Tuesday 21 April 2015

Bourgeois radicals

A young person I know, whose views are generally far off the deep-left-progressive-end of things, likes to dismiss my views and arguments as "worn out topics" and "old redundant arguments" and intone stuff like "it's a new world - we all have to make adjustments - you'll get used to it." Of course she never seems to actually understand my "old redundant arguments" and certainly never makes any credible attempt to explain wherein they are mistaken - thus the resort to preciously trite remarks about our "new world," etc. So why does she do this? What to make of such rhetoric?

Here is one among many possible answers: She is simply quite blind to the possibility that one need not define oneself by the Zeitgeist, by whatever are the fashionable views of one's day. In other words, this apparently radical leftist-feminist-existentialist-etc. type in fact seems to be deeply motivated by the demand for a kind of elitist-bourgeois respectability, and assumes that this demand is strongly motivating for others too. As Allan Bloom describes Rousseau's conception of the bourgeois: "To describe the inner workings of his soul, he is the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others." Indeed. And so it just seems obvious to this young oxymoron, this bourgeois radical, that if the Zeitgeist has spoken, then we must all adjust. We will get used to it. For surely we have no choice but to learn to accept this new understanding of ourselves which has been dictated by the others?

No comments:

Post a Comment