Reactionaries

                              Reactionaries

According to Kohn, “At the end of the 19th century, in practically all civilized countries, the legal equality of all men was established, and in the backward countries the fight for civilization included the fight for the equality of all. This has never been known in history before."

But the demand for hierarchies continues. And in innovative guises. The old royal argument was Divine Right and the domestic safety of an iron rule. (The dangers of the king's international ambitions were another matter.) Now we are offered, not equality of opportunity and the equality before the law, but rather equal access to limited resources, a promise that demands conflict--and an organizer. And we are offered the prime reward of all philosophers of inherited history: Revenge.

The new totalitarian tribalists, like their Marxist and Nazi intellectual ancestors, reject the innovative ideas and achievements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Those ideas gave dignity and respect to individuals and cultivated a social, economic and political climate and institutional setting of peaceful self-fulfillment and collateral social advancement. The tribalists want to return to the animosities, indignities and cruelties that characterized most of human history before then. Indeed, they want to feed them.

There has never in history been a reactionary movement the size of that of the last 100-150 years where the astonishing advancement of human dignity and rights--and their concomitant advances in wealth creation--have come under fire. Nor have such reactionary beliefs been centered so uniformly in institutions of higher learning. Nor have reactionaries ever claimed that such advances--material included--were inherently wrong.

There is a story about a man imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge during the Year Zero campaign, when the government tried to push Cambodia back to pre-modernity, a time of "no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death." He knew the animosity the regime had to learning so he survived for years in the camp by pretending he was an idiot.

That might help now.