A progressive (but non-woke) friend asked Razib Khan why the bench of conservative intellectuals is much shallower than that of the Left:
First, if you are a high IQ individual you are more amenable and comfortable with abstraction, system-building, and rationality. Various forms of Leftism, liberalism, and libertarianism have something to offer you immediately since they start with rationalized systems. Historical materialism, Rawlsian political philosophy, and neoclassical economics or Natural Rights. Conservatism is a less clear and distinct option because it does not present a grand universal rational system. Rather, it leans on custom, tradition, and disposition. History in an empirical sense, not theoretical. There is suspicion of excessive rationalization of cultural practices and mores. Conservatives argue that you shouldn’t overthink things! You don’t understand the ultimate big picture. Intellectual conservatism, ironically, cautions against dense, clear, and compact answers.
That’s pretty infuriating for someone whose raison d’etre is to understand in a rational manner. Thinking is exactly what intellectuals are good at. Making systems where they have reflective access to the guts of the machine and the chains of cause and effect.
The conservative argument would be that this is not really possible in a deep way when comes to human affairs, as opposed to the natural sciences. Social and cultural practices have within them embedded wisdom accrued through trial and error. That is, it’s a natural Darwinian process. Bottom-up, not top-down “intelligent design.”
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Professors themselves are overwhelming on the liberal/Left today. Far more so than in the past. What happened?
I think this goes to my second reason for why intellectuals are mostly progressive: humans tend to conform to their ingroup. All things equal progressivism appeals to the cognitive comforts and experiences of intellectuals more than conservatism. But there will be deviations from this expectation. But, in a group where 60% start out as progressive, over time more and more will become progressive due to pressures to align oneself to group identity. Only the most disagreeable will hold out, at least in public. I’ve seen this myself over the last ten years, as many people who were centrists or moderately liberal have now gone fully “woke.” There was no particular moment, rather, the whole subculture simply changed and most people moved along with it. These “woke” intellectuals often express great displeasure when I bring up their old pagan beliefs, before their baptism. They have been born anew in Justice.
Wait … this is not correct. There are hundreds of thousands of solid conservative thinkers. The internet is littered with them. Alt-right was the 4th largest bucket on YouTube before it was purged.
The problem is that nationalism is at odds with the demands of capital. It’s one or the other, and in the west it was always going to be capital emerging supreme. So nationalism was purged. And conservativism has embedded within it the notion of strong in-group ties. So the heart of conservativism was systematically expunged from public life over the past 60 years.
Kgaard, are you suggesting that nationalism does not, in fact, maximize shareholder value?
Isn’t it as simple as the fact that almost all professional intellectuals live off tax money?
A nation state is a political construct. The world is an even more abstract entity. And capital is just a whole lot of fiat currency. Except for the physical plant. That part’s real.
I am the sole shareholder in my life.
Interesting, but find it hard to agree that the Lefties have some natural affinity to thinking.
People on the Left swallow propaganda and fake-news whole. If it ticks boxes, they do not have to think. I they thought they would start to ask questions. Questioning the left orthodoxy is not approved.
People not on the Left are more willing to work things out for themselves. Above all they ask why? Even asking if unfettered mass immigration and welfare dependency is a good thing for everyone (whether they want it or not) immediately shifts the thinker away from the Left.
I accept that in many institutions of supposedly elevated thinking the very act of asking “Wait, is this true?” puts you outside the pail. Easier to mumble agreement and hope no one notices one has has a questioning thought.
“Interesting, but find it hard to agree that the Lefties have some natural affinity to thinking.”
They have the usual human affinity for rationalizing, then. You must be smart and educated to lie to yourself effectively, but not smart enough to see through your own lies. Midwits tend to be progressives. The merely average and the very smart tend elsewhere.
Appearance of rationality playing with word meanings, newspeak is not rationality.
Appearance of it make it appear genuine, reinforced by incessant repetition by the academia and media.
He instead could have said this:
1. Most conservative ideas and tenets are already established there is not need to reinvent the wheel.
2. Conservativism is not an extremely socially narcissistic, competitive culture like Progressivism, where you have to keep showing others that you are in the vanguard to be invited to the parties.
3. Conservatism is not intolerant, related to above. Since progressives are intolerant, that drives them to vouch for any new radical idea, afraid of being let behind.
4. You put a conservative on an island for 5 years, when he returns he is still a conservative. You put a progressive onto an island for 5 years, and he returns a Fascist; his once progressive vanguard ideas are already outdated.
Universities and journalists are in fact destroying civilization.
Some people value ideas over concrete reality, and some do not. Everything else is just labels and semantic sleight of hand.
Isegoria,
You are too kind.
Calling a leftist an “intellectual” is a bit of a stretch.
A leftist is a religious fanatic.
Her god is a trifecta of “common good”, “social justice” and “intersectionality”
Her ideas are nothing but fantasy and lack any scientific or philosophical weight and have proved disastrous in their many iterations in our history.
Her world view is cannibalistic and childish.
She longs for the feudal “right” to bring physical harm to others as the queen of an ant-hill with a nomenklatura one-hive-mind of other leftists like her that she approves.
We have to stop attributing to leftists any seriousness.
One of the main tenets of modern leftist “theory” is that “all whites are racist because of whiteness and non-whites can’t be racists because they are not whites” and all the rest of it is not much better.
A 10 yo can see their BS.
Why can’t we call them what they are: members of an anti-human murderous cult not all that different from the cult (myth or not) of Baal Moloch.
What is the difference between Ball Moloch and the “common good”, “social justice” and “intersectionality”?
None. One BS is as bad as another.
I think you’re giving them too much credit.
Progressives value beliefs that drive social status more than truth.
Conservatives value truth more than beliefs that drive social status.
Some exceptions made for the evangelical set.
“First, if you are a high IQ individual you are more amenable and comfortable with abstraction, system-building, and rationality. Various forms of Leftism, liberalism, and libertarianism have something to offer you immediately since they start with rationalized systems.”
This argument makes sense if applied to an ideology like classical Marxism; it doesn’t make sense when applied to today’s ‘progressivism’, which makes no attempt to be a coherent intellectual system.
I’ve said that Marxism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, whereas Fascism is explicitly counter-Enlightenment. Today’s ‘progressivism’ is more like Fascism than like Marxism from this standpoint.
“Intellectual conservatism, ironically, cautions against dense, clear, and compact answers”
Intellectual conservatism acknowledges for other possibilities — unknown or not considered.
Intellectual liberalism has considered and found the answer — no other possibilities are acceptable.
That’s my dense, clear, and compact answer.
“This argument makes sense if applied to an ideology like classical Marxism.”
Since when Marxism is Coherent? It is Marxism that the Left today does in case you did not noticed. It just expanded from “social classes” to other divisive class palette that they choose from.
“I’ve said that Marxism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, whereas Fascism is explicitly counter-Enlightenment.”
Ridiculous. Fascism is an evolution of Marxism. And it is intrinsically less intolerant than Marxism, which is a Social Supremacist ideology and thus Absolutist. How did Absolutism come from the Enlightenment?
“First, if you are a high IQ individual you are more amenable and comfortable with abstraction, system-building, and rationality.”
I think the key here is that in all these systems the “intellectuals”, or those that think they are, believe they will be the ones making the rules. Being in charge. Telling everyone what to do. But it never works out that way. The psychopaths, the seriously violent and ruthless mow everyone down in their path, take charge and shoot the silly assed intellectual scribblers.
@Sam J.
That is exactly right. Start at 5:25 in this video to see KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov’s description of the Marxist subversion process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI
“Your leftists in the United States… all these professors and civil rights defenders… they are instrumental in the process of subversion… but only to destabilize the nation… when the job is completed, they are not needed anymore… When they see when Marxists/Leninists come to power, they get offended – they think THEY will come to power! That will never happen of course, they will be lined up against the wall and shot.”