Any even marginal analysis of this fact with non-megalomaniac epistemology leads very abruptly to the position that you are not (much??) more likely to be right than your intellectual opposition, regardless your strong feelings, and "proofs" of a topic. They are highly unimpressed by your proofs, and you are unimpressed by theirs.
Conclusion: For any position with a counterpoint held by multiple people...the other side is pursuing an important truth. Until you can articulate, argue for, and feel the importance of that truth, arguing against it on the basis of it being obviously stupid simply makes you look silly to neutral observers. (opinion generated recently by reading Moldbug on Rawls...or historically, reading Leonard Piekoff on any topic).
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It appears that I am a megalomaniac.
I think your argument goes wrong in the idea that people on opposite sides of questions both have truths. No: they both have feelings. Now it is truth that someone's feeling are really his feelings -- but this isn't a truth that holds any water in rational argument. Truths, at least for this purpose, must be facts.
So, for example, I feel perfectly megalomanically fine about dismissing any argument from equality. This, in spite of the fact that equality is the rage of our age. Indeed, practically all modern political arguments boil down to one side which insists on equality in some form, both as a possibility and therefore and as a goal, and the other side which has some unequal tradition, like people being entitled to keep the money they earn, traditional marriage, American citizenship or men's and women's bathrooms, that has to go.
There are no facts to say that a man who feels he is a woman is a woman. Indeed the observable facts -- Y chromosome! penis! -- are all the other way. But certainly it is highly unequal and discriminatory to run a system of state-enforced, "separate but equal" bathrooms -- as we know, separate is inherently unequal. So, until we can do what really needs done (unisex bathrooms and the abolition of the hateful urinal mandated at the Federal level for all government, business, residential, and highway-side peeing), the very least we can do is reach out to all those transexuals in the way they want.
So yeah, I'll grant that egalitarians have an "important truth" -- which is that people seem have equality genetically encoded as a good. But this does not make them likely to be right about any facts. Actually the opposite is true: any sort of idealism makes one more likely to be wrong.
2 issues:
1. I note you don't make the argument that a man who wants to have sex with men is somehow broken. The (rough) same argument was deployed there...until we've spent huge amounts of hours (collectively) learning that there are real differences beyond the dangly-bits between gays and straights. I think I have to disagree notably with you on the man/woman thing. I'd suspect that we'll soon (<20 years) find that there is an (important) component of sexuality, perhaps not quite as strong as the gay/straight bit that defines internal gender identification. Your line seems to be there is 1 important distinction, and 2 categories. The contrary point is that the 1 distinction/2 categories approach is insufficient to describe reality.
2. I like your analysis of the egalitarian idealism. I also find it true that everyone is good at seeing other folks' idealism, and bad at seeing their own. The fact that you've identified a particular idealism in your opponents is far more likely to mean that people have idealisms, and that it clouds their judgement...than to say that you don't have one.
Oh, actually I share the liberal line on sexuality. More or less. I believe that transexuals are exactly as they report: they have, in some way, a brain that self-identifies as "female" even though a male body or vice versa. And I share your opinion that in future, we will find evidence of this, and eventually should be able to build a machine that reliably identifies transexual brains. (Build-a-machine, I speculate, should serve as the true test of whether we have hard proof of something.)
However, that is all speculation, based on subjective criteria, like my own reading of transexual's self-reports. As of today, based only on hard facts, all we can say is that transexuals seem highly motivated, and that there's no obvious reason why they'd want to be transexuals if they had a choice.
As for homosexuals, there's not a huge amount of hard evidence there, either. But again, I am willing to take people's self-reports on it, and by comparison to transexuals there's a huge amount of such evidence because (a) there are so many more homosexuals, and (b) homosexual behavior is unambiguous. By comparison, when a woman who claims to "be" a man has sex with a man -- what's really going on? Crypto-homosexual behavior or normal behavior? Or again: many male transexuals start out married to women, often having kids. Here again we see the outward traditional pattern. It is only after they transition that they start having sex with men.
All that said: I still believe the current system of bi-segregated bathrooms is good. There still are natural norms, and it is reasonable to design to them. As with any system that shoehorns fuzzy people into hard categories, there will be problems around the edges, and if it turns out that some people have their feelings hurt, that's acceptable, because there is no possible solution that will make everyone happy.
So much of opinion, even ideology, is based upon arbitrary rules. We all have a tendency to believe that our truth is the only truth, but dispassionate dissection of ideas shows a whole lot of arbitrariness that we just BELIEVE.
The best thing I ever did in school was joining my High School debate team. Y'know, actual debate, where teams bone up on the issue, but are told which side to present and defend just at the start of the debate. What I found was that I was far better at defending the side I personally opposed than the one I actually believed in.
Maybe I am an outlier, (OK, I know I am) but today I have no problem accepting and dispassionately analyzing the other side(s) of an argument. I do not believe that the other guy is necessarily wrong, or stupid, or evil. There is a fine case that can be made for statism, and a debate against personal freedom is an argument I can easily make, and can take apart most of the arguments of the commenters I could find online (present company excepted).
That is the basis of modern liberalism's strength. They are not all idiots, and even some of the leaders are not evil, they have merely fallen for a strong argument, put forth by statists, who took classical liberalism and turned it to their statist agenda.
I don't know where that leads us, but I do surely object to the idea that we are incapable of understanding the other side. We just fail to agree with it. At least, that is how my mind works.
Leonard,
I like bi-segregated bathrooms too. Cheap, easy solution that makes 95+% of the people happy.
Mostly, I think that making 90% uncomfortable for the sake of the 0.5% (0.005%?) is bad form.
If we were a lot richer, we could have 8 bathrooms for varying gender-preference, dangly-bits, and internal-feeling-ed folk. But we're not, and we don't, and that's fine with me.
2. That highly motivated thing counts for a lot in my book.
Michael,
I must have been unclear. I wholeheartedly endorse your whole comment. I don't think you and I (based on this post) disagree.
The other side has a strong, smart position. I have a value disagreement with them (Stronger liberty-preference both for me and others). IF we could reach a point where folks actually admitted that most of the difference is value-difference, I'd be happy. But an awful lot of smart conservative / libertarian types think that the enemy is evil/stupid/obviously wrong ... which is roughly insane.
Well said.
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