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+--- Thread: Roger Scruton on why most intellectuals are on the left (/thread-15871.html)
Roger Scruton on why most intellectuals are on the left - C C - May 14, 2024
One gets the sense at times that John Brockman's 1991 assessment that a third culture (of scientists and others) was arising to replace the existing intellectual culture... has kind of failed to a degree. From the standpoint that such a 3rd-culture has itself bent to the will of left-wing intellectuals -- or at least via the policies of the latter being adopted by the administrators of institutions who in turn manage the scientists (and charitably ignoring the personal ideologies of scientists themselves).
Brockman (1991): In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
So with that bubble above somewhat busted -- i.e., the traditional self-appointed "philosopher kings" still being the tail that wags the dog where it most matters in terms of controlling the thought orientation of the establishment... We turn to what the title references...
Roger Scruton: Why intellectuals are mostly left
https://youtu.be/s7_15Aya0To
VIDEO EXCERPT: Some 70 percent of academics identify themselves as on the left, while the surrounding culture is increasingly hostile to traditional values, or to any claim that might be made for the high achievements of Western civilization.
[...] My impression is that this hostility comes in part because people who self-identify as intellectuals and thinkers also want to identify themselves as in some way outside the community. Standing in judgment on it, gifted with superior insight and intellect. And therefore inevitably critical of whatever whatever it is that ordinary people do by way of surviving.
So we have created an intellectual class which by its nature does not identify with the way of life around it. And tries to gain another kind of identity through its critical stance. And produces the paradox that within academic circles, and within the press, to be a liberal instead of a conservative is almost boringly conventional. It is [their] convention to be hostile to conventions.
https://youtu.be/FYo4KMhUx9c
VIDEO EXCERPT: In 1968, all I knew was that when I looked down the street and saw all these rowdy students throwing stones at policemen, I just said to myself, "Whatever they believe, I believe the opposite."
[...] I somewhat arrogantly came to the conclusion that if you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left. Because that provides a systematic solution, an answer, to their questions. Put it all in a system and it also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system.
But if you think a bit harder and longer about it, you'll move back to what you would have been if you never had that ideology at all.
[...] Yates has a wonderful poem: Easter 1916 [...] he wrote that when he witnessed some Irish revolutionaries destroy a beautiful house of a very wealthy ... person. And in a lot of ways that poem articulates the idea that it's very easy to destroy and tear down.
Because the world is so troubling, so many people suffer, a lot of what the liberal left tends to rely on is that sense of indignation that a lot of idealistic people feel. There are things that are deeply wrong with the world.
But then when we look historically at how when these people have gotten into power [the left] ... they tend to really tear things down.
It's what Hegel calls the labor of the negative. That the the initial instinct on the left is that negative instinct [...] things are wrong and they must be rectified. They can only be rectified by the seizure of power, and so we're going to seize power in order to rectify them.
But once you've got the power the negative is still there in your heart. Because it has driven you all along, you know that's the thing that has inspired you.
So you set about destroying things and punishing people. The classes who are to blame -- the Jews, the bourgeoisie, whoever it might be.
And you don't get out of that negative structure, and I feel that's what I felt very strongly in 1968.
Blake put it an interesting way:
`The hand of Vengeance sought the bed
To which the purple tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head,
And became a tyrant in his stead.'
And that tends to be a pattern that we see again and again...
[...] if you've lost any sense that actually the world is lovable, and that there are things therefore to be rescued in it, you have actually lost the sense of why there is such a thing as a community in the first place. And that I think is one of the things that I felt very strongly throughout my life, that that there really are wonderful things that we've inherited...
RE: Roger Scruton on why most intellectuals are on the left - Magical Realist - May 15, 2024
"Won't Get Fooled Again"
By The Who
"We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
A change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war
I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again, no, no
I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half-alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do you?
Yeah
There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are effaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again, no, no
Yeah
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"