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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).

Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).

More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.

From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):

There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.

The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.

Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Absolutely not.

It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

The Jacobins are the most central example of Enlightenment ideology possible. Bolsheviks are the grandchildren of the Jacobins, and the Nazis are close cousins, both being founded on hard Materialism and totalizing authoritarianism which founds its credibility on Enlightenment assumptions.

Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.

But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Let me say more succinctly what I think is wrong with Enlightenment worldview: It asserts that there are right ways to reason about propositions of fact (viz., generally speaking, the methods used in science and mathematics), but also holds that this "way" is the only honored method of assessing merit of any kind. On the other hand, it yields no actual basis for actually adjudicating between different worldviews (or, what Thomas Sowell called visions), and, in particular, between different value systems. The latter is a controversial assertion, but I believe it firmly and I think the attempts to argue against it (e.g., Harris's The Moral Landscape and Pinker's Enlightenment Now) are terribly weak, as I argued in this post.

This particular aspect of Enlightenment worldview -- and the aesthetic and moral nihilism that it actually entails (even when its adherents claim otherwise) -- had its seeds in the period we call the Enlightenment, but has grown to dominate Western thought only in the second half of the twentieth century, accelerating (in my opinion) when the right abdicated conservatism and embraced Fusionism. This aspect of "Enlightenment" yields tendencies toward radical progressivism and moral and aesthetic relativism, which are antithetical to the Anglo-Christian tradition and indeed to all viable traditions. The part of the Enlightenment that applied scientific materialism and objective reason to science was an improvement consistent with, and emergent from, the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, the aesthetic and moral nihilism that come from applying that view "outside of its lane" are a dragon eating at the roots of the tree of our civilization. Yes, they have always been around in some form, but they were poison to our ancestors, and they are poison now. By analogy, if my grandfather was an alcoholic, I can carry on the tradition of his identity values without embracing that particular tradition which was always detrimental to the whole.

I withdraw the claim about Pinker generally; he writes like a scientist because he is a scientist -- though the percentage in his popular books is still no more than half (and Better Angels of our Nature is probably a data-heavy outlier), which leaves 50% sermonizing.

For The Moral Landscape, I submit that the paragraph you chose is cherry-picked from the 1%. Here is a link to the full text of The Moral Landscape. What do you think the percentage is there?

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