Some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
– usually attributed to George Orwell.
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Samizdata quote of the dayMay 30th, 2023 |
 61 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Speaking as an academic, I would say that he was spot on.
However, the ideas which are more dangerous are the ones that are so stupid that only an intellectual could come up with them but that have an emotional appeal which means that they are then taken up by many.
I would offer minimum wage legislation as a prime example. Proposed by Sidney Webb in a paper in the Journal of Political Economy, he considered one of its most desirables features to be that it would `price defectives out of the labour market’, thus contributing to eugenics. It is now almost universally supported as a way to ensure a `fair wage’ and thus a moral good. When I pointed this out to some of my colleagues they ridiculed the idea that I might be correct.
One of the UK supermarkets had a policy of employing `special needs’ staff and had to get rid of the policy after a minimum wage was enacted, so I suppose we could say that Webb wasn’t wrong.
It is a paraphrase rather than a quotation:
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Notes on Nationalism
A thing that has struck me about most of the “intellectual elite” has been just how wrong their self-image as such is demonstrably wrong in terms of performance and result. Something they’re utterly blind to, as well.
I really don’t think we’re quite capturing the full meaning of what “intelligent” should actually describe with the way we run our testing regimes. Sure, so-and-so may do very well on the tests, but what sort of performance do we see out in reality? Do they live up to the expectations we’ve derived from their test scores? And, if not, why not? Why don’t we ever seem to carry out the rest of the implied problem and examine just what these carefully-tested and selected individuals actually accomplish?
I suspect that were we to actually do that, we’d have some rather unpleasant surprises and even more unpleasant facts to face.
There’s an incomplete loop, here: Nothing feeds back into the testing, selection, and educational/training process that tells the system “Hey, those criteria you’re using to pick these people? They’re bunk; these jackasses all crashed and burned down the system the minute they wound up in charge of things…”
You have to have a carefully-curated systemic feedback process going on, or your system is going to augur into the ground the way ours is currently doing. I’m afraid that the criteria we’ve hit on for picking out people as “smart” really isn’t choosing the right sort of people, at all…
It was Cicero – that some things were so absurd that only a philosopher could believe them. This was not an attack on all philosophers by Cicero – but an attack on philosophers who made a fetish of going against common sense, in order to “prove” themselves superior. Cicero rightly pointed out that their obsession with sneering at what ordinary people believed, in trying to show that they were beyond ordinary people, led such philosophers to utter absurdities.
“George Orwell” was a Classical educated man (Eton) – so he would have known what Cicero wrote, and he would also assume that his own readers would know to.
It was not necessary in the time of “George Orwell” to say “I am taking this from Cicero” – readers would have known that. Including many “Working Class” readers – as copies of the classics (in English) were in the libraries of Working Men’s Institutes in this period.
As for the word “intellectual” – it has indeed become so dominated by smug idiots, that it has become an insult rather than a compliment.
Perhaps, if we wish to praise someone, we should say they are a “person of intellect” rather than an “intellectual”.
Just like the term “scholarship”, the overweening “proud” types have irreparably damaged the meaning of that term and the depth of the cultural “field” behind it.
I respect and honor true scholars and deep thinkers; what I have contempt for would be those who claim such status without actually earning it or demonstrating anything of the kind.
We’ve got way too many “fake the funk” types out there in the world today, all claiming status they don’t deserve and haven’t earned. They discredit the entirety of intellectual endeavors, and it’s pretty damn clear why there’s all this “anti-intellectualism” coming to the fore. You can only piss down a man’s back and tell him its raining for so long, and then he’ll begin to notice the smell…
Kirk.
Exactly. A reason why serious scholarship and scholars are seldom to be found in modern universities.
When we think of Ancient Philosophers pushing absurdities we may think of Plato – with his mocking of the reality of ordinary people (which is also the objective reality of the “intellectuals” – whether they like it or not) as merely shadows on a cave wall. Or his attack on the traditional view of justice as to each-their-own, pushing instead the totalitarian nightmare in his book that we call the “Republic”.
However, “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” (David Hume) was also an attack on common sense – on the traditional view that the role of moral reason is to restrain (control) the passions. Just as “one can not get an ought from an is” was an attack on the normal view of “this IS wrong, so I OUGHT not to do it” – which is what ordinary people do every day.
The absurdities of Mr Hobbes (his view of what a human is, basically just a machine, without any moral agency – and his absolutist view of the state), Mr Hume (see above), Mr Bentham (again humans as just machines without moral agency, and the state, in his case 13 Departments, controlling everything) and-so-on were once considered freakish – such people certainly would not have got positions in most universities. But they are now mainstream – and have been mainstream for a long time now. For example, at Oxford the last people to really OPPOSE such doctrines, Professor Harold Prichard, Professor Sir William David Ross, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien (and others) are long gone – dead-in-the-grave, and replaced by lesser people.
So the madness gripped academia (and much else) BEFORE the takeover by Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxists that we have today. Although it may have, unintentionally, paved the way for the later takeover by the Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxists in the universities and in so much else.
Paul,
On the other hand, the opinion of the common people in the eighteenth century seemed to be that “wealth” meant having a lot of gold and silver, and this dictated official policy from China (where, in the nineteenth century, the official objection to opium seems to have been that buying it led to an outflow of silver from China) to Britain. Adam Smith’s argument that wealth consisted in labor and its products, incomplete though it was, was a challenge to that general opinion, and one that is still needed, though the concern is now with “balance of trade” in terms of fiat rather than of specie. But I think that Smith was right and the people who wanted to hold on to gold and silver were wrong.
A lot of economics used to be attacks on the views of ordinary people. See for example Bastiat’s classic Economic Sophisms for examples of how to do this and make it entertaining.
Mr Hobbes, of my Wiltshire parish as it happens, was a nasty, brutish, and short git đ
In this context, the word ‘stupid’ is grossly inappropriate: the word ‘insane’ should be used instead.
An example:
Some ideas are so insane that only Paul Marks could believe them.
đ
In person, Tommy was a true gentleman, it seems.
The 2nd part of Book 1 of Leviathan seemed to me very much worth reading.
The 1st part is clearly the work of a crank.
As for Hobbes’ prescriptions, they can be described for simplicity as the opposite of those of Plato’s late dialogues.
Both were extreme statists, but of very different flavors.
While Plato remained a totalitarian (admitting no substantive constraints on the power of the State), the late Plato (pace Popper) turned favorable to the rule of law, and checks+balances.
OTOH Hobbes was an absolutist (admitting no procedural constraint on the power of the sovereign), but claimed that the sole purpose of the State should be to prevent the war of all against all: a huge substantive constraint.
Not that one can have effective substantive constraints, in the absence of procedural constraints.
As with all individuals, one ought not judge them by their writings. Heinlein said it best, when he commented that it took a fool to believe that what an author wrote was what they believed. I think he was meaning in a commercial sense, but it spreads out: Observe not what they wrote, but what they did.
Possibly the most egregious case of this would be anyone who ever took Marx seriously; he wrote one thing, lived entirely another. He spent his life as the prototypical Marxist ever did, doing nothing lasting, merely helping to tear down things he couldn’t understand and which he couldn’t accomplish himself. He was a parasite, pure and simple, despite all of his high-flown verbiage.
I think you have to do the same with everyone: Don’t listen to their words, mark what they do. There are some people who are very obviously taking things out on the world in their writing, or just venting. It’s a mistake to take them at all seriously.
We can also recall the splendidly contemptuous description of ‘intellectuals’ given by the trade-union leader Fred Kinnan in ‘Atlas Shrugged’…
“Your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when itâs safe – and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them – and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. (…) Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: theyâll swallow anything. I donât feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremenâs union: heâs liable to remember suddenly that he is a man – and then I wonât be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? Thatâs the one thing theyâve forgotten long ago. I guess itâs the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget.”
Given how the ‘intellectuals’ of her day reacted to Rand (and still demonstrate the same Pavlovian response today) I guess she took particular pleasure in writing that passage as a form of revenge. Fred Kinnan may be on the side of the looter cabal, but he also has a level of integrity and moral awareness, totally lacking in his allies, that makes him the one and only character the reader can envision as potentially switching sides.
“I really donât think weâre quite capturing the full meaning of what âintelligentâ should actually describe with the way we run our testing regimes. Sure, so-and-so may do very well on the tests, but what sort of performance do we see out in reality? Do they live up to the expectations weâve derived from their test scores? And, if not, why not? Why donât we ever seem to carry out the rest of the implied problem and examine just what these carefully-tested and selected individuals actually accomplish?”
I have this theory that says that true intelligence comprises of many facets, and only those who excel in all of them can be considered part of the intelligence elite.
I would argue that the major facets are a) the ability to manipulate data and concepts (intellect) b) the ability to manipulate reality (practical skills), c) the ability to communicate clearly, d) the ability to read other people’s unsaid thoughts/body language/emotional state (empathy) and e) artistic ability.
I would suggest that people who are to be put in positions of power and authority need the first 4 at least. Intellect to be able to understand complicated theoretical issues, practical skills that allow to to test intellectual ideas against the constraints of the real world, communication skills to be able to impart your vision to others, and empathy to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and see things from their perspective, thus giving you a rounded view of the matter at hand (and a greater chance of influencing them into your way of thinking).
I thus propose that any prospective politician must be forced to make a table and chairs from scratch, or construct a small building, as a test of their practical ability, and be judged on the output. We have many ways to testing for intellect, thats pretty much what all exams do. Communication skills are fairly obvious – a politician without them will fail anyway. Empathy is a harder one to test for, as it can easily be faked when people are looking for it. I’ve yet to come up with a surefire way of testing people for it that can’t be gamed.
Zerren: Fred Kinnan is one of Rand’s characters who have an oddly spelled Irish surname: it ought to be Fred Keenan. The others are Howard Rourke and Hank Riordan. So she put him in good company, with the other Irish boys.
I’m curious to understand the animosity to “intellectuals”. To be clear, I, to some degree anyway, share it. But why? Intellectual essentially means “rational rather than emotional”, at least according to the dictionaries I consulted. And that? Well that is a thing which I would certainly advocate for.
My initial thoughts are these characteristics:
* the concern is the supercilious attitude that the stereotype of an intellectual carries
* the mistake of thinking expertise in one area implies expertise in another
* Oftentimes the substitution of theoretical expertise while dismissing practical (shall we call it empirical) expertise
* Often the desire for innovative ideas for the sake of innovation rather than advancement, coupled with rhetorical skills enabling one to defend any position, irrespective of how ludicrous. (I, a passionate libertarian, can make an excellent case for socialism, for example.)
I think Orwell was thinking of the last of these.
But there may be other things too.
“Iâm curious to understand the animosity to âintellectualsâ. To be clear, I, to some degree anyway, share it. But why?”
Because the intellect is not connected to the ability manipulate reality (practical skills). Thus the intellectual can be totally divorced from the real world, and his ideas and concepts utterly at odds to natural laws and processes. The classic trope of a university professor who can hardly tie his shoe laces. Pure intellectualism without the balance of the other facets of intelligence is an unbalanced personality and as such not suited for positions of power or influence.
Fraser Orr:
The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism
Which also touches on anti-anti-intellectualism.
@Jim
Because the intellect is not connected to the ability manipulate reality (practical skills).
Tony Fauci manipulated reality pretty effectively. So I think there is more to it than that. The boffin professor who can’t tie his own shoelaces, I think we feel a certain affection for. I think he is not the guy that is bothersome.
The article Deep Lurker linked is excellent. Thanks.
Fraser:
Good point.
It is important to note, however, that the quote/paraphrase of Orwell does not in any way imply that all intellectuals believe in absurd ideas.All what it says is that all truly absurd ideas are believed only by intellectuals.
The two are not equivalent.
Returning to Hobbes: he was also an anti-intellectual of sorts.
Quoting a footnote from The Road to Serfdom:
I did a search for ‘Aristotle’ in Hobbes’ works and Hayek was correct. Hobbes blamed the classics for all sorts of ideas that he thought were bad ideas. Plato in particular gets blamed for distinguishing between monarchy and tyranny, which legitimizes revolt against any monarch who is deemed a tyrant.
Snorri – the word “intellectual” even in the time of George Orwell (Eric Blair) had already become a semi insult – it was held to be someone who made a great show of being wiser than ordinary people (sneering at ordinary common sense beliefs) – but who, in reality, believed in nonsense.
In British English saying “he is too clever by half” or even “how clever of you” are not compliments – they are insults.
Snorri – Thomas Hobbes never endorses the idea of risking your own life to defend the lives of other people against tyranny (whether that tyranny is by one person – or by a group of people) that is why he is no good as a political philosopher. He is no good as a general (non political) philosopher – because he does not accept that a human is a being, a person (not just a machine).
One can not get to the Bill of Rights (British or American) from the philosophy of Mr Hobbes, Mr Hume or Mr Bentham.
William H. Stoddard.
If you are paying for imports with gold or silver – what do you do when you run out of gold and silver?
And if you are “paying” for imports with Credit Fiat Money (just lights on computer screens) that does not represent anything, what do you do when importers stop accepting the Credit for their food, raw materials, and manufactured goods?
In the end work, actually making things, is necessary – one can not endlessly consume without producing.
By the way Adam Smith and the others, all the way to Milton Friedman, understood that – what is called “free trade” today is nothing to with what they considered free trade.
They wanted us to import some goods and pay for that by exporting other goods.
Not just consume-consume-consume and “pay” on credit.
What we have now is NOT free trade – what we have now is barking mad.
BTW @DeepLurker, I read the article directly and only noticed later that the author was Eric Raymond. I always loved his blog (even though I frequently disagreed with him) but he sort of disappeared into the ether. Anybody know what happened to him?
Fraser Orr said:
Fraser, have you ever, y’know… Met any of these soi disant “intellectuals”? Watched them interact with their self-determined “intellectual inferiors”? Noted their arrogance, and utter inability to acknowledge that they’re wrong, in any regard, when they mess up?
D’ya ever notice that they’re never the ones to have to clean up after their mistakes, either? It’s always, always the people they derisively lord it over with their vast intellectual superiority, and who likely told them “Yeah, that’s not going to work…”.
Frankly, the wonder isn’t that there’s a consistent vein of anti-intellectualism in society, the marvel is that the supposed peasantry hasn’t risen up en masse and massacred the lot of them. That may still be on the table, I suspect. I’ve muttered darkly more than a few times that Pol Pot might have been on to something… Usually right after encountering the latest idiocy coming out of the intelligentsia and the “elite” in DC.
I could be one of them. I’ve got the abilities it takes to mimic intelligence. What I lack is the essential arrogance and utter sincerity in my being right, mainly because having lived a practical life out in the “intellectual deserts”, I’ve learned an appreciation for things that the intellectuals despise and ridicule. I’m rather glad I didn’t accept being tracked into that world, to be quite honest; I find that being able to maintain some semblance of integrity is worth more to me than being able to claim supposed intellectual status based on credentials that are increasingly false and of limited real value.
Jim said:
I think all these things go into it, but I also think you’re missing key characteristics of intelligence: a.) The ability to work out cause and effect, in advance of action. b.) The ability to make mistakes, acknowledge them, and learn from them, applying those lessons going forward. c.) A degree of humility such that the “intellectually superior” can recognize that they’re not all-knowing, and that actual wisdom and practical intelligence can reside in some very unexpected places. d.) Open-mindedness to any and everything that might apply to the problems at hand.
Biggest flaw I see in most of today’s “intellectual class”, and the thing that makes people loathe them? An utter lack of humility, accompanied by an inability to admit or acknowledge egregious error that cannot be denied based on demonstrated real-world results.
Oftentimes, the intellectual doesn’t even want to admit that there’s a problem with their ideas, let alone that they might have made a mistake. They don’t learn; they don’t correct themselves. They just keep doubling-down on their errors. Look at things like all these municipal light-rail ideas they’ve implemented: Do any of them work, as planned, producing revenue and public benefit? Or, do they become vast money sinks, enabling all sorts of inimical social problems in place of the good things they were supposed to accomplish?
To be an intellectual in modern society means that you never, ever have to admit or acknowledge error. Which is what the “average man” loathes about them, along with their arrogant certainty that they know best.
Case in point: You go out, right now, here in my home state of Washington. Ask guys who work in any of the electrical trades, from residential electrician up to linesman for the utilities about the coming ban on fossil-fuel powered vehicles. They’ll tell you chapter and verse that preparing for that transition should be on a 50-year timeline, at best. The state’s elites? Want it within ten years. There’s no way they can upgrade the grid, all the household electrical systems for the chargers required, or find the generating capacity.
And, you wonder why the “intellectuals” are disparaged and derided? That’s why, in a nutshell: They keep coming up with the stupid, that the practical types have to live with and try to make work.
We’re coming up on a cusp where the practical man tires of his “betters”, and will likely do something about that. Pol Pot, here we come…
I’m only half-kidding, about that. I suspect that it’s a real risk, and that they’ll throw the baby out with the bath water when the purges come. And, again… Not advocating for it, either. Just projecting what I know of history, and what I see around me.
SG:
This. But also, once upon a time, only a few absurd intellectuals believed the absurd idea that the earth was round. The based, grounded, truly-smart people knew it was flat.
There is a fraction of the intelligent world that corresponds to Kirk’s ideas of intellectuals. The rest of the intellectuals – i.e., the smart people – are very useful and valuable. You can read the words of some of them here, on Samizdata.
Bobby:
đ
Actually, the idea that the Earth is round (spherical) was commonly accepted by Greek intellectuals.
But Anaxagoras, the man who introduced philosophy to the previously uncultured Athenians, had to escape Athens after claiming that the Sun might be no more than a hot rock, bigger than the Peloponnese.
And it was not so much the Church as the Aristotelians who condemned the Copernicus/ Galileo/ Kepler thesis that the Earth turns on its axis every day.
And it was the Cartesians who made Newton so angry and spiteful, by claiming that action at a distance (such as gravity) is logically absurd. (And actually Newton also felt it was absurd!)
Einstein had it easy.
@bobby b,
I think you ought to review the actual history, a bit more. The whole “flat earth” thing was really started back in the 19th Century as more of a joke than anything else. Anyone who ever ventured over the horizon on a fishing boat knew the world had to be round, or they wouldn’t be losing sight of shore when they did so…
As well, if you want to know true intellectual reaction, take a hard look at the controversies between the guys who came up with Continental Drift and the explanation for the channeled scablands here in the Northwest US… Both of those guys underwent decades of contempt, harassment, and ridicule from the “established intellectuals” of their fields, until most of the “established” types died out.
And, yet… Your average person was out here looking at all those ripples in the earth, the erratics, the erosion, along with everything else they saw, and saying “Yeah, I can see that being the cause… Makes sense to me…” Same-same with Continental Drift; who can look at the eastern edge of South America and the western side of Africa and not see instantly that they match way too closely for there not to be some relationship there? Laymen noted that for generations; the anointed scholars of geography and geology said that there was no way such a thing could be possible…
I would judge that there are far fewer real “intellectuals” than you hypothesize, occupying those high places in academia and governance. I’d further suggest that from the obtained results we see before us, that there are one hell of a lot more credentialed idiots than anything else.
Another thing to note is the “curse of high IQ”. People with exceptionally high IQ tend to be less successful than people with high, but not exceptional IQ.
Part of the reason is likely to be that people have trouble communicating when the IQ difference is more than 15~20 points; so that if your IQ is over 120, you better get a job which requires communicating only to very intelligent people. That excludes politics.
And yet, i wonder: is the curse of high IQ due to the fact that, when a larger part of the cortex is devoted to solving IQ tests, a smaller part is left to deal with human relationships?
I myself feel that i can better understand other people’s perspectives, after improving my diet. It’s not just how much cortex you have, it’s how you use it.
Kirk, I think that the idea of demonizing “intellectuals” (which, to me, simply means smart people who make use of their smarts) is akin to demonizing all plumbers when some plumbers do bad things.
Evil (and the more anodyne “moral wrongness”) exists in smart people and in idiots. Sadly, smart people are usually more effective in what they do, and so when they are evil, it’s a more effective evil. But the proportion of evil among intellectuals is probably very similar to the proportion of evil among plumbers, and so there are fewer evil intellectuals than there are good or neutral ones.
I would simply go deeper into causes and demonize people who personally do bad things, regardless of where they fall in IQ or racial or educational ratings. I like most intellectuals. Not all.
@Snorri Godhi
all intellectuals believe in absurd ideas.All what it says is that all truly absurd ideas are believed only by intellectuals.
That’s not true at all. For example there are millions of people in the United States who think an angel came down told some backwoods farmer where to dig up some golden tablets in the ground, along with some magic glasses that let him read special revelation about Jesus returning to the United States. I mean that is pretty out there. Other people believe that if you take a poison and dilute it so many times that there is not a single molecule of the poison left, that this now magic water somehow heals you (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.) That is pretty whacked.
Often times con artists and hucksters who are pretty smart delude people into believing this stuff, and sometimes people just believe it all by themselves, the crazy spreading like a virus.
Stupidity is by no means restricted to the intellectual.
And it has to be said that we live in majestic riches because some subset of these intellectuals studied and worked and dedicated their whole lives to inventing and discovering all the foundational ideas the make modern civilization possible.
However, I’d recommend the great article by Eric Raymond on this that DeepLurker linked above.
@Fraser Orr
Eric Raymond comments on Instapundit and, when asked, makes noises about getting his blog restarted Real Soon Now.
https://disqus.com/by/disqus_tYgyzkNZgO/ is his Disqus profile
@bobby b
I would simply go deeper into causes and demonize people who personally do bad things, regardless of where they fall in IQ or racial or educational ratings. I like most intellectuals. Not all.
Although I agree with your sentiment, I think there is a bigger picture thing here which is the approach society takes to the intellectual as a group rather than individuals. We credit them almost like Priests where their word is not subject to challenge. This is extraordinarily dangerous. When any debate goes “Fraser thinks A, but Bobby, who has the imprimatur of “expert” thinks B therefore we can simply ignore what Fraser says” is deeply damaging and toxic. And especially so when we allow Bobby to leverage his expertise in one subject to imply that his is equally expert in some other subject.
For example, I am a fan or Richard Dawkins, when he talks about areas he is a real expert such as biology or science education. but he leverages that to imply that he is an expert in general public policy, which is just simply not correct — his views on this are pretty terrible generally speaking.
I think it is perhaps that “shut up dofus, I’m an expert” that is the thing that turns me off many intellectuals. And it is a fact that truly great intellectuals are not like that. It is that middle group who have fancy qualifications but never really did anything great, that are the real source of animus. One of my kids is studying for a degree in Computer Science. And these “experts” have all this high falutin’ math and complex theory, but I am pretty sure many of them has actually written a computer program much bigger than “Hello World”.
This all reminded me of a fun quote, which I had to go back and look up:
Children Of Dune, Herbert, p. 221.
(I think that this quote is a two-edged sword, though.)
Fraser:
Strictly speaking, i did not say that it is true.
I said that that is what the quote/paraphrase says.
đ
My view is that there are some ideas so insane that only people who grew up eating the brain-damaging shit that we grew up eating, can believe.
I say that, because i am watching this documentary on twitter, free to watch for a few more hours.
If you jump to about 44:00, you’ll see the Masai laugh at some ideas that American “progressives” tend to accept as revealed truth.
The Masai are pastoralists. That means that they do not eat the shit that we grew up eating.
@bobby b,
It’s odd that you see “demonization” when I see “rightful criticism of outright demonstrated incompetence”.
I’m not even entering into the good vs. evil thing, at all: I’m strictly talking demonstrated performance, which ain’t nowhere near where most of these oh-so-righteously “smart” people would put it.
Examine their work product: EPA in that Colorado mine disaster? Hmm? The Californian environmentalists who demanded simultaneously that the energy companies not only not conduct brush clearing around their transmission lines, but also that they take responsibility when they couldn’t get the environmental impact statements through quickly enough to do the common-sense repairs and renovations to the grid? Then, drove said companies into bankruptcy, suing them for the entirely predictable wildfires that resulted?
Everywhere you look, in modern life? Most of the rest of us would be a hell of a lot better off if we’d simply never “invested” in these people’s education, leaving them to live out lives as low-level and harmless Cliff Claven types in some bar somewhere, rather than made our lords and masters in the ever-burgeoning bureaucracy.
From where I’ve been sitting, these many years, the self-proclaimed “intellectual” and “educated-yet-idiot” types are a plague upon the world. I’ve never seen them do a damn thing that was pro-active or actually effective, when it came to solving problems. They’re there mostly to justify their existence, and we’d be far better off without them serving as so much human bureaucratic kludge in the gears.
It ain’t “Good vs. Evil”, it’s “Sclerosis vs. Bloodflow”, and we’re loosing.
Personally, I think it’s a lot like the Prussian/German officer corps; they had a lot fewer of them, and did a lot better than we did at everything except industrial-level and strategic warfare. There’s a reason for that; if you’re familiar with Band of Brothers, you know the historical figure of Captain Sobel. If you’ve ever been around the military, you’d recognize his type and note the prevalence of them infesting the US forces in all branches.
I don’t think these creatures are evil; I just think they’ve been put in positions and given authorities that they have no business even being in close proximity to. They’re incompetence personified, and cannot allow anyone to find that fact out, or they’ll lose their BS jobs. In the immortal words of Governor William J. Le Petomane, “”We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen.”
Which explains so much of what’s gone wrong in modern society. We’ve got too many of these jobsworthies running around gumming up the works. We’d have been better off not bothering to educate them past the level of their intelligence, and given them work where they could really shine… Like, as quality control department members at some small-town sewage plant.
@bobby b,
Who said:
I would really, really like to see people quit using works of fiction as sources of wisdom. People do that with Heinlein, they do it with Tolkien, and they do it with J.K. Rowland. None of it is justified by the relative validity of these authors, who were writing purely for entertainment, to make some dosh. It’s faked-up profundity, top to bottom.
Bluntly put, these are not in any way, shape, or form things we ought to take as authoritative; they’re things the authors wrote in the voices of their characters, who may be mouthing the opinions of the author, but they are in no way profound or at all authoritative. Herbert’s conception of the Mentat was a device of fiction; there’s no “there” to be found, were you to go looking for the antecedent citations it came from. There is no real “mentat training institution”, nor has any of that crap ever received the least little bit of real-world validation. It’s all wishful thinking built upon castles in the air, mere impudence in the face of a vast void of experience.
Some fiction disguises profundity; most is mere posturing. Herbert was no cyberneticist, no profound thinker in the realm of such things. He was a journalist, and from what I’ve seen of his work as one, not very good at it. He was a great entertainer, but that’s about as far as I’d take things. I found the entire Dune ouevre compelling as a teenager, before I’d any real experience of the world. Revisiting those works in later life?
Well, like I said: He’s entertaining, but he ain’t no Marcus Aurelius.
The merits of that particular quote you chose? That line about “living principles”? If you pause to think about it, what he’s saying with that is in contradiction with the rest of the passage where he speaks about “common sense”. If you’ve got “living principles”, then you’ve got no principles at all, because they’re by definition unchanging underlying assumptions about how to approach a problem.
In other words, it sounds nice and profound, but it’s actually self-contradictory as hell.
As Webster would have the definition;
A “living principle” makes very little sense, in that if something is constantly changing, it’s not a principle at all. Whatever it might be, it does not fit the definition of the term, and as such…? Typical drivel found in pretentious fiction.
You have to be very careful with this crap, because that’s exactly what it is: Crap. The author is trying to postulate some world-warping thing, without access to the actual article beyond his gedankenspiel. Most such efforts evaporate once you really start to examine the premises behind them, and I say that as someone who has made some attempts at such a thing himself, and found his own efforts wanting, foundering on these very issues. In other words, it takes a bullshitter to recognize another one…
Just finished watching the documentary.
It has the serious flaw that, apart from the Masai, all people in it are North-Americans (US & Canada).
We do not get to know how insane the rest of the world has become.
Kirk:
Oh, I dunno. I’m sitting here at my computer (the entire concept for which was an intellectual achievement) about to send my words over the internet (!), thinking about which fresh foods from all over the world (!) that I have sitting in my refrigerator (!) that I might pull out for dinner. I just adjusted my A/C (!) to be more comfortable in the heat today. I’m healthy, thanks to some docs I spoke to last week (!) who counseled me about riding my mountain bike (!) too fast. My television (!) is on in the background, giving a reliable weather report. (!). One of my kids is flying in later (!). I rest secure that we still sort of reside in a country ruled subject to a Constitution (!) devised by intellectuals.
All in all, I feel well-served by intellectual achievement. None of the things I mentioned would exist without intellects. Sure, there are those intellectuals who get too much attention and veneration compared to their true value, but life is good for most of us right now thanks to many intellectuals who formulated primary concepts upon with the techies could build.
Erudition more than wisdom. But clear thinkers can write good fiction, better than can muddy thinkers, and so they’re more provoking to read. I didn’t quote Herbert to teach us all Herbert’s wisdom, but to put this discussion on new terms, and maybe show the timelessness of the discussion. Herbert, Asimov, Tolkien, Stephenson – I don’t look to them to lead my life, but they seem to have had an ability to see my present before it arrived, and to describe it well. That interests me, and so their minds interest me.
Well, yeah, that’s why I also said that the quote was a two-edged sword. đ
tl:dr – I think we have a definitional difference only. You’re attacking “intellectuals” but I think you mean “a small subset of intellectuals.” Intellectuals gave us this wonderful existence. Those vacuous “intellectuals” who seem to inhabit today’s academia are simply self-servers who are busy cashing in on the goodwill of hundreds of generations of real intellectuals from the past. Once they’re done – once they have taken for themselves all of the accolades and profit of simply claiming to be intellectuals – the term and concept of “intellectual” will have been debased. They’ll have cashed out all of that goodwill for themselves.
bobby b,
I think where we differ the most is that you think that the problem children are a “small subset”, and I’m more of the opinion that it’s the vast majority of the so-called “educated elite class” who’d be most likely to term themselves, proudly and with utterly no real basis, “intellectuals”.
Believe me, I know the type quite well. You use the computer industry as an example, but the sad fact is, most of that industry was built on the basis of truly intelligent people who produced real results. Wozniak? He’s someone I’d term “truly intelligent”. Jobs? Errr… Nope. Dude basically killed himself because he thought he was smarter than everyone else, and tried treating his cancer with some daft “fruitarianism” ideas. Jobs is actually the perfect example of the utterly vacuous line of BS that most of these types endlessly churn out; if you’ve ever talked to anyone that actually had the misfortune to work around him, and you manage to get them to unload? Yikes. You’ll be there for hours.
Look at the vast difference between men like David Packard and William Hewlett compared to their sadly diminished successors who ran the company into the ground, like Carly Fiorina. I’m sure that were you to ask either one of the two namesake founders about their intelligence, you’d have gotten something rather humble about it. Carly Fiorina, who basically destroyed the company and its reputation for technical excellence? She’ll tell you she’s a f*cking genius, no question.
I think that the real intellectual giants are men like Wozniak, and all the rest of the humble types that spend more time making things work, as opposed to blowing their own horns. The guys like Jobs? Yeah; they’re the ones I consider a plague. Jobs was someone who needed a damn keeper, to prevent him from going overboard with all his “great ideas”. He was a visionary, but one with two edges to his blade. I think he did more damage than good, when you get down to it. If Apple had done what Microsoft did with the licensing and allowed clones of the Mac OS and hardware? We’d all be a lot better off. But, with Jobs insisting on his little walled-garden fiefdom, well… Yeah. I also loathe what they did with their entire approach to proprietary everything, which magnificently damaged more than a few of my instances of Windows whenever I had the temerity to try and run iTunes.
Intellect is a brittle tool; you can work wonders with it, but untempered by wisdom and restraint…? It’s like a damn forest fire, run out of control. I appreciate the good works performed by it, and respect the men and women I see demonstrating real intelligence, but there are way, way too many of the other sort out there, at every damn level of society.
I’d include the vast majority of my teachers in high school, one of whom I actually heard say “Well, I guess I’d better read this thing, now that I’ve got to teach it…” He was speaking of the Constitution of the United States, and he was only doing that because he’d finally been tasked with teaching a real class on something other than coaching the boy’s basketball team. He supposedly had a minor in US history, with a major in Physical Education. The man proudly termed himself an “intellectual”, demonstrating utmost contempt for anyone with the misfortune to come from a blue-collar family background.
Dumb as a f*cking rock, too. I think I really started questioning the benefits of education after exposure to him as a teaching assistant to the other, actually qualified history teacher we had.
Real intelligence needs to be something conferred by performance, honestly assessed, in real-world environments. Testing alone doesn’t cut it; education doesn’t help it at all, if the baseline intellect is deficient in the first damn place. If this wasn’t the case, then we wouldn’t constantly hear the ever-present refrain “Forget what they taught you in school; we do things differently here…”, nor would you hear people telling you that they never used a damn thing they were taught…
Bubble has been lost, somewhere along the way.
Thomas Hobbes says that the only time that someone should resist the sovereign (and Mr Hobbes is clear that the sovereign can be a group of people, it does not have to be a King) is when their own life is threatented.
It never occurs to him, he never considers the possibility, that there is a moral duty to defend OTHER people against tyranny. That is where his political philosophy falls apart – as it is based on a machine-like (or bestial-like) view of what a human is (humans, to Mr Hobbes, are not beings – not persons), who automatically try and preserve themselves – but not others.
So, for example, if Mr Hobbes was about to be hanged for (say) wearing brown shoes, or odd coloured socks, he would struggle and try and get away. But if someone else was to be hanged for wearing brown shows or odd coloured socks, Mr Hobbes would not risk his own life to try save them. That is why his political philosophy is no good.
It is no good talking of what government should or should not do – if you are not prepared to fight against a government that acts differently (say has people executed for wearing brown shoes or odd coloured socks – or being over five feet tall).
The same is true of Mr Hume and Mr Bentham – and that is why their political philosophy is no good (leaving aside their general philosophy).
Mr Hobbes also redefines words – important words, such as “law” and “justice” and “right”, taking out their traditional moral content, and replacing it with the will (commands) of the state.
This was a terrible thing to do.
In his own time, Mr Hobbs rightly regarded a “student of the common law of England” as his great enemy – but in later centuries establishment legal writers conceded the case of Mr Hobbes that any command of the “legislator” was law, and overruled traditional law (that ends the “Rule of Law” as a moral concept – as opposed to concept empty of moral content and based solely on force and fear).
People with very high intelligence may find it difficult to communicate with people of much lower intelligence – but they can do it, if they are prepared to put the effort in.
For example, Prime Minister Gladstone (a man of very high intelligence) managed to communicate with ordinary (very ordinary) people, so did President Calvin Coolidge (who used to translate Ancient Greek texts – for fun) – who was not so sparing with words as is sometimes claimed (although, yes, he did not speak as much as most politicians do – partly because he only spoke when he had some information or judgement he wanted to explain to other people).
Professor Harold Prichard (one of the leading minds of his generation at Oxford) used to rightly say that if the oridinary person on the bus passing the lecture hall could not understand his lectures on moral philosophy – the fault was not that of the ordinary person on the bus, the fault was his (Harold Prichard’s fault) for not explaining things clearly. The goal always was that if someone came in (just off the street) into the lecture at the start – then they would get something worth while out of the lecture, that they would not just walk away or sit there baffled by what was being said.
Ditto with his writings – the goal was that if they were prepared to read an essay from start-to-finish an ordinary person would understand what was written. Perhaps not understand it as well as a specialist – but have a basic understanding of the matters being dealt with.
It is the difference between an “intellectual” and “a person of intellect” – a difference in English that Snorri, perhaps because he is not a native English speaker (that is not an attack upon him – after all I can speak no Dutch at all) does not seem to fully grasp.
To be called a person of intellect is a compliment – to be called an “intellectual” is not, because the word “intellectual” has come to imply someone who sneers at ordinary people and falsely thinks that he or she is beyond ordinary common sense and objective reality.
For example, that the role of moral reason is to restrain (control) the passions, not to be a slave of the passions. And that if something IS wrong, one OUGHT not to do it. This is what ordinary people believe – and ordinary people are correct to believe these things, because they are true.
After reading Eric Raymond’s essay, what stands out is that he must have confused the thalamus with the hypothalamus.
Hmm… Following Paul Marks’ advice, I read Prichard’s celebrated 1912 essay.
I am not sure how much I got out of it, but I’ll stick my neck out and say that, in my immodest opinion, Paul misunderstood what Prichard meant. If and when i’ll re-read it, i’ll admit my mistakes, if any.
Snorri, it’d help if you’d point to which essays you’re talking about… ESR is rather prolific.
That said… The one thing that separates us from Prichard’s day is that back then, they were at least discussing things like morality with some seriousness.
In today’s world, Aleister Crowley’s philosophy of “do as thou wilt” has taken over. Everywhere. Nobody considers anything besides their own personal gratification and benefit. I don’t think I’ve seen a “modern philosopher” discussing things like “social obligation” or “morality” in any real sense, other than to use those ideas as cudgels to beat people into acquiescing to whatever their latest idea might be.
Consider the crowd demanding “reparations” for slavery as an example; they rave on and on and on about how their ancestors were done badly by everyone, demanding money. Yet… Not a word comes from them about what they might owe in return for… Anything. Never mind the deaths of men in the Civil War, fought to end slavery, never mind the wealth expended fighting for abolition and freeing the slaves (ancestors of mine bankrupted themselves “doing nice things” for freed slaves, I might point out…), all of that is ignored or disparaged. Blacks would not be free on their own efforts (which may be the problem), had not a bunch of those “evil white cis men” gotten together and decided that slavery was something that should end, and put their lives on the line to do it. Without those “evil whites”, it would have never happened, and it certainly wouldn’t have happened to any degree in Africa.
There’s no reciprocal in today’s intellectual discourse; Prichard at least shows some concern for the idea of morality, which today isn’t even a consideration. Nobody asks the question of whether it is moral to dun the descendants of abolitionists for additional monies to make up for those things they wanted abolished; all the shills for reparations see and understand is “I want…”
Which is pretty much the entirety of modern thought, sadly. Even the freakin’ theologians have fallen prey to Crowley’s damaging thought process, it would seem. Look at the current state of the Catholic Church, and how they’ve dealt with the entire issue of clergy committing acts of pedophilia… Where’s the morality? Hell, where’s the bloody utilitarianism, someone saying “We ought not do this because it’ll turn our worshippers on us…”?
Nowhere to be found. Nowhere.
Kirk: I’m sorry, i was referring to the essay that Deep Lurker linked to, above.
An insightful essay, although i have a few other objections, apart from the confusion between thalamus and hypothalamus.
Snorri… WTF? I did a search on that entire page, to include comments, and there are precisely zero occurrences of either “thalamus” or “hypothalamus”…
His use of the word “thalamic”, however is in there. He is using it somewhat in the sense of “visceral”, which you can pick up from context in the paragraph where he uses it. According to the OED, the definition of the term is as follows:
The sense that he’s going for here, using that word, is that the rejection of intellectualism by this sort of anti-intellectual isn’t a thought-out thing, but a gut reaction from the core of their being… Instinctive, in other words. Animalistic, without logic or other rational backing.
Pitfalls of the flexibility of the English language. You have to actually look at it in context, make the connection, and then it makes sense. I gather you’re not a native English speaker, so it’s not surprising that that little linguistic gaming is confusing… ESR basically coined his very own usage of the word, or he’s repeating something really obscure that even the OED doesn’t catalog well.
Welcome to English, a language without rules or consistencies…
Aside from that, I find a lot to agree with in that essay. He’s saying a lot of things I’ve been saying, which must mean he’s a genius or something…
However, I do have to take exception to the way he seems to conceive of the problem as being due to some sort of antipathy the non-intellectual has towards the intellectual being because the non-intellectual doesn’t like being told what to do by the intellectual.
That’s what they tell themselves, the intellectual types. The reality is, that the typical non-intellectual is a fairly pragmatic sort; if they saw value in what they were told, they’d be very likely to process it and move on, taking the good advice at face value. The real problem isn’t that they’re refusing to accept that “good advice”, but that they’re looking at the proffered advice, identifying the inherent idiocies in it, and saying “Oh, hell no…”, which immediately sets the intellectual class into a tizzy, ‘cos they’re so much smarter than the average bear, they can’t possibly be wrong…
It’s not the ideas or that they’re being told to follow them, it’s that those ideas don’t work that’s the problem, and the fact that the intellectuals refuse to acknowledge or compensate for their errors.
I mean, it ain’t accidental that the intellectual class keeps falling for these ideological fads like communism or fascism; who was it, again, that made heroes of Hitler and Stalin both? Who made out like the North Vietnamese were saints, and Pol Pot a great guy…? Wasn’t the average blue-collar type, that’s for damn sure.
Kirk: in such matters, you should look at an encyclopedia, not a dictionary.
The thalamus is the gateway to the cortex. All the information to the cortex, whether from sense organs or from other parts of the nervous system (eg the cerebellum … or the hypothalamus) goes through the thalamus. The thalamus has no other role.
The hypothalamus, by contrast, does have an important role in emotional reactions. It’s been a long time since i studied this, and the textbooks were a bit fuzzy about it anyway, so i won’t say more, except that i do not see any other possible reason for ESR’s befuddlement.
Snorri, it’s English. You’re like a classical music expert trying to make sense of Jazz…
ESR basically coined a new usage, and it’s only clear from context what he meant by it. No idea how he came up with it, but I’d wager that there are few native speakers of English that wouldn’t get it.
You’re demanding consistency and sense from a language and people that basically follow other languages down dark alleys, hit them over the head, and then rifle their pockets for words and grammar.
Hell, that may well be the only place you’ll ever see the word used like that, but it’s pretty clear what he meant: Visceral and emotional objection to “intellectualism”.
Kirk: you should resist the urge of bullshitting.
Thank you Snorri – if I remember correctly (it is some years since I read it) that would be the 1912 essay (originally in Mind) that tries to deal with the case that evil acts are based on a knowledge problem – that the person does not know that they are doing evil things, Prichard arguing that they do know. Again, if I remember correctly (alas – that is a big “if” these days) Prichard goes on to argue that moral conduct is not really a matter of doing what is for one’s own happiness – for example that doing what is morally right can lead to one’s torment and death. The Aristotelian would reply to Prichard by saying that by “best interests” they mean best interests as-a-human-being, that even suffering and death can be in one’s best interests (can contribute to one’s “happiness” in the deeper sense of mental satisfaction), if they affirm what it is to be a human being – a person (even atheist Aristotelians such a Ayn Rand do seem to take this position).
So Aristotelians would reply to Prichard by saying – “even one’s own public humiliation spat on even by own’s own family and former friends, torture and painful death, can promote one’s happiness IN THE SENSE OF mental satisfaction – if (if) one dies knowing that one has done the right thing, that one has affirmed one’s existence as a human-being, as a person”.
One problem, of which Prichard (and Sir William David Ross) were well aware, is that the Ancient Greek word we translate as “happiness” does not quite mean that, at least not in the sense we tend to use the word “happiness” in English. So whether the Aristotelians are correct or whether Harold Prichard is correct, is clouded by this.
Later essays deal with other matters – for example I remember one from the 1930s (published in the same collection “Moral Obligation” that the 1912 essay is) on the Oxford philosopher T.H. Green.
T.H. Green believed himself to be answering Thomas Hobbes in political (and, to some extent, in moral) philosophy – but Harold Prichard tries to show (and I think successfully shows) that T.H. Green has really accepted many of the false assumptions of Thomas Hobbes – and that this makes the Political Philosophy position of T.H. Green, fatally flawed.
This is important – as, whether they know it or not, a lot of modern Western institutions proceed on the de facto assumption that T.H. Green’s position on Political Philosophy is correct, and Prichard (I believe) shows that T.H. Green’s position on these matters of Political Philosophy (leaving aside more general moral philosophy – although, yes, the matters are linked) is NOT correct.
Christian Thomists (followers of Thomas Aquinas – the Scholastic tradition, the “Schoolmen” and so on) are sometimes accused of “cheating” or of “trying to have their cake – and eat it as well”.
This is because of Heaven – the idea that one may be despised, abused, humiliated, tortured and killed in-this-life for behaving as a moral person, doing-the-right-thing – but then one goes to Heaven.
This is not open to an atheist Aristotelian – as was pointed out by Alexander of Aphrodisias, who argued that even if the soul died with the body (he did not commit himself on this position) moral agency (free will) and moral conduct remained the same.
So the atheist Aristotelian, such as Ayn Rand in modern times, faces a tough philosophical task – but not an impossible one.
However, to be fair to the Christian Aristotelians (the Thomists and others), they do say that natural law is the law of God – but that it would be exactly the same if God DID NOT EXIST.
So, philosophically, they are not really “cheating” or “trying to have their cake and eat it as well”.
There are also Christians who reject the concept of moral reason and natural moral law – and hold that things are “good” because God commands them, and “bad” because God forbids them (with God as some sort of Legislator – in the sense that Thomas Hobbes uses the term), – this position is sometimes attributed to Calvinists (and even to Martin Luther – and Dr Luther was certainly a Determinist, i.e. someone who denies moral agency) – this position is also, sometimes, claimed to be that of mainstream (Sunni) Islam.
But I do not want to be unfair to Calvinists and so on – after all such Scottish-American moral philosophers as James McCosh were in this religious tradition and denied (very strongly denied) that they had any such philosophical view – indeed stated, very clearly, that they opposed it.
James McCosh and Noah Porter were among the leading American moral philosophers of the 19th century – and they said, repeatedly, that they did not believe in these positions – neither the position that things are morally good or bad just because God says so, or the position that people can not really make moral choices (that what people do is predetermined at the start of the universe – that we can not do other than we do).
So to proceed on the assumption of “you are an active member of a Church based on Calvinism – so you must believe in X,Y,Z, in philosophy” would be unfair.
However, there are Calvinists (and others) who do take this philosophical position.
If asked (for example) “why are you preaching – if who is saved and who is damned was predetermined at the start of the universe?”, they would reply (and do reply) “because that I would be here preaching was also predetermined as the start of the universe – because everything was”.
There was a distinguished American theologian and philosopher back in the late 1700s (I believe his name was Johnathan Edwards – but I could be mistaken) who was asked to stop telling little children, in gory detail, the torments they would suffer in Hell – and that there was nothing they could do to prevent themselves going to Hell (and suffering these torments – the torments he was describing in loving detail) as it was predetermined that they would go to Hell. But he replied that he could not stop telling the children these things, as it was predetermined that he would say these things.
He was run out of town – but, he would argue, that this did not refute him. As, according to him, it was predetermined that he would be run out of town.
If it was Johnathan Edwards – it would have been early to mid 1700s, rather than late 1700s.
Another contender for the old (and, yes, possibly “too good to be true”) story is George Whitefield (or Whitfield – I have seen it spelt both ways).
Like Johnathan Edwards, George Whitefield was a Calvinist who went along with Predestination (although he did not stress Determinism as much as Edwards did – remember some people DENY that Predestination theologically means Determinism philosophically) and, like Edwards, was a strong supporter of slavery.
Indeed George Whitfield introduced slavery into Georgia – against the founding document of the colony (which forbad slavery).
On the other hand George Whitfield strongly preached against Wedgewood china (plates and so on) on the grounds that, a good Christian should reject such evil luxury. So slavery was good – but having nice plates (and cups and so on) was evil.
Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Josiah Wedgewood, the founder and owner of Wedgewood china, was known to be passionately opposed to slavery.
When people starting to leave the old South and go over the mountains into Tennessee – via the “Cumberland Gap” some of them left things behind “too heavy for the wagons over such rough ground” – things such as heavy furniture or, in some cases, the doctrine of Predestination – hence “Cumberland Presbyterians” (who reject Calvinist Predestination – and ended up rejecting slavery as well).
The “Free Will Baptists” were much the same – rejecting both Predestination (hence the name “free will”) and slavery. The created Hillsdale College up in Michigan – which lost so many former students in the Civil War. Hillsdale College is today famous for standing for liberty – rejecting government “student loans” and so on. They are “racist” because they were one of the first colleges to accept black people (and women) – but refuse to keep race (and sex) records, and to engage in the racial discrimination that today is, perversely, called “anti racism” by the Collectivist rulers.
One last point – by a weird coincidence two of the leading Anti Determinists of the 1700s had the same name – Samuel Johnson.
There was the famous British “Dr Johnson” – but there was also (at much the same time) an American Samuel Johnson – a leading Anglican theologian, who was very well known at the time.
Eastern Tennessee (for example the 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts produced some remarkable members of Congress over the years, – but other places to) has been Republican since the Civil War – ditto some areas in Kentucky and Missouri (for example the area around Branson Missouri).
This is a problem for the people, the “intellectuals”, who say “the parties switched in the 1960s” – the parties did not switch, the Democrats carried on preaching racial politics and the Republicans carried on opposing it. What “switched” was which race the Democrats supported – they went from being pro white to anti white, but that is still racial politics. It is still GROUP rights, as opposed to INDIVIDUAL rights (the latter being what matters in Eastern Tennessee and other such places).
@snorri no doubt you are right about the thalamus verses the hypothalamus, but you can’t seriously tell me that a minor thing like that is the ONLY thing you got out of this essay? I’m sure a minor mistake is a bit annoying and distracting but you evidently understood what he was driving at, and misnaming a concept doesn’t invalidate it. Perhaps the most important point is one that the so called “intellectuals” like to blur a lot — that there are lots of different categories of “intellectuals” and each should be validated on their own terms.
It is the pseudo intellectuals who like to demand the imprimatur of true intellectuals. It is the demand that we called “Dr. Jill Biden” a doctor to give her the halo of excellence that a person with a PhD in Biology or a medical MD deserves. When all she did was write some meaningless bullshit waffle about education and community college retention that has no measurable basis in impiracism, and is instead a bunch of meaningless politically correct shiboleths..
Just because Physics and Social Science are both in the Science department at a university doesn’t mean we should project the extraordinary reliability and repeatability of the laws of Physics and conclude the the “laws” of Social Science are equally reliable and repeatable.
Or, as I like to say, just because you wear a lab coat doesn’t mean we should believe everything your say. The foundation of science is skepticism not credulity.
Fraser: strictly speaking, i did not say that that is all what i got out of the essay, i said that that is what stands out… đ
The problem is, the reference to the thalamus will be understood only by people who, like me, know that ESR was mistaken. That is why it is not a minor point.
Paul: Thank you for a most interesting discussion of Prichard, followed up by other interesting stuff.
Just a couple of historical notes:
Of course, it was Sokrates and the Stoics who first claimed that human error is always caused by ignorance.
William of Ockham was one of such Christians, apparently.
But watch out, because William’s argument was that, if God must always follow the Natural Law, then God does not have freedom of the will. Therefore, God must God-self be the author of the Natural Law.
Thank you Snorri.
The, mainstream, Christian would argue that God is good – and, therefore, chooses to do what is good. Rather than the “voluntarist” position that whatever God does is, by definition, good. But then you know this – and, yes, it only solves part of the problem (not all of it).
As for the American Democrats – I can not think of a time when I would have supported them in the South, as they always supported racial-group politics which I oppose.
So much for the “switching” of the parties.
On the Confederacy itself – it supported Gun Control, for blacks, censorship (practiced, in Slave States, long BEFORE the Civil War) and it had higher and more Progressive (graduated) taxation than the Union, and more state control of industry and commerce.
The Democrat KKK, after the war, detested “capitalists” and carried on supporting all sorts of government regulations.
The more that one examines the facts-on-the-ground – the more the pet theory of the “intellectuals” that “the parties switched” falls apart.