Back Off Man, We're Scientists
Rich Lowry (praise be upon him), has a good column on liberalism's "reality problem." He writes about how liberals sold Obamacare as if it were simply the product of Cartesian logic, science, and math. The wonky architects of the Affordable Care Act were like vulcans or Mentats -- devoid of ideological, emotional, or idealistic delusions -- who had simply deduced an irrefutably superior way to organize health care in this country that would expand access, reduce costs, and create nothing but winners as far as the eye can see. Lowry writes:
The erstwhile reality-based community is having a tough time of it lately, though. Most infamously, Obamacare is foundering on the flagrant deceptions used to sell it, exposed every day by the workings of the law in reality.
Many liberals still don't want to acknowledge the rather straightforward fact that if you mandate more insurance benefits in the so-called Affordable Care Act, insurance will cost more. QED. You might be able to cushion the cost increase for some people with subsidies, but not for everyone, and the underlying insurance is still more—not less—expensive.
Now, I find this all interesting not just because angels learn to write by trying to emulate Lowry's columns ("Ah, I get it now. It's Christmas-bonus season at National Review!" -- The Couch), but also because I happened to write two books that dealt with liberalism's pose as nothing more than the "best practices" as deduced by "the experts."
In the Tyranny of Clichés I argued at some length that liberals use the language of empiricism (and common sense and pragmatism) in order to sell a deeply ideological agenda. Using the language of "pragmatism" they logic chop any open/opposing ideological commitments as if they were utterly irrational while camouflaging liberal ideological commitments in seemingly empirical language. As I wrote: "liberals and other progressives hold it as a bedrock article of ideological faith that they are not ideological. In short:Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues don when they want to demonize competing ideologies." Of course, I've made this same point about 7 trillion times in this "news"letter and elsewhere, in part because this point is always relevant when you have a deeply ideological president going around insisting he's not a very ideological person.
I'm reminded of an episode of Parks and Recreation -- back when it was reliably funny -- in which we learn the town of Pawnee, Indiana, is not only "The First in Friendship and Fourth in Obesity," but also the home of a bizarre cult that worships an alien-beast God known as Zorp. In the 1970s the cult briefly controlled the city, but these days the aging cultists in their Dockers and flannel shirts aren't much of a threat. Every now and then they gather in the city's main park to await the arrival of Zorp, who they are sure will -- this time! -- destroy the planet and leave it a slag heap. (At these gatherings, Ron Swanson (who is awesome) sells the cultists handcrafted flutes at wildly exorbitant prices. The cultists think it's hilarious and that Swanson is a sucker because he accepts checks. After all, Zorp is coming and he's going to melt the whole planet tonight.)
Anyway, I'm reminded of it because the cultists had one brilliant insight. They called themselves the "Reasonablists." Their thinking was that this would immunize them from criticism, because nobody wants to seem unreasonable or against reason.
Hail Sciency-ness
In Liberal Fascism, I wrote at some length about a guy named Georges Sorel, a largely forgotten intellectual who has been credited with being the intellectual godfather of both Leninism and Italian fascism, largely through his work on syndicalism (which we won't be discussing today, save in the opening sentence below). I write:
"Scientific" Marxism simply asserted that it was scientific and lots of educated fools bought it, at least for a while. But Sorel recognized that "scientific" Marxism was no more scientific than the time machine I invented out of a refrigerator box when I was seven years old. The Marxists insisted that dialectical materialism was an objective fact, confirmed by science; I insisted that the tinfoil-wrapped salad tongs harnessed cosmic rays to bend the space-time continuum. Sorel's genius was to recognize that in the post-Enlightenment world, science had taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition. The important thing was to create the myth that science was on the side of revolution, actually proving it rationally was an afterthought. During the Dark Ages, alchemists grew in power so long as the king believed in the myth of transmogrification, and in the 19th and 20th centuries left-wing revolutionaries grew in power so long as the masses believed in the myth of dialectical materialism.
This is a hard thing for some to hear, but science operates as magic for most of us. Most of us don't really know how things like electricity, copy machines, computers, medicine, and rising-crust pizza actually work. We're just told that scientists worked it out and we believe it because that stuff works. I open up my laptop and it lights up (I'm talking about my portable computer, sickos). But Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law still holds true: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Since the Enlightenment, lots of people have been ensorcelled by science-sounding abracadabra words, believing they've actually been reasoned with. See, for instance, Scientology or the aforementioned Reasonablists. Or consider what longtime readers know to be my favorite line from Voegelin: For the Marxist, "Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come."
The Utopian-Based Community
So it is with liberalism. I'm not saying it's a crazy space-cult. John Podesta isn't a Zorp-worshipper. The Atari Democratsdidn't take Space Invaders literally. Still, inherent in mainstream wonky liberalism is a utopian, quasi-religious idea masquerading as an empirical conviction.
So as Aristotle famously said, "We need to get back to Rich Lowry to really understand this." In his infinite wisdom,hired me writes:
It was magic talk masquerading as science talk. The belief that with the right experts -- or sorcerers -- in charge All Good Things will go together is no less utopian than the cults of Marxism, Reasonableism, or Thusla Doomism. Sure, liberalism's agenda is more reasonable and laudatory. But at its core is the same faulty assumption that this life can be made perfect. And I should say, in and of itself, belief in the perfectability of this life isn't all that dangerous. The problem is that such impulses often come in a bundle. That's why liberals tend to assume that conservatives have evil motives. Our refusal to get with the program, liberals assume, stems from a conscious desire to deny others the happiness and access to the perfect world available to us with optimal policies. In other words, it's not just that liberals want to immanentize the eschaton; liberals think it's the collective task of conservatives to keep the eschaton from being immanentized (see this excellent piece by Jim Pethokoukis on how income inequality is becoming the new climate change, where dissenting heretics must be silenced, not merely argued with).
Obama, the famous "non-ideologue," at least occasionally reveals the political religion lurking beneath the surface, as when he insists that we can create a kingdom of heaven on Earth. But ultimately, he has the same liberal blinders on.
I'm reminded of an episode of Parks and Recreation -- back when it was reliably funny -- in which we learn the town of Pawnee, Indiana, is not only "The First in Friendship and Fourth in Obesity," but also the home of a bizarre cult that worships an alien-beast God known as Zorp. In the 1970s the cult briefly controlled the city, but these days the aging cultists in their Dockers and flannel shirts aren't much of a threat. Every now and then they gather in the city's main park to await the arrival of Zorp, who they are sure will -- this time! -- destroy the planet and leave it a slag heap. (At these gatherings, Ron Swanson (who is awesome) sells the cultists handcrafted flutes at wildly exorbitant prices. The cultists think it's hilarious and that Swanson is a sucker because he accepts checks. After all, Zorp is coming and he's going to melt the whole planet tonight.)
Anyway, I'm reminded of it because the cultists had one brilliant insight. They called themselves the "Reasonablists." Their thinking was that this would immunize them from criticism, because nobody wants to seem unreasonable or against reason.
Hail Sciency-ness
In Liberal Fascism, I wrote at some length about a guy named Georges Sorel, a largely forgotten intellectual who has been credited with being the intellectual godfather of both Leninism and Italian fascism, largely through his work on syndicalism (which we won't be discussing today, save in the opening sentence below). I write:
Syndicalism informed corporatist theory by arguing that society could be divided by professional sectors of the economy, an idea that deeply influenced the New Deals of both FDR and Hitler. But Sorel's greatest contribution to the left—and Mussolini in particular—lay elsewhere: in his concept of "myths," which he defined as "artificial combinations invented to give the appearance of reality to hopes that inspire men in their present activity." For Sorel, the Second Coming of Christ was a quintessential myth because its underlying message—Jesus is coming, look busy—was crucial for organizing men in desirable ways. . . .
Even more impressive was Sorel's application of the idea of myth to Marxism itself. Again, Sorel held that Marxist prophecy didn't need to be true. People just needed tothink it was true. Even at the turn of the last century it was becoming obvious that Marxism as social science didn't make a whole lot of sense. Taken literally, Marx'sDas Kapital, according to Sorel, had little merit. But, Sorel asked, what if Marx's nonsensicalness was actually intended? If you looked at "this apocalyptic text . . . as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness, it . . . is a good illustration of the principle on which Marx believed he should base the rules of the socialist action of the proletariat." In other words, Marx should be read as a prophet, not as a policy wonk. That way the masses would absorb Marxism unquestioningly as a religious dogma.
"Scientific" Marxism simply asserted that it was scientific and lots of educated fools bought it, at least for a while. But Sorel recognized that "scientific" Marxism was no more scientific than the time machine I invented out of a refrigerator box when I was seven years old. The Marxists insisted that dialectical materialism was an objective fact, confirmed by science; I insisted that the tinfoil-wrapped salad tongs harnessed cosmic rays to bend the space-time continuum. Sorel's genius was to recognize that in the post-Enlightenment world, science had taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition. The important thing was to create the myth that science was on the side of revolution, actually proving it rationally was an afterthought. During the Dark Ages, alchemists grew in power so long as the king believed in the myth of transmogrification, and in the 19th and 20th centuries left-wing revolutionaries grew in power so long as the masses believed in the myth of dialectical materialism.
This is a hard thing for some to hear, but science operates as magic for most of us. Most of us don't really know how things like electricity, copy machines, computers, medicine, and rising-crust pizza actually work. We're just told that scientists worked it out and we believe it because that stuff works. I open up my laptop and it lights up (I'm talking about my portable computer, sickos). But Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law still holds true: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Since the Enlightenment, lots of people have been ensorcelled by science-sounding abracadabra words, believing they've actually been reasoned with. See, for instance, Scientology or the aforementioned Reasonablists. Or consider what longtime readers know to be my favorite line from Voegelin: For the Marxist, "Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come."
So it is with liberalism. I'm not saying it's a crazy space-cult. John Podesta isn't a Zorp-worshipper. The Atari Democratsdidn't take Space Invaders literally. Still, inherent in mainstream wonky liberalism is a utopian, quasi-religious idea masquerading as an empirical conviction.
So as Aristotle famously said, "We need to get back to Rich Lowry to really understand this." In his infinite wisdom,
Every side in a political argument tends to gild the lily, but the acknowledgment of any downside is particularly devastating to liberal presumptions. Liberals are inherently activists on domestic policy, and to make the strongest possible case for action, you need certainty not nuance, cost-free benefits not painful trade-offs, blissful promises not unintended consequences.I agree that everybody tends to "gild the lily" in favor of their preferred policies. But inherent to conservatism is the understanding that nothing in this life is all upside. To govern is to choose. Every policy is a trade-off. Every gain comes at a loss -- somewhere. This core understanding explains why conservatism is more empirical than liberalism, more "reality based." That's because at the heart of mainstream liberalism is the belief that, with the right application of intellect and data, experts (i.e. liberals) can create perfect policies that are good for everyone and everything, not just as a matter of "social justice" but of objective analysis. In the 1990s Bill Clinton used to insist that any suggestion of a trade-off was a "false choice." X never has to come at the expense of Y. Al Gore used to talk about his climate proposals as if there was no downside to them at all. It was broken-window fallacies for as far as the eye could see.
Consider the minimum wage. Rarely do liberals truly grapple with the possibility—supported by some, but not all research—that it suppresses employment. If they did, they would be more cautious about advocating a higher minimum wage in a soft job market and less scornful of opponents.
It was magic talk masquerading as science talk. The belief that with the right experts -- or sorcerers -- in charge All Good Things will go together is no less utopian than the cults of Marxism, Reasonableism, or Thusla Doomism. Sure, liberalism's agenda is more reasonable and laudatory. But at its core is the same faulty assumption that this life can be made perfect. And I should say, in and of itself, belief in the perfectability of this life isn't all that dangerous. The problem is that such impulses often come in a bundle. That's why liberals tend to assume that conservatives have evil motives. Our refusal to get with the program, liberals assume, stems from a conscious desire to deny others the happiness and access to the perfect world available to us with optimal policies. In other words, it's not just that liberals want to immanentize the eschaton; liberals think it's the collective task of conservatives to keep the eschaton from being immanentized (see this excellent piece by Jim Pethokoukis on how income inequality is becoming the new climate change, where dissenting heretics must be silenced, not merely argued with).
Obama, the famous "non-ideologue," at least occasionally reveals the political religion lurking beneath the surface, as when he insists that we can create a kingdom of heaven on Earth. But ultimately, he has the same liberal blinders on.
No comments:
Post a Comment