Aristide @#54,

Thank you for the link to that article by John Fonte. As one who was once a part of that Gramscian project (many years ago when I was an aspiring Marxist intellectual, Catholic Jesuit seminarian), I can attest to the breadth and depth of this penetration of the institutions which transmit the narrative explanations of “who we are” and the “why?” of things.

Most of the people who are the type as described in Karen’s post (@#74)are not at all aware of the provenance of the ideas that they parrot, if they can do that at all. Most of the young students and recent grads who are self-identified as being on the Left have minds that are little more than placard flipping images of talking points, memes, and flip taunts.

I was on the Left from roughly 1977-87. In the early to mid eighties one of those moments of the beginnings of my disillusionment with the Left involved taking a hard look at the mental landscape of the activist types and their leaders. I could find very little evidence of true intellectual quests. Finding a fellow revisionist Marxist who truly was engaged in a search for the truth was rare, but it did happen and inevitably I valued the company of that person in that desert landscape. Typically, we took the critiques of socialism coming from the other side seriously. Your activist types pretty much flipped the bird to those folks, and I always was uncomfortable with that doctrinaire, ignorant posture. Because I am Catholic, at the time I was very much diving into some of the Liberation Theologians, so the critiques of this theology and of socialism coming from people like Michael Novak MATTERED. So did the critiques of socialism coming from Karol Woytyla, Cardinal Archbishop of Krackow and Pope John Paul II. Those critiques of socialism which focused on the nature of the human being, our sinful nature, and the flawed nature at the very core of our world were a challenge to the utopian project.

All socialism, at its core, has a utopian telos. It is a truth claim about what is possible for humanity, nature, and history. Therefore, as a truth claim it has to be examined for its veracity and plausibility. A certain scientific rigor is necessary. My project – at least what I envisioned myself as doing – was to see if those critiques of socialism could be transcended by something about us and nature that we may have overlooked, so that there may indeed be a PLASTICITY of nature and mind that could thrive under the right conditions. I won’t go into the long story of my journey to finally realizing that this was going to be a dead end. It did involve further study into areas of psychology (developmental), genetics, and neuroscience.

These young Leftists today display no such intensity of quest for the truth. They are told by their teachers and professors that the ideas they are being taught are “progressive” without reference to the process by which some strand of thought gave birth to it. So, when people like me, who have had some training in these areas of the history of ideas, point out to them that they are in the the tradition of Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, et al, they find it amusing and are likely to extend the middle finger, literally or figuratively.

We live in a time when there is a disturbing lack of the ability to engage in any kind of inner Socratic dialog. And in this post-modernist milieu the lack of the appreciation of the spiritual dimension to the human being leaves a glaring gap in society’s abilities to engage in contemplation.

I am that rare former Pelagian heretic, of a distinctly modern flavor of it, who has stepped away from it and recognizes where I came from, where I’ve been, and where I hope to be going.

I fear we are indeed devolving into a society with ugly tribal instincts.