Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Interesting.

Yes and no
Robert — (archived)

We have a fundamentally different view of politics, Tom. I see it as a human activity necessarily founded on subjective human experience; you see it as objective and amenable to scientific analysis (which rather delightfully always seems to come out supporting your position, as long as you're the one doing the analysis).

People approach politics with aspirations. A vision of an outcome reflects personal desires and values, leavened by individual personal experiences; and such a vision is by definition unreal. Further, we're being reminded in the Middle East that for many people, including Americans, intangible and decidely nonobjective factors such as religion play a profoundly important role. In American politics, how can you possibly analyze objectively and scientifically the political positions some people arrive at as a result of religious beliefs?

In the early part of the 20th Century there was an intellectual fashion that advocated turning over government to "experts", scientists who would analyze their way to the perfectly rational society. Some people felt that politics was too sloppy and full of sentimentality, and that an emotional electorate was incapable of coming to the "right" conclusions. The popularity of that movement plummeted like a stone when, for example, the Nazis demonstrated the result of what I'd call "pathological rationality". All of their worst atrocities were backed up by oh-so-logical scientific thinking, not least the eugenics that had reasonably solid roots in animal husbandry and genetics, and yet was so awfully inhuman.

Everything about our American system acknowledges the essential subjectivity of politics. If it were otherwise, the Founders wouldn't have bothered with democracy; they too might've instituted "government by experts". Many of them were "men of science" as it was understood then; the idea must've occurred to them. But they chose democracy.

It is by the process of democracy that we reliably arrive at 4 when so many individuals believe that the answer is 3 or 5, or 2 or 6, or sqrt(9) or even sqrt(-1). The answer rarely satisfies everybody, but it's the human answer. We forget that at our peril.

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