n general, liberals are biased towards "personal fulfillment", and conservatives are biased towards "duty"; liberals are biased towards "discovering oneself", and conservatives are biased towards "developing character". Liberals tend to admire those who are spontaneous and somewhat showy, for being free and self- expressive; conservatives tend to admire those who are disciplined and
unassuming in demeanor. In other words, there is an outlook or orientation that tends to inform judgment pretty strongly, on both sides.
Neo, on one point I would agree with you, and that is that there is usually a real difference in outlook, in general weltanschauung, and in temperament between self-described conservatives and liberals.
However, I would disagree with your characterization of that outlook, where s-d (short for self-described) liberals are concerned. Seems to me you are thinking of a generation, specifically, of the '70's generation.
Take me, for example, as a representative of an older generation. I do not gladly accept labels, but I was brought up in a radical-liberal milieu, so I can speak of it first-hand.
In my day, people did not talk about "personal fulfillment" or "discovering themselves"; those mantras had not yet been coined. They did not even talk about "generations," for that matter. (All children wanted to do was to grow up, and it would never have entered their minds to say something like "never trust anyone over thirty.")
What New Deal babies like myself DID talk about was one's obligation to defend the poor and oppressed against the tyrants of this world. Heroism in the cause of justice was a trait we most admired. I will confess that as a child I used to daydream about saving a Negro (as we called them then) from a lynch mob. I would run over, and deliver an impassioned speech, the eloquence of which of course stopped the maddened crowd in its tracks every time. And how my heart would swell at the contemplation of my superior heroism!
And oh, how wonderful it was to fight the fascists in World War II!! Here again, I have to confess I occasionally went too far in spreading that "fascist" label around. Even my dad, a fascist-hater par excellence, suggested that I tone down an editorial I had written about Wendell Wilkie (who had dared run against my beloved Roosevelt!) walking hand-in-hand with Hitler and Mussolini.
I am no longer so naive (I hope!). But that identification with the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten, the spurned, the trampled-on, the bombed-out, etc., probably remains with me, and goes far to explain some of my career choices. I do tend to feel that the more an individual has suffered, in the concrete sense, the more he/she has really "lived", the more "authentic" he/she is, and I get really uncomfortable around people who have always been comfortable. And moral courage is the thing I admire more than anything else.
Mind you, this is not an intellectual conviction (and may indeed be indefensible intellectually), but a feeling, an "unconscious outlook," if you will. And I am by no mean unique among those who come of similar "liberal" backgrounds. We're just older than the rest of you, alas. <gg> |
