Scratch them and they seethe . . .

A few months ago I wrote a letter to a local paper, the Argus, about the industrial schools controversy. Now, for whatever reason, the argument was somewhat cut in editing, although the conclusions remained unchanged. My only disagreement with the process is an aesthetic one—that it left the letter looking rather like a bad haircut (something that I am in other circumstances more than familiar with).

The letter as it appeared—and indeed as it was written—was somewhat ambiguous. It was hard to say on which side of the controversy I was coming down. Indeed I had no overriding interest in the matter—what I was interested in was the process by which it had after so many years suddenly come to dominate the headlines.

We live in the age of a new mythology. On the one side the old, restrictive, cruel, right-wing world of things as they allegedly used to be; and on the other the new liberal world of compassion, compassion, compassion—an over-brimming compassion for everything seemingly weak and endangered and oppressed in the world.

Now I can give a snapshot judgement on the merits of the two positions, having in my working life (and as a trade union representative) had experience of both regimes—and, paradoxically, I would have to say that the people with the most ‘nature’ in them were those who nowadays would be branded as ‘conservative’ or ‘illiberal’.

It was with the declaredly ‘liberal’ managements and managers that one had the most trouble. Even in situations where the argument went beyond any matter of right or wrong and cut to grounds of pure compassion—with such people it was as though they had been innoculated against any possibility of making a humanitarian response in real life.

And the thing is that this peculiar dichotomy between practice and theory does not seem to have been an exception, but is rather part-and-parcel of the whole liberal identikit.

I append some quotes from The Art of Hating by Gerald Schoenewolf Ph.D (Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), a psychoanalytical appraisal of the liberal character. As will become obvious in reading, by ‘liberal’ is meant, in this context, basically those who espouse the modern progressivist agenda.

“Today’s liberals are cut off from their feelings and enmeshed in words and ideas. Out of touch with their core, they feel incomplete, and politicize their feelings, looking to an outside source to provide them with security. They demand that their views be applied to all of society, and they compensate for emotional detachment through declarations of brotherhood with people they have never met, trying to solve their personal conflicts by curing the ills of the world. They tend to be educated, rather than working-class people. They are drawn to passive rather than active pursuits . . .

“. . . Liberals use their facility with words, as well as a self-righteous and sarcastic tone of voice, to defeat and destroy opponents. They fling around words like ‘bigot,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘homophobic’ in order to shame and silence detractors, and they address them in a tone of voice that suggests that the opponent is evil for even thinking, much less saying things that go against the liberal ideology. The more psychologically disturbed liberals are, the more they cling to the notion that liberalism represents all that is progressive and good and right, and can never be questioned . . .

“. . . Malcolm Muggeridge . . . a British literary critic, in an allusion to the liberal’s narcissistic insistence on ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ and denial of aggression, wrote that ‘Liberalism will be seen historically as the great destructive force of our time, much more than communism, fascism, Nazism or any of the other lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc.’ In a sense Muggeridge may be right, insofar as societies generally start out conservative but become increasingly liberal as they decline.”