Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

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—and 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—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

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, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” 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.

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?

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

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 truth. If there is the 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 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?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  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 is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

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.  

Brooks again:

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. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

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, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

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.

But it is obviously not 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.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

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.

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

See brother Bill? You and I are mentally sick: (link below) Brooks would probably go along with the WHO Epidemiologist in the article.

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/15/brain-flaws-understanding-maga-as-an-epidemic-disease/

Good evening from mentally healthy Catacomb Joe.

[BV]

To say something good about Brooks: at least he doesn't go all the way with the Salon scum.

[Tom T.]

Your response to Brooks is obviously correct in every particular. So much so that you should not even have to write such a refutation. When someone denies that the sky is blue, there is really nothing that will correct such a witless person.

But Brooks is not witless. I think the problem is that he lacks or has lost that robust sense of reality that Russell argued for against Meinong: "A robust sense of reality is very necessary in framing a correct analysis of propositions about unicorns, golden mountains, round squares … " and the Orange Man Bad I would add, the latter being just as much a pseudo-object as the others.

Of course, we all know why he is so intellectually blinkered: classic Trump Derangement Syndrome. But TDS is only a name; it does not explain what it is. I have suggested before on your pages that concupiscence might be an explanation. Another possibility is something like the Woke Mind Virus that Elon Musk has been talking about lately.

But I lean towards the notion that it is just one of those unsolvable mysteries of the human condition, akin to Kant's mystery of Radical Evil. TDS simply is and it is a mystery as to how formerly sober-minded, earnest, and good faith thinkers could so easily fall off the deep end into mindlessness. And a mystery as well as to how to get them out of it.

As such, there is no point in trying to argue their delusion away. But there is a point to public responses like your post. Like Brooks, many with TDS are influential in public affairs. As such, given their delusions, they must be opposed, sidelined, and marginalized with regard to the crucial political debates we are engaged in. On that score, your post is right on target.

[BV]

Tom,

Thanks for your positive assessment. In an ideal world, what I wrote would be unnecessary. But our world is far from ideal. In fact, it is collapsing. Humanity's endgame approacheth.

That a fool such as Kamala Harris might actually become president is astonishing.

I have carefully read Meinong and the neo-Meinongians (H. Castaneda, Panayot Butchvarov, Richard Routley/Sylan (he changed his name), Terence Parsons, Palle Yourgrau, et al.) There are anticipations of Meinong in Avicenna, and some Thomist ideas have a Meinongian flavor, e.g,, common natures. Russell gives Meinong short shrift, and anyway his theory of existence is no better than Meinong's theory of objects. If anything, worse. I have many posts on Meinong, and we can discuss this topic if you want to.

Like you, I suspect concupiscence plays a role in Brooks' wrongheadedness. He also lives in a self-reinforcing bubble of the like-minded. He needs to get out more.

Part of my reason for writing what I wrote above is to try to figure out what is going on in the mind of someone who is obviously intelligent and a good writer.

As you well appreciate, I am not trying to argue Brooks or his ilk out of their delusionality. I am trying to reach fence-sitters and independent thinkers.

[Tom T.]

I pulled the Russell quote from Skepticism About the External World by Butchvarov, Chapter 5, a philosopher you put me on. The quote was of course not an endorsement of Russell. Like you, Butchvarov finds Russell's notion of existence inadequate, and I found his arguments against Russell compelling. I quoted Russell simply because his "robust sense of reality" was a well-turned phrase that seemed to capture what Brooks and the other TDS patients seem to lack. And calling Orange Man Bad a pseudo-object was just so apropos.

But I found Butchvarov's philosophical points about reality and existence very interesting (even though he insists on what you deny, that existence is a concept), as well as his presentation of Meinong. I would be very interested in reading some more Meinong and the parallels between this very modern philosopher and Avicenna/Thomism.

However, I also am very interested in Butchvarov's Chapter 5 and his take on the distinction (or better, the interplay) between reality and existence. Mine is only an initial reading, but his arguments strike me as quite Kantian. I notice you have almost as many posts on Butchvarov as Meinong and I intend to work through all those posts on both men.