“Leftism is rooted in emotion”
by Greg Krehbiel on 20 March 2013
Prager makes some good observations about liberalism in his latest column. His observations don’t apply to every liberal, or maybe not to any particular liberal, but they do help explain the general bias of liberal thought.
To understand leftism … one must understand that above all else leftism is rooted in emotion, not reason. That is why left-wingers discussing their social positions always refer to compassion and fairness …. Whether a progressive position will improve or harm society is not a progressive question. That is a conservative question. What matters to progressives is whether a position emanates from compassion.
[T]here is always tension between standards and compassion. Standards, by definition, cannot allow for compassion for every individual. If society were to show compassion for every individual, it would have no standards.
-- 2013-03-20 » Greg Krehbiel
20 March 2013 @ 10:09 am
They say — by which I mean someone said, but I can’t remember who it is — that the opposite of every profound truth is also a profound truth.
The emanation-of-emotion theory may explain parts of pop leftism, but there’s more to it than that. You could also make the case that Leftism is reason — of a sort — gone completely unmoored. Rawlsian liberalism isn’t about emotion, per se. It’s about completely abstract principles.
Once you decide that what makes something good is that someone wants it, and that everyone should get as much of what they want equally, pretty much all that’s left is for a technocratic bureaucracy to arrange things so that everybody gets what they want. Anyone who doesn’t get with the program must “hate”, because “hate” is now a technical term meaning something like “applying a standard other than whether or not someone wants something to decide whether something is good”. That’s why no amount of demonstrated love is enough to protect Christians from accusations of “hate”: the crime isn’t how Christians feel, or even what they do, it’s how they think. It’s not so much that the Left doesn’t believe in applying standards, they just have different and simpler ones, ones less tolerant of heresy.
Probably we all know people who are unreasonable not because they’re overemotional but because of the opposite, because they have a handful of principles they’re sure of and they ruthlessly follow what they see as the necessary implications. They wind up in obviously crazy places, but they don’t want to make the non-rational observation that they’ve landed in loopytown, and so can’t admit that something went off the rails.
21 March 2013 @ 10:52 am
Good point. And I like the implications for the definition of “hate.”
21 March 2013 @ 9:33 pm
eh, that’s fair. perhaps a little simplistic, but neither article nor posts seem overly condescending.
now, what would be the reciprocating analysis?
“Rightism is rooted in ……XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”
22 March 2013 @ 5:22 am
Excellent question. Nothing comes immediately to mind, but I’ll think about it.
22 March 2013 @ 7:32 am
If you were asking what conservatism is rooted in, I would probably say “balance.” But you asked what “rightism” is rooted in, and I’m tending towards either (1) a general tendency to be suspicious or (2) deference to authority.
IOW, we’re looking for a generalized bias in “rightist” thought that helps to explain their decisions.
22 March 2013 @ 4:54 pm
i simply felt it to be the reciprocal. you’ve got a lot of words and syllables in there, whereas ‘emotion’ …
there must be a more ‘nutshell’ answer to this, one that is comparably depictive.
24 March 2013 @ 9:56 am
I find that conservative policy impulses seem to be rooted in the impulse to punish people for doing unwise things.
Blaming the poor for not getting better jobs, Refusing to vaccinate against HPV because then promiscuous girls won’t be punished for their wanton behavior. Blaming the destitute elderly for not saving more of their meager wages.
But I think that to call these ideological differences “mere” emotion is misleading and not very helpful.
26 March 2013 @ 12:45 am
I think it’s harder to reduce conservatism to a few words than liberalism because at bottom liberalism believes that the social order can be formalized and conservatism doesn’t.
If I had to choose two words, I guess I would say that liberalism is about equality and conservatism is about tradition. If that seems a little asymmetrical, because “equality” is pretty abstract and content-free whereas “tradition” could include lots of things, I think that’s part of the difference between the two ways of looking at the world.