Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Right Minds

By Samuel Goldman

Radicals, liberals, and progressives have dismissed conservatism as a mental defect ever since it emerged as a distinctive brand of political thought with the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. According to Thomas Paine, Burke’s opposition to the revolution was based on an “obliteration of knowledge.” Several decades later, John Stuart Mill asserted that, although not all conservatives are stupid, “most stupid people are conservative.” In the mid-20th century, Theodore Adorno diagnosed conservative views as symptoms of a pathological “authoritarian personality.” More recently, some neuroscientists have argued that conservatives have bigger amygdalae than liberals. This turns out to be far from complimentary: the amygdala is the region of the brain associated with feelings of fear and disgust rather than thinking.

Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, rejects such reductive accounts. As the title of his recently published The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin suggests, he thinks conservatives do have functioning brains. The purpose of the book is to “get inside” them more deeply than other writers on the left have been able to do.

The results of his exploratory surgery are provocative. Robin concludes that conservatism is neither a disposition in favor of the tried and true, as the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott proposed, nor a principled commitment to limited government, as many contemporaries believe. Instead, he argues, conservatism is a “reactionary ideology” that defends hierarchy against the upheavals that began with the French Revolution.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/right-minds/

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