Childish Politics

Peeve Farm has an interesting post about how easy it is to come up with cute Lefty slogans, but how much harder it is to refute them or develop equivalent conservative or libertarian slogans. There is a reason for this, I think, and that reason is...reason.

It appears to me that there are certain default positions - intuitively arrived at if no external education intervenes - which are common across a large fraction of mankind. I think of these as being childish positions: most children would arrive at this position without external prompting. This is not meant as an insult, and many of these positions actually survive the application of logic, reason and experience.

The problem is that many of them don't. Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved socially and mentally in a very different environment than has existed for the past 150 years, and our modern world presents many problems that our intuition has not evolved to solve. The notion of fairness that seems common to humans, for example, is equality of results: a child doesn't expect to be treated differently than their siblings by their parents, regardless of the actions of the children involved; indeed a child who feels that their parents show preference to a sibling would be highly resentful. Adults, though, generally realize that a person who does not work hard does not make as much money as one who does work hard. We begin to learn that our actions have consequences.

There are similar notions about religion, economics and interpersonal relations which tend to take hold unless education or experience intervenes. Statism, for example, cannot survive any serious study of history; nor can Communism survive any serious study of economics. For that matter, logic and experience argue that welfare (a fairly central piece of the Peeve Spot post) has benefits over the short term, but massive costs over the long-term, if that welfare is sustained and large. Similarly, progressive taxation makes intuitive sense (the rich people have more money, so they can afford to pay more), but the counterintuitive notion of flatter taxes actually produces more revenue (ever notice that even the die-hard Left in Congress doesn't propose returning to a 70%+ tax at the high end?) is actually the correct one, if your goal is to raise revenue as efficiently as possible while not destroying the economy.

The best cure-all for incorrect intuition is education. This is one of the places where our public education system has failed miserably: it tends to reinforce our incorrect intuition, rather than to correct it. The second-best cure-all for incorrect intuition is logic and reason, but again this is not taught well in schools. The last resort for learning these lessons is experience, but experience has two flaws: it's frequently painful to acquire, and for some things (such as evaluating different economic systems) it takes more than a single lifetime to gain sufficient experience. As a result of this failing on the part of public schools, and the fact that most Americans are products of public schools, and the fact that colleges are increasingly dumbing down, and the further fact that most people never learn how to educate themselves; as a result of all of these acting in concert, it is very easy for an American or European to grow up basically uneducated. (Never, as Mark Twain asserted, confuse schooling and education.)

The result of this is that you tend to have two very vocal extremes, on the Left and the Right, who are philistines at best. These groups push for some of the most hare-brained schemes to become official and national policy: statism, isolationism, restrictions on liberty and the like. But most of the people fall in the middle, and by and large the dividing line between moderate conservatives and moderate leftists are those issues they have chosen to become educated about.

It would take more than a human lifetime to be educated about everything, so we pick and choose what we educate ourselves about. Those people who tend to educate themselves about economics, foreign policy, good governance and the like tend towards conservatism or libertarianism. Those people who do not (who choose, for example, to educate themselves primarily about sports, fashion, entertainment and the like) tend to remain in the somewhat leftist column, because that is where their intuition leads them.

I believe that this has also been a big reason why the country has been moving towards a more moderate-conservative view over the past 20 years, and particularly over the past 2: Viet Nam and the malaise afterwards forced an education on a great many people, and 9/11 has compelled an even more painful evaluation of ourselves and our society. This is why, since 9/11, there has been a large number of shifts to the right, most famously by Christopher Hitchens: forced to evaluate classical liberalism and the Enlightenment against statism and religious repression, honest classical liberals have gone from moderately (or even quite far) left to centrist.

But it is so much easier to chant, isn't it? Even if it is childish.

Posted by Jeff at September 29, 2003 01:02 PM | Link Cosmos