The following is from an article in The New English Review from May 2007 by Theodore Dalyrmple which is a pen name of Anthony Daniels. Daniels is a retired psychiatrist who often writes about culture. I see it as an indictment of the obsession of liberals with nuance. My own personal indictment might be more on the lines of, ‘if you can‘t win with the truth then baffle them with bullshit.’
“In my youth (in which I include my early adulthood), I read a lot of philosophy. . . . .
In those days, the Soviet Union loomed very large in all our imaginations. It was the ruffian on the stair of western civilisation, or a looming presence to the east. And that meant that, for anyone who wanted to understand the world, it appeared necessary to immerse himself in Marxism (actually, it was more important to read the history of the Russian intelligentsia from the time of Nicholas I than to read Marx), since the Soviet Union claimed to be a society founded on Marxist principles.
Marxist writers were not famed for their clarity or elegance of exposition. Indeed, clarity was rather looked down upon by them, for the dialectical nature of the world was inherently hard to understand and therefore to express. For Marxists, clarity was simplification, or worse still vulgarisation. It was the handmaiden of false consciousness that misled the workers into not being revolutionaries.”
This is what liberals frequently espouse: lack of nuance is, "the handmaiden of false consciousness that misleads workers . . . "
Dalyrmple's piece is an interesting comparison of marxism to the teachings of the Egyptian, Qutb, who is often seen as the main intellectual father of radical and jihadist Islam. It can be found at
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=7240&sec_id=7240
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment