Political Philosophy

Talk About Cognitive Dissonance

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Count up the innocent dead. Measure human misery, pain, and despair. Pile the corpses high.

The accounting makes it very clear that Communism is the greatest tragedy, the most murderous blight, in all of human history.

And yet, for some reason, the Left doesn’t seem to care. Liberal ideology is always worthy no matter the body count. It seems that the only real crime is in opposing their pet political philosophies.

Joseph McCarthy is a demon in their eyes, an odious and insidious monster. The fact that history has proven that some of his charges were valid is carefully ignored, as are the mountains of stinking corpses left behind by their favorite dictators and totalitarian regimes.

To be completely candid with you, dear reader, I have a hard time understanding why. How obvious does it have to be, anyway?

A recent article at The American Thinker sheds some light on this puzzle. It seems that the majority of educators, people who should be smart enough to know better, simply refuse to mention these undeniable historical facts to their students.

“This stuff isn’t rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn’t being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people.”

The author of the article, Paul Kengor, also explains why this refusal to pass on important details concerning the recent past has done much to create the situation we find facing us today.

“What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don’t care; they don’t get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment — from academia to media to Hollywood — will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left’s reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.”

I never had a problem telling good from bad. It is a pity the Left does.

Quote of the Day

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Conjuring images of the medieval church or the Kremlin persecuting dissidents is delicious, but it comes from times and places where very few people even had access to the information that the academy was exposed to. Those controlling authorities could actually hope to keep certain opinions from spreading by applying pressure at a very few places. That world has been disappearing for years. Anyone can get ahold of the ideas of Foucault, or Trotsky, or Derrida at the touch of a button now. Where unavailability is still a problem, ironically, are precisely those areas where those ideas are in ascendance.
 
This is why online learning and other consumer-driven postsecondary education is pushing them out. Prestigious universities are losing prestige, not because Americans are anti-intellectual, but because they are anti-intelligentsia, anti-academy. Even George Bush reads Camus nowadays. The figure of The Professor in comic books and Gilligan’s Island, a person who knows much about all important subjects, does not even work as comedy or stereotype anymore. People chuckled about the comedic exaggeration of Russell Johnson’s character then – now they would fail to find it funny at all, except as some sort of retro thing. People have access to the information themselves and know that humanities professors are often not all that smart. Smarter than average people, perhaps, and trained in particular specialties, but not dealing with subjects far beyond the ken of mortals. That is in fact why these disciplines have developed their own coded vocabularies, to identify outsiders rapidly. They can no longer rely on their superior knowledge to do that for them. It’s too easy for a talented amateur to join the conversation after a little work.
 
There is no need to censor the academy. They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. The entrenched, government-funded educators at younger levels is more worrisome.

–Assistant Village Idiot

Foster’s Clip – and Others Floating Out There

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Another comment to yet another interesting post by Foster.   (The advantage I have over some of our commentors is that I can put up a post when I realize I’m getting too long-winded and too off-topic.)

Palin’s high energy may not  rescue the McCain candidacy but at least it’s enlivening.   Obama appears to have energized some passions in  Manhatten as well as across the country,  if  dulling other  civil & communal qualities.    Transferring religious fervor  to the political leads to  some strange results.   Of course, that is why political fervor is both compelling – and disturbing.    Belmont Club discusses one.

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The Bailout and Human Nature

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Eyes and ears are poor witnesses when the soul is barbarous.      Heraclitus  

Posted mid-Sunday, as bail-out talks continue.    

Pinker complains in The Blank Slate  of the increasing emphasis in the 20th century on  nurture.   This may well have increased  our sympathies for others, but has led us to undervalue human nature and therefore not consider moral hazards that tempt it.    Our experiences are so variable and their impact so ambiguous, we may be quick to assert  effect where none  existed – or emphasize it when  convenient.       Indirectly, we came  to  devalue  that third and most personally consequential component – human agency.     We say, “Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees” and  grin, but  we  aren’t always  ironic.   Our experience and history, however,  should make  us more optimistic and  also wary:   men can be good (and remarkably so) and men are fallible.   (Sinners some might say, while the Deists find us  prone to errata.)    A culture’s use is in restraining  us from being our worst and encouraging our best; the more those restraints and rewards are internalized  the smoother, more productive, and happier  our lives. Our goal is not too  many laws but good ones, not  many restraints but necessary ones.  

The general consensus is that  increased subprime lending encouraged by Congress led CEOs to make bad loans.   We are selfish, our vision narrowed to our time and our profit:   the home buyers may have been naïve but also wanted a free lunch; the CEOs wanted to please Congress the source of their jobs, power & money; Congress wanted to buy votes, increase campaign contributions, and purchase  their own houses cheaply.    Those least likely to feel the consequences of their follies are in Congress.

Which is a long way around to the point:   What the hell were Dodd and Frank doing writing a version of the bailout?   Why do they think they should?   Why does anyone else listen to them?   Isn’t having a dog in that fight exactly the reason for recusals?   Is there no moment when we say your history has undermined your authority?      

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A Pause for Wretchard

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Richard Fernandez discusses Dostoevsky and abortion, noting that

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan in his Brothers Karamazov, wrote that the only questions which really mattered were the eternal ones. They are what return in various guises generation after generation not because we can never resolve them, but because we resolve ourselves in them.

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