THE EVOLUTION IN REVOLUTION

  The Triumph of the Age of the Idiot
https://flip.it/TrRfn7 

Umair Haque is one of many voices in the wildnerness calling us to the task of trying to save the planet and humanity.  It is irresponsible and irrational to continue to get up in the morning and carry on as if money, and positions, and promotions still matter.  Not all of us can or must be Greta Thunberg.  In the 1960s I told my students that there were many ways to join the revolution.  You didn't have to march or participate in teach-ins and sit-ins if those activities were too "activist" for your temperament.  You could write a letter to or call your city, state, and federal representatives; you could vote for candidates who supported the revolution; you could write op eds, school essays, books; at the very least, when you saw activists on TV you could simply applaud them from the safety of your living room couch.  Consider some of what Haque has to say.  A nation of idiots, harkening back to an ancient Greek perspective, is a nation destined to implode.  Idiots are concerned with "private advantage, profit, gain" as opposed to anything "collective, common, or shared" (e.g., democracy, healthcare, social security and other social safety nets); "Seeking advantage becomes taking advantage."  A Gresham's Law takes hold: bad norms drive out good norms leading to the triumph of "selfishness, ignorance and stupidity," and establishing the conditions for a demagogue to seize power.  The lesson, Haque argues is that "Everything the far right touches dies."  This is not a political claim.  We are dealing with objective facts, with reality, with factual truth:

                Far right politics have stormed the world. Yet can                                                    you point out a single example to me — just one —                                                    where they’ve worked out well? Resulted in better…                                               anything? After all, what we want from politics —                                                    no matter what ours are, really — are better outcomes.                                            It’s just that the moral circle, and their definition, by a                                            degree, differs. And yet when you take a hard empirical                                        look at the outcomes of this tsunami sweeping the world —                                    well, they’re not good anywhere. I mean that exhaustively                                    and categorically. Any…where.

Now let's be clear here about "objective facts, reality, and factual truth."  Reality is real but it is complicated.  It can be analyzed, decomposed in many ways, along different dimensions, at different levels: quantum, cosmic, and phenomenal.  The idiot problem impacts phenomenal reality, the reality of everyday life, the objectivity, the factual truth, of crossing the street and looking both ways.  There is more to say here and I am doing that in my latest book (in progress), Safeguarding Truth in the Age of Science Denial.  The thing about science and education that the right, the Republicans in America, and conservatives don't get is that they are left wing, radical left activities.   You can understand left and right in political terms or more generally in terms of open/collective vs. closed/self-centered.  There is a great deal to unpack here and I've done some of that in my writings on the sociology of science.  My book on Safeguarding Truth will explore these matters in the context of the existential threats facing the planet and humanity in a manner that should be clear to the educated reader.   

AND MORE:

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible

By Mike Lofgren

https://www.salon.com/2023/07/01/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-conservative-intellectual--only-apologists-for-right-wing-power/