Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
Zzzzz...
People like you don't understand politics or plurality. Continue on your self-indulgent superiority.
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Let me first say that in principle, I don't disagree. Liberals can be a little smug and superior--in part because their values are in part predicated on a species of enlightenment thinking that has been more or less validated by Western history. But they have no better access to truth than anyone else, and the tendency to act as though the future of history has already been written, and has already taken the shape of "progress"--is the sort of teleological reasoning that would have made Hegel blush.
But--this isn't the first time that I've seen you leap to the defense of conservatism by alluding to a kind of ideological relativism--and that's an approach that I have a problem with on a number of levels.
Firstly, relativism fails a basic test of logic. If all ideas are equally valid, it follows that they are equally invalid. The corollary that you must accept, every time you use relativism as a defense of an ideology that someone else considers morally bankrupt, is this: under total relativism,
the only person who is always wrong is the person who always thinks that he or she is right. According to that, the extremes on any side of the spectrum will always be wrong--because they themselves normally fail the only test that relativism provides for, which is a recognition that
human understanding and reasoning are partial.
Secondly--and this is a much bigger objection--relativism is morally empty. We all know that it just isn't true that all ideas are equally good. And that's more or less where Hemi-Cuda (the way I read him) is coming from. Canada isn't more liberal or more conservative than the U.S.--but it is more "moderate"--in that there is a culture of governance here that tends to be guided by reason rather than naked ideology. This is a good thing--and it's something Americans could learn from us. My worry is that instead, we'll end up learning the wrong lesson from them--but that's a topic for another day.
In this case, we have to differentiate between intellectual conservatism (which is mostly what I see you espousing) and the kind of Millenarian, magical-thinking, intolerant, nativist ethno-centric race-baiting wing of conservatism that Glenn Beck (and to a far lesser extent Sarah Palin) represent.
Any philosophy has to be able to make that distinction. One is a series of ideas that are in keeping with a materialist philosophy of life and a rational polity. The other is a millenarian, ultra-religious ideology that rejects materiality altogether. You and I both know that the result of that radical anti-materialism is complete moral nihilism. And those just aren't good ideas. As intellectually honest people, we
have to be able to reject them. To be honest, I doubt we disagree much about that.