Welcome friends!
I was just sitting here thinking mostly of ideas and a little bit about people and it occurred to me the famous difficulty conservatives tend to have distinguishing the two can be expressed in two rather different ways one involving other people and their ideas and the other involving conservatives themselves and their own ideas. I’m quite sure I’ve discussed both separately before but I don’t think I’ve ever remarked on the fact they’re actually two sides of the same coin. So let me go ahead and do that this time around. Should only take a moment or two.
The typical manifestation of the first expressions of this phenomenon, the one involving other people, is the tendency of conservatives to oppress and quite often physically assault people who express ideas they don’t like. I was thinking about this the other day while reading a little news item involving the murder at the hands of Muslim religious zealots in Bangladesh of an American atheist author and blogger named Avijit Roy who was apparently visiting the old country in a rather misguided albeit noble attempt to introduce his former compatriots to more modern modes of thinking. All joking aside let me just say I take my hat off to the man. He died a martyr to the liberal humanist cause of promoting human reason and secular ethics. A few more people like him and some of these more backward countries might actually get someplace someday. Anyway, it seems Mr. Roy was attacked as he walked home from a book fair with his wife by a group of men wielding what one article described as meat cleavers and another as knives and machetes, although since we’re apparently talking about an entire posse of violent goons I suppose they may well have been armed with meat cleavers, knives, and machetes. I wonder, what is it about Muslim religious extremists and edged weapons anyway? When they’re not chasing someone down the street with a meat cleaver they’re chopping someone’s head off with a sword. I suppose their choice of weapon doesn’t really matter, it’s all murder after all, but it just seems so damned weird and foreign to an American. What do they have against guns? Too modern? Too Western? I know they have them. When I see news from the Middle East it often seems to involve footage of a jeep or truck of some sort careering through town with an unruly mob of bearded men in robes hanging onto the sides yelling incoherently and shooting AK-47s in every direction. And didn’t we have a story just the other day involving some Islamic terrorists gunning down some random tourists at a museum in Tunisia? But I digress. My point is this is the sort of thing one expects to see whenever conservatives encounter ideas they don’t like. We have examples of this sort of thing nearly every day. Need another one but you can do without the bucket of blood? Well, how about the recent case in Egypt involving a young college kid named Karim al-Banna who wrote a blog post supposedly promoting secularist ethics and atheism and was promptly sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting Islam.” It’s ironic in a way because Egypt’s constitution ostensibly protects freedom of belief but it turns out they’re only talking about beliefs involving so-called “Abrahamic religions” such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and so on. The only freedom associated with other beliefs such as humanism and secularism in Egypt is the Egyptian authorities’ freedom to cart one off to prison.
But enough of that. Let’s move on to a typical manifestation of the second expression of this phenomenon, the one involving conservatives and their own ideas, which is the tendency of conservatives to portray themselves as unjustly put upon by people who reject or criticize their ideas. This is a very common form of argument here in the US. The conclusion is generally that liberals and humanists are intolerant jerks (“like Nazis” as most populist conservative windbags would phrase it here) because they criticize conservatives’ ideas. You also see this sort of thing with conservatives abroad. Witness for example the many foreign Muslim persons “insulted” by people who fail to abide by their religious prohibitions on cartoons, depictions of Mohammed, and all manner of other things.
Maybe I should just go over this whole idea versus people distinction one more time. Being tolerant of other people is good. Politeness is a virtue. Being tolerant of what one perceives to be a bad idea is not good. We needn’t be polite to bad ideas. Why? Ideas aren’t people. One isn’t doing anyone any favors by not calling out a bad idea as soon as one sees it. Of course when one is calling out a bad idea it’s always preferable to at least try to be polite to the people who might support that idea and confine one’s arguments to the actual idea itself. This can sometimes require a bit of attention because our language has an unfortunate tendency to personalize everything. For example, when one encounters a person spouting off some bad idea the best way of expressing one’s disagreement is to say what that person is saying is wrong. But how easy is it to slip into saying instead that person is wrong as though the person were a proposition that could be right or wrong? And who doesn’t get annoyed when someone personalizes an intellectual discussion like that? The emphasis is all wrong.
Now I wouldn’t have thought this whole idea versus people distinction would be particularly difficult to grasp so why do so many conservatives seem to have so much difficulty with it? Well, since you ask, I think there are two things going on.
First we have some conservatives who are anti-intellectual in the sense of not being interested at all in entertaining ideas that are different from their own and who simply lust after power over their fellow man and woman. These people aren’t confused about anything in particular. They just don’t want people contradicting whatever they happen to be saying, which is more often than not something of a religious nature. If they could climb into one’s head and control one’s brain they’d be happy to do that but failing that they’d at least like to control such outward manifestation of mental processes as what comes out of one’s mouth.
Second we have some conservatives who actually are interested in ideas but who want to discuss ideas in popular venues where some entertainment value attaches to personalizing otherwise dry intellectual debates by introducing gratuitous ad hominem attacks and an underlying us versus them narrative. I find this sort of conservative relatively benign. To be perfectly frank this sort of thing is practically a requirement if one intends to engage in any sort of political discourse here in the US. One would like to think most people would be above such things but the reality is many people are not. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before this is where all my talking about “conservatives” come from. To state the obvious: what I don’t like are conservative ideas; I don’t know beans about the people holding the ideas beyond that for one reason or another they appear to be attracted to bad ideas. But that doesn’t stop me from going on about conservatives, does it?
So if everyone is doing it then what’s the big problem? Well, I suppose it must involve the presence or absence of some sense of proportion. One doesn’t want to get lumped together with the sort of person who might brandish a meat cleaver or throw a college kid in jail for writing an essay. If you feel you need to personalize things a bit to keep some people interested in what you’re saying then go for it but proceed as quickly as possible to the substance of your argument. Don’t just sit there and blab on and on about how horrible you find The Other. Say something sensible. And by the way it doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor about these things. I suppose you must realize when one makes ad hominem attacks one is basically making a complete ass of oneself, right? Hopefully one is at least being a funny, entertaining, or engaging sort of ass, but an ass nonetheless. When it’s time to get serious forget the person and take up the idea. But just so you know in my experience talking about ideas can be a lot more difficult and confusing than talking about people. Some people just don’t have the patience for it. One will necessarily lose some percentage of one’s audience. So what’s the optimal mix of ass and philosopher to function effectively in a popular American context? Well, I don’t know. But I’m working on it. I’m always working on it. I’m working on it right now.
References
US-Bangladesh blogger Avijit Roy hacked to death. BBC. February 27, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31656222.
Police arrest man in hacking death of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy. Farid Ahmed. CNN. March 2, 2015.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/02/asia/bangladeshi-american-blogger-death/index.html.
Watchdog: Student jailed in Egypt’s crackdown on atheism. Eliot McLaughlin. CNN. January 13, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/13/us/egypt-student-atheist-jailed/index.html.
