Why is the arts so hostile to conservatism?

[Mugwump]

^ Tannin, if you define conservative as wanting no change whatsoever to the status quo, or having entirely conventional opinions and seeing all other races as inferior, or considering those from the working class as useless dullards, then your aunt sally married to a straw man might work. That is, however, a bit like allowing only art in the "Socialist realism" vein to be considered "Left". It's way below your level.

The Left holds no monopoly on the idea that merit may be found in many different places, nor does being on the ordinary Conservative Right imply mere adoration of power for its own sake. You might want to read the works of Burke and his pursuit of the East India Company for an example. Your post suggests that this is your understanding of conservatism, and it's so circular and tendentious that i can only presume you are teasing.

If one adopts a fairly normal definition of a conservative as someone with politically conservative opinions, being patriotic and monarchist and broadly pessimistic about human nature, sceptical of ideas of radical equality, and perhaps even democracy, , and seeing the preservation of tradition and an evolved form of life as important, then what I posted is 100% correct. A quick google search of the relevant authors will confirm that this is the scholarly consensus.

Kipling is an ardent British imperialist and an avid monarchist. The idea that he is on the Left is eccentric in the extreme. Of course he admired Indian people. He lived among them and found many of them admirable. If you think that only socialists can feel that, I weep for you.

Conan Doyle ? His hero, Holmes, is likewise an ardent patriot and monarchist. He repeatedly speaks proudly of preserving the crowned heads of Europe (Bohemia, Scandinavia, etc) , and he engages in counter-intelligence work for the British government. His revered brother Mycroft is the go-to man for the U.K. Foreign office. Holmes actively seeks to head off anarchist plots. Doyle himself split from the Liberal Party over Irish home rule to actually run for office as a Liberal Unionist, a party which then joined the Conservatives a few years later. Holmes shows no interest at all in social reform, though he shows a typical Conservative concern for justice and the rights of the innocent to be protected from crime. Doyle is not even remotely a Leftist.

Your comments on the sublime Wodehouse are strangest of all. Wodehouse personally was a complete political na�f, and I did not claim him as a Conservative. However, his hero Jeeves is a stickler for conventional proprieties in dress, in titles, in manners and in observing the forms of the class system. His idle rich are mentally negligible but mostly kindly and honorable. Wodehouse pointedly and deflatingly satirises communists (when Bingo Little joins a Bolshevik sect) and fascists (Roderick Spode) with equal aplomb. If you think that makes him politically classifiable good luck with it.

Lawrence is an oddball in many respects, but his politics were virtually fascist. A minute's perusal of the internet (Wikipedia et al) on Lawrence's politics will put you straight on this. As it happens, I was at Lawrence's birthplace near Nottingham on the very day I wrote my post, and reading Terry Eagleton's just censure of Lawrence's rather disturbing politics.

I know nothing about Dorothy L Sayers' work, so I can't comment.

[Tannin]

^ You need to read books in their historical content, not through the lens of 21st Century attitudes. Practically everyone was a monarchist and an imperialist in Victorian England.

All that aside, I neglected to make the most telling criticism of your silly claim that "the best literature was right-wing" - which is, of course, that you (a conservative) are defining what counts as "the best". It's like saying:

"All nice people are white."

(What evidence do you have for that?)

"Here is a list of my friends. They are all nice people. They are all white. See? All nice people are white."

[watt price tully]

[watt price tully]

Charles Dickens anyone?
The poetry of George Eliot? Great Grandmother of Jamie.

[HAL]

Oops. Too much data.

[Mugwump]

Huh ? Nowhere did I write that "the best literature was right wing". I wrote as follows :

QUOTE "Many, indeed most, of the great writers of the first half of the twentieth century are broadly on the right - Kipling, Eliot, Yeats, Larkin, Conrad, Faulkner, Conan Doyle, Ted Hughes. DH Lawrence. Probably Thomas Hardy. There are many exceptions - Orwell, Auden and others - but the overwhelming tenor of poetry and prose writing up until about 1960 is on the right." End quote

Good (and bad) art can be written from either (or no) political viewpoint, and it has often been written from a politically Conservative one. It's a function of the age, not the laws of great writing or the particular genius of the Leftist world view.

As to the lefties are smarter than rightists stuff, well, yes, if graduates have been indoctrinated by leftist academics for the last sixty years, you might get that sampling across an entire population of educated and uneducated people. If you compare mainstream right-wing graduates and mainstream Left-wing graduates your finding disappears, like the illusion it is.

[HAL]

I don't think that's possible. More than a million?

[Wokko]

So Conservatives are dumb dumbs so can't do arts? Ok.

Physically weak men are more likely to be leftist progressives, the physically weak are more likely to be in arts. I like this game.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/16850/study-weak-men-more-likely-be-socialists-amanda-prestigiacomo#

[watt price tully]

[David]

[Wokko]

[stui magpie]

I think Tannin's post is the biggest load of crap he's ever written.

I was in Ballarat today and it's clear the cold has his brain misfiring.

Artistic creativity has no link to intelligence. You get smart ones and dumb ones.

if his tongue wasn't firmly planted in his cheek while typing that he should get to Ballarat hospital ASAP for a brain scan.

[Mugwump]

[Tannin]

[Tannin]