"Roger Long" wrote in message
...


The real political divide is no longer between liberal and conservative.
It's between thinking and not thinking. One view of the world holds that
you assemble all the facts, discard the ones that are not consistent with
your ideology and preconceptions, and then use what is left over to
develop
a policy. The other approach is to assemble all the facts, sort them for
consistency, assemble the best planning model possible from them, and then
develop a policy.

Roger,

Intellectuals from the 20s through perhaps to the 50s believed
overwhelmingly that communism had to ultimately succeed because it was far
more scientific, rational, and well-planned than capitalism's free-for-all.
Surely a government of engineers would defeat a government of mere
politicians! Hayek was considered a crackpot in his own time for questioning
this, while Whittaker Chambers said he felt that he was switching from the
winning side to the losing one.

I'm not trying to make a point about communism per se, but rather to point
out that the sort of triumphal rationalism you express is in fact an old
idea, and one largely discredited by history. People and systems are
motivated by forces too numerous to compute the solutions of. It makes the
three-body problem look like kindergarten arithmetic.

Knowing which data to leave in, which data to leave out, and how to
interpret those things which do not conform to theoretical projections is
not the sideshow, it's the main event. Ideology is one of many anvils we can
beat the ore of raw analysis against to extract useful knowledge.

Just to give one example, I personally believe many liberals, particularly
in Western Europe, are at a loss to comprehend the nature of Islamic
terrorism because they have become so secularized that the deep religiosity
of OBL et. al. is simply unimaginable to them. Thus they become enamored of
the idea that we can negotiate on "rational" grounds, which is to say what
seems rational to them. Whereas conservatives, many of whom these days have
an element of apocalyptical evangelism in them, understand quite
instinctively that Bin Laden, the ayatollahs, etc. are talking about Heaven
and Hell, and there is no negotiating those things. Of course, I think good
counterclaims can be made here within the US regarding many social and
racial issues, where the Left has often preceeded the Right in identifying
the persistent gap in black versus white social progress as having roots
deeper than simple economics.

So my point is not necessarily to endorse one ideology but to dispute your
claim that ideology is obsolete. It is not now nor will it ever be.

Best,
-cwk.