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Why Doesn’t the Truth Sell?
When I was a young high school teacher, I had the privilege of being mentored by some truly great teachers. One profound lesson that I probably would never have learned on my own is that no matter how engaging, clever or entertaining your presentation, students will not really take away something of value unless and until the teacher has managed to inspire them to ask the question the answer for which is what the teacher is trying to convey. The trick is to make them want to know it before you present it. Teaching is less about the quality, truth, and beauty of the subject matter so much as creating an appetite for that truth.
If politics were simply about empirical results and quality of logic, the left would have already dried up and blown away by now. Centrally planned economies, the destruction of institutions such as family, apocalyptic climate myths, and pretty much anything Liz Warren has concocted is utter crapola, analytically speaking. And yet, the market for demonstrably stupid ideas has never been stronger.
We are doing something wrong.
A few years ago, I blew up a friendship over this question. My (former?) friend is a brilliant researcher who has been a major figure in leading conservative think tanks. He built up databases conclusively demonstrating the social and economic benefits of strong family life and the harms that accrue when family breaks down. We used to meet over lunch to discuss politics and he would share news of his latest project. He is a persuasive and engaging fellow. Once when testifying before a Senate Committee he even got Barbara Boxer (kneejerk California lefty who often exhibited a sub-room temp IQ) to wax on as if she were a cultural conservative in response to his testimony and statistics (until her staff got her back under control afterward).
One day in response to his email comments about what seemed to me to be an eternally unfinished project to link together the conservative social scientists still in existence in academia I wrote a stupid email implying that this was all a waste of time. I ranted that conservatives have no idea how to make people want the truths we are trying to share. We have a half-century of data vindicating the Moynihan report and just about everything our grandparents believed about morals, marriage, family, and community but the market for that content is drying up. The clumsiest and most ill-worded two paragraphs I have ever written essentially denigrated a friend’s entire career and killed a friendship the moment I hit send. Dumbest thing I ever did (or at least top five—it’s not as if this is an uncontested designation.)
And I still don’t have any answers to the issue of how to grow the right questions. When we watched the dull Romney campaign crawl to defeat with some dismay, I realized that Mitt was a like bad teacher who could not get his students to ask questions for which “Entrepreneurism!” was the right answer. In contrast, Obama sold visions, sensibilities, and narratives and won despite spectacularly bad policy substance and dismal performance in every policy area,
The left creates appetites for its increasingly stupid narratives. How do they do that? At the present time, tens of millions of Americans believe:
- The unbroken American journey to racial equality is instead a hopeless racist conspiracy of language and insidious culture.
- The freest, wealthiest, most empowered women in the history of the planet are oppressed.
- The free-market economic miracle that continues to lift the entire world out of poverty is really just economic injustice writ large.
- Contrary even to the science that only a few tears ago was called The Consensus, the climate is changing so rapidly that only central planning can save us.
- Sex is a social and psychological construct.
- [Insert your favorite elements of PC dogma here]
Why would anyone want to be the kind of person who believes this nonsense? What is the disposition, the appetite, the need, the cognitive state that makes someone receptive to this garbage?
While the grand journals of the Right debate the philosophical distinctions between the legacies of John Locke and John Stuart Mill or the definition of “nationalism”, there is an entirely different mental experience going on all around us. It is an Orc army not seeking empirical validation or a high quality of discursive thought—just the destruction of everything and everyone else. Why is that? And what should we do about it?
Published in General
Judge (then professor) Richard Posner summed up Rawls and others with his remark (I paraphrase) that tenured liberal academics develop moral philosophies and methodologies in which the value systems their methods produce invariably look exactly like the mores, tastes, and sensibilities of the tenured liberal college professors who generate them. Shocker.
Affirmative action was initially proposed and used a remedy for particular individuals (as I recall, it was about a group of workers in a particular plant who were denied positions commensurate with their seniority because of race) were to be given slots ahead of white workers until this was redressed which seemed fair in that the remedy applied to specific identifiable injury to specific people. LBJ then established it as a broad principle to correct imbalances and injustices deriving from systemic discrimination. Given that discrimination was outlawed more than 50 years ago and no American workers since have been subject to systemic discrimination (specific instances that arose since can be addressed by enforceable claims and civil litigation) both the justification and the need for affirmative action as it was originally conceived are long since gone.
In the late 60s I was against The Man. Now The Man are the Progressives who want to force us all into a life of stifling conformity in which our livelihoods are threatened if we dare speak up. Warren campaign slogan – “Sit down and shut up!”
Jim, thanks for your comments about Rawls. I have a few thoughts in response, and will break them into a couple of comments.
I don’t think that Rawls would be poison to the woke, necessarily. It would depend on the assumptions underlying the Rawlsian analysis. Let’s consider issues of sex discrimination, as an example.
As a matter of distributions and averages, women are physically smaller and weaker than men. Women also are capable of bearing children, and of nurturing infants, and they typically have a special maternal bond with their children that appears, at least to me, to be different from and generally stronger than the paternal bond. Bearing and raising children is a very difficult task, involving a great deal of self-sacrifice. (These are the reasons that we tend to honor mothers so highly.)
Reproduction at replacement levels typically requires each woman who becomes a mother to have 2-4 children (greater than 2 in order to compensate for those who have none). This is a serious burden on a woman. Among those burdens is the fact that bearing and raising children will often take a woman out of the work force for 10-15 years.
Would you want such a life, from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance? It strikes me that, from behind that Rawlsian veil, I might wish for a moral and political order that would impose some of this burden on others. Relevant policies could range from government financial support (like welfare), to government daycare, to paid maternal leave, to express favoritism in employment decisions (to compensate for time out of the work force).
In this way, I think that a Rawlsian analysis could support an intersectional or Wokeist political program.
Similar arguments could be made for race or homosexuality, from the Rawlsian perspective.
Jim, I had to truncate your comments for reasons of space.
I was aware of the basics of Rawls’s ideas, which are the “veil of ignorance” concept that you describe, combined with a “minimax” decision rule — meaning that Rawls posits that the moral and social decision rule is to maximize the well-being of the person who is worst off (since, behind the “veil of ignorance,” you don’t know whether or not that poor soul will be you).
Rawlsian analysis has several obvious flaws.
Finally, I don’t think that the basic “veil of ignorance” principle is anything new. It seems, to me, that it is merely a different way to express “do as you would be done by,” an idea that traces back (at least) to a certain Galilean carpenter that you might have heard about.
I think that it’s more complicated.
We need to be ruled. Government is necessary, because the alternative is anarchy and tribal warfare. I wish that this were not the case, but it is.
I like representative government, because it gives us some input into the selection of our rulers. If nothing else, it makes their rule temporary, allowing us to throw the rascals out periodically, if we’re not happy with them. It is not perfect, but seems better than any other system, in this fallen world.
I think the inference of @ralphie’s comment was about dependency, being “ruled” in the sense of delegation of a large swath of otherwise personal choices to government and not about things like traffic regs, securities law or FAA rules.
I don’t think you are doing this but often lefties argue a bogus reductio that conservatives are anti-government and thus want no law and would invite chaos. At a minimum, conservatives want enforcement of contract and protection of property otherwise all other freedoms evaporate. Unlike lefties, when making law conservatives instinctively weigh the prospective loss of freedom of action against the enhanced value of actions protected. Lefties are indifferent to injury to personal liberty–and for them, such loss may be a feature, not a bug– so long as some Vision is implemented.
Good point. I believe the Left’s indifference is due to its belief that their personal liberty will not be infringed under their policies. I think this goes to a profound difference between conservative principles (or at least mine) and progressives. Without some set of agreed upon neutral principles of governance we cannot hold a country of 300+ million together; principles under which sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Modern progressives reject this with their own version of the Brezhnev Doctrine – what’s our is ours and what’s your might be mine in the future and we are justified using any means necessary to achieve our goal.
OldB,
The Civil Rights Act was 1964 and ordinary affirmative action was 1969. LBJ was out of office and dead by the time that quota-based rulings came down in 1973. The original affirmative action only reduced evidence requirements to bring the suit more easily. Of course, you had to prove the case about specific individuals who had been discriminated against. It was the quota-based rulings that made it unnecessary to prove actual discrimination. Any statistical imbalance could now be used as a justification for a court ruling that forced a racial balance. We go from eliminating racism to actually using racism as a court-ordered tool based on an abstraction.
I think blaming Rawls for this is foolish. The veil of ignorance affirms individual discrimination cases. However, using racism itself as a corrective for some collective abstract imbalance breaks the veil of ignorance itself. From a strict Rawlsian point of view, this would be an injustice in itself.
Perhaps music might help here.
Regards,
Jim
Therefore, the Republican Party will not consider it. 🙂
Comment about Rawls was distinct from comment about affirmative action.
I find Rawls useless as moral philosophy. It is the illusion of method when the actuality of his process is always just rationalization.
OldB,
Well, rationalization is certainly the hallmark of intersectional identity politics and deconstructionism. With these ideas, there is no method whatsoever. As logic itself has been suspended you start at the conclusion and merely decorate.
What does Rawls do that pisses you off. I’m no Rawls expert.
Regards,
Jim
As I see it, Rawls’ veil of ignorance is just a fancy, academic means of describing how to set aside ones biases when making public policy decisions.
It’s sort of like when you have two 9 year olds who have to split a birthday cake. You tell one of the 9 year olds to slice the birthday cake, knowing that the other 9 year old will get to choose which of the two slices he gets to eat. Such a method motivates the first 9 year old to slice the cake evenly.
Rawls’ veil of ignorance is just a “cut the cake fairly” thought experiment for public policy big wigs. In reality, it’s hard to set aside ones biases, which we all have.
I find the entire construct tiresome: the hypothetical rational citizenry, the silly 4-stage process after the ‘original position’, the use of ‘fairness’ as if it were an essential referent of some kind and not inherently derivative of other values. This all seems like a tedious avoidance of both any possibility of natural law and the messy realities of human nature.
If we were to collectively arrive at a rule by which we say that those who build death camps and practice genocide should be hung or shot, then do/should we really start with the veil of ignorance and say ‘Gee, would I think this rule fair if I were a Nazi because right now, I don’t know if this rule would apply to me on account of me being in the veil of ignorance and all?” Used Ex ante or ex post, the veil never impressed me as a particularly profound concept worthy of being a formalized Big Step in a process.
Most of all, I find his methods an insidious invitation to make sweeping judgments about societal fairness and broad judgments about definitions of equality. A political philosophy that is not grounded in a lucid exploration of human nature and the personal moral obligations that accrue from having such a nature is inherently suspect in my mind. In RawlsWorld we are all cognitive consumers of rationally crafted policy options the choice of which ought to be “fair”. Yeah, that’s lovely. Thanks for sharing.