{"id":27936,"date":"2012-05-17T05:22:11","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T10:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27936"},"modified":"2013-10-14T13:48:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-14T18:48:10","slug":"intellectual-snake-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27936","title":{"rendered":"Intellectual Snake Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Illuminating: See Andrew Ferguson’s The New Phrenology<\/a>, in the Weekly Standard. It digs through the history (long), motivations (predictable) and methodology (laughable) of the constant dribble of “social science” that claims liberals are genetically\/chemically\/socially wired to be good-hearted, open-minded, whole human beings, while conservatives are clenched little demi-humans:<\/p>\n

\n

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left\u2014the differences, in Mooney\u2019s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid\u2014originate in two personality types. As it happens, the liberal personality, as psychopunditry describes it, is a perfect representation of those traits that liberals say they most admire. Liberals are \u201cmore open, flexible, curious, nuanced.\u201d Conservatives are \u201cmore closed, fixed, and certain in their views.\u201d But don\u2019t get the wrong idea: Mooney insists he is not saying \u201cconservatives are somehow worse people than liberals.\u201d That would be judgmental, and Science is clear: Liberals aren\u2019t judgmental. \u201cThe groups are just different,\u201d he goes on amiably. Indeed, he warns that the truths he reveals in his book \u201cwill discomfort both sides.\u201d Fairness requires him to be evenhanded. On the one hand, conservatives won\u2019t like the scientific fact that they tend to deny reality and treat their errors as dogma. On the other hand, liberals won\u2019t like the scientific fact that all their well-meaning attempts to reason with conservatives are doomed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Depressing: \u00a0Googling the list of psychopundits and setting how many leftybloggers take the word of the likes of Theodor Adorno<\/a>\u00a0seriously. \u00a0Or how many NYTimes columnists – Thomas Edsall in this case<\/a> – cite the infamous “\u201cPower, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others<\/em>\u201d study as actual hard science. \u00a0Or the number of leftybloggers<\/a> that think Chris Mooney is an actual scientist:<\/div>\n

A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science\u2014and Reality, which seeks to explain the Republican \u201cassault on reality.\u201d He is a very earnest fellow, and an ambitious one. He glances over an array of conservative political beliefs and sets himself a goal: \u201cto understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

His list of false claims is instructive. Along with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palin hypothesized; that tax cuts increase revenue and that the president\u2019s stimulus didn\u2019t create jobs; that Congress banned incandescent light bulbs; and that the United States was founded as a \u201cChristian nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The list of errors is instructive because they aren\u2019t properly considered errors, though the misattribution is in keeping with the modern ideologue\u2019s custom of pretending that differences of opinion or interpretation are contests between truth and falsehood. It\u2019s perfectly reasonable for conservatives to assume that offering health insurance to 43 million people will cost a lot of money, and thereby increase the deficit; and it\u2019s perfectly reasonable to distrust notoriously mistaken budget forecasters who say it won\u2019t. The act redirects vast sums away from Medicare, which should require cuts in service. Palin\u2019s \u201cdeath panel\u201d was a bumper-sticker summary of a rational expectation\u2014that the act will transfer the unavoidable rationing of health care from insurance companies, where most of it rests now, to the government, which will be forced to bureaucratically reshuffle the vast sums spent on end-of-life care. Mooney is right that Congress did not ban the incandescent light bulbs that most of us are used to; but it did ban their manufacture\u2014a distinction without a difference. As for the Christian nation: The country was founded by Christians who nevertheless resolutely declined to create a Christian government. Mooney\u2019s conflation of the American government with the American nation is an error that conservatives are less likely to make. Studies show.<\/p>\n

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left\u2014the differences, in Mooney\u2019s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid\u2014originate in two personality types.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Someone needs to do a “study” on why liberals are so insecure that they need to constantly puff up their own sense of intellectual entitlement with hack “science”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Illuminating: See Andrew Ferguson’s The New Phrenology, in the Weekly Standard. It digs through the history (long), motivations (predictable) and methodology (laughable) of the constant dribble of “social science” that claims liberals are genetically\/chemically\/socially wired to be good-hearted, open-minded, whole human beings, while conservatives are clenched little demi-humans: It is a principle of psychopunditry that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27936"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27941,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27936\/revisions\/27941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}