There is a belief dear to the more intellectual if sometimes extreme political elements that political power on the ground is nought but the ebb and flow of a great battle of ideas.  Thus philosophy is both the king of abstract human contemplation and the pawn of human instrumentation.

The Achilles heel of this view is that Nature is also expressed, and rather viscerally, through our hearts and minds and thence through our deeds.  But Nature is not an idea.  The battles between “isms” have no application to it.  Even race realism, for example, is only about Nature - just intellectuals protesting an anti-Natural ideology.

That is not to say that Nature cannot speak pretty directly through us.  It can.  But do you want to listen?

John Ray left a comment on Mark’s “A disappointed liberal” post which, as John’s comments often do, piqued my fancy.  He wrote:-

The pervasive power of advertising is a favourite Leftist theme but it is a crock.  Ask anybody in the ad game and they will tell you that they only wish they had such power.  Brand-shifting is all they usually can do - NOT “create demand”.  Read up about the Edsel if you doubt it.

Now, John is a man who has studied the human mind.  I am merely mindful of my lack of study.  So in response to his, of course, properly researched and, if required, extensively referenced point of view I will offer that scientifically useless device: personal experience.

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Not all liberals are pleased with what they have created. Clive Hamilton is a leading left-liberal thinker here in Australia. He has written a lengthy 50 page article titled The Disappointment of Liberalism.

In this article, Clive Hamilton describes very well what liberals set out to do. The basic idea of liberalism is that we should seek a particular kind of freedom, namely, a freedom to shape who we are and what we do according to our own individual will and reason.

The main impediments to this kind of freedom are the important parts of our personal and social identity which we don’t choose, but are born into, such as our gender, race and class. If only, thought the liberals, we could abolish the “oppressive” influence of such things, we could create an autonomous, independent, self-defining individual, free to pursue his own happiness.

Here is Clive Hamilton himself telling this story of how liberalism has made people “free” to define themselves according to their own will and reason:

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This morning while I was searching for a suitable, January 18-related image for our banner I came across this historical entry:-

18 January 1951:  Hermann Flake sentenced to death for “hate campaign against German Democratic Republic”.

Intrigued, I googled as many likely combinations as I could come up with but the information-safe remained firmly shut.  Does any MR-reading student of twentieth-century history know Flake’s story and the true nature of his crime?

Yesterday morning, when I started up my PC and opened OE, I found there a veritable barrage of mail from just one correspondent.  Let me say at once that he is no low-life spammer.  He is a currently self-absented reader and commenter and, to be sure, an interesting and determined fellow.  Although the subject matter of his e-mails was diverse there was, it must be said, a common thread running through them.  As threads go, some might consider it, on occasion, overly common.  No doubt, it will re-appear eventually on this page.  But I am not going to short-circuit that process now.  Anyway, one of the orphaned communications spoke of something more interesting to me - not Jewry but Conservatism, and dead Conservatism at that.

So, with thanks to Wintermute for this link to a seemingly funereal but, in the end, uplifting OQ article by the late John Attarian I am going to kick around a few Conservative notions and notions of Conservatism – not at all the same thing -  and, hopefully, spark off some interesting comment.  I shall do so in two parts.  This first one will commend realism and try to sketch out what that might amount to.

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Naturally, there’s no irony whatsoever in The Guardian, of all newspapers, finding fault with big government ... not a hint of hypocrisy in their critique of the “multi-agency approach” to, for example, the exploitation of illegal migrants by criminal gangmasters.  No, the hot-button plight of oppressed and abused workers calls forth an altogether too blinding and pavlovian response for wider considerations to apply.  So we get this:-

The tangle of Whitehall responsibilities for illegal working and gangmaster activity reflects the fact that they touch every aspect of the UK’s economic structure. So many authorities are involved that the tangle is almost impossible to unravel:

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A new study by a team of psychologists from Florida has revealed an alarming aspect to the modern Ms when she gets behind the wheel.  And before you run away with the not improbable notion that interviewing four hundred female twenty-somethings and late teens in America and Japan might have had an ulterior motive, these girls are something else.  They could, it seems, frighten the crap out of anyone.

“We need to recognise that male drivers aren’t necessarily the biggest threat on the road,” says John Houston (no, not the Late Great - one of the psychologists), “Women don’t seem to be following the rules any more. They may have been more cautious drivers in the past, but that no longer holds. We were very surprised by our findings.”

The study is due to be published shortly in the American scientific press.  Its subjects revealed high levels of hostility, sensation seeking, susceptibility to boredom, and competitiveness.  American women were particularly hostile.  “I’m in a hurry. Move it or lose it,” was the typical attitude.

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As our cocaine maker in Peru happily told us: ‘People want our cocaine because it is good and, for a while at least, makes them happy.’

So ends an interesting account in today’s Observer by Angus Macqueen  of a journey through the drug-growing badlands of South America.

There is no respectability whatever in drugs trafficking and only pathos or tragedy in drug-taking.  But the intellectual argument for drug liberalisation is becoming increasingly respectable because the alternative of prohibition has so manifestly failed.  Macqueen worries chiefly about the warfare and violence that drug moneys fuel in grower countries.  But he then makes what has become the standard case for liberalisation:-

This journey has left me thinking the politically unthinkable. With an election looming, the Blair government has made the war on drugs a populist law-and-order priority, once again conflating the taking of drugs with the crime and violence that surrounds them. But it is the war itself that is the problem. The politicians rightly warn that demand will go up if it is legalised. Not good but not the nightmare they summon up. Neither cocaine or heroin is a cancer. In quantities it destroys your nose and is bad for your brain, but it very rarely kills - unlike that other addictive plant we can use legally: tobacco.

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