bright is kinda like cool, if you have to tell people you are, you aren't...
Posted on 03/29/2017 4:25:09 AM PDT by SJackson
The Left's aggrandizement of power at the expense of individuals, states, and civil society.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
“Brights” was the term popularized by evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to describe people who think like them: materialist determinists who scoff at faith and traditional wisdom, and proclaim their devotion to rationalism, science, and critical thought. The label was mocked to death for its smug narcissism, but the idea behind it is still a foundational assumption of progressives. The irony is much of the superiority progressives claim based on their “respect for science” is an illusion, reflecting instead scientism and ideology.
Indeed, as a political movement now over a century old, progressivism was founded on the belief that new knowledge of human nature and behavior required a revision of the American political order. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic and a leading progressive theorist, wrote that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.” This faith in “science” was embraced by progressive president Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to discard the Constitution’s popular self-rule filtered through divided government and checks and balances, and replace it with administrative bureaus staffed by the “hundreds who are wise” who would guide and control the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”
Wilson’s vision succeeded, which is why today we have a bloated federal government with 2.5 million workers and a nearly four-trillion-dollar budget, two-thirds of which is committed to entitlement spending. Thanks to Wilson, today we are subjected to a regulatory regime that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate,” as Alexis de Tocqueville prophesized. This technocratic rule has diminished our freedom and autonomy, compensating for that loss by redistributing money through various entitlements that corrupt character and create dependency on our government overseers.
The ancients called this “tyranny,” a consequence of human nature’s lust for power and domination that frightened the founders and explains the structure of the Constitution. The progressives just added a new twist to the old tyrannical modus operandi: the claim that not greed or ambition for personal power or aristocratic honor, but the truths of science were the bases for their political innovations and concentration of power into their hands.
But psychology and sociology and other “human sciences” progressives based their social engineering on are not true sciences, for there is no science that can explain human nature and behavior with the rigor of physics or chemistry. We exist beyond the “complexity horizon,” and so, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, cannot be understood merely by materialist methods:
For the particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too rapidly, occur in combinations of too great a complexity, are too much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of generalization and formulization––idealization––which any science must exact.
This mistake lies at the heart of progressive pretensions to technocratic expertise wielded by what Stalin called “technicians of the soul.” And it explains the serial failures of their policies. Between 1900-1940 “Scientific racism” and the eugenics it spawned were considered “settled science,” and “eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream,” as Thomas C. Leonard writes. “The elite sprinkled their conversations with eugenic concerns to signal their au courant high-mindedness.” Eugenics, of course, was a monstrous, inhuman failure, which inspired forced sterilization and gave scientific cover to Jim Crow segregation.
It also inspired Adolf Hitler, who wrote, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” Hitler ultimately put into grisly practice the speculation of Army physician and eugenicist David Popenoe, who in 1918 co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics. “From an historical point of view,” Popenoe wrote, “the first method which presents itself is execution…. Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.”
Or consider the Great Society programs and the “War on Poverty.” Social science that reduced human behavior to material environmental causes and ignored questions of virtue and free will provided “scientific” support for these programs. Fifty years and $20 trillion later, poverty rates are about where they were in 1965, and broad swaths of many communities have been ravaged by the character-destroying dependency and lack of responsibility this government largesse has fostered. And don’t forget climate change, another “settled science” that has elevated a hypothesis into scientific fact, despite the huge holes in our understanding of how global climate works, and the mountains of countervailing evidence. Yet “climate change” also is “politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream,” despite its encouragement of policies that threaten our economy and well-being with schemes to reduce the carbon-based energy on which the global economy and global development depend.
And who can leave out the lunatic “science-based” policies ruining California? Based on dubious environmental “science,” during the drought billions of gallons of Sierra snow-melt––1.6 billion every 24 hours–– were dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect a two-inch bait-fish, and to encourage salmon to return to the San Joaquin River. Meanwhile, farms are abandoned, farmworkers thrown out of work, reservoirs that could capture this year’s unprecedented snow-melt are left unbuilt, and California has some of the highest rates of energy poverty in the nation. The same environmentalist voodoo lies behind the “high-speed rail” boondoggle. It started out costing $32 billion, but the bill has doubled to $68 billion. Work on the first stretch of track, the flattest and easiest of the whole route, is years behind schedule and will cost $10 billion, if it’s even built. Meanwhile, there’s no money for fixing California’s decaying infrastructure like Highway 99, a Road Warrior nightmare with the distinction of being the bloodiest highway in the nation. These are policies and projects an illiterate farmer in 1850 would have known are stupid.
Turns out the Dems aren’t that “bright” after all, since their dogmatic, uncritical acceptance of any idea wrapped in pretensions of science and flattering their ideology, usually leads to unforeseen, often disastrous consequences. Worse yet, their claims to be beyond ideology have given cover to their aggrandizement of power at the expense of individuals, states, and civil society.
Unfortunately, many Republicans accept the assumption that issues dependent on human character and free will can be solved solely on the basis of knowledge and techniques wielded by politicians and government agencies staffed by “experts.” The fiasco of Obamacare and the Republicans’ failure to “reform” it are a case in point. That metastasizing problem is not one to be solved by replacing or discarding a few cogs and wheels in the Obamacare Rube Goldberg machine, which as the House Republicans just demonstrated, “the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” The hard, messier truth few politicians want to face is that getting voters used to receiving other people’s money creates a malignant dynamic nearly impossible to change without suffering political punishment. Easier just to kick the can down the road and let our children and grandchildren pay for our profligacy.
As Rudyard Kipling wrote in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” the policy of “robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul” results in a world in which “all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.” In a political order that gives individuals broad freedom for their choices but doesn’t hold them accountable for the consequences, this is a recipe for bankruptcy and decline, no matter which party is in power.
bright is kinda like cool, if you have to tell people you are, you aren't...
Precisely.
BFL
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fiGVhiSe7Es/UC2iXPZr6dI/AAAAAAAAIBo/dnH7JqKKqVQ/s1600/sidepicture.jpg"left")
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
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It all boils down to the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives:
Liberals believe humans are innately good, and with the correct environment (implemented by government that assumes everyone has the same goals and innate goodness, which transfers to government itself) there will exist a Utopia where evil will not manifest itself. By definition, this means less freedom for the citizens.
Conservatives believe that humans, even good ones, are innately flawed and subject to evil and corruption, and government must be constructed in such a way to take human flaws into account and keep them from being able to manifest themselves in government, which means by definition, more freedom for the citizens.
They’re subversives.
Sorry.
You’ve got it all wrong.
Liberals believe they are smarter than anyone who disagrees with them and everything would be Utopia if everyone just did what they told them to do.
Conservatives believe you don’t have to agree with me, just leave me the hell alone and stop telling me what to do.
;o)
Well, I don’t see that I have it all wrong...
Can’t we both be right...:)?
Great read, please put me on the list. Thanks!
The nanny state will move us toward more dependent citizens. The freedom state will move us toward more independent citizens.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
The Gods of the Copybook Headings was published in 1919, but remains relevant today.
A copybook was a notebook schoolchildren used to practice handwriting. The lined pages were blank except for an example of perfect handwriting printed at the top for children to copy all the way down the page. As examples, the publishers used proverbs, quotations, wise sayings — these were the “copybook headings”, as the ones in the poem illustrate.
"Elites' of that day aren't that different than the 'elites' of our day... Lots of 'high-minded BS' bordering on evil...
Every other people is an exhibit; "rednecks" are the janitor.
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