Monday, October 08, 2018

The Left, Reason, Disagreement, And Group Interest

When you see everything in terms of power and group interest, members of your own group disagreeing with you becomes a puzzle. The leftier left also has a tendency to irrationalize...well...everything*...but especially dissent from its doctrines. I'm a white dude, so my rejection of leftist doctrines is the effect of...somethingorother...for whatever values of somethingorother. It doesn't matter that much..."white privilege" is one flavor of the moment. "Male privilege" is another, as is "patriarchy." Or whatever. The point is to reduce rational, purposive belief and action to the results of mechanism or something similar. So, faced with, e.g., women who don't toe the party line on Kavanaugh, they have to generate some kind of psychobabble or sociobabble to explain away what is, in fact, a not-at-all-puzzling phenomenon. Why did Republican women disagree with the progressive line on Kavanaugh? Well, for one thing, the evidence rationally underdetermined theory-choice as between (a) Ford's account is true and (b) Kavanaugh's account is true. For another, Republican women probably come to the problem with a different set of beliefs and values. For example, they're probably a lot less likely to think in terms of advancing the interests of women as a group. Those differences might themselves require explanation, but that doesn't seem to mean they don't constitute a partial explanation for the phenomenon in question.



*This is really the crux of my disagreement with the lefty-left: they are overly-fond of deflationary, irrationalist explanations of belief and action. Of course such explanations have an important role to play in our overall accounts of belief and action. But the lefty-left has a preference that draws them toward explanations that completely wipe out rationality and autonomy. Even though I often think that the roles of reason and autonomy might be fairly small, there is, I think, all the difference in the world between thinking that we're only a little bit free and rational and thinking that we never are. To believe the latter is to just fall right off the cliff, IMO.

3 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

Do you have any statistics on who the "leftier left" is? Total number? Where they are? (Eg. all in universities publishing in journals that no one else reads?)

Much, but not all, of your complaints about the left on this blog come off as nutpicking: hey look, another idiot paper by someone I never heard of published in a journal I never heard of either.

Yes, this stuff is a problem. But it is a problem in academia, not society as a whole. Which is not to say that it doesn't affect society as a whole, too: but one more idiot paper will not prove anything about it.
A more convincing argument is about trans-women in sports. That is where the biological difference between men and women actually matters.

12:44 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is a problem society wide. Lots of kids go to college. Presumably they learn things there. They then take that knowledge into the world. This is how we get progressive monoculture in silicon valley and media. This was in the NYT. It's not like it was published in Proceedings of East Anglia Knitters Circle. Our society is based in radical atomic individualism. You can't have primacy of group in that system. It is fundamentally incompatible, like driving on the left side of the road not in the UK.

10:57 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I agree with Anon, PM...but you know that.

I *hope* I'm nit-picking. In fact, part of me hopes that I'm just nuts and all this really is a tempest in a teapot, and nobody even remembers it five years from now.

But that's just not gonna happen, unfortunately.

6:24 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home