From over a century ago we have a powerful insight into the art of reason as a cultural heritage, which of course it is. Santayana uses it to point out that revolutionists are inevitably disinherited from their cultural heritage and thereby disinherited from reason.
The life of reason is a heritage and exists only through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so much as to understand one another.
Now the misfortune of revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives, and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity. In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything.
George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine (1913)
It is still a powerful insight today, uncompromisingly bleak in its implications but powerful. Substitute ‘revolutionists’ for ‘progressives’ and today we have the same grim and intractable problem.
When we see progressives, preach their progressive views, do we see a strange poverty in their minds? Of course we do, we see that an essential aspect of their cultural heritage is missing.
3 comments:
A good way to destroy cultural heritage is through mass immigration, especially if it is uncontrolled. Rapid social change, everyone mixing with people they have little in common with. It all has a disorientating effect, along with gaslighting on the part of the media and the erasure of national history.
We had a reasonably good cultural heritage in the UK - by no means perfect, but it worked, and people got on and were able to build decent lives for themselves. But our self-appointed governing class seem to have had different ideas for us.
You could make a reasonable argument that the 'progressives' have nearly completed their march through the institutions... and are now finding that their Utopia is still way off in the future and there is no handy plan to get from here to there.
Which perhaps explains why their 'enthusiasm' is turning inwards against fellow travellers. There is nothing so bitter as the narcissism of small differences.
Wikipedia: In psychoanalysis, the narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.
Could explain a great deal.
Sam - I agree and those different ideas should count as treason and the perpetrators dealt with accordingly.
DJ - I have a John Buchan quote on the narcissism of small differences at an individual level which I'll probably use some time. I also knew a chap like that who couldn't quite bring himself to agree on anything he hadn't originated. He was hypersensitive to minor differences. Committees can flounder around in this way too.
Post a Comment