemented. The Leftist does.

{Parenthesis: I am not sure that there are ANY people who are completely happy with the world as it is (I know of none) but, if they exist, they are not concerned about politics. So how they vote has to be speculative. It would make some sense to claim that they vote conservative when called upon to vote -- as they would not be able to find much in common with the constant complaint that is the mark of the Leftist -- but on the other hand perhaps they simply vote for whatever seems fashionable or popular at the time: Many of the Obama voters of 2008, perhaps?}

One marker of the difference just set out will be well known to anyone who reads blogs from both sides of the divide: Profanity is hugely more common on Leftist blogs. A systematic study of the matter found profanity to be TWELVE TIMES more common on Leftist blogs. Profanity is of course a form of anger and an attempt to express such feelings strongly.

The natural state of affairs

While defining Leftism in terms of their apparent drives and motivations is undoubterdly true and useful, it doesn't provide a really sharp differentiation of the Left from others. And I think we can improve on it. And to do that I think we have to refer to the natural state of affairs. "The natural state of affairs"? What is that? It is a concept sometimes used in both law and economics but I want to broaden its applicability. I think it is actually quite easy to define in a generally applicable way. It means whatever people would do in the absence of external constraints.

And Leftists are big on external constraints. They are continually trying to make laws and regulations that will move people away from doing what they otherwise would do. There is general agreement that some basic laws are needed -- prohibition against assault, murder, theft etc. but Leftists go far beyond that. In a celebrated case one of them (Bloomberg) even wanted to forbid you from buying fizzy drinks in a container that was bigger than a certain size. Leftist would regulate EVERYTHING if they could. And in the Soviet Union they went close to achieving it. Leftists are the ultimate authoritarians. They want to STOP people doing what they would do in a natural state of affairs.

So I think we can now make a pretty sharp distinction between the changes Leftists want and the changes that conservatives want. Leftists want change AWAY from the natural state of affairs while conservatives want changes TOWARDS the natural state of affairs -- or at least changes that respect the natural state of affairs.

For instance, in a natural state of affairs people would tend to discriminate in various ways. They would and do tend to give various sorts of preference to people like themselves. And conservatives generally understand that. But to Leftists discrimination is an offence deserving of severe punishment. They want to stop people doing what they are normally and naturally inclined to do. The need for change that drives them makes them the enemy of the natural state of affairs.

So I think the sharpest definition of Leftists is people who want to overturn the natural state of affairs -- a considerable ambition

Note that I do NOT use the word "liberal" for the Left side of politics. "Liberal" as a name for any left-leaning political party is just camouflage. Except in sex-related matters, liberty is in general a very low priority for them. And their attack on sexual mores arose only as a means of tearing down the status quo. Their advocacy of freedom of choice in sexual and reproductive matters soon breaks down if people make choices they disapprove of. The amazing attacks on Sarah Palin's decision to bear a handicapped child rather than abort it certainly showed no respect for her choice in the matter. And far-Leftists such as Britain's now resigned Harriet Harman make quite virulent attacks on prostitution under the guise that it "degrades women". And fundamentalist Mormon polygamy has no friends on the Left (though Muslim polygamy is OK).



So what is conservatism?

Basically it is caution based on a perception that the world is an unpredictable, dangerous and often hostile place. So change is not rejected. It is in fact, as just said, usually desired. But it is approached in a skeptical, step by step way to ensure that its effects are beneficial or at least benign. And an important criterion of what constitutes "benign" is how the change affects individual liberty. At a minimum, a conservative wants to ensure that change will not reduce his individual liberty.

Because the Leftist is angry rather than prudent, however, he cares not a bit for the conservative's caution. The most thorough-going Leftist just wants to smash everything that exists around him out of the feeling that it is all so hateful that none of it is worth preserving. And in the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the Maoist revolution and many more minor revolutions, the Leftists got their way -- with results we all know about. Doing any sort of a good job of putting back together what they have smashed is beyond them. They are destroyers only. Hate is not constructive.

Because we all know of those dismal results, Leftist activists and politicians in entrenched democracies have to be more careful. Expressing the full extent of their feelings and advocating revolution would simply marginalize them and they know that. So they have to find ways of undermining society in more subtle ways. And they are greatly aided in that by the complex nature of modern society. Most people have only the vaguest notion of how society works so the Leftist politician can propose various changes that sound good but which will be disastrous in practice -- with "share and share alike" being the classic example of that. And when the disasters unfold the committed Leftist cannot lose. He will get an internal glow of satisfaction from the suffering and disruption unleashed on all those fools around him that he hates but will be excused from blame because he "meant well".

Varieties of Leftism

So what motivates a Leftist to be so full of negative emotions toward the surrounding world? Many things. There is no one cause of Leftism. But there are nonetheless two major sources of Leftism and understanding them explains most Leftist policies and positions. The first is the motivation most common among Leftist voters and the second is the motivation most common among Leftist leaders. It would be nice if we could identify just one sort of motivation common to all Leftists but, as with so many other things in life, reality is more complicated than that. And I am not alone in seeing a dichotomy. Many years ago, that great political observer, Tocqueville, had a view very similar to that which I set out below. In his "Recollections", he saw socialism as a combination of passion in the people and illusions in men of letters, with their "ingenious and false systems" -- still a good description today.

And although the motivations of leaders and followers are in general very different, there is of course some overlap between the two. Some people who express their Leftism only at the ballot box are similarly motivated to Leftist leaders and some Leftist leaders are similarly motivated to Leftist voters.

Followers:

So, to start with the average Leftist voter: It could be that the Leftist was born into a subset of society that is in general hostile to the larger society. Miners are a common example of that. Mining towns were once bedrock Left-voting places. Why that was so is beyond the scope of what I want to say at the moment, however.

And Left-voters may simply be upset that they personally are not getting a very good deal from society as it exists and be generally critical of society for that reason. A person who is born ugly, for instance, might well be critical of society for its "false" beauty ideals.

But the biggest category of Leftist voters by far would appear to be genuinely well intentioned but shortsighted people who are strongly emotionally affected by suffering in others. They see other people who are not doing well in some way and urgently want that fixed by whatever means it takes. They are angered by what they see as "injustice". And that emotion dominates all else. And it is the strong negative emotions evoked by the surrounding society that unites these people with Leftists of other stripes.

And that, I believe is how politics works: It is particularly the people who are especially sensitive to the suffering of others who make us all suffer, paradoxical though that may seem. Without their numerous votes, the destructive and irresponsible Leftist politicians would never gain power. And the converse of that is that a little bit of heartlessness can be desirable. Balance is needed in fellow-feeling, as in many other things.

That the fellow feeling of the Leftist follower is unbalanced and immature can be seen from its sheer immediacy. Leftists can rally (and did rally) to shield vicious murderers like "Tookie" Williams from the rightful consequences of his actions because the Leftists concerned see only the immediate prospect of the offender's execution. That a failure to punish severely the reprehensible deeds that people like Williams commit will excuse and encourage more such deeds by others is just not within the tiny time-horizon of the Leftist. Any fellow-feeling for Tookie's innocuous but long-dead victims was notable for its absence in the vigils designed to "save" Tookie.

Another sort of immaturity that infests the Leftist's emotional life is the childish need to be looked after. How wonderful it would be if the protective parents of one's childhood remained forever present, shielding one from all threats and providing all needs. The Leftist passionately wants that and fools himself into thinking that the state can fulfil that role. It never does, of course, but such Leftists just never grow up emotionally. They continue dreaming their childish dreams.

One test of the claim that most Leftist voters are chronically emotionally disturbed and dissatisfied is that Left-voters should be more unhappy than conservatives -- and that has been borne out in almost all the happiness surveys that I have seen. For some discussion of that, see here. Because they are calmer, less emotional and not as easily upset, conservatives are happier and more level-headed -- and so are not as easily stampeded into foolish actions by emotional appeals. Most of them don't even believe in global warming!

So, for most Leftists, their Leftism mostly dwells deep within the personality. Which is why, from age 2, I could tell that my son would be a conservative. His favourite "joke" at that age (and indeed for some years afterward) was: "The boy fell in the mud". He was able to see the funny side of a minor mishap that would have been seen as a tragedy by an emotional Leftist.

And the soft-hearted Leftists have much to thank conservatives for. The conservative element in the population protects them from the consequences that they wish for. Nowhere is that better seen than when the revolution succeeds. Among the first people to be "liquidated" by the hard men of the revolution are the soft-hearted revolutionaries. Stalin eliminated most of the old Bolsheviks.

Fortunately, time also plays a part. Many of the well-intentioned Leftists do over time come to see that simplistic solutions to society's ills don't work and end up voting for more complex and balanced solutions. They become conservatives. Even the once very Leftist George McGovern sounded remarkably conservative in his latter years. Many of the most vocal conservatives started out as Leftists and have become quite evangelical as a consequence of learning from experience that Leftist policies are destructive. They have the same benevolent aims as before but have grown wiser about what will best serve those aims. And the older they get, the more chance they have to see the counterproductive nature of simplistic Leftist "solutions". Which is why aging is normally accompanied by a drift rightwards -- with Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan being stellar examples of that.

Leaders:

In absolute numbers, Leftist activists and politicians are very few but their impact is large -- so understanding them is the big challenge.

They generally appear to be narcissists, high on self-love. And that may well be the whole of it in some cases. And I dwell on that pattern in the third part of this essay. But the basic need that drives the policies that leftists adopt is the need for camouflage. They really want to destroy or damage the societies about them but nobody would vote for them if they came out and said that. Such Leftist leaders -- intellectuals in particular -- are out-and-out rage-filled haters who want to smash everything in a world that does not fit in with their simplistic theories. So to cover up their evil motivations they have to appear righteous and compassionate. They hide behind a big lie. But there is a perhaps regrettable tendency for people to take others at face-value. The Leftist false front tends to be believed to be genuine. So in politics the Left are always careful to push proposals that are destructive but yet look good.

So Leftists are big on the appearance of righteousness for a very basic reason. They need it to gain influence. And others who are keen on the appearance of righteousness for other reasons will tend to jump onto the leftist bandwagon, even though their motivations may be different. And a major reason why others may want an appearance of righteousness is ego need. Some people are emotionally insecure for whatever reason so have large but weak egos. They think very highly of themselves but reality can be abrasive of such feelings so they are in constant need of having their self-esteem propped up and pumped up. And the proclamations of righteousness that constitute Leftist politics go a long way towards providing that.

So the weak-ego man loves himself but needs validation for that self-love. He craves attention and praise. He needs to be perceived as wise and righteous -- and he tries to achieve that by pretending to be all heart and condemning the world for its many faults and imperfections. But, whatever lies behind the false front, Leftist leaders are driven by anger -- even if it is only anger that the world does not accord them the prominence and praise that they need and which they feel is their due.

But anger is a very bad frame of mind in which to make decisions and craft policies so the policies advocated by Leftist leaders are usually simplistic and very poorly thought-out. The Leftist leader is so keen to smash the status quo that detailed thought about the alternatives and their consequences is rare. And the basically good people who are the Leftist voters are angry too, for different reasons, so they don't think things through or pay much attention to detail either, and as a result, they will often be lured into voting for some unscrupulous Leftist politician who promises to fix everything -- but who is sufficiently involved in politics to know deep down that the cure will be worse than the disease. But if offering false hope gets the leader/activist into a position of power and glory, too bad! And the poor old conservative who knows how things work and says that there is no easy fix will be ignored -- and called "heartless".

Envy?

The most succinct summary of what I have said above is that Leftism is basically the politics of rage. This contrasts with the usual summary that Leftism is the politics of envy. But there is no contradiction. Envy is a subset of anger: You are angered by the prosperity of others. But Leftists these days seem to be a generally affluent bunch. They are certainly not on average materially disadvantaged. So material envy is an implausible motive for most of them. Envy of status, prestige and position, however, is another matter. That is where Leftist leaders are big -- something discussed later below.

Neophilia

Although anger at the world seems to be the main driver of Leftism, there is another driver that seems obvious at times: Neophilia -- a craving for novelty and excitement. For some people almost ANY promise of change will be embraced. This would seem rather infantile but there is a lot of documentation of it. It was certainly a feature of the Italian Fascist and German Nazi versions of Leftism. I look in detail at the phenomenon here and I also give some examples of it in the third part of this essay.

For much of the 20th century, in fact, "new" was a worldwide code word for "Leftist". The New Theater and the New School, for instance, were in reality the Leftist Theater and the Leftist School. Leftists really thought they had something original to say. Stalin even thought he could create a "new Soviet man" and the French revolutionaries even tried to change the calendar. Neophilia is very visible in Leftism.

So a neophiliac likes the Leftist idea of ripping everything up and starting again, not because he is particularly angry at the world but because he is bored by it. One might reasonably expect to find neophilia in both followers and leaders at times.

Conservatives and emotion

I have a separate monograph on conservatism but I think I need to say a few more things about conservatism here. The main thing that I have said so far about conservatives is that they are cautious. But caution is not really an emotion. It is a disposition and some emotions have to go with that but I think I should say a little more about what those emotions are.

What I did mention above is that conservatives are always shown in research as being happier and more content than Leftists and that leads into what I think is important. Because conservatives are NOT full of rage, they feel free to enjoy whatever is around them. And one of the great satisfactions in human life is fellowship: Feeling part of a group of people whom you like or respect. So instead of screaming "racism" at every sign of group loyalty, conservatives can simply enjoy their group loyalties. They are untroubled patriots, for instance.

So American conservatives can feel warm inside to be Americans and they can greatly value the fellowship they find in their church. And where conservatives diverge most strongly from Leftists is that they can also feel a sense of fellowship, belonging and connectedness with their ancestors and forebears. We often see this very strongly expressed among American conservatives when they talk about the "Founders" of the nation and the wisdom the founders bequeathed in the Constitution etc.

There is a good evocation below of the way Christian faith can be powerfully felt. It is the great Lutheran hymn: Ein feste Burg. It speaks of the way faith is a great comfort in adversity. Could any Leftist feel in their hearts the great diapasons there? Any that can would be well on the way to becoming conservatives



And appreciative thoughts are of course often to the fore on Thanksgiving day. I have put up a "Thanksgiving" edition of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH that shows how much hostility Thanksgiving now attracts from the Left. Thanksgiving is of course a continuation of traditional harvest festivals. Human beings have always joyously celebrated a successful harvest and given thanks to their Gods for it. It takes the hate-filled modern-day Leftist activists to find any fault with that.

And another common expression of solidarity with the past is of course the great respect that conservatives pay to those who have died in war in the service of their nation. In my country, Australia, that day of remembrance (which we call Anzac day) is our only really solemn national occasion. Leftists have tried to laugh at it from time to time but it goes from strength to strength, with young people as well as old participating in the services of remembrance.

And there is no doubt that the army is always one of the most solidly conservative bodies of people that exists in any community. And the degree of fellowship in the army must be very close to maximal. If you pass a member of your old army unit in the street, you always stop to say a few words at least. There is a lasting bond between men who have fought together that outsiders can only dimly understand. My time in the Australian army was most undistinguished (though very fondly remembered) but I was an army psychologist so perhaps I have a little more awareness of what the army is about than most. I am certainly pleased to say that in my younger days, I wore my country's uniform.



All these sorts of fellowship that conservatives feel are generally felt pretty strongly. There is often a swelling of pride and gratitude associated with such feelings. And, because of his anger and dissatisfation with society, the poor sad old Leftist is basically left out of all that. His hate and rage bars him from sharing some of the most basic human connections and emotions. And, where Leftist followers are concerned, that is particularly sad. As an emotional person, he is probably much in need of such connections and feelings so not having them must multiply his bitterness. So when Leftist followers do at long last find an outlet for their need for fellowship and connectedness that passes muster with them we get the completely over the top hysteria of Fascism, Nazism or Obama-worship. (Anybody who has been conned into believing that the National Socialist Hitler and the Marxist Mussolini were Rightists should read here and here)

And I now want to give a vivid example of how conservatives feel: Something that Leftists will hate viscerally but which most conservatives should understand and enjoy. And if conservatives enjoy feelings of connectedness with the past, where better to look at this point than to an institution founded in 1440 by King Henry VI and which is still as flourishing as ever today. I refer to a school that has been giving boys a first-class education for nearly 600 years: Eton. I reproduce below the Eton Boating Song. Eton is of course Britain's most elite school and British private schools are famous for fostering a sense of fellowship among their pupils. And you will see that vividly below. Listen to the music as you read the words and I will add a few comments afterwards. The song refers of course to competitive rowing regattas but it is also the unofficial song of the whole college. It is certainly the song most associated with Eton:



Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze,
Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees;
Swing, swing together,
With your bodies between your knees.

Rugby may be more clever,
Harrow may make more row:
But we'll row forever,
Steady from stroke to bow,
And nothing in life shall sever
The chain that is round us now.

Others will fill our places,
Dressed in the old light blue;
We'll recollect our races,
We'll to the flag be true;
And youth will be still in our faces
When we cheer for an Eton crew.

Twenty years hence this weather
May tempt us from office stools:
We may be slow on the feather,
And seem to the boys old fools:
But we'll still swing together,
And swear by the best of schools.

I went to a totally undistinguished school in a small Australian country town but that song does tend to bring a tear to my eyes. It is a powerful expression of being part of something bigger and better, and something that transcends time. I hope some of my readers get that powerful feeling too.

And note that is also a humble song. It talks of pride in a great identity but without any thought of dominating and changing others -- which is the Leftist preoccupation. It talks of the singers as being "old fools" sitting on "office stools". There is no Fascist aggression there at all. In characteristically English style, it actually spends quite a lot of time talking about the weather! No egotistical "Tomorrow belongs to me", "We are the people we have been waiting for" or "Yes we can" there.

Yet it is a song that expressed a powerful feeling. British officers in World War I were known to go "over the top" in the dreadful charges of that war singing the Eton Boating song. That to me is a sort of nobility which I know that no Leftist egotist will ever understand.

We see then that in political matters Leftists have primarily negative emotions whereas conservatives have primarily positive emotions. And the happiness research bears that out.

Patriotism, nationalism and racism

Warner Todd Huston sets out at some length the simple but rather denied truth that American Leftists only pretend to be patriotic. In a patriotic nation they have to do that for PR purposes but their hearts are not in it and they manage the pretence only by claiming that they love what America COULD BE rather than what it is. Rather pathetic.

I have set out at some length above evidence that patriotism is not in general aggressive. There is however a related attitude known as nationalism. Nationalism can mean two quite different things: 1). A desire of a people for independent existence as a nation -- as in 19th century German nationalism or 20th Scottish nationalism; 2). When the lovers of their own country want to dominate other countries. It is meaning 2 that I am concerned with here. And all the examples of that which I can think of, from Napoleon to Hitler, have been Leftists. So my summary of the matter is that nationalism is a Leftist perversion of patriotism. No wonder Leftist leaders are so suspicious of patriotism! They judge others by themselves. They know how vicious they would be with an entire nation behind them and assume that others think similarly.

But, as already mentioned, both patriotism and nationalism are only one sort of group loyalty. Rotarians are often strongly attached to their club and even homosexuals feel "gay pride" apparently. And many church members are strongly attached to their religious denomination or local church. And religious identity can extend to something like nationalism -- with physical attacks on members of other denominations. There is still a faint remnant of that in Northern Ireland (though the enmity there is as much historic as religious) and in Islam there is a lot of it. Muslims are great slaughterers of other Muslims -- if the other Muslims don't subscribe to the "right" brand of Islam. But Islam is Fascistic anyway.

And then there is the great unmentionable. You CAN feel proud of your race. And if the pride is "black pride" that is just fine. But "white pride" is apparently a breath from the depths of hell. Yet history's most destructive example of racism was not concerned with whiteness at all. Hitler in fact allied himself with the non-white Japanese and attacked many nations that were just as white as Germans are. In fact there are proportionately rather more blue-eyed blondes (idealized by the Nazis) in Russia and in Poland than there are in Germany -- and Adolf slaughtered millions of both. Hitler's bag was -- following Woodrow Wilson and Houston Stewart Chamberlain -- ARYANS. And most Aryans are in fact brown (Indians).

So the Leftist suspicion of pride in being white has exactly no foundation in the place where it might be most expected! So when Leftists associate Nazism with white racism, it is just the normal Leftist ignorance of facts and history. So white racism as an oppressive thing is mainly an American phenomenon. And the KKK were overwhelmingly Democrats! Clearly, conservatives were not the problem there.

I can't resist noting here, however, that I quite like Aryans myself. I normally have three or four quite brown Indians living with me in my house and most days I fly the flag of the Republic of India from my flagpole. And I was kicked off the Majority Rights blog for constantly mocking the white racists who also blog there. So I imagine that it is by now pretty clear that Leftists would have an uphill job of tagging me as a white racist (though they will no doubt get to the top of that hill somehow). I just don't fit their simplistic black-and-white way of thinking. If we are more careful with our definitions than Leftists usually are, however, I think it should become clear that there are some forms of white "racism" that are perfectly reasonable, normal and harmless.

I refer in particular to my prior comments showing that patriotism is not in general necessarily aggressive, hostile or oppressive. And I see no reason why what we might call "white patriotism" should be aggressive, hostile or oppressive. In other words, a feeling of connectedness with other whites and a pride in being white does not necessarily imply a wish to oppress or attack people of other races. But when we come to nationalism, however (the Leftist specialty), it is a very different situation. White nationalism (the desire to conquer or control non-white races) is indisputably a very bad thing.

But white nationalism is also a very rare thing. Hitler wasn't moved by it nor was the British empire. The chief enemy of the British empire was the French, who are quite white. The KKK is about the only example of white nationalism that I can think of. And the KKK at one time were a major power at Democrat conventions (The 1924 "Klanbake" convention, for instance). Such acclaimed Democrat Presidents as Woodrow Wilson and FDR both had solid KKK support. So if we are careful with our definitions, white pride is only dangerous in the hands of Leftists. The very small band of modern-day neo-Nazis are probably an exception to that but there are small exceptions to most rules. And the modern-day political parties that are most often called neo-Nazi (Britain's BNP and Germany's NDP) do in fact have a lot of quite socialistic policies -- just as old Adolf did.

Note how easily everything falls into place once we have swept away the Leftist hokum about Nazism and the KKK being "Rightist".

Possible objections to the above account

1). A challenge to the account I have given above could be the fact that, right up to JFK, Leftists were patriotic too -- almost crazily so in the case of people like Theodore Roosevelt and the followers of Hitler. So have I misunderstood or misrepresented present-day Leftists? If Leftists were once patriotic, surely it is wrong to see lack of patriotism as characteristic of them.

I think Obama worship gives us the answer to that. Because Leftists are more emotional, their POTENTIAL for group loyalty generally and patriotism in particular is unusually great. But the more there are things that they hate in the world about them, the more they are inhibited from giving rein to any such feelings. But when something arises that they can give undivided loyalty to, they go overboard -- as we saw in Fascism, Nazism and in the Obama worship of 2008.

So the Leftist is in perpetual conflict: He WANTS connectedness but so many things in the world about him are unsatisfactory to him that he ends up as a rejectionist rather than as a participant. In the past, it was only "The Bosses" who were the focus of his ire and he could kid himself that most of the people around him were not responsible for the "injustices" that bother him so much. So he could be patriotic without conflict.

Now, however, when it appears to him that even "rednecks" and "NASCAR dads" are on the side of what upsets him, he is completely alienated. He once felt that "the workers" were on his side and appointed himself as a spokesman for them. That illusion is now gone and the whole country is on the wrong track from his viewpoint. So how wonderful for him it was when the Obamessiah came along to rescue him from that dreadful dilemma and offered the prospect of reshaping the country into his desired mould!

2). I have argued primarily from real-life examples above that patriotism does not imply hostility towards others. I might mention that there is a very large academic literature in psychology which assumes otherwise -- starting with the work of the Marxist Adorno et al. (1950) on "ethnocentrism". Leftist psychologists claim that patriotism and racism do go together. When I did survey research to test that assumption, however, I repeatedly found that the facts showed exactly what I have asserted above -- that patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).

Reference: Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality New York: Harper.

How do Leftist ideologues THINK?

I have set out the case for what the actual motivations of Leftist ideologues are -- but Leftists themselves would be very unlikely to salute any of it. It is of some interest therefore to try to see things from their own point of view.

And Olavo de Carvalho has done sterling work there. He deals principally with extreme Leftists ("Revolutionaries") but points out that the same mentality pervades Leftist "thinkers" generally. He says that Leftists are fixated on a view of utopia. They justify themselves as seeking the betterment of mankind according to quite Christian standards. They want everyone to be loving and sharing to one-another at some future time.

And the fact that they are fixated on this beneficent vision excuses everything that they might do and gives them huge psychic benefits. It allows them to see themselves as kindly and wise even while they lie, cheat and brutalize others in pursuit of their goals. The vision is all and excuses all.

Utopia is of course unattainable but the thinking concerned is a powerful form of self-deception.



The sudden eruption of mania about transsexualism

Up until around 2020, effeminate men and butch women had mostly found a happy home among homosexuals. And they had flown quite under the radar. They were mentioned only in passing. By 2023, however, a new rage-filled religion had emerged around such people. Out of the blue, they changed from being ignored by the Left to becoming the great new cause of the Left. How come?

It's not hard to understand once you realize that the Left are the angry people and angry people need something or someone to be angry about. They need someone to shout at and tear down and attack. They need a "cause"

And their old causes have mostly lost their steam. The workers now mostly vote for Republicans so there is no longer any joy in patronizing them; The battle for gay rights has been won and pitying blacks has become too obviously a failure. But more on that:

The Left once thought that the very low average economic success of blacks was the result of them being badly treated by the educational system. The "gap" between black and white success is huge there. But no matter what Leftist educators tried, the "gap" between black and white school results remained quite immovable.

And affirmative action was not much of a remedy either. Blacks put into jobs for which they were poorly qualified tended not to do those jobs well and their children tended to do no better than other black kids. So equalizing blacks and whites was frustratingly elusive. All the anger about black disadvantage clearly achieved nothing of substance. Trying to equalize blacks became simply frustrating and boring. Leftist anger changed nothing

But the fact that blacks could not often be lifted up economically still cried out as a gross breach of the fundamental Letist faith that all men are equal. If the black/white "gap" could not be changed it had at least to be explained. So critical race theory was born. It says that hidden white prejudice is responsible for black failure.

But telling whites that they are secretly prejudiced does not do much. You cannot easily aim your anger at something hidden. And whites seem generally not too moved by the charge against them. It is hard to make whites suffer for their invisible evil. Most whites simply ignore the accusation and that is that. Some weirdos may self-flagellate but they are too few to be satisfying.

So the left had simply run out of things that they could make into a great cause for their anger. They needed a new enemy. And all that pent up anger is now directed at people who think that there are only two sexes. It's absurd but absurdity has never held the Left back. Their core belief that "all men are equal" is absurd.

And policies born out of anger are seldom wise or constructive. And the latest obsession is no exception. Who would ever have thought that cutting of a young girl's breasts or a young mans penis would ever be seen as virtuous and in need of encouragement? One almost pines for the day when all that Leftist anger required was a mandate to give High School diplomas to illiterate blacks

But who are these angry people? What makes the Left seethe with anger? Have you ever seen anyone seethe with anger the way the Left did when Donald Trump was elected President? Leftist anger was a great foaming torrent at that time -- completely unrestrained. We saw then with crystal clarity the anger that was behind the mask of doing good

All the studies of it show that the Left/Right political polarity is strongly inherited genetically -- so to a large extent the Left are just born in their unhappy state. The world just looks all wrong to their eyes. But there may of course also be life events and circumstances which generate chronic anger. Failing to get much of the rewards that life offers might well make one an unhappy person. Black anger is explicable that way.



Wait! There's more!

At this stage I want to go on to look in more detail at examples of Leftism. We will see various ways in which the generalizations so far work out in real-life practice. Carrying out surveys of Leftist attitudes (and I have done many of them) is all well and good but it is how Leftists repeatedly behave that is the best evidence of what they are and why they do what they do. We now go on to some case-studies, if you like. And in looking at those cases, I show how the various Leftist claims and causes hang together and support what I have said so far. You can find that file here.

After that I have another file in which I look at the motivations behind Leftism, with particular attention to one major motivation: Narcissism, where a weak ego leads to a constant need for praise and approval. That file is here


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