09/06/2017
University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell makes the profound observation that people do not necessarily change their opinions when presented with better information. Most people are irrational, you see, and therefore our political beliefs are often irrational too. And so what other recourse do you have but to shut up all the illogical yahoos out there — i.e. everyone from the Alt Right to Fox News, all right-leaning opinion in other words. [Don’t bother trying to understand those on the ‘other side’, by Mark Kingwell, Toronto Globe And Mail, August 31, 2017]Of course, I argue against this at Alternative Right (he also makes the ridiculous claim that some ideological questions are settled), but while I’m at it, I also vent about the childishness at the root of left-wing morality
The truth is that the facile formulations of Peter Singer (or of Rawls) is what the Left looks like when it is spelled-out in plain black and white logic. The only other place left to go is Communism — the Orwellian notion that the more we eliminate what distinguishes us as individuals, the freer we will be to achieve self-actualization. How on earth can these things be dressed-up as anything higher than the commonsense morality of a sentimental bleeding-heart, only made worse by being given some logical direction?Perhaps this partly explains why leftist logic-choppers put so much effort into concocting ever more elaborate explanations for what is wrong with society, instead of polishing their abstract vision of what is the right way. Noam Chomsky, that favorite of pseudo-intellectual Leftists, puts forth very logical arguments explaining the many ways the powers-that-be fail to live up to the Noam Chomsky standard, but he rarely gets around to offering an argument for why we should care to live up to the Noam Chomsky standard in the first place. He assumes, I presume, that we already feel his morality in our bones, and so his primary purpose is to point out our missteps. Whatever. Post-modernist thought is a much uglier and stupider thing, but in so far as it prioritizes the diagnosis over the cure it is of a similar character, though it is also a fairly blatant power play.[More]
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