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March 19, 2008
Australian conservatives work in terms of dualities that are either or and very black and white. An example is the way they use the duality of reason versus emotion. It is an old duality in western culture and often used as a weapon in the culture wars.
Take Janet Albrechtson's latest op-ed in The Australian, where her thesis is that so many on the Left are obsessed with how they feel about something:
Think about it. So many issues the Left is consumed by are about raw emotion, not intellectual analysis. They will ask you how you feel - not what you think - about some gripping issue. And that’s why Mamet changed his views. He started thinking about issues, engaging his head. So many on the Left take the shortcut, letting their gut reaction dictate their response. Of course, even before Mamet’s political conversion it was easy to work out that left-wing politics is essentially emotional, not logical. With only rare exceptions, poets, playwrights, actors, directors and artistes generally are overwhelmingly political bleeding hearts. If your daily occupation is to emote as effusively as possible and your aim is making your audience feel some emotion or another, then rational analysis is simply not your strong point.
Funny, I thought that the left tradition historically took its bearings from Marx's Capital rather than Rousseau's Emile's. That classic text was hardly a romantic text that emoted as effusively as possible. That tradition then divided into socialism and social democracy around the way the contradictions of capitalism were understood.
Albrechtson's attempts to identify conservatism with reason and the Enlightenment tradition and the left with romanticism ignores the way that it was the left that carried on the Enlightenment project to build a better world for the working class whilst the Conservatives turned against the Enlightenment and became the counter revolution. They celebrated the authority of the state wielding the sword and commonsense as prejudice, superstition and ignorance in the name of tradition.
This is recycled by The Australian conservatives in terms of the commonsense of the sturdy patriotic people versuses the arrogant Utopian reason of the inner city cosmopolitans.
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Janet does need some help from time to time. I think what she is trying to say is that some real tosh issues from the warriors of the left. Phillip Adams, a myrmidon of the Left, is emblematic of emotion over intellectual analysis. Writing in his column some time ago Phil informed us that one of his heroes, Dr Jim Cairns, often addressed an eager audience in his lounge room. Phil's job during these enlightening 'meetings' was crowd control. Crowd control in the Cairns' lounge room! Not your ordinary lounge room mind you. No, the Cairns' lounge room was built to hold 500 - 600 people. Emotion over intellectual analysis.
However Phil's column is very important in my life: it serves as an aperient. The price of the newspaper is cheaper than any product purchased from a chemist for the same purpose.