POLITICS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM | 2007-06-11
I am corresponding with my only liberal close kinsman. He mentioned he was getting more conservative on some things and attributed it to age. That is, after all, what we have experienced for ages, getting more conservative as we get older.
But I made my living observing people's politics closely, and I think he is only partly right. He hasn't changed as much as he thinks he has, and I have gotten more radical as time passes. My observation is that neither of us has really changed much.
Those we call liberals today are actually generically conservative. They like things as they are, Politically Correct. I PREFERRED things as they WERE.
But that is only part of it. The ISSUES have changed completely. In our youth conservatives stood for states' right, a.k.a, segregation, and anti-Communism. Now all National Review talks abut is forcing "democracy" on other countries and crippling medical research.
On the latter point, liberals are generic conservatives. Liberals insist that everything is a result of environment, and none of THEIR funds AND PUBLIC ATTENTION should go into genetic manipulation. You see the hilarious combination of fundamentalist preachers and Harvard Professors of Ethics uniting to suppress human cloning and embryonic research.
I predicted this in the last page of my 1976 book. There is a civil war growing up in academia today which is more important than ANYBODY'S bubble, but as usual only I notice it.
The Battles of Lexington and Concord just happened in Britain. Laws against medical research were loosened, but scientists demanded they be loosened more and the social science/"religious" side was outraged they were loosened at all.
As was the case in 1775, it will be a while before scientists declare Independence from the academia now ruled by social scientists and Political Correctness. You see the same kind of declarations of loyalty coming from them now, feverish ones, that the Founding Fathers gave to the King between early 1775 and July, 1776.
I pointed out at length in my first book (in my own name) that the basic weakness of heredity was that there was no MONEY in it. You can control tens of billions of dollars and public attention when you promise to change thins by social programs, but heredity WAS a fixed quantity.
WAS.
Every year people expect more from forbidden research. Every year hard scientists get tireder of sitting at the back of the academic bus.
I said in my 1976 book that tomorrow's scientific establishment would be more powerful and more dangerous than the PC one we have now. The routine response to my mentioning it is "SSSH! Let's ignore it and talk about Ron Paul!"
Needless to say, I won't DO that, and many a person will float away in his bubble to avoid it.
So here I am in 2007 exactly where I was in 1957: Looking straight at a future I see perfectly and everybody else ignores.