The Left: Just What Is Their Problem?

I've been reading a number of books that deal with the lefty mindset, not exactly in an organized project to dissect the lefty world view, but just because.

For instance, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and her The Origin of Capitalism she is trying to advance the notion that things were pretty good before agrarian capitalism came along and marketized the agricultural sector. OK, so in the modern era people live under a "market imperative" instead of what I would call a feudal imperative. Instead of having to keep a weather eye on the local lord and his use and abuse of power we moderns have to think about our skills and how they are priced in the market. The Horror.

With Marx and The German Ideology we get another directed analysis of the move from feudal to market society. Marx's intent is to unearth the secret of how the bourgeoisie with their money and their capital and their circulation got to turn the world upside down and put the working class into wage slavery. The Horror.

Now I am reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. The premise is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not really about the philosophy of language but is an ethical commentary on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg empire. What the heck does that mean? Well, Vienna in the pre-WWI decades produced a gaggle of commentators who wanted a moral revolution away from the bourgeois ethos of late-19th century. 

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Just what is their problem?

And just what is the problem, in our own day, of the academicians and Wokeys and activists whose whole world view is about The Horror! The Horror! of ordinary middle-class people and their "systemic racism?"

Here's a piece on "The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics" by Lee Siegel echoing the famous book of Richard Hofstadter's essays on The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You know: Red Scares and McCarthyism. It was the status anxiety of small-town America wot did it, according to Hofstadter. Maybe, just a teeny bit. But maybe the opposite is true, in spades.

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.

So maybe the feverish anti-bourgeois culture of the educated rich kids of the late 19th century is reflected in the feverish anti-deplorable culture of the educated not-so-rich kids of the early 21st century. It is good old fin-de-siècle all over again.

In The Soul of the World the recently departed Roger Scruton cuts through all this. What does it mean, he asks, to be a human in human society?

I exist as a subject, that is, as a self-conscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, which defines my point of view of the world... [But then there are] others, with whom I share language... And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others are represented as subjects like myself.

The beginning of wisdom, in his understanding, is to step outside of your own self-obsession and think about other people from their own point of view. The amazing result is that you may find yourself able to share that world with others.

Do you see how the lefty world presupposes that the world cannot be shared? Not with those capitalists, not with those stupid Viennese bourgeois and their over-decorated houses, not with bloody Wagner and his reduction of music to pure emotion, not with those deplorable racist-sexist-homopbobes?

Just what is their problem?