Quote of the Day, No. 79: The Problem with Krauthammer's Fundamental Law

Here's a post by the Maverick Philosopher with which it seems hard to disagree.

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law Here is Krauthammer's Fundamental Law: To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. It's cute and clever, a nice piece of journalese, but not quite right, although it gets at part of the truth. Krauthammer's 'law' conversationally implies that conservatives do not think that contemporary liberals or leftists are evil. But surely many of us do. Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil. My view is that many if not most so-called liberals are not good people. You are not a good person, for example, if you routinely dismiss legitimate concerns for the rule of law in the matter of immigration by accusing conservatives of having an irrational fear of foreigners. That is a vicious refusal to take conservatives seriously as rational beings and address their arguments. A second problem with Krauthammer's 'law' is that intelligent conservatives do not think of most liberals as stupid but as having the wrong values, or, when they have some of the right values, not prioritizing them correctly. Generally speaking, political differences reflect differences in values and principles, not differences in intelligence or 'information.'

There is one point, however, that I would question.

The MP states:

Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil.

But is this morally vicious, or is it simply evidence of an incapacity to think? Indeed, is it not the case that through the program of PC indoctrination led by schools, universities, legislators and media, the heirs to Western civilization are no longer, in a civilizational sense, Westerners or even civilized.

Having lost the essential ingredient of Western civilization, namely, the capacity for rational thought, we have largely substituted memes for arguments. That is not morally vicious, it is merely pathetic. We have become like a band of chattering monkeys, capable of settling a dispute only by the verbal equivalent of throwing shit.*

And if that is the case, then disaster surely looms, for a people unable to think, cannot long survive.

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* This may well be unfair to monkeys.