Omnipotentblog has mentioned Jonathan Haidt in previous posts.
“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion” is
one of the more important books you may ever read. Haidt found that people
think of morality in six different domains: harm, fairness, oppression, loyalty
and patriotism, purity, and submission to authority. Liberals focus primarily
on the first two and sometimes the third while conservatives focus on all six.
Haidt also highlighted research that shows humans are not as
rational as they think. He portrayed the human brain as an elephant and its rider.
The elephant is the subconscious and the rider is reason and intellect. The
rider likes to think he is in charge but the elephant goes where it wants. The
rider devises post hoc justifications for why it turned right or left. This is
profoundly important because liberal doctrine rests on the altar of reason. All
the ideas Democrats are selling now owe their existence to the French
Enlightenment. Thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire and Condorcet believed humanity
could create a new existence based on science and reason alone. Believing human
nature was basically good, it followed that bad behavior was largely derived
from ignorance or oppressive social structures. Tear down that scaffolding of
oppression and teach everyone things like smoking is bad and you will have a
world of happy, healthy people. This idea ruled the 20th century. It
should be obvious now that it doesn’t work but for liberals it is still full
steam ahead.
In contrast, British enlightenment thinkers like Edmund
Burke, David Hume and Adam Smith believed man was incapable of being purely
rational. To them, utopian enlightenment was pure fantasy. The disastrous
French Revolution and the success of the American Revolution would seem to
prove their case but for liberals, history is boring and pointless. Full steam
ahead.
These revelations from Haidt should be enough to make progressives
question themselves but hardened faith is tough to change. However, Haidt’s third
major point is tremendously important. It could affect serious change if the
advantage is seized. Though apparently moderate, Haidt is still a liberal. He
defends this in the book. But his research showed that, unlike himself, liberals
are largely ignorant of how conservatives think. Haidt had liberals and
conservatives answer questions posing as their ideological counterparts. Conservatives
did well. They know how liberals think. Liberals, unable to think past the false
canard that says conservatives are mean, selfish and ignorant, did poorly.
This general ignorance about conservatism is central to the
American political story. What would happen if the scales fell from liberal
eyes and they began to understand their foes? Without willful blindness,
leftism would be on life support. And if the underclass finds out conservatives
aren’t really out to get them, Democrats are done.
Maybe Haidt’s research is flawed and just doesn’t register
the truly Machiavellian nature of conservatives? Not according to American
Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks. In “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism”, he
shows that conservatives donate more to charity and volunteer more of their
time. In a landmark study on American religion, Robert Putnam and David
Campbell showed that churchgoers are not just sour-faced Pharisees. Those who
attend regularly are more generous to society on every level. Among the cheapest politicians in America is Joe Biden. Among the most generous? Dick Cheney.
“But Omnipotentblog, aren’t all the smart people on the left”?
True, academia is dominated by leftists but George Orwell once said there are
some ideas so absurd only an intellectual could believe them. For a movement
allegedly based on science and reason, there are a number of core beliefs that
science resoundingly rejects.
One pervasive anti-science belief is that, as Thomas Malthus
first wrote in 1798, there are too many people on earth competing for
inadequate resources. Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich popularized this in 1968 with “The Population Bomb”. With apocalyptic certitude, he predicted hundreds of
millions would soon die of starvation. Ehrlich later coauthored a book of hysterics with Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, which promoted infertility
drugs in food and water, seizing single mothers’ babies, and forced abortions. Few
theories have been more thoroughly disproven as Malthusianism but it lives on. In
2009, he stated his projections had actually been too rosy but they had been
staved off temporarily because his book stirred action.
Another demonstrable falsehood is the notion that wealth is
static: There is x amount of money. Rich
people hoard it. Without question, the size of the economic pie shrinks and expands
because of government policies and other innumerable variables. The rich and
the poor can get richer at the same time. This “trickle down” stuff is snidely
dismissed except there’s this thing called math, which increasingly seems to
exist for the sole purpose of disproving liberal doctrine.
The list of provably false liberal dogmas is long. Talk
radio host Dennis Prager often says, “The facts of life are conservative”. It
is why, as people age, they become more conservative. All this brings us to a
potential solution. While knowledge doesn’t necessarily make people more moral,
enlightenment can certainly make them more conservative. Because of the virtual
monopoly the left has on higher education, what if a handful of wealthy
conservatives like the Kochs or Sheldon Adelson donated money for college courses
across the nation? They would be free and provide college credit. The major
issues would be fairly debated between a liberal professor and a conservative,
both making their case with real data on a level playing field. The rabid dogs guarding
the p.c. thought bubble of college campuses would essentially be neutered. The
charge of indoctrination would be defeated because nobody would be forcing anyone
to take the class and there would be a liberal to counteract all the dirty
conservative lies (i.e. truths). Government would have to mandate this, of
course as one can imagine college administrators saying things like, “over my
dead body”. It might be fun, however, to watch academics resort to total hysterics
like mock self-immolations and nude sit-ins to prevent the dirty tricks of the
right. You know, like honest debate. Fools they may be but they’re smart enough
to know the truth is a dangerous thing.
