Miso-‘neism, hatred of anything new (fr. Greek, misos (hatred) + neos (new), is common among primitive people because they live so close to the edge that anything new seems to threaten disaster; but it’s such an anachronism in civilized societies that the word can only be found in our biggest dictionaries. Yet terrifying calamities besiege us every morning in big, bold headlines, wearing down our thin veneer of civilizing hope. Who can honestly say that our daily diet of dreadful news does not induce in us a conscious or unconscious fear-driven hatred of change? We’re all struggling to reassure ourselves behind a happy, fearless face; but even trifling inconveniences can induce hatred of new things: I disdain improved software because I hate the thought of having to learn new ways of operating it. Mi- ’sologism, hatred of reason, discussion, learning or knowledge (misos + logos) rears its ugly head!
These archaic hatreds feed all kinds of prejudice, fanaticism, vicious, if not violent, politics, and cash for pseudo-conservative candidates in recent mid-term elections; but just as hatred of change holds back primitive tribes, so too it keeps the Conservative Movement forever behind the curve. For example, according to George W. Bush, the highest debt financed spending since WWII, expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, occurred during the Reagan (“It’s morning in America”) years—4.23% compared with Clinton’s 0.76%, next to Eisenhower’s lowest 0.56%. Now, in the continuing dark days of the Great Recession spawned by Reagan and Bush spend-but-don’t-tax financing, “Conservative” opportunists want to retain its enormous tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing essential public services for the jobless and foreclosed who suffered most from those same debt-financed tax breaks.
They also subvert other honest Conservative values. Stern, “turn back the clock,” “no compromise” reactionary polemics of self-anointed “Conservatives” are at war with the teaching of the all-time favorite advocate of Conservative values, Edmund Burke (1729-97, a Dublin born Whig Member of the British Parliament):
“You can never plan the future by the past.”
— Letter to National Assembly,1791
“Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.”
— Letter to Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777
“Every human benefit, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise.
—On Conciliation with America, 1775
“Magnanimity in Politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”
—On Conciliation with America, 1775
“It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.”
— On late Publication of the Present State of the Nation (2d ed. 1769)
“By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
—On Conciliation with America, 1775
“A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
—Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. “
—On the Sublime and the Reasonable (1757) pt. 2, sect. 2
Burke’s wise words are perversely scorned by pseudo-conservatives in thrall to misoneist demons. In keeping with my landsman Burke’s magnanimity, I will not name names; but I know that generous-hearted Edmund is turning over in his two hundred sixteen year old grave like a whirling dervish at what is being said and done in the name of Conservatism.
Misoneist politics—after inflicting immense pain on voters—will eventually backfire on the Republican Party; but Republican hatred of change—has been, and will continue to plague our nation’s economy for years.
Yet, as Harold Meyerson points out, decline in innovation fails to explain something far more distinctive about Republican era economics. From 1947 through 1973, “the benefits from economic growth were widely shared, while in the years following, they increasingly went only to the top.”
Stay tuned for
THE CORRUPTION SPREADS—MIS-‘ANTHROPY (hatred of humankind)
photo credit: flickr RubyGoes
