Tired Dino Blogging

I suppose this is an extended comment on Capt. Fogg's "Bye Bye" post, so it makes sense to post it as a regular entry. Anyhow, it seems that people tend to settle into little (or big) comfort-based opinion communities; many just aren't particularly interested in adhering to a correspondence theory of truth, wherein (I'm dealing rather loosely here with philosophical terms that deserve more precision than my tired little Jurassic-era walnut-brain can give them—but hey, I'm just a blogging dino, right?) you generally have to base your assent on the correspondence of your cherished propositions with something we can all point to in the world around us. What we usually see in the public square, so to speak, is a bad version of coherence theory, wherein your propositions need only seem to make a kind of sense; they need only "hang together." That probably makes me sound too much like Matthew Arnold, who said the world would always run on inadequate ideas, but there you have it. The trouble with this populist (in)coherence theory is nicely captured by a quotation from the inestimable Dr. Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare: "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation." In our context, that means you can build up an ever-increasing web of mutually reinforcing fantasies and distortions that makes you feel great about yourself and your comrades and allows you to dismiss the views and sentiments of everyone outside the charmed circle of utter bunkum.

In my view, hard-right conservatives fit this model to a tee: they believe all sorts of absurd and contradictory things, and they react savagely and derisively at the merest hint of opposition, or else they begin bellyaching and whining about how unfair everyone is for disagreeing with them. Even when you expose them in an outright lie or flat contradiction, they won't change their views – today, for instance, McCain repeated for the umpteenth time his vicious statement that Barack Obama wants your five-year-old to know all about the full range of human sexuality. You could read him the relevant piece of legislation a million times running, and he would simply keep repeating the lie, and the more he repeated it, the more it would come to sound like an internet troll-style taunt. Why? Probably because it fits into a general view of Barack Obama that McCain's followers already held, and it makes them feel good to hear some variation on it. Such people, I suspect, hold their views as a mask for underlying sentiments and feelings. And once you realize that for many people, "ideas" are basically a mask for feelings, it's easy to see the problem.

It is not so easy, of course, to do anything about it. It seems quite intractable to me, unless we turn ourselves into a paradise where genuine, deep education is high on the agenda. But it's not hopeless – we are always engaged in a high-risk struggle to make reasonable propositions prevail, and the percentages of yea-sayers and naysayers to said propositions always seems to be agonizing close. I fear that the stakes are getting higher and higher, though: we're returning to a Cold War-like (or worse) level of risk, and here we have smiling, attractive, office-seeking lunatics casually dropping the bombshell that we might have to drop the bomb on the Russians sometime soon. I think I'll end on that note, lest I write even more disquieting things….