To Jonah Goldberg: All Our Hayek Are Belong to Us
By Mona
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The NYT reports that the conservatives are engaged in quite the internecine slugfest over whether or not one of the foundational facts of modern science is true or not, namely, whether the biodiversity on planet Earth is explained by descent with modification; aka, evolution. Many conservatives, such as George Gilder, think it is just a nasty, horrid idea that causes all manner of nasty and horrible undermining of All That is Moral and Good. And for that reason evolution must be rejected and fought.
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Derb is discussed and quoted as one of the right-wingers fighting for the legitimacy of this bedrock scientific truth: “Mr. Derbyshire, …has described himself as the ‘designated point man’ against creationists and intelligent-design proponents at National Review…” which brings me to a strong peeve I’ve had with Jonah Goldberg for several years.
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There is no doubt that Derb is, indeed, fighting against a coterie of creationist/Intelligent Designers (they are the same thing, no matter how much they protest) over at NR. Goldberg, however, has repeatedly claimed — in petulant anti-libertarian screeds such as this one — that when Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek wrote in his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, an essay entitled ” Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek didn’t mean to distance himself from rightwingers in the United States. No, perish the thought; National Review conservatism is wonderful, the shining and the last best hope against tyranny in all of its forms, and:
Hayek was explicitly talking about pre-modern conservatives, European conservatives, and reactionaries.
Except…NOT. He also meant YOU people at NRO, Jonah, the folks about whom Hayek declared disdainfully in his essay, my emphasis:
…I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it – or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic” explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.
See that last bit, Jonah? Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts. That is quintessential Hayek. And as Derb complains in the Times article about the decidedly anti-Hayekian types he is surrounded by at NRO:
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.â€
Exactly so, but conservatism has largely refused to accept such principles, and is one of the reasons Hayek was not one. He would spin in his grave at the thought of neoconservatives, who explicitly embrace lying about scientific and other facts when it is deemed politically useful to do so.
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(Jonah also seems to think Hayek explicitly repudiated the term “libertarian.” Not exactly. He found it cumbersome, but also said it might have to do.)
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Advantage: Mona. Goldberg is a nitwit; Hayek is ours, and you neoconservative enablers of religious loons cannot have him.
Comment by Kevin B. O'Reilly —
May 5, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
Mona, why do you put periods in between all of your paragraph breaks?
Comment by Glaivester —
May 5, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
There is no doubt that Derb is, indeed, fighting against a coterie of creationist/Intelligent Designers (they are the same thing, no matter how much they protest)
No, they are not, unless you want to argue that anyone who believes that there is any non-natural component to the history of life is exactly the same.
This is roughly equivalent to saying that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are the same because they both oppose the Iraq War.
The belief system of “intelligent design” and creationism are quite different.
Now if you want to argue they are the same in terms of a particular aspect of their beliefs, fine. But you have to explain in what respect they are the same, rather than just lumping all non-materialists into the same category.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
May 5, 2007 @ 5:20 pm
Glaivester, can you tell me just what IDists do believe? Since their political program is intent on getting their religious beliefs taught (legally) in public schools, they’re pretty much committed to lying about those beliefs so they don’t run afoul of the first amendment.
Comment by Mona —
May 5, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
Glaivester: A federal district court judge — appointed by George W. Bush, a judge who is a life-long Republican — has held in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that ID is in essential aspects indistinguishable from creationism. He found that ID in fact is repackaged creationism, and did so based on mounds of testimony, documents and analysis:
The opinion is long but well worth reading. I would also suggest Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross’s book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Gross, btw, is a conservative. Before ID became the monster he battled, he was railing against the academic left’s anti-science inanities, his work giving direct rise to the most excellent Sokal Hoax.
Comment by Mona —
May 5, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Kevin O’Reilly: I use Firefox, and what I see is no breaks between about half of my grafs. So I insert a period to make one.
You see, I am both an idiot and lazy, because if I asked Jim what to do to insert breaks I’m sure he’d tell me. Have I asked? No.
Comment by Jon H —
May 5, 2007 @ 5:33 pm
Intelligent Design is just Creationism wearing a Groucho mask.
Comment by DB —
May 5, 2007 @ 5:48 pm
In theory, they are. But this history of the Intelligent Design movement belies this point. The ID movement was born out of the aftermath that McLean v. Arkansas and Edwards v. Aguillard wreaked on the creationist movement. The _same group_ of people, who before these decisions were creationists, were Intelligent Design promotors afterwards. This, to me, makes it pretty clear that the primary difference between Intelligent Design is creationism is that the latter is structured to fit the requirements of McLean and Edwards, for the purpose of getting supernatural creation taught in public schools.
Comment by Glaivester —
May 5, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
Essentially, here is the difference as I see it:
Creationism essentially teaches that life was created by a Higher Being in more or less the form it exists today (perhaps there were a lot of creatures who used to exist who went extinct, but no genuinely new species have arisen).
Intelligent Design states that at some point or points, an intelligence must have supernaturally intervened in the system. Between interventions, species may have altered and evolved somewhat, and even new species may have been produced, but the entire spectrum from molecules to man could not, according to ID, have come about naturalistically.
More importantly. in terms of connotative meaning, creationism generally means “literal Biblical creation,” whereas intelligent design is much more non-sectarian and does not preach a specific history of life.
You can argue that both share traits that make them unacceptable for teaching in public schools, or that both are equally bad as science, but the concepts are different.
Comment by Glaivester —
May 5, 2007 @ 6:19 pm
Perhaps I was a bit sensitive on this issue, but I think there is a tendency by a lot of secularists to just assume that since they think that all religion is wrong, that all religion must be the same and that they consider a Quaker to be as offensive to their sensibilities as a Wahhabi.
I interpreted your statement (perhaps wrongly) to be thinking in the same vein.
Comment by Mona —
May 5, 2007 @ 6:35 pm
Oh, I understand your pique if you think I was channeling Richard Dawkins — I admire him in a lot of ways, but I am not anti-religion as he is. Our own Thoreau here at UO is a practicing Catholic, and a scientist who accepts the fact of evolution. There are religious scientists, and theistic evolution (which what you are describing) is just not ID.
ID is a political movement, not a coherent cosmology, and its purpose includes (but is not limited to) somehow getting creationism culturally accepted and into the public schools.
There are some atheists/secularists who are rigidly and intemperately anti-religion, and as insufferable as any extreme Xian fundamentalist. I’m not one of those kinds of atheists, and never have been.
Comment by Bill Woolsey —
May 5, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
Many, and probably most, Christians believe something that is more less intelligent design. That is, that God’s hand was involved in creation and the development of life. Most recognize the logic of natural selection and believe that something like that has been going on over the billions of years of earths history. These folks reject “Creationism” which means the 7 day creation 4000 years ago.
Many, (and maybe even most) Christians believe in the 7 day creation story.
Perhaps the Intelligent Design people are Creationists who are promoting a more inclusive approach of intelligent design.
IT is a bit like saying that libertarians are anarchists by pointing out the key role Rothbard played in writing the LP platform.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 5, 2007 @ 8:00 pm
On the surface, the ID movement makes claims that are far more modest than the claims made by young earth creationists. If taken at face value, the ideas proposed by the ID crowd are distinct from the ideas of the young earth crowd, and might even be worthy of examination, if for no other reason than that you can learn a lot from ideas that are interesting but wrong.
However, most of the ID arguments, when examined, turn out to be the same old arguments presented in new language. So intellectually, much of what the ID crowd has is not terribly interesting, having already been debunked in previous guises.
Also, as a movement, the ID crowd gets most of its support (moral, political, and financial) from the young earth crowd. Their goal is to use these more modest claims as a starting point for attacks on modern science, with the goal of using a wedge to enter a crack and then split it wide open.
Granted, I’ve heard of young earth creationists (even some high profile ones) dismissing the ID folks (whose ideas, if taken at face value, are consistent with an old earth) as heretics. I don’t know to what extent these attacks reflect jealousies within the movement, the utter insanity of the young earth crowd, and smart PR to help the ID folks say with a straight face “See, we aren’t young earth creationists! Honestly!”
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 5, 2007 @ 8:01 pm
In theory all Christians are intelligent design believers of some sort. For instance, I accept what modern science has to say about the history of the universe and how life developed on earth as the closest approach to the truth that we have available. I also think God is in control of the whole process, but in ways that are beyond our ability to detect. (Yes, this makes in conveniently impossible for scientists to refute, but it makes sense that an omnipotent being could operate this way if He chose.) I assume Thoreau probably believes something like this as well.
Unfortunately the Intelligent Design movement has hijacked the phrase and linked it to arguments about the impossibility of natural selection to produce “irreducibly complex” organs. Darwin effectively dealt with this argument in a couple of chapters in The Origin of Species, but the modern ID’ers claim to be saying something new because Darwin’s examples were taken from anatomy and the modern creationist can use examples from biochemistry. But it’s the same old argument.
So the actually existing intelligent design movement is just another form of dishonest anti-Darwinism. So for that reason I would say, if asked, that I don’t believe in intelligent design because in current circumstances the term means one sides with Behe, Dembski, and Phillip Johnson. If I had time I’d go through the explanation I just gave.
Comment by Mona —
May 5, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Donald Johnson, very well explicated. Really, there are times when I think I’m more of a deist than an atheist, and I suppose when I’m on that side of the fence I, too, am a believer in intelligent design rather than Intelligent Design.
Comment by Jon H —
May 5, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
“In theory all Christians are intelligent design believers of some sort”
Yet that’s not necessarily true – for instance, if there are many universes of different configurations, and God exists outside of them, and outside of time, and he caused the big bangs (or whatever) to create them, but knew only a statistical probablility that something like us would be an eventual result on one planet in one of the universes.
If God is outside of time, then he can watch this as many times as he likes until he gets a result that he thinks is Good, without necessarily guiding the process or starting from anything but random configurations.
In fact, if he does function outside of time, his view of us at the 15 billion year point in our universe’s history might be like a human viewing a rat’s maze from above, taking in the whole extent and seeing whether there is cheese at the end or not; the rat has to explore the maze from start to finish to figure out what’s the end of it, but the outside observer is not so limited and can take it all in at once.
If a Creator could create a billion randomly-configured universes, and see the entire history of each universe at a glance, he’d have little difficulty picking out the one which would produce Carrot Top. But the creator wouldn’t have to direct or design anything.
Comment by Jon H —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:05 pm
A problem with Intelligent Design is that it tries to limit the examples of Intelligent Design to things we don’t yet understand well, while ignoring the gobsmackingly bad design we see all over the place.
Nor does it attempt to explain why the Intelligent Designer would bother designing, say, an ingenious clotting mechanism, but slack off when designing the prostate.
On the other hand, that kind of distinction fits perfectly with a Creationist bent, where things like prostate trouble are just there because of the Fall.
Comment by Mona —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:13 pm
It boggles my mind that any woman who has had a bladder infection can believe our bodies have been designed by some superior Engineer. The human female’s urethra is positioned perfectly to pick up nasties both from doing fun stuff with boys, and from certain rearguard excretory functions. This poor placement often makes us miserable beyond uttering.
Comment by Leonard —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:37 pm
Mona, you just are failing to see the subtlety of the design! The misery? Part of the plan. God may be testing you…
I think evolution is a big problem for religious conservatives and those who would pander to them. So it will remain a problem for Republicans for the foreseeable future; their best bet is to hope that courts will simply squelch all attempts to put non-science in the public schools.
But I don’t see evolution as a big problem for intellectual conservatism, at least not of the Derb variety. In fact it is very useful for conservatives to be able to appeal to human nature, at least in some circumstances. Of course, they must avoid using the naturalistic fallacy (which is on display in the thinking of many of the “intellectuals” quoted for that NYT article; rather pitiful that). But there are many conservative ideas that would be bolstered by evidence that the way humans act is not just a purely cultural construct, rather, cultural constructs rooted in biology.
Comment by La Rana —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:46 pm
Conservative after all!! ho ho ho
Comment by Jon H —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:53 pm
“It boggles my mind that any woman who has had a bladder infection can believe our bodies have been designed by some superior Engineer.”
For that matter, birth itself is sufficiently risky you’d think a designer would have fixed that a long time ago.
I mean, sometimes women get significantly torn/injured pushing out the baby’s noggin, but snakes get a jaw that unhooks so they can eat huge prey.
If there were a designer, there’d have never been any need for the episiotomy – either the head would be able to squish, or the pelvic structures would be more elastic. Or humans would have pouches.
Comment by matthew hogan —
May 5, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
From Time Bandits:
Nipples, on men?
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 5, 2007 @ 11:21 pm
Jon H–
Well, that’s true. God could have done anything He wanted, including making 10 to the googolplex universes and watching what happens. So I’ll amend my statement and say that most Christians are probably believers in some sort of intelligent design, very loosely defined. But they don’t have to be, since your option is also available.
Comment by Jon H —
May 5, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
“Well, that’s true. God could have done anything He wanted, including making 10 to the googolplex universes and watching what happens. So I’ll amend my statement and say that most Christians are probably believers in some sort of intelligent design, very loosely defined. But they don’t have to be, since your option is also available.”
Yeah, there probably aren’t many people who think of it the way I described.
I find it interesting that so many people apparently believe in such a tiny, simple, limited god.
Comment by Karen —
May 6, 2007 @ 9:04 am
My personal favorite example of stupid design for humans is our wisdom teeth. They either come in crooked and cause extraordinary pain and possibly-fatal infections, or they come in straight, like mine, and consequently don’t hurt so they don’t prompt me to have them removed, but nevertheless make it impossible for me to floss effectively thus causing severe gum disease. Thanks, God, you really screwed that one up.
Seriously, I’m of the “theistic evolution” school. Theistic evolution is a conclusion I reach based on my a priori conviction that God exists. I can’t prove the existence of God from the fossil record, however. Intelligent Design claims to make specific predictions from the fossil record that prove the existence of God, which is pretty much exactly backward from the way I believe.
Oh, and I agree with Jon H, too. Who wantst the creationists piddly little god anyway? I mean, my Guy is perfectly capable of taking at least 15 million years to complete a project. Does their god have ADD or something that He can’t concentrate for more than 6,000 years?
Comment by Thoreau —
May 6, 2007 @ 11:41 am
Does their god have ADD or something that He can’t concentrate for more than 6,000 years?
Or even worse, is He so fickle that if we just mess things up a little more in the Middle East then prophecy will be fulfilled and God will come and smash everything? Some of the fundies actually believe that if we pursue a particular foreign policy we can set the stage for the Book of Revelation to be fulfilled.
Granted, Revelation has a nice ending, all things considered, but the stuff that happens before that? Well, I’d understand if Jesus felt like postponing His return until after I’ve already gone up to pay Him a visit. Cuz I could probably do without being here during some of the pyrotechnics that precede His return.
Comment by Lars —
May 6, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
“It boggles my mind that any woman who has had a bladder infection can believe our bodies have been designed by some superior Engineer.â€
I don’t know about superior, but is it so unlike an engineer to run a sewage line through a recreational area?
Comment by Karen —
May 6, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
I’m with thoreau on the Revelations bit, too. I once overheard the minister at the church where I grew up respond to a question about that book as follows: “The three greatest Christian theologians were St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The first one believed Revelation was an allegory, the second thought it was a forgery, and the third one admitted he had no idea what it meant. If those three couldn’t decide what it meant, why on Earth should someone as poor on the subject as I am render an opinion?” (I realize that Dr. T would replace Luther and Calvin with St. Thomas Aquinas, but with that substitution, the point holds through all Christian traditions.)
Also, the only book my parents flatly prohibited me from reading when I was growing up was Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. They were okay with the collected works of Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz, too.
Comment by Derek Copold —
May 6, 2007 @ 8:36 pm
Exactly so, but conservatism has largely refused to accept such principles, and is one of the reasons Hayek was not one.
Conservatives aren’t the only one who do this. Liberals are just as averse to accepting the findings of evolutionary psychology.
Comment by Walt —
May 7, 2007 @ 1:09 pm
Derek, are you legally compelled to make that point, or something? Is it the higher Broderism? Were you sitting at home, saying, “oops, now it’s time to say something bad about liberals.”
Comment by Derek Copold —
May 7, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
Dude, I always say bad things about liberals.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 8, 2007 @ 10:09 pm
“Dude, I always say bad things about liberals.”
It takes a great deal of art to say the same thing over and over and over and yet still keep it interesting for the listener. You need to put more work into it.