Yesterday I finally finished the regrettably too-short A Short History of Ethics by Alasdair MacIntyre. The book served as a delightful survey of the major points in Western ethical thought from the pre-Socratics through Moore and Sartre. For readers interested in a solid, not-too-technical overview of how moral theory has developed over the centuries, MacIntyre’s book will prove a trusted and reliable guide.
The part of the book I most eagerly absorbed was its final four pages. After wrapping up in a general way his observations about the developments and shortcomings of twentieth-century moral philosophy, MacIntyre advances the somewhat complex position that neither relativism nor absolutism are tenable in contemporary discourse because trying to find a single and all-encompassing theory of ethics is a fool’s errand.
To some degree, MacIntyre’s observation — not unique to him, of course — that people generally don’t adhere to a single and self-consistent ethical paradigm but rather shift among approaches depending on the people and the situation, marks a burst of sanity within an academic tradition that, having failed to find the One Big Explanation for morality, seems by-and-large to have retreated to linguistic games.
MacIntyre fleshes out his argument in book length in After Virtue. Occasionally described as a bridge between Augustinianism and Thomism, MacIntyre reaches back to ancient Greece and its virtues and drops them, with some modification, within a framework most robustly articulated by the Scholastics. This includes, in particular, a willingness to add a healthy of dose of teleology to ethics.
Perhaps the major system-builders — Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Burke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Moore — failed because they put their faith in reason, in the idea that ethics can be adequately described in logical terms. Perhaps it can; perhaps the right system-builder has yet to appear on the world stage. But perhaps the problem, as MacIntyre suggests, is that the entire effort is misguided. Perhaps ethics involves an interplay of sociology, biology, theology, and teleology that defies integration within a coherent and dogmatic theoretic structure.
I will not presume to level judgement about his position. But: It feels right.
Picture it: It’s late December, 2010. Granny is ailing; she could pass from this life within a matter of weeks. Her children, eyeballing the substantial estate she is leaving, reflect soberly on one fact — if she dies on or before December 31, there will be no federal estate tax on her $2.5 million estate, but if she dies on January 1, federal taxes will take a whopping $675,000 bite.
This presents an interesting question: If you know Granny is going to die within days, do you act in such a way as to hasten her demise before the end of the calendar year?
This may be a gruesome question, but a salient one as 2010 draws into its waning weeks. To ensure passage of his package of tax cuts in 2001, President George W. Bush consented to a 10-year graduated reduction of the estate tax. In 2010, the total tax is $0. In 2011, the pre-Bush rates are reinstated in full.
Death brings out the worst in people. Is pushing Granny’s departure date up by a few days worth $675,000? Considering that people will eagerly kill others for substantially less than that, is it unreasonable to wonder whether a few wealthy heirs-to-be may engage in some chicanery to reduce the money they must forfeit to Uncle Sam?
Consider the question more directly — is something as arcane as tax policy capable of directly affecting the ethical ratiocination of an individual taxpayer? Is a steep, overnight hike in the estate tax an inducement to murder? More to the point, will anyone be watching for a spike in the death rate of wealthy folks at the end of calendar year 2010?
Hard to say. The wealthy have recourse to living trusts and other estate-planning projects, such that the inheritance tax is often irrelevant.
But still. Talk about perverse incentives.
Picture it: It’s late December, 2010. Granny is ailing; she could pass from this life within a matter of weeks. Her children, eyeballing the substantial estate she is leaving, reflect soberly on one fact — if she dies on or before December 31, there will be no federal estate tax on her $2.5 million estate, but if she dies on January 1, federal taxes will take a whopping $675,000 bite.
This presents an interesting question: If you know Granny is going to die within days, do you act in such a way as to hasten her demise before the end of the calendar year?
This may be a gruesome question, but a salient one as 2010 draws into its waning weeks. To ensure passage of his package of tax cuts in 2001, President George W. Bush consented to a 10-year graduated reduction of the estate tax. In 2010, the total tax is $0. In 2011, the pre-Bush rates are reinstated in full.
Death brings out the worst in people. Is pushing Granny’s departure date up by a few days worth $675,000? Considering that people will eagerly kill others for substantially less than that, is it unreasonable to wonder whether a few wealthy heirs-to-be may engage in some chicanery to reduce the money they must forfeit to Uncle Sam?
Consider the question more directly — is something as arcane as tax policy capable of directly affecting the ethical ratiocination of an individual taxpayer? Is a steep, overnight hike in the estate tax an inducement to murder? More to the point, will anyone be watching for a spike in the death rate of wealthy folks at the end of calendar year 2010?
Hard to say. The wealthy have recourse to living trusts and other estate-planning projects, such that the inheritance tax is often irrelevant.
There is an essential piece of philosophy that seems to be missing from the broader public debate about ideology that, if properly understood, may improve the amount of intellectual charity in circulation amongst the chattering classes, and thereby decrease (even if slightly) the amount of ugliness in the naked public square.
A small but growing number of bloggers and columnists has recently made references to ideology in ways that, I think, are unfortunate. The thesis they advance is that the various bases of the electorate (the progressives, the cultural conservatives, the centrists) hold within their ideology essentially the same positions on most major issues, and the bases resort to increasingly self-referential sources of information locused primarily from within their ideology. This phenomenon — whether you call it the “echo chamber” or “epistemic closure” or simply “closed-mindedness” — is uniformly ascribed as a negative. The idea that certain people prefer, on the whole, to engage ideas with which they are already in agreement, and to avoid information sources that originate from outside their received orthodoxy, is widely condemned by political and cultural elites.
The argument that these thought leaders seem to make is thus: It is dangerous for large swathes of the electorate to seek, as their primary information sources, news or opinion content that already fundamentally agrees with their worldview. The elites argue (not unpersuasively) that engagement with “external” ideas will provide for a more nuanced understanding of one’s own opinions while cultivating a deeper and more respectful appreciation for those with whom we disagree. In short, a diversity of opinion will tend to lead to a more respectful public discourse, with more enlightened discussants. This argument is why some criticize sources like Fox News as being an “echo chamber” of essentially the same self-reinforcing opinions.
Of course, this bare-bones argument is open to myriad attacks:
NPR and MSNBC are no different, in terms of having a categorical ideological perspective, from Fox!
Why should conservatives have to “engage” with liberal ideas but liberals are under no similar obligation?
Progressives have their own echo chamber (have you browsed HuffPo lately?), so why aren’t they being criticized?
Et cetera, ad nauseam.
But the point really isn’t to attempt to rebut or refute the underlying argument, for truthfully, I happen to agree with it. I think it’s a wise idea to seek new ideas and explore radically different perspectives. I sometimes read Tom Friedmann or David Corn or Eric Alterman even though I am almost always not persuaded by them. In addition to being an occasional subscriber to National Review and First Things and The Weekly Standard, I have been a paying subscriber to The Nation and Mother Jones. A prudent commentator knows not only the substance of his own positions, but also the substances of the positions with which he disagrees. And while I still actively read the RSS feeds for NRO’s The Corner and RedState, inter alia, I also subscribe by RSS to FireDogLake, Reason Magazine, Salon, Slate, The Atlantic’s politics feed, The Economist and The Note from ABC News.
This is not a “hooray for Jason” moment, for I believe that any educated person needs to make a similar effort to understand the rationale behind another’s perspective. Rather, it’s a concession, from the beginning, that I am uncomfortable with people who refuse to leave their “echo chamber” of self-referential political truisms.
However.
I do not believe that the prevailing orthodoxy is appropriately sensitive to the interplay between ideology and epistemology.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the sources and methods of human knowledge. The questions of how we can know something, and the content of the information we believe we know, all rolls under this philosophical discipline. Within philosophy, the Queen of the Sciences herself, there is a very specific taxonomy that often surprises some people:
Simple Taxonomy of Philosophy, (c) 2010 Jason E. Gillikin.
Epistemology, that intellectual bugaboo invoked by some commentators to criticize those who are disinclined to look outside their own ideology for much of their political information, is a theory of fact. Epistemology tells us what, and how, we know things. Applied epistemology, in a political context, can quite helpfully offer a coherent theory of the impact of self-reinforcing theoretical systems to accommodate new information, for example. (N.B. — For an excellent, brief example of applied epistemology, see Michael Novak’s Another Islam in the January 2007 edition of First Things.)
That said, there is an important distinction to be drawn. For a system of knowledge to be considered properly “closed,” it must not admit to any truth that isn’t implicit from the assumptions already contained within the system. This criterion, for today’s commentators, is only partially useful, for its implications are dangerous: Reduced to first principles, there is not, nor can there be, any genuinely open system of knowledge. Even relativism — the idea that there is no universal truth — is epistemically closed, for relativism must accept the absolute premise that there is no absolute truth (i.e., relativism’s core thesis is a logical contradiction), and relativism’s first premise is merely an assertion and not an objective fact that has independent meaning in the real world. How, therefore, can there be any intellectual coherence in arguing that people should be more relativistic in their search for sources of truth?
So from a purely philosophical perspective, the idea of epistemic closure is ridiculous when referring to popular ideology. But in the world of political discourse, the idea has currency, and it is from this context that the question must be analyzed; applied epistemology is a valuable tool, but in the service of armchair theoreticians with no formal training in the breadth and depth of Western philosophy, it can be the metaphorical equivalent of Dick Cheney’s shotgun.
I believe there is a piece of the puzzle missing from these attempts at amateur applied epistemology: A coherent introduction of aesthetics into the working theory of how ideology actually functions.
A quick Bing search of “ideology and aesthetics” comes up with … well, not much. And this is tragic, for I feel a solid dissertation subject forming.
Consider the following premises:
Epistemology, as a branch of philosophy dealing with the facts about how people can know things, contains valuable resources for criticizing the processes and assumptions of knowledge bases, but not terribly much for analyzing the content of those ideas.
Aesthetics, being (with ethics) a theory of value, is chiefly concerned with the question, “What is beautiful?” (Ethics, by contrast, is concerned with the question, “What is justice?”)
Aesthetics contains useful tools for analyzing the content of a subject, to tease out various indicators of beauty and to provide a useful linguistic framework for discussing beauty as a concept.
Many schools of thought, both philosophical and psychological, assert that most humans have an innate desire for justice and for beauty.
The human pursuit for beauty and justice is often pre-rational and expresses itself in an appreciation for fairness and harmony that is a distinctive moral idea (q.v. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) but is often difficult to articulate in concrete language.
With me so far?
Here’s the basic deficiency in political discourse, then, that troubles me: Most commentators seem ignorant of, or at least indifferent to, the possibility that the “echo chamber” is an expression of aesthetics rather than an act of willful ignorance.
By this I mean: The human desire for beauty and harmony and justice is often implicit in how we think. Some of the ideas and assumptions that govern the sorts of ideas we possess are, to some degree, pre-rational; we don’t think about why we are liberal or conservative, it’s just that those ideologies feel right. We find the premises in those ideologies to be persuasive in ways that often reduce to “because I just do.” This is why some people have a visceral, emotional reaction to injustice even if they have a hard time explaining why they’re so upset — it’s not their sociopolitical norms, but their value system, that is offended.
Different conceptions of justice undergird the progressive/conservative divide. Progressives see equality of outcome as an intrinsic good, whereas conservatives tend to favor an equality of opportunity. Neither is “right;” each approach represents a pre-rational determination of what justice properly entails. Although we can profitably discuss these assumptions, in the end, all we really do is attempt a retroactive rationalization of an innate sensibility.
Likewise, aesthetic ideals strongly influence our shopping habits in the wide marketplace of ideas. Our inherent ideas of beauty don’t just govern our appreciation of works of art, they also govern our respect for (and acceptance of) different forms of argumentation. This is a major, if too often overlooked, reason why appeals to patriotism and individualism resonate with conservative audiences while appeals to rights and communitarianism work well with liberals. These big-picture ideological concepts are back-loaded with ideas that we accept or reject not only on the basis of their content, but with how “beautiful” they strike us in the abstract, even if we don’t consciously think in those terms.
This why the warfare between the left-base and right-base can get so ugly: We’re not just opposing each other’s ideas, but we’re reacting in a primal way to people who hold radically opposed aesthetic ideals. Is it any wonder, then, that so few are willing to engage openly with the perspectives of their ideological inverses? Despite the alleged superstructure of rationality, a lot of the left/right divide reduces to questions of justice and beauty that are more a matter of sentiment than reason. Much of the contemporary abortion debate, for example, features people shouting over each other’s heads, for precisely this reason: The conversation long ago turned away from the logic of statutory law, into a clash of principles that effectively defy translation into rational conclusions marked by a genuine meeting of minds.
The phenomenon of Fox News, and its alleged bias towards conservative positions, can be explained partially because its mode of coverage — even its non-ideological news sources, unrelated to opinion content — is more harmonious with certain right-of-center aesthetic norms. It’s the little things — anchors wearing American flag pins, for example — that sets the tone. There is nothing intrinsically ideological about wearing the U.S. flag as a lapel pin, or using it as part of a network graphic, but when Fox News does it and CNN doesn’t, then there is an aesthetic connection with the audience that gains a more sympathetic following among conservatives than with liberals. You could have the same shows with the same guests and the same topics, but if one network employs the accouterments that are more “beautiful” to one side of the political spectrum, then that side of the spectrum will pre-rationally be more attracted to that network than to its competitor, and the other side will be less attracted and could even descend (as many do) to the equivalent of yelling “Boo!” simply because it jars their aesthetic sense.
And then we must face the real question: Is there anything wrong, per se, in choosing to consume sources of news and opinion that conforms to one’s aesthetic norms? If I disdain cubism, for example, does anyone really claim I have an affirmative duty to seek out cubist art as “balance” to the neoclassicism that I currently prefer? Of course not — the idea is laughable on its face. Yet to some degree, today’s polemicists are arguing we do exactly that: We must actively and thoroughly seek out news and information originating in sources that we find aesthetically displeasing in order to be “well informed.”
It’s not clear that there is a vice in sticking with what you think is beautiful, or in avoiding that which you think is ugly, or that we are qualitiatively better informed by seeking out the ugly as a balance to the beautiful. Yes, there is a prudence in engaging the opinions of people from outside of our ideology. But one can do this from within the ideology. I can look to The Wall Street Journal or National Review to provide in-depth analysis of the health-reform initiative without having to read Nancy Pelosi’s blog or the latest on Huffington Post. There is nothing intrinsically privileged about the origin of news analysis provided the content is thorough and fair and intellectually honest. Unless one wishes to argue that rationality itself is conditioned upon ideology, it is not immediately obvious that the source of news is as important of a consideration as the way that the source relates a broad spectrum of information on a topic in a way that sheds light on multiple perspectives on any given controversial issue.
Admittedly, there is a tendency for analysts to emphasize those factors that comport with their ideological assumption, which is why conservative publications (despite the quality of their analysis) find, for example, that Obamacare is A Very Bad Thing, and why center-left sources think it Completes a Century-Old Promise for America. But mere tendency does not imply necessity; there is no solid reason to hold that the media sources from within one ideology are by definition incapable of accurately relating a fair analysis of the opinions of a different ideology. Although it may be rare to find this in-depth honesty, its rarity is somewhat beside the point, which is that fairness (absent a compelling argument to the contrary) is certainly possible.
So those alleged rubes in Middle America who watch Fox and listen to Rush and Sean and stood in line for Sarah Palin’s book — what to make of them? A few thoughts:
Red-meat polemics isn’t really news or opinion, in a journalistic sense, but rather popular entertainment with a hook in contemporary sociopoliticial debate. Hence the book tours on the left and the right are really less about news and more about social solidarity with people who share similar value systems. Political book-publishing feels more like an American Idol tour than a genuine exercise in high-minded civic discourse.
If we accept the premise that news facts are independent of ideology, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason why objective news sources from outside of one’s ideological predispositions should be privileged against sources from within. Does a statement of fact gain or lose meaning based on which talking head uttered it? If it does, then the whole concept of news objectivity has been irretrievably damaged.
Opinion commentary is, to some degree, a function of the base serving the base. Apart from hardcore news junkies, most conservatives don’t read liberal commentators, and vice versa. There is not, to my knowledge, a solid reason why this is a bad thing, except in terms of those commentators bitching about having a smaller audience than they’d prefer. Purely opinion work is akin to the cheer-leading squad at a football game: We all like our own cheerleaders, and they can contribute marginally to the team’s enthusiasm, but they don’t actually score the points that matter on the political playing field.
With regard to news analysis — absolutely, a well-informed citizen needs to be aware of the rationale behind the policy prescriptions of all the ideological players, but it seems to be more often asserted than demonstrated, that there is a definite benefit to obtaining this analysis from different ideologies, than on relying on analysis from within.
Is there a problem with the “echo chamber?” Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. But without an analysis properly informed by theories of justice and beauty, and a strong affirmative argument explaining why Source A from outside of one’s ideological spectrum is intrinsically superior to Source B from within, then it remains unclear to this writer how the hoopla about how “the base” gets its news and commentary is worth the electronic ink spilt in the lamentation over an alleged epistemic closure of the conservative mind.
People are more likely to accept as true, that which they find beautiful — which is why so many different newspapers invest so much time and energy in redesigns, color harmony and typographical development. We engage with what we find beautiful, and reject what we find ugly, just like we rejoice in justice and lament obvious injustice. But this value judgement doesn’t inhere merely in artistic analysis — even in the realm of opinion, aesthetics informs our consumption of ideas.
Maybe it’s a bad thing that some conservatives (or liberals, or centrists) get the bulk of their news and commentary from sources originating from within their value system. Then again, maybe it’s not. The prosecution has made its case but so far has failed to persuade.
The “epistemic closure” trope seems to be making the rounds among all the really cool bloggers, for reasons that continue to mystify me. The concept of ideological “epistemic closure” — promulgated most publicly by blogger Julian Sanchez — is an elegant if circular system: Those affected by it are incapable of accepting any truth or reality sourced outside of a narrowly defined field of their own choosing, and their unwillingness to accept the arguments from outside of the system is thereby proof of its closure. I applaud Sanchez’s willingness to provide additional refinements (in the linked post, published yesterday) to his original statement; its rare to find bloggers who are willing to revise and extend their own comments in light of the criticism of others. Nevertheless, there is an “feel” to this whole enterprise that is somewhat disconcerting.
Marc Ambinder, in a piece published today at The Atlantic, seems to accept as a given that conservatives, as a movement, have retreated to an intellectually vacuous space wherein they listen only to each other and refuse to engage any idea that isn’t spoon-fed to them by Rush Limbaugh or FoxNews commentators. A sample of Ambinder’s thesis:
I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.
This, from the chief political consultant to CBS News. The journalist inside my soul shudders at the thought that a reporter of Ambinder’s stature can believe this sort of thing.
OK, so what’s the issue here?
As I mentioned, briefly, in my previous post, I think it’s trivially true that some red-meat conservatives will reject anything that doesn’t come from within, just like some evangelical Christians refuse to accept any truth that lacks a Biblical basis or just like some progressive leftists refuse to believe that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is subject to reasonable debate. It’s human nature to identify with those with whom we feel kinship, whether this relationship is familial or racial or religious or ideological. I prefer Rush Limbaugh to Al Franken because Rush’s politics don’t jar my sensibilities nearly as much as Franken’s does, so I enjoy Rush’s humor more. This does not imply, however, that I am a mind-numbed robot who believes only what I hear amplified from the golden EIB microphone, or that I think Franken is “a big fat idiot.”
The fundamental problem with sweeping generalities about “conservatives” or “liberals” or “centrists” is that the whole exercise is little more than the erection of straw men. To speak, as Ambinder does, of “mainstream conservative voices” willfully choosing to accept ideas that are “‘untethered’ to the real world,” is to make such a broad demonization of half the electorate that the very discourse he purports to desire is eclipsed right from the gate. When you presuppose that those with whom you disagree are some sort of inbred tribe, you are guilty not only of a surprising degree of intellectual incoherence, but you are also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; after all, who wishes to engage with those who have already slandered you?
Although I get the “epistemic closure” argument that Sanchez makes, I’m not all that sure he’s saying anything new or even anything unique to conservatives. What does surprise me is the way that some public commentators have seized on the concept as a way of mocking the opposition — there is a dirty feel to this, as if the chess club divided about whether Kasparov or Deep Blue is superior, and after a while, they resort to ad hominems cleverly disguised as dispassionate philosophical debate in order to score cheap rhetorical points.
The reality is this: Yes, some conservatives are inbred hicks (ideologically speaking). So what? So are some progressives. So are some libertarians. So are some holier-than-thou centrists. This phenomenon is utterly unremarkable.
What is depressing, though, is the discounting of any intellectual vibrancy from the Right. Sanchez, Ambinder and others seem to look at the ongoing, fierce debates within the conservative movement as a sign that the jackboots of orthodoxy are on the march. In fact, I think recent debates within the conservative movement are a necessary and even salutary development — over the last decade, conservatism has moved from the Contract with America to K-Street indolence to “compassionate conservatism.” The Right frequently discusses immigration, sexual politics, drug legalization, homosexuality, war, and economics. There are more touch points of disagreement, I daresay, on the Right than on the Left, and the progressive movement today seems to be more intellectually monolithic with adherents who differ only in intensity, not in objective. So, yes, conservatives argue and sometimes some conservatives lose (sorry, Messrs. Brooks and Frum). Some issues see a consensus position develop among the base. This is natural. In fact, one could argue that the lack of this process among the Left is the really noteworthy story.
In the end, I think the “epistemic closure” issue is much ado about the utterly pedestrian, an example of armchair philosophizing by polemicists more interested in trouncing their enemies than in genuinely engaging their interlocutors with an open mind.
Da hits, dey keep on comen, mon. Grab a white jacket and your favorite tranq and let’s explore today’s more delicious news items ….
From the “denial of the patently obvious” department comes an astonishing, full-throated defense of the Associated Press by Paul Keep, editor of The Grand Rapids Press. In today’s opinion column, Keep expresses his shock and disbelief that people who comment on news stories on MLive.com believe the AP is guilty of bias by virtue of omission or accent: “My experience is that AP works hard to tell the whole story and insists on verifiable facts, not opinion or spin. It doesn’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak. That allows it to be truly objective and informative. Not as splashy as trying to whip up partisans on the right or on the left as the prime-time TV opinion shows do, but a real public service.” That may be true in terms of intent, Mr. Keep. But the AP is also guilty, in practice, of selection bias. Most newspapers in the U.S. turn, in whole or in part, to the AP as a leading source of wire copy to augment their sparse and declining local content. The AP, by burying certain stories (look at the different coverage paradigms between the AP and the British media over Climategate, for example) or emphasizing others (like the frequent mentions of racism or wackiness alleged to permeate the Tea Party movement), performs no less ideologically in the aggregate than if the Democratic National Committee were assigning the daily news budget. As the former editor in chief of a community daily, I had access to the raw AP feed, and from my own experience, a part of the hard news crossing the wire was not as immune to bias as Keep suggests. I am genuinely astonished to see a newspaper editor make the sweeping comments Keep made in his column; his apparent lack of institutional self-awareness would be comical were it not conveyed by the person whose thumb is closest to the flow of public information in my community.
Speaking of the Chartreuse Lady, the Press’s editorial today takes a turn for the absurd. Having decided that it’s not enough that political ads must disclose their funders, the editorial board has challenged Terri Lynn Land, Michigan’s secretary of state, to facilitate disclosure of those who fund the funders. Apparently chagrined that groups like the Michigan Chamber of Commerce can fund political advertising under their own names, the Press seems to be demanding that Land force the Chamber and any other political advertiser to publicly disclose contributors to their organization. The poker face known as “defending the public interest” was betrayed by the pettiest of tells: “But the public should know which people specifically pay for the television commercials and other advertisements that shape public opinion for good and ill. Allowing these communications to continue incognito encourages the worst in human nature and diminishes accountability.” Translation: We want a live human person to embarrass when his dollars fund an ad with which we disagree. The argument that there is a public interest in disclosing a trail of dollars from their origination in some private citizen’s wallet, to state-wide advertising campaign, is hard to defend; it is not inconceivable that a citizen may contribute to, or be a member of, an organization with which we agree 80 percent of the time but not necessarily 100 percent of the time. I would be outraged if, as a theoretical donor to the Chamber, I was listed as a “donor” for a political ad I didn’t support when in fact my donation went to enhance local businesses. Don’t be fooled — the editorial has nothing to do with exposure and accountability and everything to do with increasing the leverage to “name and shame” donors to causes with which the mainstream media may collectively disagree. Don’t believe me? Just look at the shenanigans surrounding the disclosure of petition signers for California’s Prop 8.
For reasons that defy immediate comprehension, people seem to be nodding approvingly at the notion, popularized by blogger Julian Sanchez, that conservatives are suffering from some sort of “epistemic closure.” Sanchez’s argument is the ultimate straw man: He ascribes to conservatives, uniformly, the attributes of tribalism and unreflective groupthink, then he bandies about quasi-philosophical language to explain, like Jane Goodall commenting upon ape behavior, just why conservatives are so closed-minded and incapable of rational discourse. Oh, and of course, liberals suffer from none of these traits; they are open and enjoy dialogue and revel in encountering fresh, bold new ideas irrespective of their ideological provenance. Sanchez: ” One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.” The rejoinder is almost too obvious — although it is certainly true that some conservatives find solace in right-leaning sources of news and commentary, it is a grave error in reasoning to ascribe this sociopolitical introversion to all conservatives, or even to a majority of them. Just as some liberals will only read HuffPo and FireDogLake and are incapable of thinking outside of a progressive-left box, so also do some conservatives read only The Corner or The Weekly Standard. So what? Each side has its fringe, but the bulk of thinkers on the Right (and, in fairness, on the Left) routinely engage with the substance of the other side’s opinion. To the extent that the “epistemic closure” trope has any weight, I suspect it’s in the unwillingness of the national media to present as spokespeople anyone who isn’t a tribal chieftain in their own ideological territory. Sanchez can do better than this sort of rank pseudo intellectual demonization of right-wing straw men.
Da hits, dey keep on comen, mon. Grab a white jacket and your favorite tranq and let’s explore today’s more delicious news items ….
From the “denial of the patently obvious” department comes an astonishing, full-throated defense of the Associated Press by Paul Keep, editor of The Grand Rapids Press. In today’s opinion column, Keep expresses his shock and disbelief that people who comment on news stories on MLive.com believe the AP is guilty of bias by virtue of omission or accent: “My experience is that AP works hard to tell the whole story and insists on verifiable facts, not opinion or spin. It doesn’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak. That allows it to be truly objective and informative. Not as splashy as trying to whip up partisans on the right or on the left as the prime-time TV opinion shows do, but a real public service.” That may be true in terms of intent, Mr. Keep. But the AP is also guilty, in practice, of selection bias. Most newspapers in the U.S. turn, in whole or in part, to the AP as a leading source of wire copy to augment their sparse and declining local content. The AP, by burying certain stories (look at the different coverage paradigms between the AP and the British media over Climategate, for example) or emphasizing others (like the frequent mentions of racism or wackiness alleged to permeate the Tea Party movement), performs no less ideologically in the aggregate than if the Democratic National Committee were assigning the daily news budget. As the former editor in chief of a community daily, I had access to the raw AP feed, and from my own experience, a part of the hard news crossing the wire was not as immune to bias as Keep suggests. I am genuinely astonished to see a newspaper editor make the sweeping comments Keep made in his column; his apparent lack of institutional self-awareness would be comical were it not conveyed by the person whose thumb is closest to the flow of public information in my community.
Speaking of the Chartreuse Lady, the Press’s editorial today takes a turn for the absurd. Having decided that it’s not enough that political ads must disclose their funders, the editorial board has challenged Terri Lynn Land, Michigan’s secretary of state, to facilitate disclosure of those who fund the funders. Apparently chagrined that groups like the Michigan Chamber of Commerce can fund political advertising under their own names, the Press seems to be demanding that Land force the Chamber and any other political advertiser to publicly disclose contributors to their organization. The poker face known as “defending the public interest” was betrayed by the pettiest of tells: “But the public should know which people specifically pay for the television commercials and other advertisements that shape public opinion for good and ill. Allowing these communications to continue incognito encourages the worst in human nature and diminishes accountability.” Translation: We want a live human person to embarrass when his dollars fund an ad with which we disagree. The argument that there is a public interest in disclosing a trail of dollars from their origination in some private citizen’s wallet, to state-wide advertising campaign, is hard to defend; it is not inconceivable that a citizen may contribute to, or be a member of, an organization with which we agree 80 percent of the time but not necessarily 100 percent of the time. I would be outraged if, as a theoretical donor to the Chamber, I was listed as a “donor” for a political ad I didn’t support when in fact my donation went to enhance local businesses. Don’t be fooled — the editorial has nothing to do with exposure and accountability and everything to do with increasing the leverage to “name and shame” donors to causes with which the mainstream media may collectively disagree. Don’t believe me? Just look at the shenanigans surrounding the disclosure of petition signers for California’s Prop 8.
For reasons that defy immediate comprehension, people seem to be nodding approvingly at the notion, popularized by blogger Julian Sanchez, that conservatives are suffering from some sort of “epistemic closure.” Sanchez’s argument is the ultimate straw man: He ascribes to conservatives, uniformly, the attributes of tribalism and unreflective groupthink, then he bandies about quasi-philosophical language to explain, like Jane Goodall commenting upon ape behavior, just why conservatives are so closed-minded and incapable of rational discourse. Oh, and of course, liberals suffer from none of these traits; they are open and enjoy dialogue and revel in encountering fresh, bold new ideas irrespective of their ideological provenance. Sanchez: ” One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.” The rejoinder is almost too obvious — although it is certainly true that some conservatives find solace in right-leaning sources of news and commentary, it is a grave error in reasoning to ascribe this sociopolitical introversion to all conservatives, or even to a majority of them. Just as some liberals will only read HuffPo and FireDogLake and are incapable of thinking outside of a progressive-left box, so also do some conservatives read only The Corner or The Weekly Standard. So what? Each side has its fringe, but the bulk of thinkers on the Right (and, in fairness, on the Left) routinely engage with the substance of the other side’s opinion. To the extent that the “epistemic closure” trope has any weight, I suspect it’s in the unwillingness of the national media to present as spokespeople anyone who isn’t a tribal chieftain in their own ideological territory. Sanchez can do better than this sort of rank pseudo intellectual demonization of right-wing straw men.
Once upon a time, in the far-away land of Grand Rapids, there was a young man who decided to distinguish himself from his peers by articulating a full-throated, aggressive conservatism in a social space permeated with superficial left-wing dogma. This young man internalized his conservatism, turning it into a badge of honor; he felt at ease with its hard-headed pragmatism and rejoiced in its elevation of individual merit.
As time passed, the young man became so identified with his ideology that he became something of a foil from central casting, the Alex P. Keaton in a room full of Phish groupies, to the point that his persona, during his college years, became irrevocably intertwined with the public perception of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
Yet all was not right in Grand Rapids. Our hero, far from being personally content as a political malcontent, instead grew increasingly cynical about the political process. The lucid conservatism with which he found succor through the pages of National Review and First Things was transformed without his consent into a semi-coherent “compassionate conservatism,” and he found himself defending, with diminishing zeal, the ineptness of a President who just couldn’t seem to marshal the competence to match his conviction.
By the time yet another national election cycle came around, the young man found himself utterly disconnected, even after the brief puff of excitement following the Palin announcement. No, not only were the Party and the Movement different, but so was he; an ideologue, no more.
II
My journey from educated-but-unreflective ideologue to something more nuanced has been a long, painful process. The first trickle started after Hurricane Katrina; the “heckuva job, Brownie” nonsense mixed with ongoing stupidity at the TSA and the obvious excesses of the K-Street GOP did not sit well. Although my faith in theoretical conservative beliefs did not waver, my hope that conservatives ascendant would be an unmitigated force for good, did. In early 2006, I started to share in the sense of doom about the mid-terms, and after that, my heart wasn’t really in it.
The fact that Mike Huckabee could be a contender for the GOP nomination that John McCain eventually won, left me listless and politically cranky. The enthusiasm of the Left over Barack Obama and the 2006 elections suggested that perhaps conservatism flourished best when it was in the wilderness, serving as a counterweight that may occasionally stymie the Left but which was simply not capable of governing in its own right.
Yet Obama, and particularly the Pelosi/Reid team, have moved in disconcerting directions. Going wobbly over Gitmo, treating the underpants bomber as a law-enforcement issue, forcing the Porkulus bill, ram-roding a horrid health-reform bill, advocating cap-and-trade — all of it, based less on sound science and prudent economics than on the cynical desire to placate a hungry activist base.
This has renewed my political interest, yet I am no longer able to claim the role of the unreflexive GOP apologist.
Partly this is because of my stands on the issues, which I had to hone without substantial regard to the “party line.” This has led me to an economic neoliberalism, marked by fiscal restraint, low taxes, low regulation and more privatization, low national debt, and free trade. In defense and foreign affairs, I support maintaining a large military and using it to aggressively defend American interests abroad, and to end widespread human-rights abuses (e.g., genocide), something on the Dick Cheney model. On most domestic social policy, I now trend libertarian, even though I oppose abortion in all instances and would prefer that innovations like gay marriage wait for widespread social acceptance instead of mere judicial fiat.
Accordingly, I now consider myself a center-right Republican. Most social issues don’t resonate with me like they used to, although I remain a very strong proponent of fiscal restraint and aggressive prosecution of the war on terror. Furthermore, I am much less likely to pull the GOP lever in the ballot box by default; I’d vote for a competent, centrist Democrat (like Bart Stupak) over a bomb-throwing radical (like Michele Bachmann) on any first Tuesday in November.
III
From this new vantage point, a few observations emerge with greater clarity.
Not for naught is Peggy Noonan growing on me. Her columns of late continue to address the erosion of civil discourse in the body politic. The Left and the Right, it seems, aren’t even bothering to shout over each other anymore; now, they talk only to their true believers. Those in the middle who could be persuaded have very little recourse to reasoned debate. Those on the fringes are engaged in discrediting their opponents in any possible way. This does not bode well for the nation; America as a two-party environment needs to have a certain amount of social lubrication to keep those two wheels spinning at least on the same axle. The “Climategate” story is an excellent case-in-point: Fudged climate data could have been a teaching moment for climate-change proponents and skeptics alike, but instead it turned into something akin to an early Soviet party congress in Copenhagen, with a deluge of dogmas and denunciations substituting for meaningful debate.
The Democrats are playing a dangerous game by utterly ignoring the will of the middle (which by ungodly proportions is opposed to Obama’s signature issues of health reform and cap-and-trade) to impose a solution written by the fringe Left. The arrogance of this imposition upon the electorate is breathtaking, and it will not redound to the Democrats’ good eleven months hence, nor to the good of the future generations that must pay the bill for this package of reckless spending.
The Republicans have gotten lucky by being irrelevant, yet they still seem incapable of providing a unified and coherent alternative to myriad issues that could earn them genuine goodwill and respect. This is the perfect time to build a solid case for a responsible, pro-freedom policy alternative, but little comes back except “No.” A golden opportunity, wasted.
The last year should put the nail in the coffin of the idea that media figures are unbiased. Look no further than Anderson Cooper’s “teabaggers” nonsense, or the resurrection of Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” strategy with regard to Climategate, for proof.
The people most affected by the big-picture political struggles of the day are the people least likely to be tracking these issues with diligence. How many 20-somethings who don’t really care about health insurance are really aware that in just a few years, they may face steep penalties for going without? How many 13-year-olds realize that their goal of serving in the military may well result in a tour in Afghanistan? How many senior citizens understand the impetus to rationing that underpins the Senate health bill? And where are the mediating organizations that should help keep the average citizen informed, with utmost objectivity, about policy changes?
Some commentators, including Noonan, have suggested that the 2000s were a “decade of disillusionment.” Perhaps this is so, but it need not be a self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point, the cooler, wiser, more moderate heads must prevail. They must be open to some change, but perhaps not a restructuring of the country. They must be willing to talk, but not to encourage the sloganeering and invective of the fringes. Most importantly, they must have the courage to run and win elections, thereby bringing a sense of balance back to the national debate, a framework of fairness that has been missing for a few years.
Political evolution is hard work. It takes real courage to set aside the talking points and the knee-jerk ideology that accompany a sociopolitical movement, and instead find wisdom along the path less traveled.
Rational people take comfort in their rationality. They explore the world around them with intellectual curiosity; they pose unconventional questions about unquestioned convention; they seek the assurance of a rigid taxonomy assisted by predictable chains of causation.
Yet faith in rationality, in realism, in common sense — is profoundly misguided, methinks. The last few weeks have made me witness to several highly rational people floundering in a sea of emotional distress. Yes, I have been able to offer comfort by appealing to alternative taxonomies or hidden premises or shifting paradigms. Yet it is curious, isn’t it? That vaunted rationality should be left so utterly defenseless against the wild-eyed irrationality of passing emotion?
The ancients had their fun with this dilemma, of course; the entire modus vivendi of both the Stoics and the Epicureans was based on bringing an armistice to the head-heart conflict.
And today, the cool rationalism of the Obama administration yields to the irrational passions of the administration’s activist fringe to push policies whose priority makes precious little sense when considered under the cold, hard light of realpolitik.
Nevertheless.
Perhaps it’s a statistical blip. Perhaps I’m merely more attuned to it lately. But several close friends have confided in me of their emotional turmoil, and their struggle to find meaning in it and to find a “logical way out.”
And there’s the rub. There may not be a logical way out. Maybe, instead of thinking their way out of the box, they need to feel their way out. Maybe the rigid rationalism that facilitates over-thinking and self-doubt should be shelved in favor of a wild ride of the heart.
In conflicts between the heart and the mind, the heart’s inclinations usually push in favor of short-term gratification, sometimes at the expense of long-term prudence. This impluse can be resisted, but never suppressed. Resistance is futile; the heart’s yearings will be assimilated. So perhaps instead of using reason as a weapon to slay the heart’s longings, reason can instead be used as a tool to channel those longings into something more strategically sound.
Perhaps.
All I know is that, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. The mind doth not triumph.
So asked the New York Times in a brief review published Nov. 9. The story, previewing a soon-to-be-published book by Emmanuel Faye, focuses on the way that philosophers and other theoreticians are struggling with whether — and to what extent — the thoughts and writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) should be accepted as valid and respectable. Heidegger’s arguments are a crucial underpinning to many of the deconstructionist and anti-Western sentiments pervading contemporary academic philosophy. As the Times puts it, “Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.”
Yet Heidegger was also a Nazi. Thus, the dilemma. Should right-thinking scholars engage Heidegger’s thoughts, or must his ideas be dismissed whole cloth because of his political associations and racialist attitudes? Put more broadly: Is it reasonable to exclude certain ideas from respectable discourse merely because of some negative characteristic of those ideas’ prime mover — irrespective of the argument’s validity?
If Heidegger had been a Marxist or a Buddhist or a homosexual instead of a Nazi, no one would think twice about embracing his ideas based solely on the merits of the underlying arguments. But because he was a Nazi, and academicians have a visceral hatred of Nazism, there is a long-running debate within the academy about the overall philosophical merit of Heidegger’s work.
This is curious. Surely, the academy should be the one place where every idea is evaluated on its substance, without being prejudiced by ad hominem attacks against the idea’s proponents?
Yet philosophy is not immune to this most distressing closure of the contemporary mind. Even theoretical physics is involved; stories abound about how many physicists divide into camps about string theory, and any idea — even if utterly unrelated to string theory — proposed by a scientists on the opposite side of the line, is greeted with more skepticism and less charity than if the idea came from “within.”
This is tribalism at its most absurd, and its most dangerous. There are hints that the pursuit of objectivity among the academic elite is being gradually supplanted by a soft subjectivity that is willing to apply critical-thinking skills to an argument, but only if the argument and its proponents pass a hazy and unspoken but nevertheless real ideological litmus test.
So we can dismiss Heidegger, who despite his personally repellent political views, was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. But we can embrace Peter Singer, a one-world socialist who has argued that infants several months’ old can ethically be killed because he has decreed that they are incapable of self-awareness? This is the full logical flowering of alternative feminist approaches to logic, wherein the substance of a discourse is in some ways equal in weight to the nature of the relationship between the discussants; the relative or apparent virtue of a person indelibly marks the respectability of his works in a pre-rational but meaningful way.
Philosophy is not easy work. It requires lucidity, rigor, and precision. Yet any philosophy that lacks the charity to take ideas as things-in-themselves instead of being the mere by-products of a person who is worthy of praise or blame, is a philosophy that is little more than rank ideology dressed in patent-leather shoes and a tweed jacket.
Embrace Heidegger, or reject him — but do it for the substance of his arguments and not because of his political preferences.
