I just picked up Tuesday’s Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon ‘documentary’ Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.
He is right. Those are the real issues. He is on the wrong side of them mostly, but they are worth arguing about. When he suggests that the delusional state of politics is caused insufficient democracy, he is wrong about that too as there is actually too much, the principal form of governance in the English-speaking world being imbecility howlback. But at least he has identified the problem.
Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.
Yet another post extolling the virtues of a lefty (and this time a superlatively repulsive one). Where have we, perhaps, seen this one before?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hess
Don’t worry, though, I’m sure this time the plan will go off without a hitch.
Are you really so thick that you think that I am praising Monbiot’s personality or worldview here?
A précis for the hard-of-thinking: Moonbat though he is, George Monbiot is still part of the rational world, and there are overlaps where we can agree completely. This is a surprise to me, and offers an insight into the profound disjunction of other cultural universes which we both see as alien for the same reasons. He’s a rational, in some sense, collectivist. There are irrational collectivists out there, and lots of them, which is really scary.
Funnily enough I also agree with some of the points he makes, although I suspect that agreeing with George Monbiot is rather like possessing a broken watch – its right at least twice per day.
Guy,
Yes.
Reading this CiF article earlier today I found myself, for nigh on the first time ever, agreeing with both the thesis and the details of an article by George Monbiot, where I usually agree with neither.
I agree with you, the man is both rational and a rationalist. He does look at the issues. He may not come to the same conclusions I do, and we may not agree on solutions, but at least he is not living in a completely different world. A conversation with him would be possible.
If I were to come to the conclusion that my government had committed mass murder of its citizenry, and carried out its crimes via a conspiracy as broad as the 9/11 conspiracy theorists claim, my only option would be to gather my family and run, not walk, in terror to the nearest border.
The calm manner in which the conspiracy theorists go about their business within the borders of the United States convinces me that even they don’t believe their claims.
I think George Monbiot is another example of someone who is concerned about the same sort of problems as we are and can even analyse them intelligently but due to a few underlying assumptions ends up with completetly different solutions. Our solution: less government. Their solution: more and better government. That our preferred solution tends to work rather more often and has been known to last longer is what makes our position in the end.
Guy,
I think, if I may dare use a Kuhnian analysis is that you and Monbiot share the same paradigm. You may disagree with him but at least your disagreements are commensurable. You could actually debate with him in a way that could not be said for the really whacked out green fringe, Islamic supremacists or the KKK to name three of many.
Either that or Monbiot is rational but wrong and the others are bonkers and wrong.
I watched an interview with George Monbiot once where he very intelligently criticised the automatic green idea of Carbon Offsets. I found myself agreeing with everything he said. It kind of upset my preconception of him being just a simple moonbat.
Imbecility howlback is excellent but there seems to be an excess of preaching to the converted here. The idea of an evolving, rationalist civilisation has the virtue of being amusing.
I don’t find this shocking at all. I frequently read Monbiot’s column in The Guardian, and almost always find it profitable to do so. I very often disagree with him, but I find his arguments and opinions challenging, and find that in the process of figuring out why I disagree with him my own views are developed and stengthened; and that can only be a good thing.
nic, how about some facts to back up your garbage?
I make this the 3rd time you’ve done this sort of post in about a week: poor fool of man that I am, I think I see a trend and I think I see where it is ending up.
In any case, “rationalism” is a worldview.
Years ago I learnt that Saddam Hussein liked the same condiment as me, somehow I managed to move on form this without positing that I live in the same world of ideas as him, but, then, I guess that’s because I don’t.
And here’s the cruncher, Rothbard et al. said the exact same thing
Anyway, have fun with your project, first time tragedy second time farce and all that.
Well, finally I have read an article by Monbiot! Previously I have avoided that through strong recommendation from some quarter or other. So beware that the views I write here of him are those I understand from others.
The article is about a film: Loose Change (that is unless I have missed something).
The article seems to be a “fisking” of said film. From said fisking, I think I’ll skip the film: unless perhaps locked in a long-distance aeroplane – but that does not sound to good either. Anyway, the film seems to fit well the classification “barking moonbat”.
However, we now have our Guy feeling closer to Monbiot than ever before: same universe in fact (though not previously, at least so I understand).
But why I ask!
The (other) guy is rehabilitated through fisking a barking moonbat.
[I struggle to understand why the other guy wrote it, why the Guardian printed it, why our Guy rated it, and why I read it (to the end).]
[Well, concerning the Guardian, perhaps not: good of them actually, in a way.]
Yes, I’m shocked.
Best regards
This is rather off topic but I suppose it could be regarded as “shocking” that the BBC has made a radio program that is available for download, about Karl Popper whose book features next to the gun at the top of this page.
Likewise, I found myself agreeing with Johann Hari for once today…
We all fund this torrent of Saudi bigotry
Even if the Global Warming predictions are wrong, I can’t think of a better way of encouraging the general population to stop funding Islamofascism.
Not that shocking when you consider that in the very samebook (well, the second voume) Popper praises Bertand Russell and H.G Wells, praises Marx’s moral passion, claims there could be no morality within the 19th century economic system and waxes lyrical about the need for “piecemeal social engineering” – specifically citing Sweden as the model to be followed.
Quite so, Gabriel. I admire Popper for his method of thought. I very much support the model of a conjectural understanding of objective reality by forming critical preferences based on the current state of knowledge. I am not over much concerned by particular theories Popper himself formed a critical preference for, many of which I find preposterous.
Gabriel, (and Perry),
Thanks for the heads up. My next reading project is to work through Popper. Knowing obvious caveats from the start makes interpreting points along the way a lot easier.
I am hoping to find some good foundations laid out, much like I found with Rand; who’s interpretations of her own principles are often incongruous.
NickM,
I think, if I may dare use a Kuhnian analysis is that you and Monbiot share the same paradigm.
No, I don’t think that flies at all.
Kuhn is pretty incoherent, but what I take him to be saying is that a consensus of belief in an expert community is held together by shared operative concepts, and that those concepts support the uniformity of substantive belief; hence that shared belief-systems have conservative forces in them and move from stable point to stable point by wholesale shifts in conceptual substructure.
I don’t identify any consensus between myself and Monbiot about any subject, and our conceptual bases are very different: look at how we talk about “democracy”, for example. So we can’t be said to share a paradigm, which is not far from what Perry has christened a meta-context.
What we share is categorical method – even the existence of basic logical categories cannot be taken for granted in the alternate worlds. It would be possible to move between our opinions and change our concepts and values with a large wrench – but without doing violence to the method. The way we treat evidence could remain constant, what we think it means having altered.
Bryan Appleyard,
…an excess of preaching to the converted here…
An occupational hazard of blogging, journalism, and all other media where the audience chooses itself. To ensure one preaches to the unconverted requires one to buttonhole them in an unexpected place, or imprison them and force them to listen.
I’ve enjoyed his writing in the past and he’s a fellow Hancock afficionado, but, quite frankly, Andrew Collins is a sharked jumped nut. I mean, just look at this! Yes, “It’s safest to distrust those in power”, but how he reconciles that with his full on neo-leftishness I don’t know.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery is definitely a more worthy work that The Open Society (field of competency issues no doubt, much like some of his heroes). I don’t think it’s all bad (the chapter on Hegel is a must), but it’s not all that good either, nor is it very libertarian. I think you could make a case that the New Labour approach to government has certain antecedents in Popper’s thought; they, after all, have decidedly rejected historicism and utopianism as well.
(Just to be gratutitous I think Open Society could have done with having some of the more banal insights edited out. Plato’s dialogue structure is used as a persuasive device? Well no shit sherlock!)