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May 15, 2010
The Australian's op-eds just get worse---to the point of looniness. If the strategy is to develop a conservative perspective on, and an interpretation of, the events of the day, then the stridency becomes ever more shrill and the claims ever more extreme--to the point where its columnists live in an inverted world.
The latest example from its stable of Conservative hacks and ideologues is an op-ed by Melanie Philips, who has a column in the Daily Mail and runs a blogs for the UK The Spectator in which she teases out the left's secrets and sinister patterns.
In her Londonistan (2006) book Philips claimed that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain. Britain is "sleepwalking towards cultural suicide" and "has capitulated to Islamic terror" etc.
In her Blind ideology is dancing on the grave of reason op-ed in The Australian Philips takes aim at the progressive intelligentsia's style of thinking.
She says:
Across a broad range of issues, the progressive intelligentsia appears to have junked the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and upside-down thinking.Take man-made global warming, for example.The belief that the planet is on course for carbon Armageddon is now embedded in Western politics. Yet the evidence that the climate is warming to an unprecedented and catastrophic degree just isn't there. The seas are not rising, the ice is not shrinking, the polar bears are not vanishing, and there has been no significant climate warming since 1995.
In Philips' inverted world science is ideology and an irrationality, whilst her opinions and fundamental religion are reason, which is the reverse of the actual situation in our world.
However, this is what conservatism actually means today. This kind of inversion is what those who gather around the Australian actually believe, and the subterranean racial and class resentments leads to the idea of the Left's conspiracy machine.
Philips' perspective in her upside down world is that:
Such irrationality, intolerance and, indeed, bigotry run counter to the cardinal tenets of a free society based on reason and the toleration of dissent.This is because these dominant ideas are all rooted in ideologies: environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, egalitarianism or scientism, the belief that scientific materialism alone explains everything.
She has written a book on science as a form of irrationality that engages in a witch hunt, whilst environmentalists are fascistic. So science stands for the anti-enlightenment. The claim is that science is ideology because it wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea and sacrifices truth to power.
Philips claims that, in attacking science and the progressive intelligentsia, she is defending a free liberal society. However, the very extremity of her claims and the demonisation of her opponents indicates that she has dumped the whole idea of a liberal public reason based on argument and debate. Criticism can, and should be made of natural science, environmentalism and scientific materialism in a liberal society but this is done though argument not blanket condemnation.
Update
The Australian's political strategy is one of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis that makes an enemy of those who work for the Rudd Government. News Limited, with its ruthless and nasty culture has has been conducting a war on the government primarily via The Australian. Surprisingly, the ABC takes its political compass from the ugly Australian.
Maybe this inverted world is an expression of an emerging conservative populism? If so, will it led to genuine grass-roots organizing: voter registration, letter-writing campaigns, building mailing lists and staffing phone banks, canvassing neighborhoods at election time, and, above all, getting elected and mounting direct challenges to incumbents, regardless of party?
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Melanie Philips is one of my favourite comedy writers. In fact the whole Spectator stable is one big laugh these days; the US version is even worse than the UK parent, if such a thing is possible. Every edition demonstrates why satire is impossible to do any more ... you could publish lots of it on 'The Onion' and people would think it was meant to be a parody of the loonier wingnut blogs.