Conservative Intellectuals and the Invisible Hand

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/conservative-intellectuals-and-the-invisible-hand/

The expression “conservative intellectual” was, at least until the nineteen-fifties, an oxymoron. Conservatives, with their founder, Edmund Burke, insisted that not reason but custom was the true foundation of freedom. The rights of Englishmen, founded in long tradition and customary practice, were real. “The rights of man,” the brainchild of Enlightenment thinking, was but a chimera, a brainstorm without substance. The “reason” of the Enlightenment produced only a wind-egg and worse, the Terror. Conservatism attacked reason itself, so how could it then turn around and spawn conservative “think tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, peopled with conservative intellectuals?



The change seems to have come with books like The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism was what linked the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia together. Before that everyone thought one was extreme left and the other extreme right. No two regimes could have been more different. But no, they shared a new kind of political structure never imagined by the ancients who otherwise identified all known political structures.

Totalitarianism, it seemed, needed an ideology, a set of ideas that cling together to inspire citizens to embrace the totalitarian movement, set out for its illusory Shangri-la, and perish in confusion. The ideas within the ideology were unimportant because the ideology served the same purpose in any totalitarian structure regardless of the ideology’s content. That the Soviet Union was to the far left and Nazi Germany to the far right didn’t matter. The actual ideas in the ideology factored out, so to speak, leaving just the path, the unreachable Shangri-la, and the pit. For all intents and purposes they were identical.

The totalitarian structure was not really a structure at all, but, perhaps an anti-structure, a whirlwind where everything changed from day to day. Its kaleidoscopic chaos hypnotized the population then led them into the maw. In its grip people turned away from lifelong friends. In politics they fervently embraced policies and motives only to abandon them a day later. Such is the instability of ideas. Under totalitarianism, in the spell of ideology, people abandoned all morality. They shoved others into gas chambers in Poland, or, bizarrely, confessed to crimes they did not commit, trundling off proudly to their own executions in Moscow. Nothing held fast; everything was in flux. Oh ideas, evil ideas. Spiraling into hell, those in their grip hallucinated that they marched all together towards paradise.

More at the link --

[zbdent]

1. "Conservatism" favors ignorance ...

when the entire ideal means, essentially, doing what's standard and established (and not moving forward), what does that say about the intellectual curiosity? non-existent ...

[BlancheSplanchnik]

2. excellent read

"Its kaleidoscopic chaos hypnotized the population then led them into the maw. In its grip people turned away from lifelong friends.....Under totalitarianism, in the spell of ideology, people abandoned all morality.....Spiraling into hell, those in their grip hallucinated that they marched all together towards paradise."

powerful, very thought provoking


saving the link for later