Leftism and Reason

A commenter on Bruce Charlton's blog objected to my statement in the last post that leftism is a rational ideology according to its own materialistic bias. He thinks it is fundamentally unreasonable. I don't disagree. I did say it was often held by people whose beliefs were based on what they wanted to believe, and my use of the word ‘ideology’ was also meant to imply disapproval. I see ideologies as intellectual constructions bearing little or no relationship to reality. The world has no need for ideologies formed by theorists with spiritually desiccated minds such as Karl Marx or any number of minor 20^th and 21^st century academics.

But what I meant was the difficulty of arguing purely rationally against leftism from within the framework it has set up for itself and which now seems to be increasingly accepted. From a more universal framework it's not hard to argue against at all, but if you accept the absolute materialism of the leftist there are readymade assumptions built into that which tend to be self-supporting for the leftist thesis.

Of course, materialism is irrational as I have written here, and I certainly was not saying that leftism is rational in any true sense. It's clearly not. In my view it derives from the rebellion against, first, natural authority, and then, and ultimately, God and the idea of being a creature. Reason for the leftist is pressed into service to support his prejudices, but if you accept the boundaries of the artificial world he has created then reason alone might not be enough to get you out.

If only leftists were honest about their motivations but they're not. It all goes back to the first one in the Garden of Eden who preached equality (ye shall be as gods) but only in order to destroy true hierarchy so that he might establish a new and false one, an inverted one in fact. He's still up to his old tricks, using apparently rational argument to promote them. It's only when we go beyond reason that we can fully see through them.