blatham wrote:Hume not only wrote many political essays, but applied for chairs at two universities. Add in the projects he undertook in philosophy and one would have some trouble arguing convincingly that Hume would need a shotgun to his head to involve himself in contemporary issues or contemporary groups, particularly regarding the issues of religious dogma gaining greater foothold in the community or in the machinations of rule.
I'm sorry, but you're bashing a strawman. None of this refutes the claim you are attacking, which was:
Thomas wrote:If forced at gunpoint to choose between the ACLU and the Religious Right, I'm sure he would rather join the ACLU. But his obvious preference of reasoning over bullying seems so intense to me that he wouldn't have joined either organization unless forced at gunpoint. I guess he'd rather have an Op-Ed column in the New York times. I can see him blog, too. I am fairly certain he would have preferred turning people around by persuading them rather than through political pressure.
Or in other words: Contrary to your assertion, I am not denying that Hume, if he lived today, would "involve himself in contemporary issues". I just don't think that joining a political pressure group would have been his preferred way of involving himself politically. While I found it interesting to learn that Hume applied for chairs at two universities, I don't see how this supplies evidence against my point, since universities weren't thought of as political pressure groups at the time -- as well they shouldn't.
blatham wrote:How many anti-nuke individuals or environmentalists sought to gain power, though organization and activism, in thousands of school and hospital boards?
I am judging from my experience in two highschools, one near Chicago, one in a small university town in Oregon, each of which I visited for about two weeks. I admit this is an unimpressive statistical sample. But for what it's worth, the biology curriculum in both schools taught a version of ecology that came pretty close to Gaia worship. In the geography lessons, the textbook of both schools, and in the classroom teaching of one of them, Cuba under Batista was portrayed as a Third World country, and Cuba under Castro was portrayed as a successful effort in bringing a Third World country up to speed with the industrial nations. It was also said in the textbooks that the world was facing an overpopulation crisis and that measures in the spirit of China's one-child policy were the right way to counter it. Sure, the price of forced abortions and sterilizations seemed high to the Westerner, but hey -- who are we to impose our values on other cultures? Overall, China was made to look a lot better in the Geography textbook than the Pope, who was portrayed as an old fool for disagreeing with policies to tie development aid to implementation of population-control policies.
Don't ask me how they did it, but it seems the environmentalists and socialists did a pretty good job at pushing their agenda into school curriculuae, contrary to the facts of the matter.
In addition to that, I don't think the EPA would have been incorporated without political pressure from environmentalist pressure groups like Ralph Naders. Nor do I believe it would have grown to its current size without that influence. Do you? While I agree that the left-wing pressure groups didn't coopt the political institutions the way the right-wingers did. But they were successful at coopting different institutions, and I stand by my judgment that their political success was comparable to that of the Religious Right: substantial, but limited.
blatham wrote:Who can tell us more that is 'true' about love, the bio-chemist or the poet? Who can better discern the 'truth' of political movements and consequences, Milton Friedman or George Orwell?
I'd say that depends on what you want to know about the phenomenon in question. For example, if you want to know what it was like to live through the Great Depression, Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath and Orwell's
Road to Wigan Pier are hard to beat. But both are unreliable sources if you want to know what caused the Great Depression, and how we as a society can prevent a new one. To this end, Keynes' "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" will get you much farther. Milton Friedman's
Monetary History of the United States is better still, but it's not a fair comparison. Friedman wrote in the fifties, not the thiries, so had access to information that the other three didn't.
Likewise, I wouldn't be surprised if Tom Wolfe writes the definitive novel about the Religious Right some day, and if it will tell us exactly what it feels like to be part of it, and what it feels like to be missionized by it. But if I want to reach an informed judgment on what its likely impact will be and what, if anything, I ought to do about it, I'll trust peer-reviewed sociologists, economists and ethnologists over novelists hands-down. The former sell their texts on their strength in figuring out facts, the latter merely sell their text on their strength in writing entertaining fiction.
In case you haven't noticed: you are influencing me by forcing me to give you a good reason why I'm not persuaded by each particular argument you make -- or else change my mind. As you acknowledged earlier, I have shown a willingness to change my mind in response to persuasive arguments on other occasions, and I assure you the only reason I haven't changed my mind yet is because I haven't really found your arguments persuasive so far. The one that came closest yet was your link to the 2000 Texas GOP platform.
