PrintDecember 9, 2009
Dick Cheney is more compassionate than Nancy Pelosi
Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has penned what should become known as the most devastating exposé regarding the decades-long but self-deceptive liberal claim to the mantle of “compassion.”
In other words, Scruton’s is the first essay of its kind in recent memory to demonstrate a stark but unsettling (at least to liberals) truth well-known to such profound but academically silenced thinkers of the past like Edmund Burke and Aristotle. Scruton’s bombshell:
“[T]he conservative conscience is governed not by self-interest but by a concern for the public good.”
Scruton contrasts his claims for conservative compassion with the “phony” but “costly” compassion of the left:
“This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our
lives.”
lives.”
The left’s endgame, according to Scruton, is nothing less than an “aggressive sentimentality” that threatens to eradicate the very basis of human sentiment and feeling:
“As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square.”
European elites are pleased, says Scruton, that America and the Obama Administration have finally accepted the “modern consensus” that lies should replace truth and fake emotion should supplant the deeper sentiments:
“The [Nobel Peace] prize is an endorsement from the European elite, a sigh of collective relief that America has at last taken the decisive step toward the modern consensus, by exchanging real for fake emotion, hard power for soft power, and truth for lies.”
Scruton’s most important audience should be women and the youth in America - groups that typically embraced the left’s dubious claim to compassion and altruism.
After finishing Scruton’s brilliant piece, I thought of a memorable line from one of my favorite films – The Hustler. Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) finally sees, at the end of the film, into the heart of his promoter and nemesis – Bert Gordon (George C. Scott):
“You’re dead inside Bert, and you want to make everything dead around you.”
Make sure to read Scruton’s entire piece. For liberals, the essay is Kryptonite on steroids.
