Winehole23
08-03-2009, 11:08 PM
Believers in Anything (http://www.amconmag.com/mccarthy/2009/08/03/believers-in-everything/)
Posted on August 3rd, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy (http://www.amconmag.com/searchr.php?v&author=Daniel+McCarthy)
(http://digg.com/)
G.K. Chesterton never did say (http://chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm) that the problem with atheism is not that it leads men to believe in nothing but that it leads them to believe in anything. That’s just as well, because the truth in that cliche is broader than the words themselves (in any permutation) denote. A more general statement might be: when you have abandoned trust in established authorities, you have not thereby ceased to trust authorities; instead, you may be placing your trust in new, possibly worse ones.
The birthers are a good illustration. Commenter Delmar Jackson writes (http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/07/31/birthers-and-nationalism/#comment-33391) in response to Daniel Larison’s post on birthers and nationalism (http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/07/31/birthers-and-nationalism/), “I am not a Birther, but I have lost my trust of the media. Can you tell me why it took the National Enquirer to break the story on John Edwarrds cheating on his wife during the primaries?. The mainstram nedia ignored the story while Edwards continued to take votes from Hillary allowing Obama to win.” There’s a valid point here: “responsible” news outlets chose not to report on Edwards’s affair, just as in earlier days they chose not to report Kennedy’s affairs or Franklin Roosevelt’s physical disability (or his affairs, for that matter). The “privilege” politicians receive for their embarrassing personal secrets may extend to Republicans as well — The State newspaper in South Carolina knew about Gov. Mark Sanford’s indiscretions months before his disappearing act prompted them to expose him. These are just a few instances of news the reading public might care about that the media refuses to report. The litany of things that the media does report that aren’t true — see Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cook, for starters; you might add, on a slightly different note, Judith Miller and Mike Wallace — is too long to recite. Skepticism toward the mainstream media is well warranted. As is distrust in public officials, who have been lying to Americans about elections, wars, and the economy for a couple of centuries now.
But skepticism about media and political authorities doesn’t logically entail belief in wildly improbable notions like Barack Obama’s Kenyan nativity. That doesn’t follow logically, but for a lot of right-wingers, it does follow psychologically.
I’m skeptical of claims that all human beings have a more or less equally powerful need for faith. Clearly some people are more superstitious than others. Among religious believers, some are theologically inclined and others are mystically and emotionally inclined. Among nonbelievers, some buy into parascientific New Age mumbo-jumbo or imbue science with a religious aura, and others are more epistemically humble. Some number of people do, however, have a compelling need indeed to believe in improbable things that conform to ideological preferences. The toppling of corrupt authorities doesn’t do anything to decrease the credulous and authoritarian tendencies of this subset — it only unleashes those tendencies to find wilder, more ideologically satisfying objects.
Stalin is an example of the ideological true believer. He was both a committed ideological Marxist and a very paranoid man. He suppressed traditional religion in the Soviet Union. And when empirical science contradicted his ideology– as genetics certainly contradicted the belief in human equality — Stalin promoted the nonscientific but “politically correct” ideas of Trofim Lysenko. The birthers are not Stalinists, but they do subscribe to a kind of right-wing Lysenkoism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism). The ideology that insists the mainstream media and government cannot be trusted (and it’s true, they very often can’t) also positively affirms the “truth” of preposterous claims that fit the believer’s paranoia. In other words, ideology efficiently turns skepticism into belief. And that’s only putting the problem in epistemological terms. In political terms, it converts skepticism of government power into affirmation of government power — from conspiracy theories about Clinton (there were plenty of those) and Obama to dogmatic support for, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. The ideological impulse is primary, however, and its object is secondary. Thus Bush or even Palin could conceivably be subjected to the skeptical phase of the ideology, which would then find a new object for its affirmative phase. If Bush or Palin aren’t sufficiently devoted, the ideological authority will descend upon Alan Keyes or Orly Taitz.
There may be a vicious circle here where distrust of flawed mainstream authorities leads to trust in flawed fringe authorities, which in turn produces more alienation from the mainstream (I’m not just talking about the center-left media and government here, but mainstream as in ordinary, non-ideological people). The way out of this cycle of paranoia would be to burnish some less flawed, more-or-less mainstream authorities — a church? disinterested scholarship? anything could do the trick. But once you’ve sunk deep enough into the belief that you can’t trust anyone who questions an anti-mainstream belief, you can only trust people whom nobody else trusts, getting out of the hole becomes impossible. At that point, your ideology has redefined up as down, so that attempting to climb out means only digging deeper.
Posted on August 3rd, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy (http://www.amconmag.com/searchr.php?v&author=Daniel+McCarthy)
(http://digg.com/)
G.K. Chesterton never did say (http://chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm) that the problem with atheism is not that it leads men to believe in nothing but that it leads them to believe in anything. That’s just as well, because the truth in that cliche is broader than the words themselves (in any permutation) denote. A more general statement might be: when you have abandoned trust in established authorities, you have not thereby ceased to trust authorities; instead, you may be placing your trust in new, possibly worse ones.
The birthers are a good illustration. Commenter Delmar Jackson writes (http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/07/31/birthers-and-nationalism/#comment-33391) in response to Daniel Larison’s post on birthers and nationalism (http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/07/31/birthers-and-nationalism/), “I am not a Birther, but I have lost my trust of the media. Can you tell me why it took the National Enquirer to break the story on John Edwarrds cheating on his wife during the primaries?. The mainstram nedia ignored the story while Edwards continued to take votes from Hillary allowing Obama to win.” There’s a valid point here: “responsible” news outlets chose not to report on Edwards’s affair, just as in earlier days they chose not to report Kennedy’s affairs or Franklin Roosevelt’s physical disability (or his affairs, for that matter). The “privilege” politicians receive for their embarrassing personal secrets may extend to Republicans as well — The State newspaper in South Carolina knew about Gov. Mark Sanford’s indiscretions months before his disappearing act prompted them to expose him. These are just a few instances of news the reading public might care about that the media refuses to report. The litany of things that the media does report that aren’t true — see Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cook, for starters; you might add, on a slightly different note, Judith Miller and Mike Wallace — is too long to recite. Skepticism toward the mainstream media is well warranted. As is distrust in public officials, who have been lying to Americans about elections, wars, and the economy for a couple of centuries now.
But skepticism about media and political authorities doesn’t logically entail belief in wildly improbable notions like Barack Obama’s Kenyan nativity. That doesn’t follow logically, but for a lot of right-wingers, it does follow psychologically.
I’m skeptical of claims that all human beings have a more or less equally powerful need for faith. Clearly some people are more superstitious than others. Among religious believers, some are theologically inclined and others are mystically and emotionally inclined. Among nonbelievers, some buy into parascientific New Age mumbo-jumbo or imbue science with a religious aura, and others are more epistemically humble. Some number of people do, however, have a compelling need indeed to believe in improbable things that conform to ideological preferences. The toppling of corrupt authorities doesn’t do anything to decrease the credulous and authoritarian tendencies of this subset — it only unleashes those tendencies to find wilder, more ideologically satisfying objects.
Stalin is an example of the ideological true believer. He was both a committed ideological Marxist and a very paranoid man. He suppressed traditional religion in the Soviet Union. And when empirical science contradicted his ideology– as genetics certainly contradicted the belief in human equality — Stalin promoted the nonscientific but “politically correct” ideas of Trofim Lysenko. The birthers are not Stalinists, but they do subscribe to a kind of right-wing Lysenkoism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism). The ideology that insists the mainstream media and government cannot be trusted (and it’s true, they very often can’t) also positively affirms the “truth” of preposterous claims that fit the believer’s paranoia. In other words, ideology efficiently turns skepticism into belief. And that’s only putting the problem in epistemological terms. In political terms, it converts skepticism of government power into affirmation of government power — from conspiracy theories about Clinton (there were plenty of those) and Obama to dogmatic support for, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. The ideological impulse is primary, however, and its object is secondary. Thus Bush or even Palin could conceivably be subjected to the skeptical phase of the ideology, which would then find a new object for its affirmative phase. If Bush or Palin aren’t sufficiently devoted, the ideological authority will descend upon Alan Keyes or Orly Taitz.
There may be a vicious circle here where distrust of flawed mainstream authorities leads to trust in flawed fringe authorities, which in turn produces more alienation from the mainstream (I’m not just talking about the center-left media and government here, but mainstream as in ordinary, non-ideological people). The way out of this cycle of paranoia would be to burnish some less flawed, more-or-less mainstream authorities — a church? disinterested scholarship? anything could do the trick. But once you’ve sunk deep enough into the belief that you can’t trust anyone who questions an anti-mainstream belief, you can only trust people whom nobody else trusts, getting out of the hole becomes impossible. At that point, your ideology has redefined up as down, so that attempting to climb out means only digging deeper.