John Cleese, of Monty Python fame and certainly one of England’s most learned philosophers, gave a talk given in 1987 in which he had some interesting things to say about extremism that fits in well with what Luke in the Bible and Will Braun, have said. Actuall,y it fits well with everything you have ever thought about extremists.
He started by acknowledging that a lot of people were complaining about extremism. The airwaves were filled he said with people who were less friendly and more intolerant of others. People lacked respect for their opponents. Cleese did not disagree with that, but, he said, what about the other side? What about the good things about extremism?
“The biggest advantage of extremism,” Cleese said, “is that it makes you feel good, because it provides you with enemies. The best thing about enemies is that your can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you!”
Cleese had more to add, as if that was not enough:
“If you have a lot of anger and resentment in you and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that the only reason you are doing what you do is that your enemies are such very bad persons and that if it weren’t for them you’d actually be good-natured, courteous, and a rational all the time. So if you want to feel good become an extremist. Now you have a choice. If you join the hard left, they will give you a list of authorized enemies—almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, the Americans, judges and multi-national corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors, and, of course, moderates. Or, if you’d rather be an extremist on the hard right, no problem, fine no problem, you still get a lovely list of enemies, only a different one. Noisy minority groups, unions, Russia, weirdo, demonstrators, welfare spongers, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, [or I guess CBC in Canada] strikers, social workers, communists, and of course, moderates. Once you get this superlist of enemies you can be as nasty as you like and still feel your behavior is morally justified. So you can strut around abusing people telling them that you can eat them for breakfast, and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth. A fighter for the greater good. And not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.”
As a result, maybe extremism is not such a bad thing after all.