The Liberal Mind

What makes liberals tick, or ticked off? Ace has an insightful essay up on why disagreeing with a liberal can create a hostile environment:

Liberalism isn't just an ideology. It's not just politics. It's what makes them good people. The political has truly become the personal.

. . . [This] has the unavoidable effect of making liberals think that anyone who disagrees with them is a bad person. There's no getting around that implication: If liberal thoughts make one good, then it must be the case that un-liberal thoughts make one bad.

Which means: [L]iberals honestly, genuinely believe that people who disagree with them are just plain bad. Not misguided. Not merely wrong. Not beginning with a different set of unprovable first assumptions which, inevitably, lead to wildly different conclusions. No-- if you disagree, you're a bad person.

Those of us who've spent some time in academe know just how true this is. And here it should be stressed that the disagreement needn't concern anything overtly political. I recall describing my dissertation topic (the disappearance of the classical hero from Italian Renaissance political thought -- sexy, eh?) to a then-colleague at the University of Georgia not long after I arrived in town. She furrowed her brow and replied, gravely, "That sounds as if it could be reactionary." I was taken aback -- reactionary? What was even political, much less far right, about the writings of the likes of Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Caluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and their ilk?

Perceptive readers will see just how naive I was back then, a dozen years and a score of scars ago. You see, I was doing intellectual history, and it's based on the writings of dead white males, and their writings comprise primary sources. Much worse, it was apparent that I thought highly of these men. The topic not only had nothing to do with feminism, but explored the concept of heroism. That implied that individuals could have a dramatic impact on the writing of history and political theory, which in turn opened the door for the influence of great men on history itself (whatever that was). All this is terribly elitist to modern elites, who prefer to explore the lower orders (not to mention base appetites), the better to pose as concerned, empathetic folk unafraid to take on principalities and powers.

Hence, the liberal article of faith -- that those who disagree with them ooze evil -- itself evinces a proclivity to live by ideology rather than observed experience, reason, conclusions derived at logically, or tradition. It's why erudition, especially of the type pursued in the modern academy, is ineffective as an antidote to their worst vices: arrogance, preening, and intellectual rigidity. Having learned that appeals to authority are easier to muster than hard evidence, and that such fallacies are as sweet music to their fellow elites, their decent into intellectual slovenliness was predictable.

George Neumayr has a fine essay on the irrationality of intellectuals; I addressed a similar problem here.