Reason is fundamental
"Don't These Illiterates Understand Trickle-Down?" (Parker Bros.)
George Neumayr
Illiterates and Intellectuals
American Spectator
11/30/04
“ The moral relativism professors teach in the classroom doesn't shake their confidence in the morality of the Democratic Party. Why isn't the morality of the Democrats subject to the usual academic contention that morality is unknowable? Because academics are practicing a kind of secular fideism, the idea that reason is irrelevant to faith and even if it contradicts faith, so what? The secular fideists on campus faculties can't square their customary skepticism and relativism with their fervent faith in the Democratic Party's policies, but no matter. If reason is irrelevant to academic life -- read academic reviews and most professors hesitate to say that man's reason can give a certain account of anything and more or less say academic life consists of opining and spinning unverifiable theories -- why shouldn't it be irrelevant to political life as well? ”
Full Article
Anti-intellectualism is one of the defining characteristics of the right. They tenaciously attack every group that might disagree with them. Especially those that do the research. Thus the media, hollywood, academia are all not to be trusted. Bush himself claims not to read much, he mocks serious debate, he scorns science, and he disregards nuance at the price of a war against reality.
Bush has been an affront to thoughtful people everywhere--and yet the paleoconservatives at the American Spectator want us to buy the ridiculous notion that it is simply irrational to vote Democrat.
Read On! |
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| Republicans are the party of “social justice,” while Democratic policies “do harm” to the needy! “In other words, professors care more and so naturally vote for the Democrats. Apart from its comic presumption, the comment reveals the unintellectual character of modern intellectuals: they speak more loudly about their hearts than their minds even as their compassionate conceits do harm to the people they purport to help.” |
Progressive policies are all based on the idea of social justice and aiding the less fortunate--living wage laws, worker protections, universal health care, the social safety net, and so on. Republicans generally base their proposals on principles like individualism, social Darwinism, business interests, and moralizing that encompasses their own brand of religion, yet abandons the material needs of most people. The take-home message is that Republican economic theories are bad for those most in need. "Trickle-down" theory simply doesn't work. Today, we have huge deficits and less jobs to show for it. Democratic economic policies are ones that actually do create jobs and improve the social infrastructure that supports families. (Here are some comparative indicators between the Clinton and Bush years.) |
| University professors are all postmodernists who are fundamentally against reasoning. “Having lost contact with common sense through a skeptical distrust of reason, postmodernist professors more or less decide their politics on raw emotion...” |
Conservatives love to overstate the influence and absurdity of "pomo." In fact, universities are dominated by another idea of knowledge--science. For example, their candidate expressed doubts over the reality of global warming. Democrats follow the consensus of the scientific community, including government and military scientists, that it is a grave and gathering threat. |
"The fundamentalist mind is . . . essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference."
This is what historian Douglas Hofstatder wrote in 1963 in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Anti-intellectualism is one of the defining characteristics of the right. They tennaciously attack every group that might disagree with them. Especially those that do the research. Thus the media, hollywood, and academia are all not to be trusted. Bush himself claims not to read much, he mocks serious debate, he scorns science, and he disregards nuance at the cost of a war against reality.
Bush has been an affront to thoughtful people everywhere--and yet the paleoconservatives at the American Spectator want us to buy the ridiculous notion that it is simply irrational to vote Democrat.
The reason university professors overwhelmingly supported Kerry was not because they are all irrational postmodernists--it was because they saw a president who rejected facts and relied on a particular brand of ideology, a faith-based "way of knowing" contrary to reality, and they saw the human cost in poverty and lives.
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