[Industrialblog,
April 27, 2006]
Contempt, America and other Stuff
I ended up taking another look at the Left, to see if about my theory about renewed confidence. I judged too quickly. Another few looks and what I see is not confidence, it's contempt. It's a deep contempt.
To many on the Left, we on the Right are stupid, we are dupes, we are in denial, we refuse to think, we have severe psychological disturbances, we're desperate to prop up a worldview with fantasies, and we're uneducated.
Even though I'm just benighted, let's take a look-see so others can enlighten me:
Atrios: "The point is the wholesale embrace of manufactured horseshit to desperately prop up their collapsing worldview."
Crooks and Liars: "Bush followers are lucky. They have an outstanding capacity to create their own fantasy world where any facts which reflect negatively on the Leader are simply discarded and ignored. Just this last week alone provided numerous, glaring examples of how this disturbing fact-denial process works."
Glenn Greenwald: "They [Bush supporters] are not susceptible to challenge or reconsideration because they are the by-product of faith and desire and not a critical or rational assessment. They believe these things because they want to believe them, they have to believe them, because the whole world-view on which their identity and purpose has come to be based — the brave, heroic President leading the great conservative nation in glorious, epic war-triumph over the evil Muslim enemy — depends upon believing these myths. No facts can shake these beliefs because they aren't grounded in facts and aren't the by-product of rationality."
Atrios again: "History. Read some, morons."
My Left Wing: As the Senate gears up to bring up the immigration issue again and the Department of Homeland Security's recent round-ups, it is not hard to spot the private prison profiteers because they are the ones currently with dollar signs in their eyes as thousands of undocumented immigrants are being dumped into their torture chambers depriving them of all that makes a person human.
Commenter at My Left Wing: "Arizona has a draconian prison system that looks like a Gulag: forced labor camps that have resulted in the death of at least one young prisoner."
Daily Kos (Susan G.): The Republican Party seems riddled from top to bottom, from bench to pitcher's mound, with players more concerned with small-minded vengeance and limited information access than with actual governing, openly and competently."
Well. That was a lot to share. Is getting all this contempt and loathing out helping you in your daily lives? Does it make you feel better? Are you happy?
Maybe, just maybe, that all the strawmen you've created aren't real. Maybe there are smart people on the right and the left and maybe there are more things in the middle of the road than white lines and dead armadillos.
Of course, the Left is far from alone in this. There is a universal tendency to assume that those who disagree with us are stupid, uneducated, ignorant, mentally unbalanced, or wicked. Indeed, any attempt to argue any of these points successfully requires us as writers to take this universal tendency into account. So if I say to myself, "Democrats are evil," I have to think, well, am I just indulging in the same open contempt they are? If not, how do I know it?
Are Democrats wicked? No. Do the Democrats support wicked policies. Some. Can the Democrats support their policies with facts and argumentation? Yes. Does that make it right. Not necessarily. There may be other facts and other arguments.
I get frustrated on a couple of issues.
But I try to understand where people are coming from.
Why do women support abortion? Because they don't like or want anyone telling them what they can and can't do with their bodies. It's an emotional response, and more than a little deeply felt. There's also a couple of thousand years of non-choice and women being raped and exploited through their children and other fears beyond that, if you're a believer in things like a collective unconscious. It's not an irrational emotional response. It's the wrong conclusion, but I understand where it's coming from.
Why do men support abortion? For three main reasons. One, they want sex without consequences. Two, they're cowards. Three, they don't think a woman should be told what to do with her body. The first two reasons are contempible, but the third is rational. It's wrong, but rational.
Why do people think there's such a thing as same-sex marriage? Because they think marriage is a social construct, and the definition can be changed without consequences. Marriage means a loving commitment to them, nothing more, and so they are willing to abstract this one concept and abandon the rest of the definition. They're wrong, marriage flows from natural law, which cannot be violated without consequences. But to believe my point of view, you need to accept natural law. And very few people do.
Immigration. Israel. Taxes. School choice. Do we oppose the president during wartime? There are arguments for and against, and let's not pretend there's some easy answer that every rational person can agree with. If there was, we'd all agree on it. But where you come out depends a lot on who you believe will give you an accurate rendering of facts and how those facts fit into your predetermined worldview.
George W. Bush may be a heinous, corrupt president and the worst one in human history. Or he may be an upright man who's doing his best, and history may have a nuanced rendering.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not playing all nice here. I still hold that the Dems are wrong about more things than not — it's not so much the facts that are the problem, but how they assemble them and how they interpret them. As the old joke goes, if you accuse a Jesuit of killing two men and a dog, he will produce the dog alive to refute your argument. Anyone can take the most extreme views of their opponents, or catch them in error, and make broad generalizations about them. It's a little more difficult to actually think.
I switched political parties for a lot of reasons. Like most people in both parties, I have reservations about various aspects of the GOP. In my case, I'm not a rah-rah capitalist by any means. I distrust large organizations of almost any kind, but recognize that large organizations are often the only defense against the tyranny of petty local tyrants. I think long arguments about government miss the point, which is this: A virtuous people needs less government than a vice-ridden one. If people exercise self-restraint, understand cause and effect, are enterprising and hard-working, work to remove their own ignorance, take responsibility for their actions, and can be trusted to keep their word, you wouldn't need a lot of government. But if people are eager to exploit the commons, exploit their neighbor, and exploit themselves, you'll need more government.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. But it's not a guarantee. It was an agreement among people to act according to certain rules. If we insist on over-reacting to every event by creating more rules instead of punishing wrongdoers, we'll be even more choked with them than we currently are. People think I'm kidding when I saw we should have hanged Ken Lay and Bernard Ebbers, but I'm not. Instead, everyone was punished with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Instead of having common-sense regulations against weapons in school, we get the mechanistic overreaction of "Zero Tolerance." And these kind of sentimental, emotional reactions are common in both parties.
To many on the Left, we on the Right are stupid, we are dupes, we are in denial, we refuse to think, we have severe psychological disturbances, we're desperate to prop up a worldview with fantasies, and we're uneducated.
Even though I'm just benighted, let's take a look-see so others can enlighten me:
Atrios: "The point is the wholesale embrace of manufactured horseshit to desperately prop up their collapsing worldview."
Crooks and Liars: "Bush followers are lucky. They have an outstanding capacity to create their own fantasy world where any facts which reflect negatively on the Leader are simply discarded and ignored. Just this last week alone provided numerous, glaring examples of how this disturbing fact-denial process works."
Glenn Greenwald: "They [Bush supporters] are not susceptible to challenge or reconsideration because they are the by-product of faith and desire and not a critical or rational assessment. They believe these things because they want to believe them, they have to believe them, because the whole world-view on which their identity and purpose has come to be based — the brave, heroic President leading the great conservative nation in glorious, epic war-triumph over the evil Muslim enemy — depends upon believing these myths. No facts can shake these beliefs because they aren't grounded in facts and aren't the by-product of rationality."
Atrios again: "History. Read some, morons."
My Left Wing: As the Senate gears up to bring up the immigration issue again and the Department of Homeland Security's recent round-ups, it is not hard to spot the private prison profiteers because they are the ones currently with dollar signs in their eyes as thousands of undocumented immigrants are being dumped into their torture chambers depriving them of all that makes a person human.
Commenter at My Left Wing: "Arizona has a draconian prison system that looks like a Gulag: forced labor camps that have resulted in the death of at least one young prisoner."
Daily Kos (Susan G.): The Republican Party seems riddled from top to bottom, from bench to pitcher's mound, with players more concerned with small-minded vengeance and limited information access than with actual governing, openly and competently."
Well. That was a lot to share. Is getting all this contempt and loathing out helping you in your daily lives? Does it make you feel better? Are you happy?
Maybe, just maybe, that all the strawmen you've created aren't real. Maybe there are smart people on the right and the left and maybe there are more things in the middle of the road than white lines and dead armadillos.
Of course, the Left is far from alone in this. There is a universal tendency to assume that those who disagree with us are stupid, uneducated, ignorant, mentally unbalanced, or wicked. Indeed, any attempt to argue any of these points successfully requires us as writers to take this universal tendency into account. So if I say to myself, "Democrats are evil," I have to think, well, am I just indulging in the same open contempt they are? If not, how do I know it?
Are Democrats wicked? No. Do the Democrats support wicked policies. Some. Can the Democrats support their policies with facts and argumentation? Yes. Does that make it right. Not necessarily. There may be other facts and other arguments.
I get frustrated on a couple of issues.
But I try to understand where people are coming from.
Why do women support abortion? Because they don't like or want anyone telling them what they can and can't do with their bodies. It's an emotional response, and more than a little deeply felt. There's also a couple of thousand years of non-choice and women being raped and exploited through their children and other fears beyond that, if you're a believer in things like a collective unconscious. It's not an irrational emotional response. It's the wrong conclusion, but I understand where it's coming from.
Why do men support abortion? For three main reasons. One, they want sex without consequences. Two, they're cowards. Three, they don't think a woman should be told what to do with her body. The first two reasons are contempible, but the third is rational. It's wrong, but rational.
Why do people think there's such a thing as same-sex marriage? Because they think marriage is a social construct, and the definition can be changed without consequences. Marriage means a loving commitment to them, nothing more, and so they are willing to abstract this one concept and abandon the rest of the definition. They're wrong, marriage flows from natural law, which cannot be violated without consequences. But to believe my point of view, you need to accept natural law. And very few people do.
Immigration. Israel. Taxes. School choice. Do we oppose the president during wartime? There are arguments for and against, and let's not pretend there's some easy answer that every rational person can agree with. If there was, we'd all agree on it. But where you come out depends a lot on who you believe will give you an accurate rendering of facts and how those facts fit into your predetermined worldview.
George W. Bush may be a heinous, corrupt president and the worst one in human history. Or he may be an upright man who's doing his best, and history may have a nuanced rendering.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not playing all nice here. I still hold that the Dems are wrong about more things than not — it's not so much the facts that are the problem, but how they assemble them and how they interpret them. As the old joke goes, if you accuse a Jesuit of killing two men and a dog, he will produce the dog alive to refute your argument. Anyone can take the most extreme views of their opponents, or catch them in error, and make broad generalizations about them. It's a little more difficult to actually think.
I switched political parties for a lot of reasons. Like most people in both parties, I have reservations about various aspects of the GOP. In my case, I'm not a rah-rah capitalist by any means. I distrust large organizations of almost any kind, but recognize that large organizations are often the only defense against the tyranny of petty local tyrants. I think long arguments about government miss the point, which is this: A virtuous people needs less government than a vice-ridden one. If people exercise self-restraint, understand cause and effect, are enterprising and hard-working, work to remove their own ignorance, take responsibility for their actions, and can be trusted to keep their word, you wouldn't need a lot of government. But if people are eager to exploit the commons, exploit their neighbor, and exploit themselves, you'll need more government.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. But it's not a guarantee. It was an agreement among people to act according to certain rules. If we insist on over-reacting to every event by creating more rules instead of punishing wrongdoers, we'll be even more choked with them than we currently are. People think I'm kidding when I saw we should have hanged Ken Lay and Bernard Ebbers, but I'm not. Instead, everyone was punished with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Instead of having common-sense regulations against weapons in school, we get the mechanistic overreaction of "Zero Tolerance." And these kind of sentimental, emotional reactions are common in both parties.
No it isn't. Nowhere else do these people even try to apply the notion that a woman shouldn't be told what to do with her body completely without reference to who she might be harming by doing it. That idea — don't tell me/her what to do with my/her body — is complete rubbish.
What's going on is that people are in a culture where something is held to be irrefutably true — that abortion is a human right — and like most people they're radically incompetent at producing any sort of apologia for the things they most deeply hold to be true. It doesn't make them stupid, it just means that they're not philosophers.
To take an example, in Terminator 2 (which is, perhaps unintentionally, a very philosophical movie), Eddie Furlong commands the Arnold Terminator not to kill anyone. The Terminator asks why. Eddie can't produce any reasons or arguments — he can only fall back on insisting that such a thing is beyond the pale. Most people in his position — most sane, good people — couldn't produce any arguments for why murder is wrong. That most abortionists sound completely irrational when they try to justify abortion doesn't mean that they actually are idiots. It just means that for them abortion is normal, and that they're normal people. Normal people treat every principle that they're not used to seeing contested as a first principle. It's only philosophers who try to reduce their list of first principles down to a minimum.
I suspect that in both groups, though, the core value is guilt-free sex, which is only possible with reprocussion-free sex. The unfortunate thing, for that culture, is that sex is special because of its reprocussions. Shaking someone's hand can't produce a child, but shooting semen into a woman can. That's why sex is so special. When you completely remove the child, rubbing genitals together becomes like seeing a woman's ankles was 100 years ago — it was thrilling and could send a shiver down your spine because it felt forbidden, but you can get used to it so that it's nothing special very easily. Modern men don't care at all if they see a woman's ankle (it's a family story that my great-grandfather fell in love with my great-grandmother when she was stepping up on a chair to fetch something and he caught sight of her ankle).
Not to wax to C.S. Lewisian, but this is a great example of how every sin carries in its very nature its own punishment. When you try to have sex without consequences, all you wind up with is fake sex. But — and this is where gay marriage makes a lot of sense — if straight people are mostly just having fake sex, how are gay people any different?
I think that the reason that so many women get caught up in abortion is that the sexual revolution and many of the gains of feminism were historically linked. A lot of people have some mental associations between being against abortion and being for old-style femininity. I doubt that they really care that much for abortion as abortion.
Chris, can you give me an example of something, unrelated to abortion and pregnancy, a woman could "do to her body" that would in any way effect another person? I find your argument....er, well, let's say unique.
She could use her fists to beat you to death. She could shove you off of a cliff. She could pick up a knife and stab you to death.
All of these are things that she's doing with her body, because everything she does, she does with her body.
No one cares whether a woman scrapes out her uterus with a knife or takes huge doses of hormones when there's no chance of affecting someone else. The question is entirely whether these actions might kill someone else, just like the law is in every other circumstance.
Every action can be considered only from the point of view of the actor. Children do that when they want to hit their siblings without getting blamed. "I'm going to swing my fists like this and walk forward, and if you get hit it's your fault!" "Yeah? Well I'm going to kick my legs like this and walk forward and if you get kicked it's your fault!" So of course you can consider abortion only from the point of view of the abortionist. The main difference is that not even the children take what they say seriously.
Is that honestly your idea of an intelligent argument? If so, I'm not going to waste my time. I have a sock drawer that needs re-organizing.
And I wasn't trying to reason anyone into anything. I was giving an account to Bill of a phenomenon such as (apparently) yourself. I don't expect you to understand yourself, or anything else in the universe, for that matter. For most people, understanding the world is neither there hobby nor their job, and that's fine. In short, if you haven't the least idea of how to engage in philosophy, by all means don't trouble yourself to try it now on my account.
Chris, you are a twit. I won't try to chip away at your false sense of superiority, because it's probably the only thing you have.
My background is in philosophy and math. In these realms, we try to make statements about the world which are literally true. Most of the world doesn't; most people generally rely on "you know what I mean". Most people have their knowledge in some more direct sense than mediated by reason, which generally works out very well. It becomes absurd, however, when people try to take irrational knowledge and rationalize it; "you know what I mean" is useless when the entire enterprise is to explain to somewhat who doesn't know what you mean, what you mean.
This is why philosophy is so interminable and often barely penetrable; it's trying to use language for what language does not do very well. It's trying to be precise. Moreover, it's the endeavor of very limited minds trying to be precise.
CK, you don't literally mean "a woman shouldn't be told what to do with her body". But if you don't mean it literally, you don't mean it usefully unless you're talking with people who already agree with you and intuit what you mean because they themselves believe it. Moreover, you can't reformulate what you mean to anything which you'll actually take as literally true until you get to something like, "the universe should have be arranged so that a woman can voluntarily control whether she gets pregnant in a way that affects no one else" (or something like that), but this isn't public policy. Every attempt you can make at a formulation like, "don't tell a woman what to do with her body" simply won't work, because you're going to run afowl of some other part of real life. Go ahead and try, if you like, but it won't work. It won't work because all of our ethics and laws are based on the idea that what you do can be constrained based on its affects to others. If you try to elevate some other principle above that — give people rights to do something regardless of its affects on others — you're going to be affirming a principle which if applied to the rest of life will produce results that you won't endorse.
Now of course you won't personally endorse them, but that's a credit to your heart, not to your head.
I'm not claiming to be superior to you. I'm not a very good person, and you may well get into heaven before me. But just as the worst basketball player is still better at basketball than someone who's playing golf, someone who's practicing philosophy even poorly is a better philosopher than someone who isn't even trying.
And that's the point. Most people aren't trying to be philosophers — for most people the particular words that they say don't really matter. Indeed, most people, like yourself, are almost offended when you actually take the particular words that they used seriously. I was just pointing out that Bill was paying far too much attention to the actual words.
"...just as the worst basketball player is still better at basketball than someone who's playing golf..."
should have been,
"...just as the worst basketball player, when playing a game of basketball, is playing a better game of basketball than anyone who's playing a game of golf..."