Political theory

Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus discusses the reliability of people’s beliefs about their own experiences. Her research suggests—and I think it’s borne out by daily experience—that they’re often not reliable at all. Further, notorious cases involving “recovered memories of abuse,” which she also discusses, demonstrate that expert intervention tends to make things worse. Experts are human like other people, and when they claim to bring memories back they are more likely constructing and implanting them.

These, I think, are all the same story:

• English 10-Year-Olds Taught about Condums, “Gay” Sex.
• U.N. Child Rights Committee Calls for Child Access to Contraceptives Without Parental Involvement.
• Psychiatric Association Debates Lifting Taboo on Pedophilia.
• Ontario Establishes Same-Sex Marriage as Human Right.

Among the claims Professor Bellesiles made in his Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture — a book once acclaimed and now thoroughly discredited — was that there was no significant market for guns in early America. Clayton Cramer, one of Bellesiles’ most effective debunkers, describes the results of a quick look at 18th and early 19th c. newspapers: you just can’t avoid the gun ads. As Cramer asks, why did the experts, many of them specialists in the period, who praised the book and gave Bellesiles the Bancroft Award get taken in so easily? As in the case of expert opinion on affirmative action, it’s enough to make you think that experts have collective interests — identical

Stanley Kurtz has a generally sensible discussion at NRO of the practical function of sexual taboos, that by defining what is fitting within sexual relations they make it possible to rely on such relations to be something definite and so make family life possible as a social institution. He then says:

I would rather accept some disruption in family stability than go back to the days when homosexuality itself was deeply tabooed. The increase in freedom and fairness is worth it.

An oddity of modern life is that experts run everything, nothing they do works, and obvious repeated failure makes no difference. Education and liturgy are everyday examples. Students learn nothing and act badly, people abandon the mass and faith, but no matter how bad things get nothing can be done. After all, the responsible way to deal with problems is to consult the experts, and the experts certainly aren’t going to make themselves the issue, so nothing can happen. The problem touches on basic philosophical questions. Today people regard formal objectivity, and not loyalty, tradition or faith, as the proper final standard for thought and action. That may seem rational, but it means people are stuck with whatever the experts tell them, no matter how mindless, because formal institutional objectivity requires them to treat expertise as knowledge. What grounds could they have for doing otherwise?

The relation between civilization and cultural revisionism is paradoxical. On the one hand, revisionism visibly contributes to a decline in civilizational standards — rising crime, declining standards of culture, and increasing crudity and violence in daily life. On the other hand, the most educated, cultured and prosperous places are the most revisionist. The moderately pro-family and pro-faith views of the Bush administration ally it at international conferences with the Muslim world and sometimes no one else — certainly not the Europeans or even American elites. So if you embrace cultural liberalism you’re on the way to becoming a barbarian, but if you don’t you’re probably one already. What can that mean? One possibility is that since cultural revisionism destroys social

How seriously should anyone take complaints that American society is “totalitarian”? After all, people here can mostly say and do what they want. Elections are free, the press uncensored, the police and courts comparatively honest and law-abiding, person and property generally secure. Education, religion and culture are as independent of outside control as their practitioners are willing to make them.

The statement thus seems too extreme to justify. Nonetheless, there is truth in it, at least as a matter of tendency. “Totalitarian” does not mean “extremely violent.” What it means is suggested by Mussolini’s statement that “everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.” The basic point of totalitarianism, then, is not that the state should use overwhelming brutality, it’s that the state by its very nature overwhelms opposition—that it is the supreme source and embodiment of everything spiritual and moral, so that opposition to it is illegitimate and even meaningless.

What does it mean that our society has officially rejected the notion of a common moral reality in which all participate? (See, e.g., Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”) Officially, it means that we’re free, democratic and progressive—we give everyone the right to establish his own values, make consent the basis for authority, and strive through the market, the provident state, and anti-discrimination rules to enable each to get what he chooses, as much and as equally as possible.

“Neoconservatism” is a contentious term, but it’s useful as a description of a movement that attempts to moderate and so stabilize liberal modernity. In particular, neoconservatism accepts both the modern aspiration to reform all things and bring them in line with clear universal principles, and the liberal choice of freedom, equality and efficiency as the principles that are to be made authoritative.

Philosophical pragmatism is mostly the habit of changing the subject if a line of thought makes one uncomfortable. It’s the collapse of the coherence theory of truth into a comfort theory of truth. Such a view can have the appearance of great reasonableness, of not wanting to take things too far. A consequence of the view though is that the
status quo becomes impregnable, because the comfort of the well-positioned becomes the criterion of reality. Rather than explore reality pragmatism has thinkers explore how they feel about things. If they don’t like them, they can then maneuver (with the aid of media people, publicists, and professional organizations) to make the positions that cause them discomfort impossible to assert.

What to do about AIDS in Africa? Easy, says a New York Times Op-Ed by Kati Marton of the International Woman’s Health Coalition. It’s mostly a disease of powerless and victimized women, so the answer is empowerment: female condoms and microbicides, and programs that train women how to resist sexual predators. Sex and disease are technical issues, the idea is, so where there are problems a technical fix—skills and resources—must be the answer. To the extent there are human problems they must all reduce to inequality, so egalitarian intervention must be the answer.

Current departures such as “gay marriage” are often defended as examples of the natural development of institutions with the times. To oppose them is said to be an arbitrary attempt to freeze social development at a particular point. Such claims don’t hold up. While it’s true that changing conceptions, interests, and ideals have repeatedly led to changes in institutions of all kinds, modern attempts at social and cultural reconstruction are quite different from past developments.

Some of the differences:

1. The extent of the changes intended. An attempt categorically to abolish sex roles as a legitimate principle of social organization is incomparably more radical than (for example) attempts by the Catholic Church to get rid of polygamy or divorce. It is more radical even than the Bolshevik attempt to get rid of private property—sex is more basic than money. The same could be said about multiculturalism, which in substance is the demand, backed by force of law, that all particular cultural standards be deprived of public authority, and so of necessity replaced comprehensively by rational universal standards devised by bureaucrats and experts and enforced by the state bureaucracy.

What is knowledge? The question has been supremely important in modern times. Before we could know about the world, it seemed to Bacon, Descartes and others, we should criticize our ways of knowing. Our investigations should free themselves of the things that lead to error. They should be exact and impersonal, based on logic and on observations that anyone could repeat with the proper training, equipment and care. They should be, in the modern sense, scientific.

Those aspirations have been borne out by success. By building on them modern natural science has vastly extended man’s knowledge and control of things. It hasn’t been all gain, however, because scientific standards are not as neutral as they look. By rigorously limiting what qualifies as knowledge they limit what can be known and therefore what can be viewed as real. To accept scientific standards as final is to prejudge the nature of the world. It is to permit only those things to exist that we can measure, manipulate, and know without regard to personal qualities or commitments.

Other ways to make the point I made in my most recent entry:

• The problem with “pluralism” is that it only applies to other beliefs. Pluralism itself must be accepted universally. It is therefore monist and not pluralist.
• It is inevitable that there is a plurality of fundamental beliefs. Today, as always, that situation must somehow be dealt with. “Pluralism” is the attempt to deal with it in a universally applicable way that solves the problem once and for all. The way it does that is by requiring each belief to recognize the equal truth of all other possible beliefs and so abolish itself as a belief. No belief that is permitted to vary is permitted to be fundamental to anything that matters. “Pluralism” is thus in fact the most antipluralistic of philosophies.