A Disclaimer

In light of how popular my last post about conservative writers has been with a certain Herald Sun columnist and other conservatives, I think I should offer a few caveats:

Firstly, as much as I love to bash the sillier brand of leftism, I see myself more as a libertarian, or classical liberal, than a conservative. In fact, conservative moralism is as much a threat to civil liberty as political correctness, the main difference being that university gives us all a keen eye for the former, while the latter slips by under the guise of youthful idealism. In truth, I oppose both.

Conservatives are wise to realise that the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, impartiality and individual rights are just that — ideals — and that where human beings are involved there is always going to be a shortfall between theory and practice. However, the downside to this is defeatism; a repudiation of the idea of progressive change and the congealing of an outmoded and potentially oppressive status quo. The strength of left-wing thought, on the other hand, is its idealism: it doesn’t take the status quo as fixed and immutable, and it marks out the possible contours of future progressive change. Its own weakness, in turn, is that this tends to veer over into utopianism, prompting calls for the restriction of civil liberties and their replacement with a bureaucracy that would trade the liberty of some for the supposed equality of others. Some go further, holding the liberal state itself up as a barrier to ‘true’ freedom and equality.

However, as much as I dislike the left-wing tendency to demonise the past and trash the achievements of Western civilisation, I don’t think there’s any need to legislate ourselves into a coffin-freezer of Victorian tradition. I believe that progressive change is possible — slowly. The Left should probably lower its expectations to bring them in line with reality, while the Right should raise its own to accommodate the human instinct for natural justice. Within this liberal framework, there is surely room to ‘realise our country’ and its ideals, to use Richard Rorty’s phrase, without setting up prison camps and liquidating the kulaks.

Secondly, and all bombast aside, I do have respect for some of the left-wing writers mentioned in my post. Klein, Chomsky and Pilger all have important things to say; and though they often take things a little far, I would more likely side with Pilger on the issue of the Vietnam War than with, say, Roger Kimball. I just wish they’d learn to leaven their prose with a handful of wit and a pinch of nuance!

Thirdly, I tend to attack the Left because, well, it’s just more satisfying. Most informed people I am friends with realise that the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution was unnecessarily inhumane; that the Bush Administration is a shallow duck-pond of moralists, sycophants and ignoramuses, who duped the United States into a thirty-year imperial conflict in Iraq that it has neither the strength nor the stomach to execute successfully. Poking fun at the Right — after eleven years of Howard and seven of Bush — now strikes me as kind of passé. And really, some of the further absurdities of the hyper-PC academy just couldn’t be made up. The self-righteousness of some on the Left really does set it up for a hammering.

Alas! I should have foreseen that conservatives would find my post and drag it kicking and screaming into the trenches. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for everybody to read my material. But until the black candle has been lit, the goat has been slaughtered and its steaming blood has been mingled with my own, I will remain steadfastly — sacrilegiously — independent.

~ by Sebastian Strangio on June 9, 2008.