Thursday, December 11, 2008
Sympathy for the devil
Dr. Helen wonders why "intellectuals sympathize with criminals." She approvingly quotes Theodore Dalrymple, who argues that intellectuals go to great lengths to distinguish their own reactions from those of the average person (who instinctively sympathize with the victims of crimes rather than the perpetrators).
While this is no doubt true to a certain extent, it is far from the entire story. There has been an intellectual class for thousands of years. Sympathy with criminals has been one of its touchstone issues only for a couple of generations (which is why the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" was so funny). Why the change? I think it is because it has recently (as in the last 60 years) become popular among intellectuals to identify social rather than individual causes for pathology. If poor people, unwed mothers, and drug abusers are the victims of social conditions rather than of their own poor individual choices, then it must also be true that muggers, rapists, and stick-up men are victims, too. Either way, this thinking goes, it is society that causes the problem. Well, if that is true then calling for more individual "responsibility" will not do a damned thing. Social problems call for social -- meaning statist -- solutions. It is all very convenient for people who want government even more involved in the lives of Americans.
It is easy to see why virtually all such people are left-wing.
CWCID: Conservative Grapevine.
12 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Dec 11, 10:00:00 AM:
I don't think it has so much to do with intellectuals per se, it has more to do with the rise of Romanticism among intellectuals after the enlightenment of the late 18th century had run it's course. Social criticism mutated from the pragmatic Hume to annoying people like Thoreau, and outright idiots like Rousseau, a man who amazingly still has his admirers.
Merit and achievement became less fashionable amongst intellectual elites, to be replaced by romantic notions of man's "inner nobility" and suspicions of the "inherently corrupting nature of civilization". Those sorts of ideas are still popular among cultural and intellectual elites all over the west. It's why intellectuals love people like Mumia Abu-Jamal; they get carried away by these antique notions of romanticism and spin themselves up into paroxysms of delusional speech about how society should recognize that his murder of the Philly cop was only some sort of figurative effort, a noble savage fighting back against the grimy, gritty lack of imagination and vision in everyday life. Sure, some guy died and his family was left bereft, but that really is beside the point for a lot of these candidates for rubber rooms.
I'm obviously exaggerating to make a point, which is that western intellectuals and their cultural followers must be persuaded to abandon romanticism. Just get over it. At root it's a philosophy that promotes completely delusional worldviews and notions that form the intellectual base of all totalitarian philosophies. Could fascism or Communism ever have risen to prominence without the ground prepared in advance by people like Rousseau and Thoreau?
If a serious effort could be made to discredit romanticism and promote more rational, pragmatic and merit based philosophies, then intellectuals might not be so interested in promoting totalitarian governments, and certainly less sympathetic to criminals.
By , at
Thu Dec 11, 10:05:00 AM:
There is a problem of definition here.
The concepts of "intellectual" and "liberal" are being used interchangeably. While there is a lot of overlap, the two are different. An intellectual can be rational, a liberal can not.
The liberal wants to be loved, he wants always to have the high gound and be morally superior to others. The liberal really likes this posture if it costs him nothing to assume it.
Thus, a liberal intellectual will ALWAYS side with the criminal because he believes it positions him above the rif-raf and causes him to be admired by other intellectual/liberal/elitists.
The difficulty is always identifying which liberals are true believers and which are simply pimps working for profit or some other motive while pretending to be liberal.
We were lucky with Willie; he was a womanizing crook and not a left wing believer. It is beginning to look like we'll dodge another bullet with Hussein who is justanother Chicago thief.
By , at
Thu Dec 11, 10:06:00 AM:
Thanks for that. "Tolerance" for the left too often includes tolerance for criminal activity.
By 
MEANA55, at
Thu Dec 11, 11:01:00 AM:
It is more apt to call it sympathy for the devil, of the devil, and by the devil.
I agree with nearly all of what Anonymous@10:05 is saying. Most of the mushyheadedness of leftist doctrine is an intellectual trap for the weak-minded, and the craftier evil types can gain great personal advantage through falsely elevating this trap to supplant true intellectualism. Should the Professional Bowlers Association ever declare golf scoring, then the smart bowlers will consistently roll perfect games by intentionally gutter-balling. President-elect Obama's 37 wouldn't look so bad then, eh?
As for whether an individual Marxist is evil or merely a tool of evil, I am color-blind in that region.
Where I differ is with the commenter's judgment that the lesser venality of President Clinton or, in the commenter's opinion, the common thievery of President-elect Obama can be characterized as dodging-the-bullet. In my opinion, this is a more dangerous gradualism that makes me wonder if we will have the means and will to effect a righteous backlash in the face of outright tyranny.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Dec 11, 12:16:00 PM:
I think that it is also directly proportional to how cushy and safe their lives are. If they are able to live their entire existence in a safe and prosperous country without even being made into a victim (I mean an actual victim, not a 'I demand attention because I'm different' victim) or otherwise having to deal with the fact that the world is a harsh, uncaring, and sometimes brutally evil place, then they just kind of assume that almost everyone is like them and those that aren't, ought to be. Many liberals are naive and unworldly.
'But I traveled Europe and worked for UNESCO in Kosovo!' cry the lefties.
As a tourist and as a temporary, uniformed aid worker giving away free crap.
LIVE in the world for a while away from the ivory towers and gated communities and high-rises that you like to call home. Spend a year or three in the barrio. Have your car broken into 3 times. Be called some creative racial slurs by people whose language you don't speak and who don't give a shit about social repercussions. (because there aren't any) Lose friends not to random crime, (because you can rationalize that away) but to a deliberate act of war by another group of people who hate you because you aren't like them.
The biggest gap I've seen between liberals and everyone else is a reality gap.
By , at
Thu Dec 11, 01:35:00 PM:
Some good comments above.
I pretty much agree with the posting. If problems are caused by society then you are not responsible.
That conclusion is very comforting to those who do not wish to be responsible.
The academics and intellectuals , right or left, those I call Statists have no objection to the government erasing individual rights. But they insist the changes must be done properly, by redefining what words mean and denying the consequences of acts.
Statists feel such direction is necessary, not for them but for the masses.
And most importantly, they expect to belong to an Elite who will be exempt. An Elite who are innately suited to direct matters for the rest.
By Mystery Meat, at
Thu Dec 11, 02:52:00 PM:
This reminds me of Norman Mailer's sponsorship of a talented murderer, Jack Abbott, who murdered again when Mailer had helped to get him out of jail.
By , at
Thu Dec 11, 03:15:00 PM:
If it's true the cause of such behaviors are societal in nature (which I likewise have doubts about), I don't think it necessarily follows that social problems call for statist solutions. There are lots of ways to attack social ills without resorting to government. For instance, I would argue pop culture over the last 20 years had more to do with the insignificance of Obama's race in the presidential election than any government-based affirmative-action policy.
By Escort81, at
Thu Dec 11, 04:39:00 PM:
Good discussion.
I agree with Squealer re the impact of pop culture over the last few decades as it relates to the election this year.
Anon 10:00 AM echoes in part one of the the arguments set forth 20 years ago by Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind."
Now for some levity that is only tangentially related in that it is a brilliant defense of wrongdoing, seeming to blame "the system" -- I can't stop myself from posting another Animal House video link: "...Shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system?"
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Thu Dec 11, 11:56:00 PM:
"...the average person (who instinctively sympathize with the victims of crimes rather than the perpetrators)" ... that's a egghead intellectual statement in and of itself and quite an assumption.
There's been plenty of cases of the 'common folk' sympathizing with criminals: Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood, DB Cooper, not to mention Mobsters who helped out in the local community.
I believe it's who people perceive is the victim (from 'The Man' or the government vs. innocent victims or the powerless) that determines if people sympathize with the perpetrator or the victim.
I believe the perception of criminals as sometimes good or as merely victims of circumstance is a universal thing not just an intellectual thing.
By Power of the Logos, at
Fri Dec 12, 09:13:00 AM:
All very good comments. However, I think the main reason for this is due to the fact that there is far more money in helping criminals than there is in helping victims. The rest is just justification.
By , at
Fri Dec 12, 09:45:00 PM:
I do believe that a lot of crime is caused by social problems. If a person grows up poor, and learns the attitude that it's something caused by his society, and there is not much he can hope to achieve doesn't matter how much he tries because the odds just are so badly stacked against him, of course it's more likely he'll never even really tries. Or if he is taught that the rich, or the middle class or the white or whatever, are his enemy, and he is a judas if he plays by their rules - especially if he ends up winning. Only that is a problem that usually seems to get worse when the liberal solutions are tried. And as said, maybe the right way to go about it should be with changing popular culture rather than going for the statist alternatives. Go back to where the guy who beats the odds is seen as a hero, not as a traitor. Right now it seems, most often anyway, that the hero can only be a true hero if he a) stays poor at the end of the story, or b) becomes rich but not because he's smart with his finances but because he either finds a treasure or steals it from some rich, and of course evil (of course the rich guy is bad, he's rich, can't get there without becoming corrupt) guy.
