The Closing of the Liberal
Mind
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKInish.Blogspot.com
Suppose that you are a Soviet agent in 1955. Your
cover is that of an insurance salesman.
Of your two "jobs", the Soviet agent part is more
important, but you need to be a good insurance
salesman to maintain your cover.
Being a good insurance salesman doesn't clash
with being a good Communist, because your job
selling life insurance allows you to pursue your
real job. And you cannot conflate the two jobs. You
can't sell insurance to your KGB bosses or pitch
Communism to your insurance prospects. If you do
that, then worlds will collide.
But if Communism is on the way up, then you can stop
selling insurance and tell everyone who walks into
your office that Communism is their best insurance.
You are no longer a Communist who sells insurance.
You are just a Communist running an insurance
agent's office.
This state of affairs has applications beyond
Communism and life insurance.
Suppose you are a liberal in the 1950s. You don't
support some gang of reds goosestepping their way
across the country and rounding up people into
gulags. Nor do you want any of the revolutions that
some of the radicals hanging around outside NYU
sometimes recite poems about.
You believe that the best pathway to a liberal
society is through liberal institutions. You disdain
the Marxists with their rigid party orthodoxy for
closing off their minds to open inquiry and healthy
debate.
As a journalist, a professor, a scientist or a
lawyer, you believe that maintaining liberal
institutions will liberalize society. That a free
press will invariably spread liberal ideas, that
scientific inquiry and open debate will teach people
to be more open-minded and that protecting
everyone's rights will end a society of privileged
tiers.
The society that you are working toward may be a
one-party state, or a multiparty state where all the
parties are of the left, but you still believe that
will come about through a liberalized society where
the vast majority will be educated and shaped into
recognizing the truth.
And you believe that values such as objectivity and
scientific truth, and institutions that are open,
will bring people to recognize that truth in the
long-term, even if you have to accept defeats from
these values in the short-term.
Accordingly, as a journalist you will report both
sides of the story, even if your bias does spill out
in the framing of it, and even if the other side's
view becomes popular enough to temporarily threaten
a program that you want to see carried out,
calculating that maintaining trust in the
institution of journalism will allow you to reach
more people in the long-term.
As a professor, you will teach views that you
disagree with even if some students may be
influenced by them, because the legitimacy of
academia as a place of open inquiry is more
important in the long-term to the success of your
ideas.
As a scientist, you will challenge wrong theories
that may advance your views in the short-term, but
threaten the integrity of science in the long-term.
As a lawyer you will defend people you disagree with
to maintain an open system that allows you the
freedom to dissent.
It's not always like this. There's plenty of bias
and favoritism in the mix. But underneath it is the
notion that the institutions that keep a society
open are the best means of creating a liberal
society.
But now you are a liberal in 2015 and the society is
already very liberal. You are the product of liberal
professors who learned at the feet of other liberal
professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a
liberal community to parents whose grandparents were
already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you
came of age as a member of a natural elite.
The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied,
the movies you watch, the professors who taught you
and every adult you grew up with all reflect your
point of view. You have no sense of being
marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any
sense that there is another point of view out there.
Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by
corporate money who are about to be swept away into
the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural
youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop
Against AIDS protest.
You live in a bubble and you see no need for an
open society or for maintaining the integrity of
institutions such as journalism or the scientific
community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds
with your entire way of thinking because it presumes
that there is some higher truth than the one
propounded by the progressive reality-based
community. And you know, with the casual faith of
any born believer, that this is not possible.
As a journalist, you report a progressive narrative.
The other side doesn't exist except as an obstacle,
a stumbling block to the forward march of progress.
They are only there to be ridiculed out of history.
When you see numbers showing that very little of the
country trusts the media, you disregard them,
because what else are all those strange people in
flyover country going to do anyway? Stop watching
CNN? Stop reading Newsweek? And if they disagree,
it's because they hate the truth. Truth being your
ideology.
As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will
lead to a healthier society, and then you build a
hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be
science. Anyone who disagrees, hate science.
Science being equivalent to your ideology which, you
believe, is based on science, making actual science
unnecessary.
Your science, like your journalism, consists of the
progressive narrative that proves whatever you want
it to prove, whether it's that capitalism will melt
the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or
oil is about to run out.
Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you
than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of
Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it's
progressive. And if it doesn't, then it's worthless.
As a teacher or professor, you teach your students
to challenge whatever their parents taught them,
while accepting whatever you teach them. Your goal
is not to teach them to think, but to trap them in a
closed loop of progressive thinking, forever looking
down at the less enlightened while striving to
become more enlightened without actually giving up
any privilege.
As a lawyer, you work to create a closed system
where no one gets any rights except through the
progressive narrative. An open system is no longer
in your favor now that you think you control it. You
have no idea why anyone who is right would want to
let those who are wrong speak out and spread their
ignorance and hate.
Across a variety of fields, open institutions become
closed systems. Their purpose is finished now that
they have led people into the maze. What was once
open inquiry has become closed indoctrination. The
legitimacy of the institution and the system no
longer concerns those who run it, now that they
believe that there are no more alternatives to them.
These systems have become discredited but those who
run them believe that the debate is over.
The open mind was a useful tool in the past because
it enabled the questioning of another way of
thinking, doing and being. But now it's an obstacle
because the way of thinking, doing and being is
owned by the former questioners. Dissent is only
patriotic when you're one of the patriots.
Questioning authority should only be done when you
are the questioner, rather than the authority.
Or to put it another way, the men who run them are
no longer liberals who sell journalism, science, the
law or ideas. They think that the revolution has
come and they only sell one thing now.
It comes in a little red box that closes and never
opens again.
The trap has closed, but the trappers are as much
inside it as anyone else. Worse still, they are as
unaware of being inside it as fish are of water. The
closed system is all they know. Doublethink displays
of cynicism and faith based on party affiliation are
second nature to them.
They have forgotten how to think about things,
but they are very good at thinking about how to
convince others of those things. They no longer
explore ideas, they only missionize. They are great
marketers, but failed intellectuals. Their only
skill set is a social media strategy. They can
convince people to do something, but they can't ask
whether the thing should be done.
The American liberal is dead from the neck up. A
member of the elite, he rules, but has no talent for
it. Like the Bolsheviks, he is adept at blaming
others for everything and at manufacturing simple
slogans. And like them he thinks only in terms of
power, control and leverage, without understanding
why his intellectual predecessors spent so much
building up the institutional influence that he
casually squanders by destroying the credibility of
journalism, public service and academia.
Generational degradation has robbed him of any sense
of time. He is always living in the present, which
also seems to him to be the future. The past to him
is a treasure trove of eccentricities. And he cannot
conceive of any future that supersedes his way of
life. Patience, like objectivity, is a foreign
notion to him. Nothing can wait for tomorrow or ten
years from now. Everything must come about right
now. Battles are won, but wars are lost. The liberal
hare races ahead into the post-everything future,
never considering that in the long-term, it is the
slow conservative tortoise that wins the race.