| « | Thoughts On Elections Near And Far |
»
|
|
Monday, September 20, 2004
Stupid Or Evil?
January 6, 2004
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of the larger West Coast dailies, has printed a guest editorial by one Neal Sparkman that promises to stir a lot of mud into the national political discourse. In this remarkably bilious and self-exalting piece, Mr. Sparkman opines that the reason for President Bush’s generally high popularity is that Americans are stupid:
It’s not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren’t the people I’m referring to. The people I’m referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They’re perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don’t have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all—far above all—they don’t think.
Well, it’s a step up from evil, which is left-liberals’ other explanation for conservative sympathies. But your Curmudgeon, who hasn’t encountered a liberal capable of resisting the temptation to demonize, psychologize, or denigrate conservatives in twenty years, finds it more than merely amusing.
Argument about anything is premised upon the supremacy of facts and logic, measured against a common, honorable standard of evaluation. Whether a fact is brought into play by Albert Einstein or the village idiot is supposed to make no difference. If it is verifiable and relevant, it must be admitted on an equal plane with all other facts. Whether a skein of implication is proposed by Mother Teresa or Satan, honor requires that we ignore its provenance and judge it according to its logical soundness and predictive accuracy.
Sparkman, who obviously dislikes President Bush’s policies, though he never says which ones or why, would prefer that we invert that scheme and place the identities, or more precisely the allegiances, of arguers above the objective merits of their arguments. If you approve of Bush Administration policies, then by Sparkman’s rubric you cannot possibly have an honorable, rationally defensible reason for doing so. You must be either stupid or evil.
What does Neal Sparkman make of George Will and William F. Buckley? Of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams? Of Frank Gaffney and Victor Davis Hanson? Surely he wouldn’t call them stupid. Indeed, if we judge by the diatribe linked above, they could give him cards and spades and still beat him hollow in any contest of intellect, erudition, or eloquence. So they must be evil.
Your Curmudgeon, himself no intellectual slouch, must be evil too. Sigh. How late in life we learn these things.
Were they judged solely on their immediate soundness, Sparkman’s contentions could simply be dismissed. But let’s not be hasty. If this is to be the new left-liberal paradigm for countering the arguments of conservatives—and clearly, the Post-Intelligencer thinks it worthy of consideration at the least—it has powerful implications for the immediate future, and possibly for the longer term too.
For quite some time, left-liberals have preened themselves for their moral superiority—what Thomas Sowell calls their “vision of differential rectitude”—to those who disagree with them. On the strength of that assumed superiority, they have deemed themselves exempt from the requirements for courteous persuasion, for demonstrable results, even for candid presentation of their intentions to us benighted ones. Instead, they’ve used political power of several forms to impose their preferences on the country, have retroactively revised their goals when they failed to meet the ones they originally stated, and have increasingly turned to stealth to get their way. They have disdained to stand to account for any failure, be it practical or moral. They have shielded those of their own who’ve demonstrably exploited political privilege for personal gain, though they’ve condemned the ordinary self-interest of private citizens and have done all they could to thwart it.
Today, the consequences of the highest-profile left-liberal policies have become too obvious to conceal. The tide of sentiment against them has propelled their opponents to political dominance. But increasingly often, left-liberals disdain to argue or explain. Instead, in Sparkman’s fashion, they dismiss their opponents as either stupid or evil.
How many arguments would you expect to win with tactics like those? How many converts to your convictions would you reap, if you started every pitch by castigating your targets?
Though your Curmudgeon disbelieves in left-liberal doctrines, he believes strongly that they should be argued for—that men of wit and knowledge should undertake to defend them with all the logic and evidence they can muster. This is important precisely because they are opposed to the ideas of freedom, the free market, inviolable individual rights to life and property, and a system of justice founded on objective law, objective evidence, and unbending rules of procedure. We must know how to defend these things logically. If we’re never required to do that, we will forget why they’re important, and will fail to do them justice when they’re attacked by force or guile.
There is this as well: the Sparkman paradigm, which accuses conservatives of sealing themselves off from facts and theses that contradict their beliefs, whether by intention or incapacity, actually puts left-liberals in far greater danger of that pitfall. It is not possible to dismiss one’s opponents as either stupid or evil, yet still grapple with their contentions in full sincerity. If we on the Right are correct and the left-liberals are wrong—it doesn’t matter about what—the left-liberals will never learn it.
It’s far better to have intelligent, well-informed opponents than stupid or ignorant ones. You have a chance of learning something from the former, and they have a chance of learning something from you. It’s far better to have opponents you respect, who respect you in equal measure, than contemptible ones who express only contempt for you. Respect is a prerequisite for every constructive form of human interaction. If not given, it cannot be returned.
Comments
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
