Ungleichschaltung

The counter-counterculuture—as much a product of Vietnam and its times as the counterculture itself was—could only recognize threats from a single direction, the left. It had nothing to say about a war that the Republican Party couldn’t manage; it had nothing to say about the housing crises, beyond reflexively fingering some kind of ’60s-style racial agenda; and it had nothing to say about the Great Recession. It still has nothing to say about any of these things, and it broadcasts that “nothing” every day of the week on Rush Limbaugh’s airwaves and through the cable signals that carry Fox News.

The counter-counterculture was never conservative, although by virtue of its opposition to the counterculture it wound up occupying the space that prudent conservatives otherwise might have occupied. The counter-counterculture was not all bad, just as the counterculture itself wasn’t. But neither has any relevance to the strategic and economic problems facing the country today.

Arnold Kling:
What I am suggesting is that libertarians, rather than defining ourselves in terms of what we believe is right, could instead define ourselves in terms of how one should arrive at beliefs about what is right. Our goal should be to rely as much as possible on logic and as little as possible on heuristic biases. If using these methods leads to the conclusions that are traditionally libertarian, fine. If not, then we should change our conclusions, not our methods.

Kling cites a study that concludes that libertarians are slightly more likely than liberals and somewhat more likely than conservatives to rely on logic and inquiry (rather than intuition and heuristics) in making their decisions.

Some notes on his column:

  • Logic alone does not give us the semantics of the world; at most, it gives us the syntax (one part of the grammar) of rational belief structures. Logic does enable us to see what bundles of beliefs are compossible or incompossible.
  • If our rational belief support structures are not to be circular and cannot be infinite, then there will necessarily be some propositions we accept directly from sense perception or intuition, i.e. without rational support from another belief. These beliefs are what Alvin Plantinga calls ‘basic beliefs’. Logic doesn’t help in acquiring these beliefs, only in determining which ultimately supported beliefs are consistent with the basic beliefs.
  • The way lies open to folks of all political persuasions to follow Kling’s advice and rely less on heuristics and more on logic; they will nonetheless start from different basic beliefs and (by rational means) arrive at different conclusions. In fact, one hopes that the best proponents of each of the basic political stances already do this.
  • Overcoming bias is a worthy goal, but logic alone can’t do it. It takes a good deal of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practice to spot intuitions sneaking into a position or argument as presuppositions and premises.
  • Suppose a person dutifully employing logic arrives at the conclusion that personal liberty and representative government have more bad consequences than good; this person is by Kling’s definition a methodological libertarian, but it seems odd to call him a libertarian.
“As recently as the 1950s, the dominant culture—as expressed in movies, TV shows, music, theater, and news media—was by and for adults. By the 1960s, that had changed, and our culture became a youth culture, one in which the dominant trends are determined by what appeals to teenagers. The youth culture takes its direction from the preferences of young people who are isolated from the responsibilities of the adult world, get status and recognition from one another, and thus are highly manipulable.”

“Alternative Education”, by philo at The View from Alexandria

preciseandtowering (via bluedollar):

Usefulness comes not from pursuing it, but from patiently gathering enough of a reservoir of material so that one has the quirky bit of knowledge about practices of iconography, or Catholic mysticism, or Reformed Christology, or ninteenth-century missions theory, or whatever, that turns out to be the key to unlocking the problem which someone offers. The academic theologian becomes useful to the church and the world by reading widely, and remembering broadly, across the tradition, by being and becoming a catalogue of what has been done before (and by being plausibly imaginative in how the tradition might be used to address contemporary problems.)

— On discovering (again) the utility of theology | Steve Holmes @ Shored Fragments

ayjay:

I suspect — I can only guess — that Price’s environment is one in which the narrow-minded anti-intellectualism of Christianity is just part of the epistemic furniture, one of those things that Everyone Knows, in precisely the same way that the white people I grew up among simply knew that Negroes were shiftless and lazy. I find two things especially noteworthy about these things that Everyone Knows: first, they tend to be really nasty-minded; and second, they tend to be equally tidy-minded — that is, they make the world a neat, simple place in which there are ever so many people one needn’t take seriously, or treat with anything other than immediately reflexive contempt, because one knows in advance of any particular encounter exactly what they’re like.

— Adventures in Generalization | The American Conservative

ayjay (via pegobry):

I can personally attest that, despite the liberal bias, I was happy in academe. Another Republican-leaning faculty colleague liked to point out that a conservative student was likely to get a better education than a liberal one. Having one’s worldview challenged—rather than affirmed—strengthens one’s ability to think clearly and critically.

Similarly, conservative faculty members learn to be polite and rigorous in defending their perspectives. And while the loudest voices on the campus tend to be the most extreme and intolerant, there are also many liberal faculty members who respect other viewpoints.

So here’s my advice to conservatives and libertarians in academe. Don’t think of yourself as a victim, and don’t use ideological bias as an excuse to stop trying. In my experience, academe is very much a meritocracy despite its liberal bias. It’s OK to express your views, but be nice about it. Some liberals on campus—like the hostile crowd at the D’Souza talk I attended—may choose to abandon civility. You will drive them crazy if you don’t.

— Sita Slavov, “Surviving Academe’s Liberal Bias” (The Conversation - The Chronicle of Higher Education)

mwfrost:

Corsair.

I have to admit that I have a thing for this plane.

Addendum to the foregoing post:

I agree that it is life’s work to recover and foster old virtues “by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence”. And as nature’s necessities recede from our lives, we have more room to cultivate virtue in a deliberate way. But I don’t think societies will cease to grow of themselves: we will will take elements of our culture and cement them into what we imagine are necessities. This may in part be another form of idolatry, but I also think that we humans require some form of limit or necessity or struggle against which or under which we define ourselves.

One possibility that worries me is that we are already fabricating notional necessities unthinkingly out of the structures of internet culture, and that these notional necessities will take the place of nature in enabling virtue to be molded unthinkingly. Perhaps the future does not compute, but I worry that it is instead in some sense being computed.