Comment by decayza
10 years ago
This is why liberal intelectuals are so paralyzed. Yes of course we're emotional too. And yes we can be swayed. But life is not black and white. The best of us has managed to develop a resistance to this kind of rhetoric by a life of study, debate, examining common rhetorical tricks etc. And it's not just different values that drives us. It's values that has carried us through a century of carnage into a much better life. We need to stop apologising and invoking bullshit relativistic cultural arguments and show some pride in basic values like equality for women, freedom of speech etc. I kind of think that's the central point that Bertrand Russell is making we paralyze each other by focusing on any potential error instead of realising that the things we value is mostly aligned and has been refined over a long time. We can trust most of our values.
I would argue it was only through 'bullshit relativistic cultural arguments' that equality for women and freedom of speech are even considered basic values to begin with.
Please explain, I can't even imagine what you could be referring to.
The argument for women being allowed to vote and women being allowed to work in factories, along with being paid the same (which is still ongoing) was via highly organized spreading of word and demonstrations. Articles were written, flyers passed out, petitions written, discussions were had all over. These were all considered at the time, uppity issues that was more or less bullshit that "we" the american people should focus on core values such as family instead.
To be frank, women's sufferage really was formulized in 1848 arguably, and then took until 1920 to actually happen. During that time, there was similar discussion to what we're having now. The idea of basic values have changed because of cultural discussion, over the course of decades.
I would argue that equality of sexualities has increasingly become another core value, with the debate of such happening over similar amounts of time. The discussion of course is still ongoing in this field and I'm eager to see what will happen in the future.
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You should read Thomas Sowell's "A conflict of visions". It's short and really great. It's about why people group themselves into the political left and right, and why those sides disagree.
One of the points he makes is that the left and right don't agree on what the words "equality" or "fairness" mean. Right wing people tend to focus on equality of process. Left wing people tend to focus on equality of outcome.
That is, a conservative will tend to say "is the hiring process fair? yes? then if 90% of the jobs go to men, there's no problem". Whereas on the political left, they may say "if 90% of the jobs go to men then by definition the hiring process is not fair, and we should find a Solution, like by setting quotas". Right-wingers will tend to reject direct intervention like that, as they don't trust in human ability to intervene without causing unexpected and undesirable side effects.
Russell was pretty close to the definition of a liberal intellectual, so I'm a little unclear what your point is?