tagged with conservatism
On the difference between conservatives and liberals, or, why conservatives lie through their teeth while liberals expect the truth to surface:
It is a typically conservative estimate of human beings to see them as sunk in irrational prejudice, incapable of reasoning coherently; and it is a more radical attitude to hold that while we may indeed be afflicted by all sorts of mystifications, some of which might even be endemic to the mind itself, we nevertheless have some capacity for making sense of our world in a moderately cogent way. If human beings really were gullible and benighted enough to place their faith in great numbers in ideas which were utterly devoid of meaning, then we might reasonably ask whether such people were worth politically supporting at all. If they are that credulous, how could they ever hope to emancipate themselves? Eagleton, Ideology (12)
This could less charitably be referred to as the difference between authoritarianism and democracy. I intend to continue to pitch my tent with the radicals.
Speaking of evil (and an excellent example of how the conservative movement’s use of language has been both brilliant and horrible):
In the so-called war against terror, for example, the word ‘evil’ really means: Don’t look for a political explanation.…If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes. Eagleton, After Theory (141)
Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense has grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present. Eagleton, After Theory(7)
“Blunted” is a convincing choice of words here. Our sense of history hasn’t been erased completely (if we couldn’t look back at all, we would cease to be human), but the edges are now dull.1 It’s a bit like the ways our taste buds have been diminished by decades of fast-food; we can no more appreciate the flavor of fresh arugula anymore than we can remember why we fought the Korean War.
- The “we” in this statement refers to “we Americans”; Eagleton is likely including his British co-citizens in this statement, but the loss of a historical sense seems acutely American to me. ↩
