Who Needs a Place to Holder? I Do. (Obviously)

First, I went and posted on protein wisdom again.  The post hit the web fifteen minutes ago, and already 3,393 people have convicted me of irrevocably gaying up America's youth.  By the time you get there, I'm sure I'll have written Article 1 of the newly established U.S. of GAY's Constiution.  Feel free to defend my honor with arguments. 

Second, I plan on responding to Sinthome's irritating post; but because it addresses the subject of my MLA paper, I won't respond until I have time enough to devote to it the serious thought it deserves.  Should be soon, but if not, Sinthome can take pleasure in knowing that his irritation has forced me to reconsider the utility of my irritation ... all of which I find extremely irritating.  Fear not, however, my flagging self-esteem won't suffer further; nor should yours, as I've learned that these environs kick ass and y'all are very respectable.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

DAL, I'm glad that you've cooled down. But really, I don't think that you're on much stronger ground now than you were then. Poeple inherit their politics? If you want me to, I can treat conservatives as helpless victims of their upbringing, unable to choose for themselves -- personally, I think that's a lot more condescending than my current attitude.

But I don't really think that's a major part of your response. Mostly you seem to have a concern with "equality". Well, that's highly atypical, for a conservative. Aren't you supposed to believe in meritocracy? Or perhaps, if you're more Burkean, in stable societal class arrangments and traditional inequities that nevertheless contain embedded wisdom? I don't think that "equality" is really a well-chosen word.

Mostly, I think that you don't like someone telling you that your political philosophy is irrational and that you're not worth arguing with because you hold to it. But what if that's actually true? As CR says above -- might as well agree with him for once -- there's absolutely no presumption that anyone has to hold that all ideas or ideologies are equal.

So it comes down to, can I back up my claim that conservatives depend on irritable mental gestures instead of rational thought? Well, perhaps not in the case of every last conservative. There may be a few atypical ones somewhere. But there are none among the group that Scott has chosen to address; that is evident from the responses. I'm sorry, but your initial response was almost the definition of an irritable mental gesture, and your current one is not much better.

Lastly, I should point out that conservatives have really screwed up America, with your support of every evil thing that the GOP has brought from torture to aggressive war to the tossing away of our liberties in the futile pursuit of safety, and with corruption and incompetence ranging from the loss of a major American city to the trashing of all of our long-term aims. I don't actually loathe or dislike you; as I said originally, I don't think that you're worth bothering with. But if someone else wants to, why shouldn't they? "Holding a broad class of people in contempt for any reason isn't cool, ever" is highly convenient if a broad class of people have just screwed up worse than any political group in power has screwed up in American history. If you don't want to be held responsible, abandon conservatism.

[CR]

DAL:

CR: I have no intention of responding to your insults in kind. That was what I did in my first post, and I regret it.

Oh, seriously. Just try it. It'll be sort of fun to watch. And my comments weren't simply "insults." They were arguments wrapped up in satire. The argument being: ideas aren't people. People should be treated equally; arguments should not. And, further: the logic of your silly comments, horrifically, has actually become SOP - in the wake of the emergence of the "bias" meme - in our nation's newsrooms. And it is this SOP that permitted Iraq to happen, and just about everything else. But whatever. Keep on keeping on - you're sort of posing as the comical sideshow to all the horror and destruction happening on the mainstage.

Rich -

Oh, I suspect we have or would agree on a few things, doncha think?

Full disclosure (and if you cut this into your archive for later usage in our scraps I swear to god I'll get that picture of you put back up on LS lickedly split) - I've been thinking that in my second book, what I'm going to work on as soon as this dissertation is finished being trimmed into a manuscript - I am going to acknowledge you in the acknowledgements. I think that our fights actually pushed me into a new and more profitable direction with my thinking about the relation between cultural work and politics. Not that I agree with what you've said time and time again - the uselessness of my sort of work, etc - but I've become more self-reflective about the issue, very much for the better... Take much more seriously the question of how, exactly, my work might actually serve a purpose, rather than simply taking it for granted that more of the same sort of critique is moving the ball in any sort of meaningful way.

Anyway, sweetness and light, finis. Just thought I'd say a nice thing, for once...

[DAL]

But really, I don't think that you're on much stronger ground now than you were then. Poeple inherit their politics? If you want me to, I can treat conservatives as helpless victims of their upbringing, unable to choose for themselves -- personally, I think that's a lot more condescending than my current attitude.

OK, but-- to take a leaf from your book here-- what if it's true? External influences-- particularly our upbringing-- /do/ have a lot to do with who we are, and our political views /aren't/ based strictly on rational choice. I would be different-- and so would my politics-- if I'd been born to, say, a pair of Haitian immigrants in Florida. You would be different-- and so would your politics-- if you'd been born to, I don't know, Pat Buchanan's campaign manager.

I'm not saying that personal choice has /nothing/ to do with political preferences, because no one's entirely a hostage to the fates. But I am saying that the element of choice is severely limited, because your politics (and I use the generic "you" here, obviously) are very much bound up in who you are, where you live, and what your life has been like.

So are your politics (generic "you" again here, folks)-- are your politics, as I was sayin', entirely a matter of your choosing? Can you really change them at any time? I would argue that the answer's no-- I don't think, Rich, that you could wake up tomorrow and say: "Today's a fine day for becoming a conservative!", and then really do it, with full conviction and sincerity.

Sure, you might be /motivated/ to switch sides by some great external shock (though I can't imagine what would be sufficient); or you might move rightwards along the political spectrum after a gradual internal journey; but in either case, I don't really think you're changing by a conscious choice.

I think, in other words, that I'm on more solid ground than you believe-- that political affiliation is not, in fact, a matter of free will, subject to change at any time.

But you're right-- that's not the main point of my argument.

But I don't really think that's a major part of your response. Mostly you seem to have a concern with "equality". Well, that's highly atypical, for a conservative. Aren't you supposed to believe in meritocracy? Or perhaps, if you're more Burkean, in stable societal class arrangments and traditional inequities that nevertheless contain embedded wisdom? I don't think that "equality" is really a well-chosen word.

I think it's pretty darned well-chosen, actually. I'm using "equality" in basically the Enlightenment sense of the term-- that is, I'm using it to indicate /human/ equality, not economic or social equality. In plain language, I mean a basic recognition that, as human beings, we all have a certain amount of value or moral presence or whatever you want to call it; and that no person's qualities, or vices, can increase or diminish that basic human value.

I'm well aware that Enlightenment views of pretty much /everything/ have fallen out of favor in the academy these days, and as such, what I've just said may look pitifully outdated, simplistic, or naive. I'm OK with that.

I'm also OK with the fact that, because it would be going waaaaaaaay off-topic and would be of only marginal interest to you (or to CR, for that matter), I can't discuss this at any length at all, but I /will/ say briefly that this concept of human equality is at the core of my pers'nal political philosophy, which /I/ think is tolerably coherent-- and which emphasizes many values (charity and compassion for the poor, health care for all, and a general desire for peace, to name a few) that I gather you wouldn't expect to see from a conservative.

That doesn't mean I'm not a conservative; it means you're wrong when you assume that all conservatives (or even the less categorical "conservatives in general") must invariably hold position X on issue Y. There's a lot more conflict and diversity within the ranks of the conservative movement than you seem to realize... but more on that later. I gotta keep this word-convoy a-rollin'.

Mostly, I think that you don't like someone telling you that your political philosophy is irrational and that you're not worth arguing with because you hold to it. But what if that's actually true? As CR says above -- might as well agree with him for once -- there's absolutely no presumption that anyone has to hold that all ideas or ideologies are equal.

No there isn't. But as I explained above-- or tried to-- what I really found offensive was the assumption that conservatives constitute a vast and mindless (and therefore inferior) "they."

In other words, I wasn't objecting to your opinion of conservative /ideology/ (although I do think you have no clear idea of what, if any, that ideology might be; is it Burkean? Is it a belief in meritocracy? Or do conservatives lack a coherent political platform, as you've said before? Maybe there /is/ no monolithic bloc of conservatives. Maybe, among people self-identifying as conservatives, you can find just as much diversity of opinion as you'll find among people on the left.)-- anyway. I wasn't objecting to your opinion of conservative ideology; I was objecting to the very clear implication that conservatives were inferior to you-- contemptible or beneath contempt.

I'm sorry, but your initial response was almost the definition of an irritable mental gesture, and your current one is not much better.

Well, I'd call it more of an angry outburst than an irritable mental gesture, but I freely cede the point. I certainly hope I'm making /strides/ towards a standard of argument you'd be willing to recognize as the product of an intellectual equal.

Lastly, I should point out that conservatives have really screwed up America, with your support of every evil thing that the GOP has brought from torture to aggressive war to the tossing away of our liberties in the futile pursuit of safety, and with corruption and incompetence ranging from the loss of a major American city to the trashing of all of our long-term aims. I don't actually loathe or dislike you; as I said originally, I don't think that you're worth bothering with. But if someone else wants to, why shouldn't they? "Holding a broad class of people in contempt for any reason isn't cool, ever" is highly convenient if a broad class of people have just screwed up worse than any political group in power has screwed up in American history. If you don't want to be held responsible, abandon conservatism.

As I mentioned earlier, conservatives are /not/ a monolithic whole, any more than liberals are. Within the conservative movement, there's a substantial amount of opposition to almost every single thing you've mentioned. Your remarkably crude, stereotypical view of conservatives tells me you have almost no familiarity with that which you condemn in sweeping terms.

Really, we're not some kind of super-unified bloc of evil fascists, marching in lockstep to the destruction of America at the behest of our villainous Republican commanders. Believing that we /are/ won't make it true-- so is there any chance that you'll abandon the belief, perhaps acquire a more nuanced and realistic view of conservatism, and get out there and engage with a few of the many, many thoughtful people on the right?

[DAL]

CB: Nnnnnoooo, I'd have to say your remarks were more along the lines of insults than satire. They were /clever/ insults, but there's a difference between witty insults and satire.

But, as a great statesman said famously once upon a time, meh. I ended up addressing your point in the first part of my response to Rich, so what the hell, just scroll up and read that... or, if you're feeling lazy, here it is in the form of a short (or shortish) two-paragraph quote:

"External influences-- particularly our upbringing-- /do/ have a lot to do with who we are, and our political views /aren't/ based strictly on rational choice. I would be different-- and so would my politics-- if I'd been born to, say, a pair of Haitian immigrants in Florida. You would be different-- and so would your politics-- if you'd been born to, I don't know, Pat Buchanan's campaign manager.

I'm not saying that personal choice has /nothing/ to do with political preferences, because no one's entirely a hostage to the Fates. But I am saying that the element of choice is severely limited, because your politics (and I use the generic 'you' here, obviously) are very much bound up in who you are, where you live, and what your life has been like."

That's the heart of it, anyway. There's a bit more detail in the full post, but-- as this self-same statesman also said-- whatever, dude.

[DAL]

... shit! Tags.

Ahhh. Better now... I hope. But see? This is /exactly/ why I use the slashy things for emphasis. It's also why I shouldn't argue on the Interwebs instead of sleeping.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR, people who flame each other usually turn out to have similar interests if nothing else -- otherwise, nothing to flame about. I've always felt that you were capable of producing good work, in addition to your often annoying (to me) Internet persona. The problem with pseudonymity, and the problem with a society that demands pseudonymity of certain people, is that it can produce a state in which people see only the persona, and none of the work done by the person animating the persona.

DAL, time starts to forbid picking this apart piece by piece. Well, here goes.

First, your point about what if conservatism is effectively determined, in most cases, by early upbringing. Well, I don't think so, but what if it was? I claimed that conservatism is irrational, that conservatives can not think rationally except within certain formally subscribed areas, and that therefore they are not worth arguing with. None of this changes if conservatism is not a matter of choice. I might pity someone who was born tone-deaf -- but I sure wouldn't listen to them sing.

Next you write that your basic point is:

"I'm using it to indicate /human/ equality, not economic or social equality. In plain language, I mean a basic recognition that, as human beings, we all have a certain amount of value or moral presence or whatever you want to call it; and that no person's qualities, or vices, can increase or diminish that basic human value."

Oh no, it's the supposed Enlightenment value of equality -- but not economic or social equality! In other words, it's fully OK to have a poverty-stricken underclass, as long as whenever you meet someone, you make nice noises about their intrinsic value. Those Enlightenment revolutionaries; they were so insistant on keeping the existing economic and social order.

My amusement at bog-standard conservatism and its idea of the Enlightenment aside, nothing that I wrote was an assertion that conservatives do not have this essential human value or moral presence. You are incapable of rational thought; well, so are many people, given that there are a lot of conservatives. I do think that this is a moral choice on your part, and that it's possible for you to think differently. You just can't do that and hold on to conservatism.

Lastly, there's a whole constellation of sentences saying that conservatism is complex, that you in particular like peace, "Within the conservative movement, there's a substantial amount of opposition to almost every single thing you've mentioned", etc.

It's funny, isn't it, how after a failure, no one seems to have authored that failure. I wonder who was supporting Bush all this time? Without the conservatives, who could it have been?

Your various objections are meaningless and self-serving; you voted Republican, and, from your initial post, you're still planning to. You are responsible.

[noah cicero]

The american conservative is an a terrified child who doesn't understand ideas.

The real ones.

There were a lot made during 9-11 that have left them.

But the Michael Savage ones, those people are nuts.

[DAL]

So, but wait a second. Everything I say is a self-serving justification, and everything /you/ say is the product of rational thought? OK! Nice meeting you.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I didn't say that everything that I said was the product of rational thought, or that everything you said was self-serving justification. I did say that your vague claims of personal and communal disagreement with various aspects of failed Republican policy was a self-serving disavowal of responsibility, since it didn't extend to actual opposition.

And judging by your final flash of petulance, I think that I was right.