Assertion: Politics is reductionist

By Aziz P. -
Discuss.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Apart from being reductionist, Politics is also primate nature. Ever read De Waal's books on chimp behavior? Even human tactics and strategies in politics don't look too sophisticated in comparison to chimps'. I recommend De Waal to anyone interested in the roots of human behavioral developments.
6:18 PM
Aziz P. said…
I think it's pointless to discuss "primate nature". There may be similarities but we have a far more complex society than anything chimps can possibly create. You're just being reductionist in your own way by trying to scale down from complex human socities to "building blocks" of primate behavior.

I think the more insightful way to go is the opposite direction - to look at systems as a whole rather than individual holons in the hierarchy.

However as your own comment illustrates people prefer to think about things as atomic in nature. You are doing it with biiology; others do it with politics. For example, look at eth conservative and liberal positions on abortion, death penalty, and collateral damage in war. Neither side has a coherent narrative or set of principles that tie their positions on these issues together. They apply reductionist analysis - largely driven by political maneuvering - and come up with stances that are not really related to each other.
8:01 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wow, I'm a political blogger!

By Razib Khan -
I'm feeling kind of strange, blogging about political and foreign policy issues. I'll be honest, I don't follow this stuff anymore, I have a hard time getting my head wrapped around a lot of topics and I don't expend much CPU cycles to the bread & butter of the political blogosphere. But a few points: 1) I've been motivated to make some negative comments about what I perceive to be unhinged fantasists because even if I don't focus on this area much I can spot incorrect assumptions since those assumptions are derived broadly from other disciplines. 2) Several individuals in a thread below referred to the potentiality of Islamists. As I said to Dean , England made its craven peace with Germany 1 year before war. Fascist brownshirts had been terrorizing Jews, Austria had been annexed and the Rhine remilitarized. Germany had already been involved in a World War. The comparison of the potentiality of threat seems a very stretched analogy to what had been...
Read more

Wrong reason

By Razib Khan -
No matter the reality that reason is imperfect because our own reasoning process is fraught with "noise" introduced by our biases in the form of slanted premises and unexposed assumptions I believe it is a good place to start, sometimes. John Emerson in the comments says this: The idea that militant Islam is a threat equal to Nazi Germany or the USSR, or might become that big a threat, is assumed by many and perhaps most hawks, and it really underlies the whole Iraq War. That idea is almost impossible to argue in detail and I've seldom or never seen it argued. It's just pure fantasy . I don't know if it is pure fantasy, but yes, I do think that to a great extent it is fantasy. I've believed this from the fall of 2004 when I extended my reading to non-science blogs. Many of the individuals expressing a hawkish perspective claim a historical perspective, but as someone who loves history for its own sake I tend to find their analyses grounded in biased and m...
Read more

Divider, not a uniter

By Aziz P. -
Howard is already taking heat for this one: "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." A fair charge? As usual with Dean, he makes a valid point but drapes it with an inflammatory metaphor that completely obscures it - and in the process, undermines his own goal. Dean's point is that the GOP strategy solidly rests on a foundation of drawing a dividing line across America - where "Us" are righteous and "Them" are craven, and that teh very concept of a principled vote for Them is a contradiction. There are p...
Read more