Husker Red: Dead White Men
This will be a reply for both Squashed and Politicalprof, who have been courteous enough to engage with me in a thread of discussion on the Enlightenment. I’d like to quickly provide what I hope can steer the discussion in the direction I originally intended, which is most certainly not…
I’m going to reply on my comments blog—because I just have a few scattered responses. I agree with most of what you wrote. That said, in bullet points:
As somebody who someday aspires to be a dead white man, I won’t criticize reading their work. I do, however, want to caution you on following them too carefully down the garden path. Locke, for example, builds his theory of property from, essentially, a state of Nature. So does Hobbes. So did everybody then. And, not surprisingly, their view of the state of nature and how society should logically be constructed from that mirrors what they set out to prove. (Be cautious about this any time anybody makes an argument from the State of Nature. It invariably is an argument based on an imagined state that’s been imagined, generally unintentionally, for the sole purpose of affirming some political structure somebody wants to base upon this. I could probably dig through my the archives to find the time somebody got so upset that I pointed this out that he blocked me.)
I ignored most of your argument on the enlightenment because I’m pretty skeptical about political theory as a discipline. Or, rather, I get concerned about how it is applied to contemporary politics. I’ll probably write a post on this before too long, but the short version is that we craft political rules that we think we should follow in order to have the best government we can. The rules help us avoid doing terrible things in a moment of passion. Unfortunately, they also stop us from doing good things when we understand society better. Balancing established political principles with the needs of people is … tricky.
I don’t think the left is particularly guilty of turning its back on science, en masse. Sure, the Huffington Post publishes some quack stuff, but we don’t see mainstream Democrats echoing that in the way that we see Republicans denying global warming. The “natural” medicine movement is a combination of rubbish (say, homeopathy) and a sense that we perhaps often overmedicate things. (I’ll drink a tea with, say, cloves in it if I have a sore throat an just want to numb it a bit with out getting into pharmaceuticals.)
The health consequences of our industrial food chain are pretty easy to document. Most of it comes in the form of diabetes. There’s some amount of rubbish in the “natural foods” movement. (Raw foods, etc.) There’s also a lot of good stuff. Pesticides, for example, really do have harmful buildups. There are also very legitimate concerns about the treatment of animals in our industrial processes. They also have a nasty habit of creating better pests. Again, I don’t think any of the flag bearers on the left are trotting out the pseudoscience on any of this.
Without going too far into it, I’m not sure how the left is attacking people’s food choices on any sort of wide scale. I understand there are some citywide bans on trans fats and proposals to put an extra tax on soft drinks. But most of the food movement has been in the form of nutrition education. Telling people the consequences of certain choices is different than taking that choice away.
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squashedcomments reblogged this from huskerred and added:
my comments blog—because...few scattered responses....what...
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