Here’s an email from my cousin Andy:
Now that things have settled down I finally got around to checking out your blog. Literate (of course) and quite stimulating. Good essay on utopianism, very much on target, although I don’t think liberal/conservative distinctions have become entirely meaningless. Disparate views among conservatives on discrete questions like abortion, gay rights, free trade, Iraq, etc.don’t necessarily negate agreement on broad over-all political philosophy. I also think the views of liberals, self-proclaimed or otherwise, tend to be more predictable than those of conservatives, at least conservatives like you and me. And I don’t think we’re that unusual.
Liked your observation that the founding fathers were visionaries but not utopians. The Constitution’s unflinching recognition of human nature and its simple but sophisticated machinery for curbing excess are indeed remarkable. Despite rhetorical similarities the American revolution was profoundly different from the French, which was basically utopian and ended up devouring its own children, as they say of revolutions in general, culminating of course in Bonapartism. At least Napoleon was preferable to Robespierre.
The abiding sin of the left is sentimentality, which I suppose in this context might be another name for utopianism. The irony is that sentimentality, with its ostentatious love for humanity in the abstract, often leads to the most horrendous crimes in the name of a higher good. Hitler and Stalin were sentimentalists. The actual driving force was perhaps lust for power, but I think they also believed in the idealism they preached with such bloody consequences, the superiority of the Volk or the manifest destiny of the proletariat.
But you’re right, of course, that utopians have also, historically, been in the forefront of beneficent reform, and that conservatives can fall into the trap of believing improvement is not possible (though there are plenty of exceptions to that, notably Bismarck and Disraeli). Trouble is that utopians are like the guy who knew how to spell banana, just didn’t know when to stop; whether liberal or totalitarian, they’re more addicted to coercion than democratic conservatives are. In contemporary America the penchant for social engineering was notably manifest, for instance, in the utopian attempt to promote equality by creating an artificial “racial balance” in the schools, through massive coercion, mainly busing, which ended up practically destroying urban public education without doing black kids any good. Even when I was a no-enemies-on-the-left liberal I thought that was idiotic and self-defeating, which of course proved to be the case. In fact my life in the People’s Republic of New York, while doing TV minidocumentaries on economic and social questions, had a great deal to do with my burgeoning apostasy.
Randy is an interesting guy, a point of view I hadn’t heard from a self-proclaimed homosexual–no apparent self-hatred, no apology for personal preferences or behavior, but at the same time a realistic acknowledgement that homosexuality is deviant, that equating it in every way with straight life and institutions isn’t all that healthy socially. Not that tolerance isn’t in order, or that the gay rights movement hasn’t been a good thing on balance, but the current gay party line reminds me somewhat of those feminists who insist that all differences aside from the undeniable obvious are culturally imposed. (Incidentally, while I’m turned off by the shriller feminists, I think one reason for the vitality of the West is the emancipation of women and the channeling of their talents and energies into intellectual, vocational and social life.)
I once heard Truman Capote say that he didn’t really believe in bisexuality, that everybody, basically, is either gay or straight. One hesitates to dispute a dispatch from the front, but I don’t think that’s true. My own opinion is that homosexuality is largely inherent, but with gradations, sometimes malleable to a greater or lesser degree, and in some though not all cases partly a matter of choice; if environmental and social pressures steer an individual with homosexual tendencies into a straight life I don’t think it’s necessarily destructive to personal happiness or fulfillment. But of course it depends…