Conservatism is surely not this

By Aziz P. -
From the pages of National Review, flagship of conservative thought:

- an essay lambasting Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, for causing "emotional distress" to the "spiritually sensitive".

- an approving link to an essay (labeled as an "elegantly stated truth") that asserts that liberalism prevents people from comprehending a perversion of the soul (and therefore, implicitly facilitates the same).

What bothers me most about these two examples is the underlying sentiment that ordinary people are simply reactive, and must be shielded from unpleasant truths.

I take the opposite approach - that all people are rational actors, and can be trusted to reason. As long as one does not mistake reason for being flawless objectivity. I think that's the requisite assumption for someone - anyone - professing to believe in democratic ideals. For if the populace cannot be trusted to think, then why give them any power over society?

Comments

Razib Khan said…
aziz, i believe how much of a 'rational actor' one is is directly proportional to IQ. and even those who have graduate school educations get into situations of ridiculous credit card debt :)

in other words, you need to modulate the model by two factors:

1) there is variance of rationality in direct proportion to the amt. of logical-analytic aptitude that god gifted one with

2) rationality is also bounded by other 'irrational' predispositions which are likely byproducts of cognitive architecture or evolution

as far as rationality & conservatism goes, fundamentally i think conservatism is anti-rational, insofar as it believes that custom and tradition hold within them truths which can't be immediately accessible to reason. an attempt to over-rationalize falls pray to the folly of 'constructivism.' i don't necessarily buy this whole-hog, but this is a strong (dominant?) stream in conservatism. less so in american conservatism though, which is in many ways a hybrid child of genuine conservatism and classical liberalism.
5:32 PM
bc said…
Of course ordinary people must be shielded from unpleasant truths:)

The truth is that this whole war on "terror" was disguised imperialism. Set up paper tigers(terrorists) all over the place and spread your battalions and regiments all over the place!
5:38 PM
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