Over at Harry’s Place, he posted this short list:
…ten statements that I think a reasonable or principled internationalist and opponent of the war should be able to sign up to:
1. Iraq is better off due to regime change and the Iraqi people now have a more hopeful future without the Ba’athist dictatorship in power.
2. I am very pleased that Saddam Hussein was captured and now faces justice.
3. The Iraqi ‘resistance’ offers no hope for the Iraqi people and needs to be defeated.
4. Support needs to be given to both the Iraqi governing council and the coalition forces in their struggle against these reactionaries.
5. I hope that defeat of the ‘resistance’ will allow for a progress towards free and fair elections and democratic self-government in Iraq.
6. The Coalition troops should stay as long as they are needed to assist the transition to democracy and independence in Iraq.
7. I hope that a successful, democratic Iraq will be an inspiration to democrats throughout the middle-east.
8. I hope that the capture of Saddam and the fall of his regime will inspire other peoples who are fighting against dictatorship.
9. And that the end of his regime may warn off others who are considering developing or hiding WMD programmes.
10. All of the above are more important to me than the success or otherwise of the political careers of Tony Blair or George W Bush.
The comments linked to this simple article are pretty predictable. There are some who can say “yes,” and some who say “yes, but.”
People see themselves as mainstream, regardless of their views. To do otherwise would be admitting to yourself that you are in the minority in your beliefs. Pat Buchannan doesn’t think he’s far to the right. Howard Dean doesn’t think he’s far to the left. Believe what you will, but true radicalism is rare in our culture. “Progressive” is the new term being used for radicals, because it carries an implication of legitimacy. Radicals don’t really want to be considered radical. They just want to be part of a group. The lone radical is a rare and exotic occurance.
They all view themselves as individualists, but act like lemmings to be classed as one of the “smart people who know what’s good for this country and the world.
I’ve always loved Kipling’s poem, If:
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim;
Too many “smart people” don’t realize that their native intelligence doesn’t directly translate into “smart.” Too many intelligent people aren’t very smart because they fail to heed Kipling’s advice. It is one reason for the hard leftist mentality being centered in academe. Professors with PhDs have done little useful with their minds. And their students have had little time to do so.
At the Air Force Academy, I was surrounded by some very intelligent students. The minimum SAT requirement for entry was 1300. I always told them I wasn’t intelligent as they were. In fact, I didn’t qualify for admittance. I also told them I was smarter than they were. They knew that, but didn’t understand why that was so. I compared it to computers, which they all understood quite well. In my case, I was operating with an 80MB hard drive, whereas they were all equipped with the latest 80GB model. The difference was that my hard drive was full, and theirs were just getting the bugs out of the operating system.
To truly be “smart,” you must have knowledge and experience. And those must both be broad–eclectic. Knowledge can come from books, but experience only comes from doing something other than reading and writing. Unfortunately, many people feel they can get by with one or the other. I’ve known some very intelligent people with loads of knowledge who cannot judge distance, hammer a nail, or relate an allegory to anything in their lives. I’ve known people with years of experience doing things who cannot understand theoretical concepts well enough to capitalize on that experience. The “intellectual elite” fall into the former category.
At Ambient Irony, Pixy Misa explains this in philosophy terms:
The basic concept of materialism is very simple, and it is this: The universe exists. Got that? Well, that’s all it is, really. The universe exists, and we exist within it. Living creatures are made up of the same fundamental particles as stars and planets and comets and so on; our brains are made up of the same sort of molecules as our bodies, and we use those brains to observe the universe and try to make some sense of it.
Now, idealism says exactly the opposite: The universe does not exist of itself, but is merely an artifact of mind. It is our perceptions that are the fundamental reality, and matter has no existence independent of perception.
Analysis versus knowledge, or materialism versus idealism. Using your native intelligence to explore the world as it exists, or using it to try and explain why it doesn’t fit your views of how it should exist. Most materialists understand they need to dip their synapses into the pool of idealism from time to time, but idealists see no need to go the other way. What they think is what the world is.
And that is the prime conflict between what in politics is called right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal.
What it amounts to is logic. I took a Logic course in college as my Philosophy elective. (As an aside, isn’t it interesting that engineers have to take philosophy, sociology, and psychology courses, but none of those majors require a solid calculus-based physics course?) It intrigued me that business and arts majors had so much trouble with the course. For me, it was an easy A. The others had difficulty with logical reasoning and syllogisms. Boolean math and programming uses this synthesis. IF A AND B THEN C, or IF A OR B THEN NOT C. These same intelligent people cannot grasp this concept. Questions 7 through 9 above call this logic into play. But question 10 is the trump that takes the trick, and simple reasoning is overcome. They feel like they’re being logical–and they are–but their logic is inductive rather than deductive.
Inductive reasoning is the gathering of bits of specific information and using knowledge and experience to make an observation about what must be true. Knowledge and experience–where did we see that before?
Unfortunately, they have no real experience to fall back on. If they were bullied in school, did they fight back, or run to a teacher? I know where I’d place my bet. Did the problem go away? Probably not–they were still afraid every time they met the bully in the hallway, and avoided him in every way possible.
Every person I’ve ever known who has confronted a bully–win or lose–gained enough respect that they were never bothered again.
So, in the case of Iraq, will we be safer? Not according to Howard Dean, and not according to commenters to Harry’s post. Their ‘knowledge’ tells them that everything will be worse, and they have no ‘experience’ to balance that judgment. And their inductive reasoning is clouded by the requirements of #10. If they would only phrase their beliefs honestly: ‘I cannot think clearly because Bush must be defeated, no matter how good he is for our country.’ We might have some valuable debate.