March 20, 2014
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Hatewatchers go the other way. The future, when all those “conservative old white people” have died off and blacks, browns, and white liberals are all dancing around the maypole together in multicultural harmony, will be paradise. The present, in which Cultural Marxists control the commanding heights”corporations, universities, churches, both big political parties, and the media (except for that annoying Fox News)”is pretty good.
The past, however, was to them an abyss of oppression and misery. Even its jokes must be purged from the record.
Diversity. In the Gawker.com interview I did following my ejection from National Review, I used the word “paleoanthropological” and mentioned being an opera fan. Several commentators were stunned. A hater who likes high culture and uses nine-syllable words? How can this be?
Left-liberal types live in bubbles, mixing only with others who think like themselves. Their notion of those who think differently is abstract, taken from movies, TV, and the high school Eng. Lit. canon.
My own suburban left-liberal neighbors are utterly flummoxed by me. He seems so nice! How can he write those awful things? Some of them, I think, don’t really believe I exist. (See the item “Reality” above.)
Whichever hatewatcher gets assigned to be the spy at an American Renaissance conference must suffer similar bafflement. Nobody’s wearing jackboots!
Science. In my intergalactic bestseller We Are Doomed, I observed that:
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal….Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures.
I think I should have added “political” to that starting list. Having no desire to boss other people around, I don’t pay as much attention to that aspect of human nature as I should.
Be that as it may, my observation applies to the left at least as much as to the right. When scientific facts contradict the feel-good fantasies of infinite human equality and malleability, the left is as hot in denial as any backwoods creationist. You could ask Charles Murray about that, or Michael Fumento, or James Watson, or Larry Summers, or Jason Richwine. Pretty soon you’ll be able to ask Nicholas Wade.
When Barack Obama, in his first Inaugural Address, vowed to “restore science to its rightful place,” I near fell off my chair. The missing qualifier was: “…so long as it doesn”t tell us things we”d rather not hear.”
