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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
Fair points. And, maybe, with retroactive apologies to both Hemi-Cuda and Calgaryborn, the fairest thing for us to do from now on is to avoid dragging other posters into a conversation that is orders of magnitudes weirder than anything they imagined when they first composed their replies.
I often wonder if you and I aren't so different, though certainly we come from what we might term different "partisan" backgrounds. We both know that certain fields of academic study come with built-in shibboleths that betray the ideological underpinnings of their very projects of inquiry--the cozy relationship between Cultural Studies and Marxism comes to mind, or that between economic conservatism and political science.
Over time, I've grown uncomfortable with the Left Hegelian vision of history, precisely because of what you say above--that it seems out of line with a democratized world in which we must always be conscious of the partiality (in both senses) of knowledge. What in liberals is a smug confidence in the rectitude of their values, in Marxists is a gloomy (and yet, also smug) knowledge that history is careening toward disaster and redemption according to better ideals.
But that's an aside: the point is that I think both of us are interested in the impact of ideas (let's call them philosophies) on the realm of the real--and the Nietzchean relativism that you speak of has infected our way of thinking so thoroughly that University students in first year literature classes genuinely believe that their blinkered and stupid ideas about the books that they are encountering for the first time are just as good as anyone else's. And this is the endpoint of relativism. Nothing matters; no credential can set one person apart from another, because all credentials are equally in/valid. No action can be termed moral or immoral--all actions are equal. All persons are equal in value--no method of measuring them can stand above any other.
More to the point, no ideology can be seen as "wrong," even if it depends on millenarianism and nihilism as its basic warrants.
I just don't believe that any of that is true. Maybe that makes me a bad liberal--but to me, there is real right and real wrong. There really are good actions and evil actions, if not good and evil people.
And Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Their ideas, their ways of thinking--are disastrously wrong. They're not evil people. But they are ignorant people--and yes, they are stupid people. There may not be a static set of principles that determines "truth." But "bull****" looks the same in any philosophy.
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Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are morons because they have this pretense of anti-intellectualism as intellectualism which drives me crazy. Like Palin's little wink or Beck mixing his sneakers with suits. It's the ultimate in democratic stupidity.
The common man can probably rule himself, but he needs guides through a natural aristocracy where the quest for knowledge is understood as something important where not all can participate equally. Heck, the greatest insights made on America were written by a French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville and they are still studied for their relevance today.
There is a reason that we should read great books naively. I am almost certain that there are very few men (and some women) who attain a level of philosophical genius in the sense that they can actually step aside the pattern of history and create honest insights into the workings of human nature. I am absolutely certain when I read Shakespeare or Austen or Plato that they should be telling me things, not me criticizing them.
We are lost as a society, currently. Our politics are in disarray, given to smugness and sloganeering by both left and right.
I've got to come back to this subject in the morning, any more and I won't be able to sleep tonight.