Friday, April 18, 2008
The Left's backwards Thinking
Obama's infamous comments are quite revealing of his (and the Left's) misunderstanding of human nature. Let's revisit those comments. He says that people in small towns "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Obama shows here that he has the Rousseauean belief that men are born good and are made bad by society. He thus shows that he is ignorant of the fact -- understood by religions around the world, and increasingly shown by evolutionary psychology -- that the natural state of people is poverty, a desire to have weapons for hunting and defense of their own, and xenophobia (which explains the last three listed). This is not to say that we should not do something to overcome these natural tendencies, but we have to recognize that these are the originary state of humans. Wealth is what is unusual and recent. Opposition to racism is what is unusual and recent. Thank goodness for both, but we have to recognize that we develop these, that they are not the original state of man. This confused understanding of human nature and the evolution of human behavior is what causes the Left to come up with completely backwards ideas of what we should do, what government should do, and what its role should be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
You may be interested in the book A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. I have only read a second-hand account of it, but the basic argument apparently is that people on the left put high faith in people's "perfectibility", while people on the right are more skeptical and thus advocate institutions that keep people in check.
Thanks. That one by Sowell I haven't heard of.
The scientific evidence to date suggests that perfectibility isn't an option. Betterment, yes. Perfectibility, no. And that betterment has never come from government policies -- those always come after the fact, to bring the stragglers in line.
I had read Obama's comment rather differently - but from a long way away.
It seemed to me that he was just echoing the view in Benjamin Friedman's book, "The moral consequences of economic growth", that people tend to get bitter when economic opportunity passes them by.
However, it would not surprise me if he (and his Democratic opponent) do believe that humans are born good.
Having grown up in a rural small town in the U.S., I never saw people feeling bitter. To be honest, most people in small towns are practically unaware of what is going on outside the county and don't think too much about trying to get ahead or run in the rat race or whatever. They don't cling to religion because of lack of economic opportunity -- or because, as Obama said, the government isn't providing for them -- but because they are true believers. They honestly believe in their religious convictions -- something foreign to Obama and others on the Left, who ascribe all behaviors to economics. That's part of the materialism of their neo-Marxism. They also don't cling to their guns for the reason he says. Rather, guns are part of the culture, part of what a father hands down to his sons. I knew people who would quit their job for deer season. I know Obama can't understand that. More, economic conditions don't have anything to do with racism. Xenophobia is a part of human nature -- one we can fortunately fight against and even overcome, but something humans are born with nonetheless I'm afraid. So all in all his thesis is deeply, fundamentally wrong either way you look at it.
Post a Comment