Serious, intellectually honest conservative Rob Dreher:
Again, this is not a brief for relativism, moral or otherwise. It is, though, to put in a word for intellectual humility. Facts really are stubborn things … but what is a fact?
It probably won’t surprise you that the discussion leading up to this involved both Stanley Fish and Chinese Traditional Medicine.
I still think that Hollywood conservative Dennis Hopper said it best:
Trentrunner
Wow. Sounds like Dreher’s epistemology ran over my dogma. Or something.
The “serious” Repubs are starting to sound like English grad students from the 80s and 90s.
I guess we’re finally all pomos on this bus.
Jim, Once
So what’s the big problem with relativism? Even my Sister of Mercy philosophy teacher allowed that it was the only way to get through life. Once again – has anyone on the right actually read the pretty dense collection of literature on the subject?
DougJ
@Jim, Once:
I would argue that saying there’s no such thing as facts goes far beyond relativism. That’s what gets me.
arguingwithsignposts
goddammit, fuck rod dreher. he gets painted as a serious, intellectual conservative and he is the worst evangelical bullshit who’s been peddling his crap for the talibangelicals for too long.
I’m getting a real good laugh out of him questioning the values of “facts,” Mr. “i believe the bible is true.”
Mark S.
We can’t really know anything for sure, so it’s best just to take an ultra-orthodox theological view of life. It’s what Burke would have advised.
The Moar You Know
I’ve never heard of Rob Dreher before, and will avoid any future writings of his. He is not very smart.
Martin
@DougJ: Well, that’s the basis of my issue with religion. Once you accept a supernatural, you’ve got to throw any absolute knowledge out the window. The speed of light might always be measured as a constant, or God could just be fucking with you – you never really know.
Not surprised that Dreher is comfortable operating from that place, to be honest. I gave that shit up when I was a kid.
John Cole
It’s like a middle school philosophy club with these “conservative intellectuals.” Worse, actually. There’s hope the middle schoolers will learn something in the future.
I guess it does make it easier to deny climate science and evolution and everything else if you deny the existence of facts.
ANOTHER ROUND OF TAX CUTS FOR EVERYONE!
Martin
@The Moar You Know: That was a remarkably BOB-like statement.
Linda Featheringill
Doug:
What is your definition of dialectics? Or which definition areyou referring to here?
I have a couple of definitions in mind but neither of them really fit.
IndyLib
@Mark S.:
Yep, and if that was the way the human race had gone about it, we’d be inventing the wheel about now, and that just might be far enough back “in the good ole days” to satisfy these idjits.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Oo, oo! Here’s one!
Rob Dreher sucks mangy dog cock.
DougJ
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m referring to the Dennis Hopper clip there.
Jim, Once
@DougJ:
Absolutely. But I’d like to start at the first step of this so-called argument. It seems to me that someone who questions the definition of facts – that same someone whose ideological partners fulminate about moral relativism – should at least speak with some clear understanding about the history of these arguments.
Mark S.
@John Cole:
If philosophers weren’t burdened by high taxes, they would be more motivated to come up with answers to these questions.
Jim, Once
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yeah, and this
The Moar You Know
@Martin: Given my day and how I feel about life at the moment, this does not surprise me at all. Maybe I’ll get some fucking bricks and put together a primitive oven, I probably have just enough room in my backyard for one.
But I stand by my statement. This Rob Dreher fellow – and there’s no other way to put it – is just not very smart. He knows big words, and knows how to string them together properly, but when you cut through the big words to the core of what he is arguing, you are left with the inevitable conclusion that there’s not a lot of grey matter, or life experience, powering the torrent of high-priced vocabulary.
Little Dreamer
@Linda Featheringill:
He didn’t mean dialectics, he meant dianetics (this makes about as much sense as the crap Hubbard wrote).
Sly
WRONG.
Lewontin said that “evidence of God” is an inherent contradiction. God, and broader supernatural belief, are a point of departure from the explicable. Supernatural phenomenon defy material explanations because they are supposed to. The supernatural, by definition, exists apart from material causes. For Lewontin, that meant that it exists only in the minds of those who believe in it.
From the same fucking article, by Lewontin, where that quote first appeared:
Little Dreamer
@The Moar You Know:
__
Of course there’s not much grey matter, he’s a theologist, his world is all black and white, and never the twain shall meet!
Jim, Once
@The Moar You Know:
How many college teachers did you know like this?
RSA
Doing philosophy is much harder than it looks. Dreher should stick to what he knows, whatever that is.
Little Dreamer
@Jim, Once:
Either that or announce retirement.
;)
Mike Kay
we would have won viet nam if only Col Kurtz had cut taxes.
Xecky Gilchrist
… but what is a fact?
That there is some heavy-gauge industrial grade wankery.
Jim, Once
@Little Dreamer:
There’s a thought. Oh. Wait. I did.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
You should have done something about the article by Anonymous Liberal that was quoted by Dreher. Of the two, it was the one worth reading.
DougJ
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Hmmmm….I feel like we already discussed that article at some length. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
(EDIT: I’m wrong, we haven’t discussed it. But it did cover a lot of the same ground as discussions here.)
Karmakin
On the topic of “relativism”…
Sam Harris has a book coming this fall that’s going to try to address this whole mess. And from the video, I think he might do a good job of it.
“Relativism” is the BIG BIG lie of conservatives. It’s Big Lie #1. The reality is that there’s an objective thing such as right and wrong, and it can be judged as such. Harris puts it as the effect that your actions have on conscious beings, and I agree with that.
Why it’s a big lie, is that an authoritarian moral source, especially a supernatural authoritarian moral source is about as subjective and relativistic morality-wise as it gets. You can justify pretty much anything using that. But more so, it shuts down the entire moral conversation. And that’s the worst of it.
This is to say that we can, and even SHOULD have debates about morality. Actually judging our effects can be very difficult, and we may not see eye to eye. But at least at this point, we’re coming at it from the same perspective, using the same language, and the same points of reference. But reducing it to “God said it” ruins that.
Hakumei
A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk—have at you!
glasnost
This post. This post is an excellent example of what I brought up in my belated comment on that post of yours, Doug, that began with “some people say I talk too much trash about David Brooks”. Nobody saw that one, so I’ll repeat myself.
BJ is a top-3 site for me, but – and I like a lot of your posts, Doug, but maybe a third of them are like this – not just make you look like kind of a dick, but kind of a dick about essentially harmless things. Sure, this isn’t Rod Dreher in a shining moment of clarity, but it’s really not as though there are no possible discussions asking “what is (or is not) a fact” that are worth something. Just because we can all think of many things that are obviously facts, doesn’t mean that there aren’t gray areas.
I’m not even reading Dreher’s post, so I don’t know if he came up with some good examples or wandered into the fog. But it really doesn’t matter. You get kind of impressively worked up about this kind of crap, which is at best basically fine if it was someone we liked, and at worst a little bit silly.
There’s an important difference between ideologues, militants, the ignorant and condemnatory – the Michelle Malkins and Andy McArthy’s – and what is merely crummy arguments or vapidity. Megan McArdle, David Brooks, Marc Ambinder, Jake Tapper, Politico, etc etc etc – all of these people sometimes make dumbshit arguments, display bias, or elevate trivia to high art. But you could point these things out without being quite as much of a dick about it. And this isn’t just a question of It’s-A-Small-World Disney Channel bipartisanship. Sometimes these people actually say interesting or reasonable things (like many mediocre people) and most of the time I don’t trust you to be able to tell the difference.
Which brings us back to Dreher. Is there an interesting rumination right here? One that could be basically transplanted to Crooked Timber or Obsidian Wings without missing a beat? Who knows? Because you think these people are scum, and you tend to run right by that stuff.
There’s too much in common with folks on the right who I really can’t stand – too much knee-jerk xenophobia and not enough patience to make a careful, civil disagreement once in a while. I’m not a fetishist about civility, but too much attitude becomes a habit, then a crutch.
I think JC does the best job of making sure to make his logic about what’s wrong with a post explicit, and more than “this post is an example of an attitude I like to trash” or “this post says makes a dumb statement”, but more like “the local conclusion of this idea A is really incredibly bad situation B, and you don’t get that / don’t care”.
TenguPhule
You can’t argue with these people. You can only confine them into a place where they will not endanger the public intelligence (such as it is).
Failing that…
Jim, Once
@glasnost:
I’m not even reading Dreher’s post
Johnny Pez
This seems like a particularly apt place to quote the commentariat over at Sadly, No!
I am not getting out of the boat.
Dracula
A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk—have at you!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@DougJ: To tell you the truth, I was only comparing the two articles: The Anonymous Liberal post was about those people who isolate themselves and refuse to see the facts, and the other was an example.
Personally, I think this dead unicorn needs to be kicked over and over until the stuffing comes out and the majority of Americans can see what they have been riding most of the past 30 years.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Like pushers selling crack on a street corner.
Observer
@glasnost:
I dunno know about any of that.
The basic form of a conservative argument these days is to dispute *everything* to run out the clock on the TV segment or news cycle. The goal is to get to a he-said-she-said standoff and avoid actual debate. The higher level goals seems to be to get the public to believe there’s a dispute about the issue and therefore move the argument onto solid “sound bite” grounds where conservatives can win.
The foundation for such an outlook is to say the intellectual equivalent of “what is a fact” and then proceed to dispute every single blessed thing about an issue and then create “anti facts” such as ‘death panels’.
Ecks
One of Dreher’s own commenters nails it:
Boom, debate over. Move on, nothing else to see here.
@Sly: Yep. The “super” in “supernatural” gives the whole gig away. An instrument that tells us about the natural world is simply silent with respect to the supernatural. It can neither confirm nor deny, leaving only an article of faith that one is free to believe or not on one’s own recognizance.
DougJ
@glasnost:
Thanks for the feedback. I actually did try to explain why I didn’t like Dreher’s post but I didn’t think my explanations added anything to what seemed like the obvious stupidity of saying “I’m not a relativist, but what are facts”, so I left them out.
As for coming across as an unfair asshole who gets angry at VSPs over nothing in a third of my posts, that’s deliberate.
arguingwithsignposts
@glasnost:
Shorter glasnost: concern troll is concerned.
Protip: you can delete that bookmark. I’ve followed Dreher’s nonsense since way back when the Dallas Morning News started experimenting with blogs. He’s an ass, he’s always been an ass, but he’s taken seriously by the Dallas Theological Seminary crew and their ilk, and if you don’t know what kind of outsized influence they have, you have no idea.
Sly
@glasnost:
I think you’re kind of confusing the issue by not understanding where Dreher is coming from.
There has been a debate among theologians, in part due to the rise of the scientific method as a reliable predictor of the natural world, around the veracity of such as thing as “evidence for God”.
In the context of science, this concept is self-contradictory. Evidence pertains to the material, natural world. A world in which the supernatural, by definition, is not a part. The supernatural, as posited by people who believe in the supernatural, can and does counteract the mechanisms of material reality without being subject to those mechanisms. In the parlance of most religious expression, this, in essence, is the definition of a miracle.
Honest theologians, at least in my estimation, get this. They acknowledge that the supernatural can not be explained through material causes because the supernatural exists outside the realm of material causes. They do, however, believe that such a realm exists. Many scientists may too, but the honest ones acknowledge that such a realm does not pertain to their methodology. This is what Stephen Jay Gould meant by the phrase “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”. On the other end of the spectrum you have people like Dawkins, who posit that religion actually does make claims about the material world and that, yes, those claims can be subject to scientific scrutiny.
Dreher doesn’t get this. His argument is that science is epistemologically closed because scientists refuse to accept readily available evidence that exists outside the realm of material causes. He doesn’t get that science has no business dealing with anything within this realm because, by its very nature, it is inapplicable to scientific methodology. He’s just using the political debate around closed-mindedness because it “feels” like it applies to his own notions concerning science vs. religion.
Facts in science, and facts in politics, are usually the same thing, however. Rational policies are, by definition, based on a rigorous examination of human social dynamics. When Dreher asks “What’s a fact?” he’s not looking for an answer. He may think he is, but he really isn’t. He’s looking for a way to burst into the conversation for his own narrow ends.
Comrade Kevin
I like the Carly Fiorina ad. She’s attacking Boxer, and she’s not even going to get out of the Republican primary.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@glasnost:
Nah,. wrong take dude. Dougj, I think, just really really cares about what pundits and others write and the general milieu of written political discourse. That’s not a fault, but rather just a different emphasis about politics that you or I , or someone else has. I am glad we have someone here who does such dogged work on these things, though every post doesn’t always interest me personally, plenty of DougJ’s threads do and his obsessions pay off then, at least for moi.
Ecks
@Sly:
Actually my understanding is that while Gould heartily approved of it, the term actually comes from a Pope John Paul II encyclical… Hence the latin term magisteria.
So there you go BJ community, when he wasn’t being a vile bastard JP2 actually had some smart things to say :)
Well I don’t know about the SAME… most policy is not run through extensive double blind testing (most of it can’t be) or other forms of high powered empirical scrutiny. Most of it is “do we have enough votes to increase the garbage workers pay by 2%,” and “do we have the votes to past a package of modifications to the tax code allowing for certain kinds of buildings to go through a curtailed application process whereby…”
But your point GENERALLY is well taken :)
Sly
@Ecks:
I did write rational politics, not all politics. :)
wag
In my second favorite (following AN) Dennis Hopper movie we get to hear “Baby loves blue velvet.”
not very politically correct.
handy
I just read this Wikipedia article on Dreher.
Yeah, not so much.
Ecks
@Sly: Rational politics. Is that like military intelligence, amicable divorce, civil war, jumbo shrimp, and American English?
I like my morons oxy.
MinneapolisPipe
Did someone say Dianetics?
Alex S.
I don’t know… in MY world, a fact is something that exists or is true without any doubt. My interpretation of reality is mostly based on facts. Anyone who tries to insert doubt into the definition of a fact is twisting language and reality around it. I try to get a feeling for Dreher’s point of view and it makes my head dizzy.
John Cole
This is spoof, right?
Rod Dreher wants to set civilization back to the stone ages by denying the existence of facts- “Does the earth revolve around the sun or the sun around the earth? I don’t know, because what is a fact, really?”
And your response is to get upset by the tone of this post?
This country deserves Republican rule.
Svensker
But what would Ayn Rand say!
grumpy realist
I’ve always felt the ultimate fact is something which, if you ignore its existence, you are liable to wind up dead (or damaged) no matter what your belief system is. Witness the critical mass of plutonium, for instance.
I do think Rod Dreher should go off and read a whole bunch of the Scholastics and later philosophers (e.g. Spinoza) before writing another sentence. Reading his philosophical contortions is like watching a not-too-bright child figure out toilet training. Encouraging perhaps for the parent, but why should the rest of us be inflicted with the typical learning process?
kezboard
Rod Dreher is saying that conservatism is true in the same way traditional medicine is? OK, I’ll take that.
glasnost
Assuming those posts are eated for good, maybe due to Noscript –
@glasnost:
I think you’re kind of confusing the issue by not understanding where Dreher is coming from.
Sly, you’re missing my point. I think your explanation of where Dreher’s coming from is very good, and your criticisms are legit. If Doug’s blog post had used your text, it would have been an excellent blog post. I’m not claiming Dreher is right. I just don’t think it, like many other posts that aren’t actually right, deserves knee-jerk ridicule. Knee-jerk ridicule should be reserved for people that are either both dumb *and* offensive or emotionally repellent, or people making long strings of deep stupidity.
I think that this is just a mainstream christian-style beef with science typical of an, not to be condescening, an averagely-thoughtful person. Is there really a need to deal with people like that the same way as we deal with, say, Pam Gellar? I can’t speak for everyone, but I find it irritating. It makes for too much dumb trash talk.
Doug:
I actually did try to explain why I didn’t like Dreher’s post but I didn’t think my explanations added anything to what seemed like the obvious stupidity of saying “I’m not a relativist, but what are facts”, so I left them out.
Well, for one thing, if you’d done that, I wouldn’t just be noticing for the first time the first part of that paraphrased quote. Oops.
So you got me there, that’s a dumb coupling. But even so, it’s possible to get what he was trying to say, which is the fairly standard (“I still don’t agree with X in my day-to-day arguments with people but right at this moment is seems kind of compelling and true”.) Maybe there’s an extra dollop of lack of self-awareness here, but… people who don’t like relativism resort to relativist arguments sometimes. It’s not perfectly consistent, but I don’t think it’s a declaration of cretinhood. It’s just ordinary intellectual inconsistency. You could have a useful conversation that begin by pointing that out, and probably Dreher wouldn’t call you names and shit.
Meanwhile,
As for coming across as an unfair asshole who gets angry at VSPs over nothing in a third of my posts, that’s deliberate.
This spikes my curiosity. Why? What’s your angle here? Is irony involved somewhere? What’s the goal?
The audience wants in on your plan.
Little Dreamer
@John Cole:
I’m sorry, but, unless you have children to sacrifice to the awful future we’re setting up for them, I don’t think you don’t get to make that determination.
Let’s just say you don’t have much skin in the game.
I’m not ready to give up on them just yet.
Little Dreamer
@Little Dreamer:
__
I just woke up, sorry!