A Philistine Says Good-Bye

Today, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Keith Thompson, former Philistine, says goodbye to his tribe, and joins the rest of us:

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives  --  people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere  --  reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

As a former Philistine I can confirm Thompson's slow process of  realization:

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

But there is always a moment -- the proverbial straw -- that makes it almost impossible to cling to whatever dimming shadows of good are left in the Left.  For Thompson, it was the January 30th vote.  For me it was the Left's -- especially feminists' -- inability to see anything good in our liberation of Afghanistan.  Eight years of Taliban horror, and all of the stern proclamations and U.N. condemnations did nothing.  It wasn't the Western academic feminists who liberated Afghan women, it was American Special Forces soldiers.   For this, Philistines will never forgive our military.  And for this, I will never forgive Philistines.

Philistines are incapable of giving their country -- especially their servicemen -- any credit, of any kind for anything that resembles good work.  They would rather reject reality all together, and manufacture failure, than embrace a good and noble cause. 

Don't worry, Keith, your're not alone.  Besides, you can still shop at Whole Foods.

By the way, Thompson's article proves a theory I've long held: there's often more eloquence in the parting than in the coming together:

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals  --  people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense  --  is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Comments

[Bruce Brownlee]

Quite true: one doesn't run across many ex-conservatives trying to harangue or bully or, occasionally, argue you into adherence to leftism. Cultural rightists tend to stay approximately where they are, once they've gotten there.

Perhaps it's that at base the leftist views are narrow, dogmatic, contain easily-learned (though endlessly expansive) categories for the simplification of experience, and answer all questions in advance (circumstances change, but the Underlying Causes never do.) One mustn't neglect the huge and ever-gratifying factor of self-congratulation. I imagine that fervent leftists, having no particular beliefs apart from social-political ones, are extremely uneasy about allowing complexity to clutter their lives -- or leave them dangling in the void. They'll gnash and claw against anything, including palpable reality, which threatens them.

Conservatives-libertarians, on the other hand (and to admittedly varying degrees) accept complexity, and with it what cannot be explained, controlled, planned for, and otherwise put to bed. However, they due recognize certain simplicities of experience, such as those which are as plain as, say, an airplane in a skyscraper. Evil is not always subtle -- unless you have Big Ideas to protect.

well, I suppose it took me a few years to figure out that I wasn't crazy. In my defense, though not exoneration, I must say that I live in eastern Massachusetts, that it wasn't quite so clear to me that I wasn't crazy (I had to work through several interesting counterexamples), and that I was not then familiar with the phenomenon of the intelligent rightist (until I happened upon a few small magazines in, inevitably, Harvard Square.)

Better late than never. Even as late as Mr. Thompson.

[TheLeague]

My trip to the Light Side was fast and easy. I looked out the window of my Crystal City, VA office one September morning and saw a red, orange and dark-black billowing cloud rise over the Pentagon.

Nothing could ever excuse that act, and yet the Philistines found a 1001 different way to do just that.

I couldn't handle it any more.

The Philistine's deep silence after the joyous liberation of Afghanistan was the final straw.

It didn't take me as long as it did you (and many other former Philistines that I know), but it was the same realization: Philistines are crazy; I am not.

Funny, you don't hear many stories of conservative/libertarian types becoming more liberal. There aren't many Philistine neophytes. It's usually the other way around.

I wonder why.

[Bruce Brownlee]

Thanks for directing attention to Thompson's fine piece. One can't help but wonder if his days as a San Francisco journalist aren't numbered -- certainly his party invitations will fall off abruptly -- but he's to be commended for his bravery.

His story is similar to mine, with this proviso: What took him so long? I mean the question honestly, because I thought myself something of a slacker in ignoring all sorts of warnings between the late 1960s and 1980, until -- a HERD of elephants in the livingroom, and not a few rhinos -- they couldn't be ignored.

Among the many warnings:

1. An anti-war demonstration in 1968. Among the chants shouted: "Ho, Ho, Ho, Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!" I thought at the time: Since when does being against the war entail being in favor of the enemy?

2. A philosophy seminar in the 1970s. A Marxist student observed of Paul Robeson, sneering, "They SAID he was a Communist." I responded, innocently enough, "But he WAS a Communist." Silences. Glares. A sharp intake of breath. Uh oh.

3. The Fall of Saigon. The left declared universally that the Vietnam pull-out would result in no reprisals, and that contentions otherwise were merely reactionary propaganda. I thought, Well, here's a good empirical test. Based on "reactionary propaganda" about Communism, I'd guess that the pull-out will result in mass slaughter. Result: Mass slaughter.

The psychology of dogmatism so far removed from reality as to be delusional (if sincere) is quite beyond my analytic powers, but I've been thinking about it for years -- and occasionally sharing those thoughts with friends, many of whom became "ex-friends," in Norman Podhoretz's pithy phrase. Thomspon confirms some of my worst suspicions -- again.

Irrelevantly, nice new look, and congratulations about getting back online, more or less intact, and decidedly unbowed.

So: How did YOU come to reject political Philistinism? Surely there's a tale to be told THERE.