Tag: empiricism

Myersvision: Cryptid Epistemology – A Possible Second Chapter

The Portly Politico15 Comments

On Wednesday I posted a piece entitled “Cryptid Epistemology,” which was more about academics’ desperate attempt to monopolize “truth” through a campaign against “disinformation” more than it was about searching for Bigfoot.  That said, the two topics are intertwined, and the piece is an exploration of why access to information, and the ability to parse and analyze that information, is so important.

What I admire about the more humble and intellectually honest side of the cryptid community is that they are open to the possibility that we don’t know everything.  Indeed, they carefully sift through thousands of hours of footage, interviews, blog posts, books, etc., in search of gold.  That they often come away with pyrite does not discourage them; instead, they keep looking, gently setting aside the few nuggets they find for further evaluation.

Maybe Bigfoot exists—maybe he doesn’t.  What’s important is that these folks, so often dismissed as kooks, are sharpening their minds and engaging in intense analysis of thousands of data points.  They are making healthy skeptics of themselves, even as they search for something at which most skeptics would scoff.

Who, I ask, is the real kook?  So many self-proclaimed “skeptics” are merely parroting the very same narrative that was spoon-fed to them in a high school history class, or in their freshman philosophy course at college.  They often do so with an air of condescension and derision, the sort of know-it-all-ism that derives from an excess of education but a dearth of wisdom.

The older I get, the more I realize how precious little any of us know.  Things that were taught to me as inerrant “truth” have turned out to be a vast panoply of lies and half-truths, assembled into a shambolic, Frankensteinian mess for the benefit of the government and corporations.

To give one rather benign but illustrative example, before I turn it over to Audre Myers:  as a kid, my elementary school teachers would, it seemed to me, forcefully and a bit angrily insist that the United States was moving to the metric system, and we’d all need to learn it so we could cope in a post-Imperial units world.  It was all nonsense, and even as little kids we all kind of knew it was a bit overblown.  Had our teachers said, “the metric system is important to learn because it is the standard in scientific research,” it would have been a.) truthful and b.) productive.  Instead, they tried to terrify us into thinking we’d all be European, holding our cigarettes like gay men and speaking Esperanto (yes, another lie they told us in elementary school).

To be fair, things that I have taught have turned out to be inaccurate.  The more I study history, for example, the more I realize that the narratives I teach—often derived from what my history teachers taught me—are often incomplete or even incorrect.  When teachers talk about creating lifelong learners, it is for a reason:  we can only get a small fraction of the Truth in our lives, and we should constantly undergo a refining process to purify our knowledge.

But I have overstayed my welcome in this overly long introduction.  Audre offers up an excellent continuation of “Cryptid Epistemology,” her own further refinement on the journey towards Truth:

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Cryptid Epistemology

The Portly Politico9 Comments

Ever since The Age of The Virus and the 2020 usurpation, there has been an increased focus in academia on supposed “mis- and disinformation.”  Anytime a small guild of academics champions a cause that runs cover for government and corporate propaganda, we should all activate our skeptical antennae, regardless of our political leanings; there is a good chance someone is lying to us.

The mis/disinformation racket is a lucrative one.  The federal government is shelling out big money to experts in this field to speak at conferences.  Without violating anyone’s privacy, I have direct knowledge of some of the amounts involved for academics giving presentations on the topic.  If I could pull in a cool six grand (and change) for talking about how everyone who disagrees with my positions is suffering from an advanced case of disinformation, I might do it, too.

William Briggs at his Substack Science is Not the Answer hosts a very good guest post by Jaap Hanekamp entitled “The Misinformation Dis(mis)course Revisited: The Losing Battle of The Academic Expertocracy“; it offers a very good treatment of the danger of this mis/disinformation regime.  In essence, it is simply a form of censorship.

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Conservative Inheritance

The Portly Politico3 Comments

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination (PDF) the following about conservatism, which he viewed as being virtually extinct following the Second World War:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

It’s probably the most frequently cited quotation from a liberal among conservatives, because it did, in 1950, offer a practical assessment for the state of conservatism in the United States.  The twin struggles of the Great Depression and the war led to a triumph of what Russell Kirk called “Rooseveltian liberalism,” which sought to use the power of the government to address economic problems.  With the defeat of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and entering the long Cold War with the Soviet Union, Americans placed great faith in the ability of their government to solve basic problems.

Indeed, the experience of conservatism since the Second World War has largely been that of accepting liberalism’s underlying propositions.  “Conservatism,” then, came to be more of reaction to the excesses of liberalism—a tapping of the brakes, not a full stop or reversal—rather than a cogent philosophical and social system on its own.

While that’s a controversial statement with many exceptions—there remained many conservatives, like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who continued to resist Rooseveltian liberalism—consider that the first Republican President since 1932, Dwight Eisenhower, accepted much of the New Deal, and left it virtually intact.  His signature achievement as president, other than ending the Korean War, was to champion the construction of the Interstate Highway System.  That was a worthy undertaking, to be sure, but the legacy of a major Republican president was to spend millions, rather than rolling back the interventionist state.

Since then, conservatism has gone through a number of permutations, many of which I’ll cover throughout my History of Conservative Thought course this summer.  My point here, however, is that conservatism, strictly speaking, cannot exist in the dominant framework of modern liberalism.

I’m not rejecting the tenants of classical liberalism—equality before God, the possession of God-given natural rights, the freedom of association—per se.  But conservatism is an empirical, rather than a rationalistic, endeavor.  Indeed, Russell Kirk argued that conservatism is not an ideology, as such, but the result of millennia of human experience.

Or, as Ted McAllister writes in “Toward a Conservatism of Experience” for RealClearPolicy, “Conservatism is an inheritance, not an ideology.”  He continues:

American conservatism emerged out of our experiences as a self-governing people who love their inherited liberties rather than abstract rights; whose laws have historically emerged out of our norms rather than a specious theory of justice; whose gift for creating and protecting political freedom (the freedom to govern ourselves, our communities, our associations) has served as the primary obstacle to the relentless drive toward an egalitarian administrative state.

McAllister’s essay—which is really a book review of Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed—makes a compelling case for a conservatism based not on metaphysical abstractions but on the “discovery, articulation, and defense of a reality we experience and of affections formed long before we needed to defend them.”  McAllister argues that conservatism had to adopt a more universal, ideological paradigm during the Cold War to face the major existential threat of international communism, but should return the localized, particularized forms of organic social arrangements America enjoyed prior to 1945.

Part and parcel to this restoration is a rejection of democracy’s excesses.  McAllister writes that “democratic culture overindulges a love of equality and abstract moral truths,” that it encourages a leveling of all people into bland masses and, paradoxically, hyper-atomistic individuals.  In such a culture, perverse individualism separates Americans from their communities and their heritage.  Instead, our churches, schools, social clubs, and other institutions have fallen prey to progressive ideologues, rather than serving as the glue that binds society together.

There’s a lot to chew on in McAllister’s review.  Permit me one more extended quotation:

American conservatism is rooted in inheritance, in the rough guidance of experience over abstract idealism, and in the protection of the pluralism found in voluntary association and in self-governing communities. This is why something profoundly American is lost when conservatives embrace abstraction and universal slogans in their struggle with either liberalism or progressivism….

Suffice it to say that today we lack a strong and traditionally conservative intellectual — and specifically academic — class. The easiest measure of this weakness is found in both the number and the intellectual range of conservative academics. Of particular importance here is the dearth of conservatives in the humanities. Indeed, the number of conservative scholars devoted to such studies as philology, literature, theology, philosophy, and history as well as themes such as imagination, beauty, and truth, has dwindled both in raw numbers and as a percentage of conservative academics. Of course, outside the academy, there are journals and institutions that engage the moral, literary, historical imagination, which offer some reason for hope. But the overall trend on the Right has been toward intellectual work geared toward contemporary and immediate concerns — more about power than about beauty.

In essence, McAllister argues that, while we often appeal to abstractions in our never-ending battle against progressivism, we adopt their rationalist framework by doing so, albeit out of necessity and expediency.  That said, our focus on the immediacy of political power has led conservatism to sacrifice culture—a key reason, I would argue, as to why progressives are so dominant there.

McAllister overstates the problem slightly—just look at New Criterion to see “conservative scholars devoted to… themes such as imagination, beauty, and truth”—but the Left certainly dominates our culture.

At this point, though, I wonder how we can get back the old conservatism.  It’s a worthy goal, but it seems unlikely in an age in which progressive and postmodern dogma reign supreme.  The extent to which the progressive frame infects conservatism—even down to our mental processes—is disheartening, and explains the capitulatory approach of once-great conservative publications like National Review, which can barely contain its eagerness to run and apologize to Leftists for challenging them.

In the long-run, though, conservatism’s foundation—its groundedness—in objective reality, as opposed to rationalist abstractions, will allow it to prevail in all its beautiful, localized, variegated permutations.  That “long-run” just might take a very long while to arrive.