Fixated beliefs have to be associated with youth where they play an important part in the process of maturation. Do old leftists become conservative?
Some no-doubt having long survived on some fixed ideas do suddenly find that they are vaporious and fall back on less fragile myths. But they are a minority. I have known too many old communists where the flame burns bright to their last days to believe anything else.
There is of course another side, where experience teaches patience and knowledge bestows a grasp of subtlities sometimes lost on young firebrands who see this as mere conservativism as opposed to the love of the "radical" as an all-embracing solution.
And in between somewhere lie the opportunist, who cull careers from mouthing progressive ideas but in all practical spheres promote theoretical distain.
I have not been following the recent debate to which you refer - so apply the distinctions where you may. If the problem is with the conservative right is a Peter Pan existence, the problem with the left is religiousity, fragile utopias and a fear of self-criticism immune from any sense of irony. It is the fixations of the converted, sometimes a product of youth, but of a different order than the unconscious, visceral, predjudices of the right.
The left's dilema stems from an intellectual disability encapsulated quite nicely by the introduction to the US The Declaration of Independence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
Greg
--- Message Received --- From: "Peter K." <peterk at enteract.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 13:02:20 -0600 Subject: Re: Lenin today
Greg:
>I was struck in how people from the right to conservative were Peter Pans >intellectually. I do not
mean for the longing always of "how it was" but deeper. It is if >their vital social opinions became
stuck in the early teenage years and they never >grew out of them.
However, isn't it common for people, usually intellectuals, to become more conservative as they get older. There's the old quip about a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Does this hold true in Australia or, like the direction of water going down a drain, is it the reverse? I think you're on to something with the emotional immaturity of conservative, although there are some immature lefties in evidence on this list.
----------------------- Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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