Feeling our way to utopia

Today democracies around the world are being voted down by electorates looking for right-­wing authoritarian leaders who will fire up their grievances, insecurities and disappointments – who will gladly target the ‘elites’ and enact something like the ‘general will’ instead of prosecuting the greater good.
But it’s not only right-wing extremists who have embraced the politics of feeling, sensibility and blame. Increasingly those who consider themselves left, progressive and tolerant spend a great deal of time assigning culpability to ‘the privileged’, a conveniently vague catch-­all category, when they would be better off considering pragmatic class issues and promoting practical reforms that will work for the whole of society. When the sensibility-­rich slogan of ‘who’s to blame?’ outguns ‘how do we fix this together?’, society is in big trouble.
I am reminded here of the moment in Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog when the eponymous hero, surveying the wreckage of twentieth-century dictatorships, remarks: ‘Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.’
It’s certainly hard work finding leaders who are prepared to lead by sense and not sensibility these days. In fact a quivering alertness to sensibility is very much in the minds and hearts of the men and women who run Australia. Politicians, business leaders, vice-chancellors, political parties and publishers are all too eager not only to listen to the feelings of their most emotion-­led constituents but also to appease and placate whoever complains loudest.