I have spent a lot of time in academic institutions the last several years. There is a level of insularity to such places, of being in a kind of bubble. Being in places in which most everyone around you shares interests that are similar to your own has a distorting effect on the mind. I often hear students complaining about the limits of conversation outside the hallowed halls, of having to talk small or explain their work to “general readers”. There is a certain level of incredulity to these accounts. We forget the extent to which our specializations are niche when we are surrounded for extended periods by others who share them. We know, on some level, that we are oddballs, that most people do not share our idiosyncrasies and predilections, but we nonetheless often find ourselves projecting our interests onto people who not only do not share them, but find the subjects that amuse us thoroughly boring. There is a group of people out there, a group that comprises most of the human species writ large, that not only does not read this blog or blogs like it, but cannot so much as comprehend what anyone would find interesting or worthwhile about such things. They are the disinterested, the apathetic, the politically indifferent. Confronted by these individuals, we rationalize our eccentricity by disparaging and devaluing them, by implying that it is in some “immoral” not to share the political or philosophical inclination. This piece I dedicate to the indifferent, to those who will never read it, and I write it in their defense.
Category: Politics
Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
A Critique of David Bentley Hart
I ran across an odd argument from David Bentley Hart being articulated by Damon Linker, a fellow whose views I have been critical of before. The charge is that atheists and secularists have misunderstood what god is and have consequently attacked a straw man representation of religious views. The argument is dredges up a slew of old fallacies, and is an excellent case study in what not to do.
A Critique of Isaiah Berlin
Today I’d like to mount a critique of Isaiah Berlin. In particular, I’d like to go after his objectivist argument for value pluralism, the notion that there are multiple moral systems that, despite their conflicts, cannot be described as more true or better than one another because their differences are so foundational as to be incomparable on any given metric. I will argue, contra Berlin, that he is simply empirically wrong–in the real world, moral theories separated by time and culture have much more in common with one another than Berlin perceived.
The Peculiar Similarity of Subjectivists and Solipsists
A thought occurred to me this morning that I think well worth sharing about subjectivism and solipsism, and how these two ideas are much more similar to one another than perhaps they appear. I want to share it.
Continue reading “The Peculiar Similarity of Subjectivists and Solipsists”
The Left’s Technophobic Streak
Lately I’ve found myself making an observation about the modern political left–it has a tendency to fall into a rather unbecoming technophobia. On a slew of issues, from guns to drones to surveillance to GMO food to nuclear power, there is an increasing tendency for people on the left to attack the new technologies themselves instead of any specific use or consequence thereof.
Benjamin Studebaker 