{"id":505,"date":"2024-10-15T15:08:18","date_gmt":"2024-10-15T15:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/10\/15\/red-world-and-blue-world\/"},"modified":"2024-10-15T15:08:18","modified_gmt":"2024-10-15T15:08:18","slug":"red-world-and-blue-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/10\/15\/red-world-and-blue-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

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In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God\u2014and<\/em> we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self\u2014in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity<\/em>, \u201cOur moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.\u201d In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue? <\/span><\/p>\n

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump\u2019s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred<\/em>. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the<\/em> truth. If there is the<\/em> truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The<\/em> truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  <\/span>If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title<\/em> is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Brooks again:<\/span><\/p>\n

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But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, T<\/span>rump famously boasted, <\/span><\/p>\n

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Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it is obviously not<\/em> a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.<\/span><\/p>\n

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory<\/a> is? <\/span><\/p>\n

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile: In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God\u2014and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and … Continue reading “Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163,56,228,125,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-politics","category-truth","category-truthfulness","category-wokery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}