Good friends have informed me that I’m unfair. Mea culpa. They tell me I hold progressives to a higher standard of logic than the groundlings who have gone conservative. By “groundlings,” I don’t intend to be insulting, but rather lack a better descriptor. I mean working people, those for whom feeding the kids, hard work, banal concerns such as how they’re going to pay the rent, are foremost on their minds.
In fairness, there’s a sound reason for this. The leading voices of progressivism enjoy the privilege of greater education, the comfort of knowing where their next meal is coming from, the joy of having the opportunity of basking in Abe Maslow’s self-actualization. They can afford to complain about paper cuts because they don’t have to worry about losing their legs.
The groundlings, on the other hand, are by no means stupid, as one would realize if one would only listen to them. But progressives too often don’t, even if they claim they do, because they say things that progressives reject, and use words that progressives refuse to allow. By choosing to believe they’re stupid (or racist, sexist, deplorable, pick ’em), they can dismiss them from their world, castigate them and listen only to the dulcet tone of their choir.
The groundlings tend to appreciate things that progressives find abhorrent. Tradition. Hard work. Nationalism.* Fair play. Normalcy. These are solid values, but not the sort of values that require doctoral theses to explain. Progressives seek change, the evolution of our sensibilities, to achieve what they believe to be a more fair, more just, society. As a general notion, what’s not to like about making things better? But change doesn’t necessarily make things better, just different, so it’s up to those seeking change to show that it will do so.
And this is where evidence is needed. It’s not enough that they are better educated. It’s not enough that they write papers, do studies, engage in rhetoric, whether comprised of meaningless jargon or actual, comprehensible thoughts.
Years ago, I used the metaphor of hemlines. Fashion designers did what they do, and one year they went up, while the next year they went down. There would be millions of words murdered to explain why, but they were, of course, nonsense. There is no inherent virtue in the height of a hemline. There is no rational explanation for why higher or lower is better. Just different. And if it wasn’t different, there would be no reason to rush out and buy a new dress to be in fashion.
So it’s not a matter of murdering words to explain away what should be obvious. Either your belief can withstand scrutiny or it can’t. This is true whether you seek mandated use of pronouns or contend that the reason women, the majority gender, aren’t dominant is that men are superior.
Since progressives are the ones who seek to tear down Chesterton’s Fence, they bear the duty to show that it’s the right thing to do. Since they enjoy the benefits that enable them to make this showing, the education and privilege, there is no reason to lower expectations. If they’re right, they should be able to prove it.
Which is why something like this reminds us that, despite all that brainpower, all that passion, all the screaming about their virtue and the demands to silence any opposition, they have a problem.
According to this, 52% of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with vote tallies, handing the election to Trump. To head off the knee-jerk rejoinder, it’s not that groundlings don’t share in believing things to be facts that are false. Neither side owns truth, even though both believe it does.
The salient difference is that one side holds itself out as more enlightened than the other; one side demands change to accomplish its enlightened goals. The burden is on the moving party to prove its case.
Is the opposition to change disingenuous in its efforts to refute the need for change? Often times, sure. Neither side has a monopoly on logical fallacies, or righteousness. While it may be true that decision-making is usually a product of emotion rather than reason, that doesn’t make it good decision-making. The side that screams loudest, that emotes the most, isn’t necessarily the most persuasive, even if it’s able to gather together those who share its bias.
The side that wraps itself up in education, privilege, a claim of intellectualism and enlightenment, still has to produce evidence to support its contention that the change it demands is a good enough reason to tear down the fence. It’s not good enough to claim enlightenment while believing in lies. Nor is it sufficient to point at the lies the other side believes in to show that they aren’t alone in their bias.
It’s just a question of what the evidence shows, and who bears the burden of proof. So yes, I’ve been unfair in that I hold smart people who seek change to their proof even when the demands on the groundlings may not compare. But if you want to recreate society to suit your enlightened vision, the burden is on you to show it will be better, it will not create unintended consequences that will do harm to others, that you have the evidence, and not merely the belief, that it’s the wise choice.
It’s all about the evidence, no matter how enlightened you feel you are.
*Curiously, the word nationalism, with the prefix “white,” has become a huge pejorative word. It’s unclear why loving one’s country is a bad thing, particularly in politics where one would presumably elect people for the purpose of serving that country and their constituents. Does it make more sense that an American elected official put the interests of Syrian refugees in Paris ahead of his constituents in Idaho?
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I think we need a term for people who are one paycheck away from disaster. If they or their child is a crime victim or is arrested that would be the disaster.
My word is grossly inadequate, but I failed to come up with a better one. I hope someone else will.
“Provincial” is close, but also considered a slur.
“Realist” has acquired some alternative meanings, but I really like “realist” to describe people who have to live in the real world, and it might be a difficult word to turn into a slur.
Precariat.
A potential precariat?
When you can afford the luxuries of not having to fight paycheck-to-paycheck, the thought that “there but for the grace of God go I” can be disquieting.
Some people appear to avoid facing that thought by inventing reasons why they, themselves, are more deserving than others.
This exercise of maintaining illusory superiority is much easier when using strawmen caricatures of people for the comparison target.
Obviously, anybody who doesn’t share the in-group passion for protecting the southern lesser spotted snail darter is impossibly dense.
We have to protect the Southern Lesser Spotted Snail Darter. Otherwise, what would us Rednecks use for Bass fishing bait?
Sorry, SHG. It’s relevant to Mike’s comment. Enjoy.
Barbecue. Understood.
Every morning, as I read the news from the nation’s largest newspapers, I am struck by the doubled and misspelled words, malapropisms, incomplete and otherwise incoherent sentences. Of course, “journalists,” above all, consider themselves “educated” and “enlightened.” So much so that they try to give us those things now instead of facts. They are the veritable priesthood of liberal progressive Pharaoh. In the attempt, they are making it clear that “education” and “enlightenment” do not mean so much in this country today.
The enlightened feel its their duty not merely to serve the cause of the marginalized, but to tell the unenlightened how to think, as they’re too stupid to realize they’re wrong. Too many journalists believe themselves to be the priests whose duty it is to convert the heathens to enlightenment.
I think I prefer to remain unenlightened.
Enlightened is a rational, modern and well informed outlook. Rational eliminates raving nutjobs and timely would be a better choice than modern in my opinion.
What is the standard for informed? A low probability of making a serious mistake or better informed than the average resident of the city, state or nation?
Definition 2: spiritually aware. Enlightened people believe they exist on a higher spiritual plane. The air is probably thinner up there.
I was going to use the word “woke,” but I’m prohibited under the rules of enlightenment from using it.
I thought it would be best to stay away from definition 2.
You’re not as spiritually woke as I am. Oh crap, I said it. Sorry.
This post is well written and remarkably reminiscent of Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France .”
Burke stole it from me. Friggin’ Edmund.
FIrst, when you think about the concept of “community”, which is a very big thing in progressive circles, it is all about having an affinity and a feeling of responsibility to a group. The progressives think that this sort of group affinity should be limited to very small local communities, but at the same time they promote the idea of group identity based on race, gender, sexual proclivity, which means that the group identity encompasses a very larg number of people. I think of nationalism as a form of communitarianism, at a larger scale. It can be positive or negative, depending on the aspirations of the leaders of the group – even small communities can cause a lot of trouble if the leaders decide that their particular group should own or control the local water supply, or some other local resource. Nationalism is just an extension of the boundaries. from the local community.
In addition, I had never heard of Chesterton’s Fence before, but it is a very important concept to engineers who have to fix a machine. You have to understand how the thing works, and why it works the way it does before you start to take it apart to fix or change it. And that usually requires an understanding of history, including any failures of the machine in the past. The progressives do not seem to be willing to acknowledge the failures of their past fads, from prohibition, to eugenics, to socialism. They ignore all the suffering they have caused – “we will just do it right the next time”. They cannot accept that the theoretical basis for their ideas is incomplete, and that it does not include many important phenomena (e.g., human nature) which cause problems in implementing the perfect society.
The highly educated conservative elite don’t have much of a record of learning from their mistakes. Nor of learning from experience or evidence, be it scientific or economic, or social or any other kind. .
SMH. Yes, “brilliant people agree with me,” so no matter how well-educated the conservative elite may be, they’re wrong. You’ve broken the irony meter.
“The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence” — nice to know there’s a term for that. As the gentleman in engineering said above, so also in software engineering. When updating old code, you’ll do better to find out why a particular oddity in the code exists, rather than just assuming the people who preceded you on the job were hopelessly stupid and wrote weird things for no reason.
Speaking of holding the educated and comfortable to a higher standard of reasoning–the sample size on that survey is ridiculously small and self-selecting–far too small to make any reasonable conclusions about Democrats in general. Of course, if you’re just using it as a rhetorical prop for your argument… don’t have me on a jury. I like my evidence to be factual and lawyer arguments to be actually reasonable, not appeals to emotion trying to appear as reason. On the other hand… I agree with your overall point.
(And that is why I voted to acquit, ultimately. The public defender’s argument was a shoddy appeal to emotion that insulted my intelligence, but the facts of the case made the government out to be a gigantic ass. I am bothered by sloppy arguments even if your point is good, but that does not make the point less good.)
The sample was an example, not proof, which has been discussed and shown ad nauseam. But if it bothers you, that’s all that really matters.