Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito
Conservatism and Sociology
Mark Wegierski, on the science of power
In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a central point is that semantics are critical for the maintenance of a given social and political system. “Newspeak is Ingsoc, and Ingsoc is Newspeak.” The coherence or incoherence (in terms of definition), and the positive or negative value (in terms of emotion), which are commonly associated with a political ideology, will tell one a great deal about the strength of that ideology. The words and language which are used to describe social or political phenomena, which Orwell called “the B vocabulary” in his Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, constitute the primary instruments by which an ideology asserts itself in any given society. It should be noted that complex, multi‑layered political terms such as “conservatism” or “liberalism” or “socialism” conjure immediate images and emotional responses in most people’s minds.
In terms of the unstated emotive content of the term “conservatism”, these images and emotional responses, for a traditionalist conservative, can range from a wistful remembrance of the beauty of a Gothic cathedral and the medieval Christendom from which it sprang to a visceral distaste towards a middle‑aged WASP corporate controller type luxuriating in his penthouse suite atop Manhattan, and the oppressive capitalist structure which he represents (for the archetypal Left-liberal). Continue reading
“Systemic Racism” or Systematic Rubbish, Part 1
Robin DiAngelo
“Systemic Racism” or Systematic Rubbish? part 1
by Ilana Mercer
The “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction. To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms, the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable, to use statistical nomenclature. Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called “racism”—systemic or other—it remains nothing but a thought “crime”: impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached. Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. By logical extension, America is not a free society.
The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally. The law, then, is not the problem, logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward. “Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”
Systemic racism is most certainly not “the only plausible explanation” for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: in aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements. Continue reading →
Share this:
Like this: