WHY INTELLECTUALS ARE MOSTLY LEFTIES

6 November 2023

This is the title of an extract from a conversation between Roger Scruton and Hamza Yusuf.

https://youtu.be/FYo4KMhUx9c?si=Wfj6jcH9797jumbQ

It's a very good presentation by Roger. He is talking about the appeal of left-wing ideologies today to those seeking a solid framework for their beliefs and ideas, pegs on which they can hang their knowledge. Like the leaves on a tree, if the leaves are the bits of knowledge, an ideology connects all through eventually to one central trunk, which is their ideological belief system. 

This is inevitably lefty thinking, or Marxism if you prefer. Roger says that the day will one day come to anyone with a living brain when that person is able to look back at the time when they had an ideology and realise that today they do not need reasons to explain the way things: things are simply the way they are. Someone who doesn't need reasons any longer is someone who we might call a Conservative.

I think it's not only the attraction of a coherent system of thought for navigating a complex topic - politics, political behaviour -  that pulls in younger people and those with intellectual questions at university.

But I think as well there's this thing called Group Think, which is a bit like an equivalent in the financial world to FOMO, fear of missing out - if you don't join the group then you're likely to be ostracised and see your career cut down. So newbies at the margin join up, for fear others in the core will think they "don't understand", ie have puny intellects, and after that initial commitment they just go into the subject deeper and deeper.

It's a bit like walking into a forest. It gets darker and darker and darker and then eventually you start to walk out of the forest and eventually the daylight begins to return and you start to see the world as it really is, as it always was, when you were a child, you see more objectively, and you can start to make connections and associations of your own.

This FOMO thing is part of how soft power works, as well. If you don't join the neocons then your career as a journalist or a teacher or in high administration or in politics, your career will be shortened because you have ideas that oppose those of the ruling elite, you are therefore against them. There's not much room for nuance lower down in the hierarchy.

It must be annoying to non-extremist contrarians like Roger, never to get a proper hearing for his ideas. Dead now poor chap, coming up to his 4th annif' this Jan24.

Group Think and the lack of diversity of perspectives - not the same things - is very dangerous  ... look at the mess we're in today, for example. Look at the Central Banks. They are all staffed by hundreds upon hundreds of PhDs in economics, all of whom pretty much are neo-Keynesian ie they all think that debt is not so important because the job of the government is to intervene in the market with fiscal and monetary policies that will smooth out short term irregularities, but in reality they can't see the consequences of their Grand Designs of untested ideas, like QE, and hence the mess we're in today. 

It's just the same with all these lefties who think the individual is unimportant and the interests of workers worldwide, as they see them, should prime over the liberty of the individual.

We know that the interests of the individual and the nation will out against the collectivists and the internationalists. We know that you build a wall from the ground up, brick by brick, and don't start at the top!

And we know that the neoclassicists in economics are right when they talk about the need for a balanced budget and for letting individuals in the market combine to decide, each blindly, the way forward.

As to Hegel's "Labour of the Negative", that Roger talks about, yes it's true that Roger's negativists think that the world is all wrong and the only way to put it right is to seize power in order to put into practice your  blueprint for your New Utopia, that's true.

But as I recall Edmund Burke when he looked at the French Revolution in 1789, just like Roger did his in 1968, he concluded that Revolution will fail just as Grand Designs fail, and progress can only really come from incremental change, "in-flight corrections", if you prefer. Roger says he spent his life trying to find out what he didn't like about the mess those students were making of policemen's helmets back in 1968.

The real trouble with the left is its collectivist thinking. It makes grand designs for the future, ignoring present realities and ignoring human nature ; and then when things go wrong it realises that it was because it didn't have perfect knowledge, that is the problem. It's the lack of perfect knowledge that you would need for Grand Designs to work out as planned.

So that's me for the day...