October 20, 2008
I'm proud to be "stupid"
Orrin Judd, on the "stupid party":
Posted by John Weidner at October 20, 2008 07:24 AM[Quoting Joe Knippenberg]....But for me the more interesting reason is the one to which the late William F. Buckley, Jr. alluded. To the degree that intelligence is connected with proud self-assertion, a hubristic belief in one's own capacity to understand and remake the world, it tends not to be conservative or respectful of the lessons and burdens of the past. It looks forward to the change it can effect as it rationalizes and humanizes the world. It does not bow before anyone, least of all a creator God.[Orrin:] While he objects to the term "stupid," Mr. Knippenberg points to the reason that it is correct to consider conservatism the Stupid Party. If Intellectualism can be said, as seems fair, to be the hubristic belief in remaking the world according to one's own rationalizations, then conservatism is profoundly anti-intellectual.
Nonetheless, there are some smart and learned people who don't take this view.
Conservatism, which accepts Creation as a gift from God and men as beholden to the lessons of the past, can even be said to be "stupid." This is particularly clear in the sphere of morality, where conservatism proceeds from the idea that, as Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn puts it in Leftism, Man is:A person with an intransferable destiny, unique created in the image of God, responsible to God, endowed with an immortal soul.or, as Jacques Maritain put it in The Person and the Common Good:The human person is ordained directly to God as to its absolute ultimate end.Every variation of Intellectualism, or Leftism as Mr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have had it, is just a form of rebellion against this "stupid" recognition that we are Created by and responsible to God, rather than self-created and responsible only to the self. This latter bit of foolishness reaches its apotheosis in Richard Dawkin's delusion of existence being the product of "selfish genes," Mr. Dawkins being, not coincidentally, one of the popularizers of the term "Brights."....
What's bizarre to me is that you don't need a belief in God or Creation to end up on the humble side of "how can I understand the world and reshape it?". You need only interact with a complex system and try to change that (for me, it was making Emacs work with multiple X-Windows windows). Then you just have to realize that, as complex as that was, it was still simple compared to the real world.
More over, if you're an atheist and therefore an evolutionist, for what reason would you think that evolution would produce an intelligence capable of understanding the world, itself, and its social network well enough to rationally manipulate it? Believing that it has, now that is blind faith.
P.S. I am sorry I haven't had time to respond to you previous posts on marriage and libertarianism. Someday...
Well, the engineering department is less likely to have people of the arrogant lefty I-can-shape-the-world type than the English Dept. (Or Sociology, God help us!) They get hands-on experience trying to shape things
Also, the humility of the scientist or engineer ought to suggest that one should be a skeptic. That is, one should be equally open to the possibilities of belief and unbelief, and determined to explore both with the same seriousness and patience and tenacity. (Needless to say, the "skepticism" a Dawkins would claim is a fake---he starts out with faith in his science-ism.
