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?

Knowledge is scary

There may be certain things about the world or about yourself that you don't want to know. So if someone points out these things, maybe you get angry with the person pointing it out - the old story: don't like the message, shoot the messenger. Surely this is really quite remarkable: people are afraid of knowledge. Ponder that. Boko Haram and the like are just the extreme manifestation of something you can see everyday on Facebook - or even, too often, in the aggressively 'progressive' and 'tolerant' environment of many university classrooms (i.e., the supposed enemies of Boko Haram). People are afraid of knowledge; especially self-knowledge. But they still grasp that knowledge is a genuinely good and desirable thing. That's why they lap up absurd, self-righteous narratives about how enlightened they are, in comparison to all the people who have thought or do think differently from themselves and their narrow set - even when they have no idea of what those other people thought or think and why they thought or think it. And so they get angry if you question their absurd, self-righteous narratives. If they're 'progressive' types, they'll often go so far as to angrily dismiss you as a bully or a bigot - why? - because you have dared to challenge them to think critically about their precious 'progressive' viewpoints... and somehow they fail to see the irony! So do you laugh or weep? What a waste of time even trying to talk to such people! And yet, they remain fellow citizens and fellow human beings. We still have to live together. So even though it so often seems like a waste of time, we are not absolved from the responsibility to at least try to make positive contributions to public discourse. (And that's what your 'personal' FB page is: if people can see it, by definition it's public.)