Left, Right and Rational

In an earlier post I made the point that progressive movements have not always been exclusively Leftist/liberal.  In the movie, “To Sir With Love” produced back in the sixties, a teacher was portrayed as adopting a hugely progressive and unconventional approach to education when he tossed out the standard school curricula and substituted open dialogue in its place. If you knew no more than this about the movie you would think that the teacher’s tactic and mindset would have had to have been liberal. But that was not actually the case. The dialogue that was opened between the students and the teacher concerned almost all things considered conservative in today’s intellectual framework. So while the move was progressive its objective was to instill conservative principles in the classroom.

That much was covered in my original post, “To Sir With Hindsight”.  But as I thought about it further I came to the realization that although it is entirely fair to characterize the teacher’s objectives as conservative it is equally, if not more proper, to characterize them as rational. And therein lies the true difference between conservative and liberal. Go into virtually any school in the West at any grade level and you find that the curricula have become “Progressive”. But this sort of progressivism is only a liberal’s definition of progressive. And it is a wrong definition. What liberals have been passing off as progressive for the last fifty years is actually unconventionalism.

What Sir did in his classroom was unconventional but that was as far as the liberal mind could follow the plot. What Sir did may have been unconventional but it was also rational - and that is what differentiates the progressive nature of Left thought from Right thought. The Left thinks that anything and everything that is unconventional is of itself progressive. For the Right progressive simply means any rational change that improves the social condition. Too often for the Right that means undoing the insane experiments of Leftist progressivism.  

When Ayn Rand wrote her book, “Atlas Shrugged” and developed her philosophy of objective reality she described socialism as an ideology that could only produce an ever spiraling decent into political and economic destruction. In effect, she said, it was suicidal. Any rational human being ought to be able to see that socialism is a clear path to self-immolation. Why, then, do we insist on following such a path? Her only conclusion was that a majority of people were suicidal by nature.

I found it difficult to argue against this conclusion. Especially now when emotions are at such a pitch that people are committing suicide in large numbers on a daily basis just for the satisfaction of knowing that they are killing others and disrupting social order. On the Left we have people who will not condemn this brutality and refuse to recognize that their own destruction is assured if they will not adapt their thinking to the reality that assails them. Instead they do their damndest to interfere with anyone who would stand between them and their own destruction. Is this insanity? Is this suicide? What the hell, exactly, is behind such mad behavior?

I don’t agree with Rand that in most cases Leftists are bent on suicide. Suicide would imply that the victim understood beforehand that the actions he intended to take would result in his death. I don’t believe that Left thinkers actively pursue death. I think they are simply incapable of rationalizing the connection between their behavior and its ultimate ends. In fact I’ve found that most of them give little consideration for their own fates because they are obsessively concerned about the fates of the “downtrodden and abused”.  Ayn herself described this exact mental conditioning in Atlas Shrugged.

It isn’t suicide, then, that leads the West down the path of socialist destruction. It is the Left’s inability to separate emotion from their thinking processes and come to rational conclusions. At least that is the main causality in my opinion.