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Friday, July 06, 2007
Unforgiven
No, this won't be about the Clint Eastwood movie, though that deserves a special study of its own. Your Curmudgeon has been reflecting on his favorite fictions of all sorts, looking for the commonalities among them. Most recently he's been thinking about the late science-fiction writer James Blish.
Blish had a somewhat erratic career. His best novels -- A Case Of Conscience; The Frozen Year; VOR; Black Easter -- are among the very best in all of speculative fiction. His others are...somewhat less exalted. The common thread that runs through his standouts is a metaphysical premise, which for Blish was reinforced by his own sense for moral absolutes: Reality is what it is, despite your disapproval.
If you've been reading Eternity Road for any length of time, you're aware that your Curmudgeon shares that conviction, and what it implies. Indeed, it's the principal reason he's politically a libertarian and personally a conservative. But it's useful for other tasks as well.
When a person, an institution, or a nation relentlessly pursues a self-destructive course despite clear evidence of its lethality, one cannot help but ask why. We come equipped with a hard-wired desire to survive, which we propagate involuntarily into our organizations. Suicide is not unknown, of course, but mass suicide or a seeming penchant for it is inherently puzzling. How does a seemingly healthy man fasten upon a practice that's all but guaranteed to eventuate in his demise? How can any healthy man attach himself to an organization that promotes such a practice?
The answer involves a regress through all manner of arguments, sound and unsound, until one reaches the assumption beneath them: nothing is absolutely real unless I concede its reality. This is the negation of Blish's metaphysical premise.
The individualized version of this premise is called solipsism. The collective version, which is more prevalent in our time, is called social construction of reality. The sufferers blithely assume that by sheer power of their massed disapprovals, they can set aside the laws of the universe -- that those laws, like the ones passed by legislatures, can be overturned by an adequate majority in opposition to them.
This, as our British cousins would say, is not on. But one cannot argue against a bad premise, as premises are not formed by argument. One can only enumerate its consequences and hope the sufferer will infer his errors for himself.
The state of the world as we find it today suggests that the social-constructionists cling more tenaciously to their premise than any aggregation of its consequences can overturn. One needn't look far for examples:
- Anti-gun forces are dogged about their convictions despite the absolute correlation between gun-control laws and explosions of felonious crime.
- Open-borders advocates are staunch despite the enormous mass of statistics that demonstrate that illegal aliens are both an economic drain and a threat to civil order.
- Proponents of an expanded welfare state cannot be swayed by the repeated demonstration that all such -- reduced requirements for public support; subsidy of specific products; guaranteed annual incomes; public provision of housing, health care, or other services -- are followed by rapid growth of the beneficiary community and a reduction of its inclination to pay its own way.
- Gender-war feminists, most prominently those also behind unrestricted abortions, refuse to address the correlated declines in affected women's physical and mental health, their reduced ability to form stable relationships, their propensity toward miscarriages and barrenness, and the general diminution of respect for life.
- Drug Warriors efface all evidence that the anti-drug laws have actually fueled the use of and trade in the affected drugs.
- They who demand that Israel cede still more land, money, and perquisites to the "Palestinians" dismiss the consequences of previous gestures of that kind: accelerated anti-Israel violence coupled to demands for still greater concessions.
- They who advocate the accommodation of Islam in Western, Christian-Enlightenment societies refuse...no, excuse your Curmudgeon, please, that one is just too painfully bizarre, and anyway, you've read it here before.
These are just the ones that come immediately to mind. There are innumerable others.
The point is merely this: it's the metaphysics behind these perverse political demands that sustains them. A rational man, who concedes that evidence trumps theory, would agree to reconsider his position in the face of such overwhelming data. But rationality of that sort carries humility as an inseparable companion. The man of overweening pride, unwilling or unable to admit that he might have been wrong, will insist that the data are irrelevant, we didn't try hard enough, the right people haven't been put into power, and so forth. His arrogance absolutely forbids him to comtemplate the possibility that he's been wrong about the most fundamental matter of all: the objective nature of reality. The suggestion enrages him; it offends his sense of self-importance.
What brings this to mind this fine Friday morning? Mainly this passage, courtesy of The Smallest Minority:
Emotion is what wins arguments, and there is a tremendous amount of emotion among those fighting to reduce gun violence -- there always is when someone gets hurt or must go through the tragedies that we experience in this country as a result of gun violence....
That is important emotion, and it will do more for the argument for stronger gun laws than any facts or figures ever will.
...
We have to show legislators the human side of this issue, too, and force them to base their own decisions and policies off of that emotion...
The Gun Guys (actually the paid anti-gun, anti-freedom, activist Gonzo )
Email from June 26, 2007[There you have it. Just what we have been saying for years. The facts don't really matter. What matters is emotion. They know the facts don't support their agenda. The number of innocents dead, wounded, raped, and robbed is irrelevant as long as someone feels good about removing the tools of self defense from those victims. And they need to force legislators to base their decisions off of that same sick mindset.--Joe]
Joe Huffman's diagnosis is squarely on-target, but your Curmudgeon takes the matter one step further: What assumption permits these persons to hold to their faith in the supremacy of their frankly emotion-based conviction? Only the social-construction premise, embedding the supremacy of human will over the laws of nature, could possibly lie beneath it.
And only one imaginable response is possible:
There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, It’s horrible! — It’s not true! — How vicious and selfish! — saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not."Senor d’Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don’t agree with you!"
"If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."
"Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong."
"How do you know it?"
"I feel it. I don’t go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you’re heartless."
"Madame, when we’ll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I’m heartless enough to say that when you’ll scream, ‘But I didn’t know it!’ — you will not be forgiven."
[From another Curmudgeonly favorite: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.]
Have a nice day.
Comments
When I was in Israel in 1965-1967 I would buy used copies of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead (cost: 25 cents) put a small logo inside the cover and leave copies on buses, at restaurants, at school. Hundreds of copies over those years. It was my Johnny Appleseed phase of life. Two interesting things I observed.
The first was rather immediate: I never came across a previously planted copy with my hidden logo back in the used book stores. Whoever got the copy did not sell it.
The second observation came in the past few years when I read that Israel leads the world in patents and inventions per-capita.
I would like to think, that perhaps in my small way, I planted a few seeds of creativity, self-reliance, and dedication to objective reality that helped foster some of the inventive Israeli industry.
I met her once and the first thing that you notice is that she had an accent heavier than Maria Ouspenskaya.
Posted by bernie on 07/06/2007 at 11:38 AMYou have put words to the feelings of unease I have with the pro-choice movement.
I have often found it hard to reconcile my libertarian leanings with my unease.How can we have respect for human life when it is so easy to legally kill someone innocent of any crimes and transgressions?
It reminds me of those I have met that grew up under a communist regime’s authority. No respect for life. People are just bodies without souls. I knew two women that grew up in the Soviet Union and while they were full time students(looking to be doctors), they were also willing to take money for sex on a very casual basis. Not professionals. They just had no respect for themselves as an individual. They were just a body and if someone wanted to use “it”, who were they to get in the way. And this was a very common mindset amongst their peers. Horrifying.
Great post, Curmudgeon.
Posted by Jim Sullivan on 07/06/2007 at 07:57 PMEmotion is what wins arguments...funny, but I find that phrase about as horrifying as Endlösung. They come from the same Weltanschuung (I’m sparing you any more German here). Prof. Carroll Quigley said something about the Third Reich and the Japanese militarists as the last great push of ancient mystical notions against the Enlightenment, or words to that effect.
“Social construction of reality”. Indeed, by another name, that’s what the Aztecs were working under when they cut the beating hearts out of living human beings. One of Rand’s many achievements was to remind people that a mystical Marxist would do the same, in the name of “the greater good.”
Posted by Wahrheit on 07/06/2007 at 08:06 PM
