Justin's post on H. G. Wells (a must read, of course) reminded me of the hopeless confusion so often created when political differences are shaped by differing perceptions of human nature. As I opined in a comment I just left below, advocates of political liberalism (which I think includes one-world socialism of the sort advocated by Wells) tend to mistakenly view bad people as good under the delusion that others are like them. Bad people (Josef Stalin will serve as an example) think otherwise.
So do:
liberals who've just been mugged
political (but not necessarily moral) conservatives, and
assorted political cynics and ideologues.
I'd also include those libertarians whose leave-everyone-alone-because-all-force-is-bad isolationism was "mugged" by September 11 and its sequelae. Many of the latter were forced (in my view, at least) to reach back to the classical thinkers and dust off an old idea best expressed as "SI VIS PACEM PARA BELLUM." Not that they have discarded the idea of leaving people alone unless they do you harm, mind you. It's just that some of them now realize there are people who have no intention of leaving YOU alone, and if you sit around and wait, you might find yourself on the rapture end of a huge mushroom cloud.
There is an ever larger disconnect between those who would sit around and wait for an attack and those who would take preemptive action to prevent one. The latter are accused by the former of being out of touch with reality. (I have a bit of trouble understanding this, and I have posted about it before.) I think that there exist fundamental differences in the perception of human nature which explain why political (and even religious) disgreements make well-meaning people see the other side as "evil." (Trouble begins when such political thinking crosses that line where opinion becomes more than opinion.)
H. G. Wells, a visionary, touched this nerve when he interviewed Stalin:
STALIN: You, Mr. Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie.
Stalin, of course, was a thorough realist, and a thoroughly evil man. While he was right about the existence of evil people, what he failed to tell Wells was that he didn't care about good or bad; he merely used the terminology to manipulate well-meaning people. Tens of millions of people were murdered, and it mattered not at all to Stalin whether they were good or bad, because he didn't care about such things.
Howard Dean implicitly accuses George W. Bush of a similar lack of principle:
Though Dean, a Democrat, complimented President Bush, saying he "ran a great campaign" and was "very disciplined," he compared the president to former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, at least in one regard.
"The truth is the president of the United States used the same device that Slobodan Milosevic used in Serbia. When you appeal to homophobia, when you appeal to sexism, when you appeal to racism, that is extraordinarily damaging to the country," Dean charged. "I know George Bush. I served with him for six years [as a fellow governor]. He's not a homophobe. He's not a racist. He's not a sexist. In some ways, what he did was worse … because he knew better."
Dean also criticized Bush for the ballot initiatives in 11 states calling for gay marriage to be outlawed, saying this "had only one effect, which is to appeal to homophobia and fear and gay-baiting in order to win a presidential election."
And he took a shot at Rev. Jerry Falwell.: "Most Americans are decent people -- not all. I mean, there are those hate-mongers. I wouldn't call Jerry Falwell a decent person."
Is Howard Dean right about this? I don't think so.
And it is here that I must take issue with both liberals on the left and and moral conservatives on the right. The last communitarian president we had was Jimmy Carter. There is no way to be a successful president of the United States if you believe that all people are basically good, and therefore all good people must be made to welcome the mandate of goodness by government fiat. But I think that any president so foolish as to believe that all people are evil, that evil lurks everywhere and is manifested in things like sexual temptations and other human vices, and that government exists to root out this evil by means of social engineering -- such a president would be equally as communitarian as Jimmy Carter. And just as doomed to failure.
Howard Dean objects to Bush not for being a communitarian, but (apparently) for seeming to be one.
Sorry, but I'm not reminded of Hitler. Nor Stalin. Nor even Milosevic.
I am reminded more of Hattie McDaniel, who uttered the famous line, "I'd rather play a maid than be one."
Oddly enough, I'm hoping Dean is right. (But not in the way he thinks he is.)
Hey, since I'm into Hollywood imagery these days (and being plentymisunderstood), it occurred to me that political ideologues (of the left as well as the right) might not appreciate the Bush-as-Mammy "comparison." To them, I humbly offer a better analogy: that of the apparently too-cynical Prince Feisal, played by Alec Guiness in Lawrence of Arabia:
General Allenby: I thought I was a hard man, sir.
Prince Feisal: You are merely a general. I must be a king.
Mammy, Feisal, whatever.
(I'm sure both were equally misunderestimated at one time or another.....)
MORE: Speaking of PARA BELLUM libertarians.... "Fuck yeah!" (A crude synonym for "Indeed!" Unfortunately, it's an expression I can't use lest my blog be content-filtered into oblivion. But there's a store in New York spelled FCUK, so maybe my "error" will escape notice!)
posted by Eric on 11.15.04 at 09:51 AM
Comments
Yet another extremely interesting post spectrumologically. Yet another post tying in with Thomas Sowell's dualism of "the unconstrained vision" of the socialist (rationalist, optimistic, man is good or can be made good through government programs, enlightened benevolent social planners can be trusted to bring us into utopia) vs. "the constrained vision" of the conservative (empiricist, pessimistic, man is inherently flawed and will always remain so, his knowledge is necessarily limited and his motives are questionable, nobody can be trusted with unchecked coercive power over others, government is necessary but must be limited).
Ayn Rand opposed that "argument from depravity" because it conceded the ideal to the socialists, it concedes to the socialist the premise that socialism is the ideal but then argues that man is not good enough to practice it. Man is not good enough to be a slave under a totalitarian state! The argument, stated thusly, seems to refute itself. I agree with Rand. Man, Woman, is TOO good to be a slave. We must strive to be FREE -- THAT is the ideal.
The truth, as I see it, is that we are each of us a complex mixture of the good (including of competing goods, hence polytheism in theology), the evil, and the bad. Contrary to Rousseau, we are not born good, not born free. Freedom, the good, is a value which one must strive for, achieve, and fight to hold on to. Values, and the virtue required to achieve them, require an eternal uphill struggle.
If we were all as totally depraved, as rotten to the core, as Calvinists believe, no one would ever have built the World Trade Center. We would never have got out of the caves. If we are as innocent as Rousseau and his philosophical descendants believe, no one would have destroyed it. (Actually, if we were innocent in the way that Rousseau and most of his philosophical descendants believe, we would still be living in caves, for that was his ideal, the state of nature, the Garden of Eden.)
As I noted in that Instalanched post a few days ago, the Sowell spectrum was somewhat reversed, with the socialists or the Left being status quo pessimistic realists vs. the conservatives and libertarians, the Right on this spectrum, being faith-based visionary idealists.
I note that same reversal of the Sowell spectrum keeps cropping up in debates over abortion.
The anti-abortionist will list a number of undesirable conditions into which the hypothetical baby is to be born, e.g., poverty, too many siblings already, drunken fatherm genetic defects, etc., and ask: "Would you abort this child?"
The pro-abortionist will of course say: "Yes!"
Then the anti-abortionist will answer: "You have just aborted Beethoven."
The pro-abortionist will often reply: "But more likely, I would have aborted Hitler."
The anti-abortionists, the pro-lifers, often conservatives, often Christians, often believers in the doctrine of Original Sin, yet have faith in the potential of men and women to achieve the good even under the most adverse circumstances. The pro-abortionists, often liberals or Leftists, often "secular humanists", argue that man is so inclined toward evil, so rotten at the core, that he must not even be allowed to come into existence at all.
Well done Steven. Love your awareness of unforeseen (and often paradoxical) consequences.
I hereby extend to you the Official Steven Malcolm Anderson Indulgence And Permanent Exemption from the "Eleven Rules of Etiquette for Commenters" I was just forced to implement!
(Hey, they're my rules! I can break them whenever I want -- and now you can too!)
"Unforeseen consequences" or "unintended consequences", is a concept central to the "constrained vision" as described by Sowell. In fact, I just saw a series of comments in Dean's World by a man who kept making typos while trying to spell "unintended".
But -- uh, oh! Norma doesn't like that at all, and therefore neither does Dawn. According to Norma's animist beliefs (from her studies in African mythology), there is no such thing as "unintended consequences", no such thing as an accident or a coincidence. That's the "accidentalism" promoted by the Communist Conspiracy. Everything is intended, either by you, or by a God or a Goddess, or by the Communist Conspiracy.
I hope I don't end up on their "Sons of the Devil" list. As long as I keep glorifying Conservative Lesbian Individualist Theology I won't be. Those two holy Goddesses will just set me down as another "fuzzy Liberal".
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
Yet another extremely interesting post spectrumologically. Yet another post tying in with Thomas Sowell's dualism of "the unconstrained vision" of the socialist (rationalist, optimistic, man is good or can be made good through government programs, enlightened benevolent social planners can be trusted to bring us into utopia) vs. "the constrained vision" of the conservative (empiricist, pessimistic, man is inherently flawed and will always remain so, his knowledge is necessarily limited and his motives are questionable, nobody can be trusted with unchecked coercive power over others, government is necessary but must be limited).
Ayn Rand opposed that "argument from depravity" because it conceded the ideal to the socialists, it concedes to the socialist the premise that socialism is the ideal but then argues that man is not good enough to practice it. Man is not good enough to be a slave under a totalitarian state! The argument, stated thusly, seems to refute itself. I agree with Rand. Man, Woman, is TOO good to be a slave. We must strive to be FREE -- THAT is the ideal.
The truth, as I see it, is that we are each of us a complex mixture of the good (including of competing goods, hence polytheism in theology), the evil, and the bad. Contrary to Rousseau, we are not born good, not born free. Freedom, the good, is a value which one must strive for, achieve, and fight to hold on to. Values, and the virtue required to achieve them, require an eternal uphill struggle.
If we were all as totally depraved, as rotten to the core, as Calvinists believe, no one would ever have built the World Trade Center. We would never have got out of the caves. If we are as innocent as Rousseau and his philosophical descendants believe, no one would have destroyed it. (Actually, if we were innocent in the way that Rousseau and most of his philosophical descendants believe, we would still be living in caves, for that was his ideal, the state of nature, the Garden of Eden.)
As I noted in that Instalanched post a few days ago, the Sowell spectrum was somewhat reversed, with the socialists or the Left being status quo pessimistic realists vs. the conservatives and libertarians, the Right on this spectrum, being faith-based visionary idealists.
Most interesting about it all....