The Fall of the Liberal Dilettante (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

So Jonathan Haidt noted that the hallmark of a liberal is openness to experience. Well openness to experience is an easy trick when one's own dinner and home and comfort are not threatened. And although the oft cited rule about there being no atheists in foxholes has been nearly continuously proven wrong by history, the aphorism does point out rightly that maintaining beliefs is more difficult when our comfort is threatened.

When we find ourselves in situations where our morals and beliefs will expose us to trials and discomfort, we discovery quickly how strongly we believed. The Spanish Inquisition discovered the torture was an easy way to make devil worshiper that are Christians, and many a caliphate discovered the taxation was an easy way to make the infidel into a Muslim. A belief untested by the fire may not be a belief that all. The fire will either forge us or fry us alive.

And all of this brings to the educated liberal elite. Holding an ideology of non violent tolerance and openness and sharing of the wealth is easy when one's own wealth is not being shared, when one's own hone is not being opened, when the violence being tolerated is not being inflicted on those close to you.

To Quote the character of Higgins in the Robert Redford classic movie 'Three Days of the Condor'; "Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!"

Am I saying that all liberals are conservatives with a coat of privilege on them? No, but a lot of them are. What I am saying is that liberal and conservative are convenient labels that we generally only have the luxury of applying to ourselves when times are good, even if they aren't as good as we think they should be.

When times are bad, truly bad, things change. During the special period (famine) of Malawi, during the Holodomor in Ukraine (The USSR inflicted genoicde by starvation), during the post World War 1 years in Germany, marching the trail of tears in North America during the Indian War, in the Concentration Camps of World War 2 or the Gulags of Stalinist Soviet Russia, during the Great Leap Forward in China; during these times we nearly all become pragmatists.