ARONOFF: ... your book, The World Turned Upside Down ... How did you come to write this book?A pretty good diagnosis, but a cultural defence is not enough. Demography is destiny. We need a demographic defence.
PHILLIPS: For me, it was very much a question of joining up the dots... I came to the view that all these things were actually linked: They were all issues on which it was not possible, any longer, to have a proper discussion or debate; they were all issues on which the progressive side of politics took the view that it wasn’t simply that they believed that people who dissented from their point of view were wrong, they believed that they shouldn’t be allowed to speak at all... They were all linked by the fact that they were all ideologies—that is to say, they were all governed by ideologies such as a whole range of -isms: Feminism, anti-Americanism, environmentalism, anti-Zionism, moral and cultural relativism, and so on. And all these ideologies, because they’re ideologies, basically, they start with the belief that the idea is not only correct, but can’t be challenged, whatever that idea is, and then they force evidence to fit the idea.
So anyone who subscribes to any of these ideologies basically cannot accept reality or truth, and, consequently, it’s like having a dialogue of the demented. If you’re trying to bring forward actual evidence of what actually going on—actual reality, actual truth, actual facts, historical facts, present day facts—you’re told, “No, no, no, that’s simply an opinion, because there is no truth any more.” If there are no truths, then there are no lies—so everything is simply, in the jargon of today, “competing narratives.” So you can’t have the debate, and, more than that, if you question things ... you find that you lose your friends, that your professional situation becomes very difficult, you lose your chance of promotion, you don’t get the job, you don’t get the government grant, whatever it is. It’s quite an extraordinary situation. You have a kind of totalitarian situation. So I realized that this was a kind of wholesale denial of reason that was going on, and that led me to ask why this was all going on, and how this could possibly have come about in the era in which we tell ourselves we’re living through the most advanced era of mankind, an era which is governed entirely by reason...
ARONOFF: ... you say it’s not so much between Left and Right as it is between the intelligentsia and ordinary people...
PHILLIPS: Yes. It’s something that I’ve discovered in recent years, to my astonishment, and I think it’s actually quite a significant point—a very significant point—that the people who deny reality are almost always part of the intelligentsia, that the lower down the social and educational scale you go, you find that people there are very rooted in reality. They’ve got their feet on the ground, they have no truck with silly ideas, and you find that they are sane and decent and moral. The higher up the social and educational scale you go, particularly people who have been educated in universities in the last decade or two, you find that they are people who are much more likely to have a highly ideological view of the world, to be anti-America, anti-West, anti-capitalism, and to have—most importantly— no idea what truth and objectivity actually are. They disdain the whole notion of truth and objectivity, and they’re the people who are the most vicious and venomous towards Israel... it’s where the most irrational and bigoted views coalesce under the umbrella of “being rational” and “progressive.” It’s a kind of symbol, if you like, of where we’ve lost the plot over a whole range of issues.
And all these ideologies are centered in the universities, so the universities, far from being the crucibles of reason, have become the destroyers of reason, and the intelligentsia have become the destroyers of reason. It’s because the intelligentsia—historically, I think this is true—people who live in the world of ideas, are particularly prone to believe those ideas even when they depart from reality, to believe in theory. They’re also the people who tend to be, because they’re well-educated, high-minded—and high-minded people tend to be drawn to the idea that the world can be perfected in some way. So all these ideologies—look at environmentalism, look at anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism—we may think that some of them, or all of them, are horrible and destructive, but from the point of view of people who believe in them, they are all ways in which they think the world can be perfected... But we all know, from history, that Utopia always fails—by definition, it’s an impossibility. We also know, from history, that ... whenever you have Utopias that proceed to fail, their adherents always turn upon—always make scapegoats upon whom they turn, with great venom, to express their rage at the thwarting of the establishment of Utopia. We’re living through a period in which secular Utopias are mirroring the appalling totalitarian and fascistic movements of the past, in which the thwarting, the perceived thwarting, of the perfection of life on Earth led—in different ways, very different ways—their adherents to take it out on scapegoats. We see this today...
ARONOFF: How is it that the Islamist movement that you’re talking about there, ties itself to the Left? ...
PHILLIPS: The alliance between the Left and the Islamists is pretty eye-watering ... it is extraordinary that the Left literally march on the streets of London, literally march shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists... They are all governed by this idea of the realization of some kind of paradise on Earth, and that gives them a kind of common cause. The third thing is that the idea that people on the Left have always been against violence, against tyranny, and against fascism is wrong. People on the Left have a great deal in common with tyranny and fascism. People on the Left obviously have lent themselves to tyranny during the Communist period, and, as I say, you go back to the French Revolution, you find the progressive side of politics lent itself to mass murder. The Left has always been drawn to violence, it’s drawn to the exercise of brute power, and it’s drawn to people who extol that...
ARONOFF: ... And with sharia law, in the West ...
PHILLIPS: ... One cannot have that. One cannot have a society where you have a parallel jurisdiction, because if you have a situation developing in which you do not enforce the principle of one law for all, then you stop being a democratic society, and you become, instead, a kind of Balkanized country in which you have different groups jostling with each other but are not part of the same society. This is intolerable ...
ARONOFF: ... one quick comment on the media, and its role in spreading this point of view that you’re talking about...
PHILLIPS: ... most journalists are on the Left, and most journalists, I think, are acting as fifth columnists in the war against the West, a war waged both from within and from without.
File under: people who live in the world of ideas, are particularly prone to believe those ideas even when they depart from reality.
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