Julian Sanchez writes:
I’ve written a bit lately about what I see as a systematic trend toward “epistemic closure” in the modern conservative movement. As commenters have been quick to point out, of course, groupthink and confirmation bias are cognitive failings that we’re all susceptible to as human beings, and scarcely the exclusive province of the right …Yet I can’t pretend that, on net, I really see an equivalence at present: As of 2010, the right really does seem to be substantially further down the rabbit hole.
Andrew Sullivan offers up some related links and commentary. I tend to agree with Sanchez and Sullivan, but I thought you all would be a good group to poll. Please offer up your opinion in the comments.
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Conservatism in the US is based on three pillars: a moral conscience (JudeoChristian ethics), reason (the Enlightenment), and a rule of law under which all are equal. And you think this is closed-minded?
Like many who have posted, I think this is stupid and silly – Tyler you should know better…
No one on the internet is MORE close minded than Andrew Sullivan – he long ago determined that Dick Cheney was [is?] a war criminal and that Sarah Palin is the antichrist…
And if you have any doubts about how wacky the left can get listen to a night or two of Olberman…
The big problem we face is the growing distance between those who believe in the individual and those that believe in the collective. That is what will what will ultimately tear us apart as a nation
The terms conservative and liberal are perhaps unfortunate choices. It does not mean progressive vs. static. Rather it means where one stands on the issues. I suggest some of you read “Public Opinion and American Democracy” by V O Key….
I don’t know if liberals are any more open-minded on an individual level. My sense is that the Democratic Party is pieced together from a more ideologically varied set of constituents than is the Republican Party, which then makes uniform messaging much harder. The lack of message discipline makes the left *sound* much more open-minded, even if it isn’t actually composed of people who are any more open-minded than people on the right.
Then there’s the question, of course, of whether or not such internal ideological clashes are good or not. I think the ideological topology of the right makes it more susceptible to groupthink and makes it harder to challenge and update assumptions. The recent movement towards more libertarianism may be healthy for the right, if only because a little schism can force some navel-gazing that hasn’t seemed to have happened all that much over the last thirty years.
Julian Sanchez is a left-wing “libertarian” who not only hates the Republican party but also conservative ideas. Why am I not surprised that Tyler Cowen agrees with Julian Sanchez?
Conservatives have an emotional and an intellectual problem. Self-reliance is an ancient virtue, but Reaganism will not save you from complex systems. The teapartyers have to start learning science. Atomic decisions by all individuals can tip the system over. It goes haywire. You should feel lucky it was only finance this time. The precise intellectual disease is “market fundamentalism.† The sole belief in markets has a tinge of mysticism to it, and this is true even if you restrict that word to mean the intellectual-emotional propadeutic for salvation and transcendence in the remission of sins and the cessation of suffering. But economics ought to be a science, and conservatives are reading a lot into markets that really isn’t there. An individual brain is not capable of containing all the information required to make informed decisions in most markets, in other words to make the proper “demand,” and so prices do NOT calculate all that information. They only transmit information related to scarcity and desire. Prices don’t necessarily transmit the environmental costs of goods and services. Prices don’t predict systemic catastrophe. And the world is crowding. It is also crowding-up against its biogeochemical limits faster than it is inventing technologies to fix it. This also causes the multiplying network effects of increasing personal and social transaction costs. So I would like to know how any conservative or libertarian thinks we are going to avoid more government. Certainly the state of scientific knowledge in the Republican Party gives me NO HOPE that they can make proper market decisions so that there will not be increasing environmental and fiduciary problems. Well I think there may be a way to square this circle! The Republicans should learn science. In economics and ecology, Reaganism never worked.
Nonsense. There is no comparison. I would like to hear of an instance of “statist fundamentalism” preached by any liberal Democrat (or even a neocon.) Liberals do quite well in markets. Indeed a current liberal standard-bearer, Paul Krugman, has written eloquently and incisively about the virtues of markets in several books. And written it better than a conservative could. On the other hand I would like to hear of any contemporary conservative making the coherent intellectual case for the indispensable virtues of government. I doubt that you would know where to begin. You would have to end-up defending Obamacare. It would kill you.
Andy Hallman: You may be quite right about my sample of conservatives and liberals. I’m “open” to that explanation.
Not sure I’d accept Rudy G. as ample evidence of “the rest of the conservative movement fell in line.”
However, even if true, I’d argue that accepting an explanation at one point in time isn’t necessarily a sign of closed-mindedness. Never accepting an explanation and always seeking out the truth is an attribute of an inquisitive mind. The test of a closed-mind comes when conflicting evidence is presented and how that conflicting information is incorporated into their worldview.
Do they ignore it and call it bunk without doing any homework? Closed-mind.
Do they research and whether the evidence has merit? Open-mind.
Do they react reflexively with fallacy, name calling or changing the subject? Closed-mind.
Do they react by asking questions about the evidence and trying to learn more about it? Open-mind.
The test of a closed-mind isn’t whether they disagree with you. The test is in how they disagree with you.
I do know conservatives with closed-minds. They tend to have the same reactions to counter evidence as my liberal friends with closed minds.
mulp – I think the drug war is a waste of time and money and contributes to creating a dangerous black market. I’ve held that belief for a long while now and I will continue to hold it until I come across compelling counter evidence. And, I’m open to that evidence. I won’t lie. I wish the drug war could be effective.
Btw Andy, what are terrorists true motives? I don’t know enough about it to have a strong opinion.
From my POV, terrorists seem like equal opportunity killers to me. Their mindset seems to be their belief that they are empowered to take innocent lives to serve whatever purpose they see fit. I could be wrong. I’m open to suggestions.
However, I must say, when a kid punched me on the playground, I wasn’t too concerned about his true motives. I was more concerned about defending myself. There was an extremely simple way other kids could avoid my self-defense.
Ap, Do you mean evidence of market fundamentalism aside from the rhetorical posture of the Republican Party? Aside from many of the comments here? Aside from the teaparty’s “socialist” blather about Obamacare? Or Milton Friedman’s proposal that we privatize the national parks? It might help to know what a “movement conservative” is.
Democrats and Republicans both have many interest groups and the Left has its own wingnuttery replete with sloganeering canards. What I don’t understand is the unwillingness of the Right to entertain the intellectual case for both market AND government solutions. I mean do it verbally and in writing. I hear and read a much larger portion of the U.S. left that makes both cases. This going to be necessary to discuss the policy for any specific event without the pre-set default of priors, the judgement of others’ motives, and the “anti-socialist” sloganeering.
Do democrats, republicans or even libertarians support polygamy? This is one of the biggest infringements on human rights in the modern world but most people seem to be closed-minded on it.
Constant, I hope “open-minded” means neither a market fundamentalist nor a statist. Statism isn’t right, and market fundamentalism cannot be right if it doesn’t work in lots of cases. Because then it is no longer a fundamental.
Yet, some variation of market fundamentalism is almost all that the Republicans have in their current rhetoric. Wouldn’t the phrase “open-minded” be better applied to the view that policies ought to be decided on a case-by-case basis?
mulp,
As Ronald Reagan might have said, there you go again. All that you asked for was proof that some conservative out there had an awakening on the war on drugs similar to yours. That proof was provided. If you consider yourself in any way attached to the Democratic Party, then I wonder at your chicanery in your condemnation of National Review simply because of party affiliation. As I’m sure you are aware, the two-party arrangement makes leaving because of disagreements with one area of policy a more difficult proposition than it would be in a parliamentary system.
As a side note, considering the talk of trans-fat banning and regulation on your side of the aisle, I wouldn’t count on your ideological mates to see the wisdom of a less oppressive drug policy any time soon.
Chris, you are not far from the way (read my previous comment). A man with a brain.
Lee: Thanks for your reply. My point was not to argue against any and all regulation; simply that the default state of mind that a given government program or regulation is absurd to hold in light of the many constraints that make decision-making, structuring, and implementation of regulation so unlikely to achieve their purported goals. Incentives for government to collect information are all over the place, and I see precious few incentives for government to directly collect superior or alternate information to businesses. I also see information problems as more resolvable through regulation than through direct action (and most of this regulation can be accomplished at the state, and not the federal, level).
Concerning healthcare reform, I’m glad that you appreciate and understand its moderate, and even ostensibly conservative, nature. It’s certainly interesting to see a bill with the general structure of the Heritage Institution’s response to Clinton’s reform effort be so supported by leftists, and so opposed by conservatives! I didn’t like the bill’s general structure when it was proposed by Heritage, when it was implemented by former Governor Romney, or when a form of it was passed into law by President Obama, and would vastly prefer a single-payer solution (though that’s not my optimal solution). But that is neither here nor there. My point in bringing it up is that, when you have such a low level of public discourse and information that both leftists and conservatives are arguing the bill’s merits based on provisions that are not in the bill (single-payer being one that comes to mind) and without debating the actual merits of the bill, the premise of corrective democracy breaks down (not completely, but enough so that “throw out the bums” doesn’t work all that well). Even now, I can think of several societal problems that could be dealt with using regulation that aren’t due to widely-held (and erroneous) beliefs about society.
When did I say Republicans care, and when did I express a preference for Republican politicians? They are not exempt from the characteristics make government action so difficult for me to recommend. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to fully (or even partially) meet voter preferences in a two party system. The party member who disagrees with some plank in his party’s platform has a more limited set of options than a consumer in the free market would with most of what he purchases.
Many comments here reflect the standard lefty notion that conservatism is closed-mindedness and knee-jerk aversion to change. Not so. It is an appreciation of what we have and a wariness of poorly thought out or outright malicious proposals from those who do not value the current state. Most conservatives rightly (!) suspect that many of the proposals for change are thinly veiled transfers of wealth that will leave them poorer. Most conservatives I know are happy to see all members of society reap its benefits and enjoy its freedoms. But we also believe those who are able should pay their own way.
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