House of Eratosthenes

Somewhere along the line, liberals and conservatives start talking past each other, each side expressing thoughts that are doomed, well before launch, from ever being received as intended. And these days I see it happens fairly early in any given exchange. We’ve got quite a few people walking around among us who say “Nothing ever comes of it, no minds are changed, don’t even start because it just pisses everyone off.” The command ends with a dangling preposition, but there may be something to it anyway.

But of course, we have President Obama, the end result of chanting “hope!” and “change!” — and not discussing anything. So I think it’s fair to say we’ve given don’t-discuss-it a good, fair try, and that doesn’t yield success either.

Anyway, it seems to me from all I’ve been hearing and reading that the point where liberals and conservatives no longer understand each other, has something to do with truth. As in, investigations (video auto-plays) (hat tip to William Teach at Pirate’s Cove):

[House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday on “State of the Union” that she did not accept that the videos — which have rocked the social conservative movement this summer — were accurate. She said she was concerned by the undercover filming by the Center for Medical Progress, which produced the edited clips.

“I think they should be investigated as to how they obtained those and doctored those and had them be accepted as something that was an indictment against Planned Parenthood. Because that’s not true,” she said.

I think of “investigation” the way Nancy Pelosi wants me to think of it, as an effort to get to the truth; but it is clear, from these remarks, that she does not think of it that way because she already knows what truth is. “Investigation,” therefore, has to mean something in her world that is a lot closer to the meaning our political leadership generally has in mind: Theater. Far from any sort of effort to get to anything at all, it has more to do with talking than listening.

Here and there I’ve opined about the divisions between people who work according to process, versus those who place weight on the outcome of an effort; like here, here and here. The distinction has lately begun to consume me, perhaps because over the last few years I’ve been forced to evaluate it from all sides. It’s hardly a liberal/conservative thing, doesn’t start out that way anyhow. Some people go all day long, then all year long, never really learning anything, never being forced to have their minds changed about anything. And so they turn their whole lives into a sort of choreography, which is what I see the Congresswoman doing here. It’s really quite amazing when you think about it — here she is in mid-sentence talking about finding out what the truth is, and she already “knows.”

We saw the same thing with “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” There are many other such examples. And yes, it does seem to settle into the split between conservatives and liberals. I see it in the behavior. Liberals say to conservatives, “That’s not true” and the conservative, quite visibly, loses momentum. As if to say “It’s not? Maybe it’s not. Where did you hear it’s not? What is the truth of the matter?” And this has been observed, understood, morphed into a new strategy. I’ve caught a few of them doing it. They’ll say “That’s not true!” and sometimes I will make a point of questioning the questioning, without losing any momentum. This is enlightening. Very often, it turns out they have no basis whatsoever for saying the earlier statement was not true.

It is as if someone herded them into a big auditorium, and told them “Look, no matter what it is, just tell the conservatives it isn’t true. It’s like hitting a shark on the nose; it works if you do it right, and hey, it’s your only shot.” And this defines the whole fragile relationship between liberals and truth: It is a fair-weather friendship, always contaminated, and that’s at best. This sentiment of “Let’s just see if we can get away with it” is always lingering, in there, somewhere.

Conservatives telling liberals something is not true, on the other hand, usually is not like that. And the liberal reaction is different too. As a strategy, “just say it isn’t true and see what happens” wouldn’t work with liberals. They don’t care. Their reaction is “You’re a conservative, who are you to say what’s true?” This gets back into John Hawkins’ observed feedback loop:

Liberalism creates a feedback loop. It is usually impossible for a non-liberal to change a liberal’s mind about political issues because liberalism works like so: only liberals are credible sources of information. How do you know someone’s liberal? He espouses liberal doctrine. So, no matter how plausible what you say may be, it will be ignored if you’re not a liberal and if you are a liberal, of course, you probably agree with liberal views. This sort of close-mindedness makes liberals nearly impervious to any information that might undermine their beliefs.

I haven’t got what it takes to be a liberal recruit, let alone a full-fledged one prowling the pages of Facebook, trying to spread the anti-gospels. I would be required to believe that liberalism is a pursuit of goodness and human progress, it is in mid-stride trying to eradicate war, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, blight, et al. Also, trying to achieve total equality. It’s at the “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet” stage with all of those. So far, so good; I have a lot of projects like that. But also, I would be charged with the duty of deflecting and ignoring all undertones of uncertainty, from outside as well as within. It doesn’t work for me, because if I’m not done with applying a method, and have no results to show, then how do I know the method is working?

Thus it is proven: Liberals do not think, at least, not the way normal people think. Here I have to once again ponder an unsavory thought, that their ideas are different because their notions of truth are different, and their notions of truth are different because they’ve simply never had to reckon with what truth is. They are the little kids who never got busted for telling a lie, all…uh…up of which grown.

“….They are the little kids who never got busted for telling a lie.”
OR smacked on the ass, RIGHT THERE at the market check out line candy racks, for fall down tantrum “ally seeking”, in front of EVERYBODY!
Consequences for behavior…or something.
- CaptDMO | 09/28/2015 @ 08:37
As far as I can see, “truth” for the Leftist is whatever needs to be said to prove a point or win an argument; any congruence with empirical, verifiable reality is a happy coincidence. This “truth” then gets stridently repeated until is is universally believed. Until, that is, a new “truth” is required; rinse, repeat.
- Tamquam | 09/28/2015 @ 09:46
It seems to me this may plausibly go back to a fundamental philosophical difference between progressivists and conservatives: conservatives believe that truth should determine policy, whereas progressivists believe that policy should determine truth.

In the full picture, this is a circle, with the truth of a situation influencing a policy designed to change that situation which, if effective, then gives the next generation of policy a different set of truths to work with (note that this circle can be either vicious or virtuous depending on the situation and the policy). But most people have a predilection for one half of the circle over the other as the “more important,” a predilection often shaped by their own experiences and indoctrinations rather than any attempt at impartial, objective, wide study. The progressivist believes that a conservative emphasis on truth as the source, rather than the target, of policy reinforces unjust status quos, enshrines rather than challenges assumptions, and unnecessarily retards necessary improvements for society as a whole; the conservative believes that the progressive emphasis on truth as the target, rather than the source, of policy facilitates hasty action in ignorance or error, rewards emotional manipulation over objective dissemination of information, enshrines the self-interest of the loudest complainer rather than the reasoned analysis of costs and benefits as the biggest factor in policy change, and inflicts unjust real costs on some parts of society in the name of hypothetical and often ephemeral benefits to other parts. Neither is completely wrong.

The progressivist’s error, however, I think to be ultimately more destructive than the conservative’s, simply because the progressivist error in presuming truth to always be open to change by policy means that they disallow any possibility of correction. A philosophy that admits no explanation for discrepancies other than attributing them to the error or malice of others is by definition one that can never be shown to be wrong in itself, and if that’s not the definition of epistemic closure I don’t know what is.
- Stephen J. | 10/09/2015 @ 10:40
[…] For File CXCIX Feminism Wants Your Soul Twiddlers “Why the Right is Right” Quid Est Veritas? The Static and the Dynamic If We’re All Treated Equally, Graft is Harder Their Destructive […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/24/2015 @ 10:10

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Quid Est Veritas?Monday, September 28th, 2015

Quid Est Veritas?
Monday, September 28th, 2015