Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Reply to Bob's Post

Bob Godwin recently posted an entry on his blog making reference to me. He cited comments I made in response to his brief comments on my blog as “sinister piffle” indicative of leftist “ideas that are patently absurd and/or dangerous.” This was what he said as a set up for his “straw man” critique of my perspective:

This came up in our recent drama involving a reader who writes that, “I assumed that because you and the rest of the One Cosmos community were obviously so intelligent and articulate, there would be an openness to discussion to political and religious perspectives differing from your own.” He claims that his perspective “is not readily subject to definitive labels but is fluidly transforming into something that increasingly draws from all aspects of the political spectrum,” and that “whatever one's religion or spiritual path might be, compassion, kindness, and what one famous psychotherapist called ‘unconditional positive regard’ should ideally inform one's every interaction with others, even when we don't like what they believe or have to say.”

This is most of what he proceeded to say in response to the above:

This is a fine example of how the Left is always able to play the “compassion card” in order to promulgate ideas that are patently absurd and/or dangerous. For I do not say that I possess objective truth. Rather, I say that objective truth exists, and that I attempt to align myself with it. Now, to even suggest that objective truth exists places you in diametrical opposition to the entire project of the intellectual Left, which is to say that truth is relative, that no culture is better than any other, that “truth” is simply a function of power, that "perception is reality," etc.

I think I can speak for all One Cosmos readers--at least those readers who understand my message--that it is a gross distortion to suggest that we are not open to “a discussion of political and religious perspectives differing from our own.” My book alone disproves such nonsense, as it draws upon virtually every discipline and religion known to man. By comparison, leftist thought is ridiculously hidebound and parochial. What we are absolutely closed to is any discussion that suggests that truth is relative and that all points of view are of equal value… My philosophy is precisely the opposite of this reader, who says that his “is not readily subject to definitive labels but is fluidly transforming into something that increasingly draws from all aspects of the political spectrum.” In other words, his philosophy is not grounded in anything permanent or transcendent, but simply in whatever various people happen to believe at the moment, no matter where they are in the political spectrum: presumably left, right, Marxist, socialist, radical environmentalist, feminist, homosexual activist, whatever.


Our reader is certainly free to believe any and all fashionable political ideas he wishes to believe, but he cannot do so and call himself American (and please, I do not mean this primarily in a patriotic, but a philosophical sense). For our founders most definitely believed in permanent and transcendent values that it was the purpose of government to protect and conserve. In other words, they did not cobble together an ad hoc philosophy based upon whatever ideas were floating around at the time. Rather, they deeply meditated on our human nature and our divine blueprint, and tried to design a political system that accounted for the former but facilitated the latter. They would have been appalled by any philosophy that denied antecedent truth or elevated the relative to the absolute.

But our reader is not in accord with our Founding Fathers. Rather, he holds the deviant postmodern view that “whatever one's religion or spiritual path might be, compassion, kindness, and what one famous psychotherapist called ‘unconditional positive regard’ should ideally inform one's every interaction with others, even when we don't like what they believe or have to say.”

This is leftist thought par excellence. While it sounds generous and compassionate, nothing could be more tyrannical and totalitarian, for this type of pseudo-thinking begins in amorality but inevitably ends in immorality. How can it not? To give “unconditional positive regard” to everyone? Who is worthy of such an attitude except for an infant? Furthermore, to value everything without condition is logically to value nothing, for it obliterates the very hierarchy that informs you of what is worthy of value.

This type of sinister piffle goes directly against the idea of the transcendent unity of mankind. In other words, I believe that because Truth is one, so too is mankind. Take away the notion of transcendent truth, and we are left with a bunch of warring tribes, all with their relative nonsense--as Kimball says, “African knowledge,” “female language,” “Eurocentric science,” or “the idea that history is a ‘myth,’ that the truths of science are merely ‘fictions’ dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth--more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals.” “Whether working in the academy or other cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is ‘no such thing’ as intrinsic merit; ‘quality’ is only an ideological construction; aesthetic value is a distillation of social power; etc., etc.”

"Unconditional positive regard" is the Ultimate Value for a person who has none. Does it include respecting “those religious codes which demand that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death? What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced? In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism... requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as ‘racist’ and ‘ethnocentric.’”

Leftist thought is actually profoundly anti-Enlightenment, for it fosters a spurious freedom: “Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value. Questions of ‘lifestyle’... come to occupy the place once inhabited by moral convictions and intellectual principles. For the postmodernist, then, ‘culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this’.... In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises--freedom understood as the emancipation from values that transcend the self--culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary ‘options.’”

So are One Cosmos readers intolerant? You bet--if they agree with me, they are. Intolerant of the totolerantarianism that masquerades as “unconditional positive regard,” the horizontal license that mocks vertical liberty, and the tyrannical absolutism that passes itself off as moral and cultural relativism. The unity of mankind cannot be found in its superficial diversity, only in that unchanging end toward which its diversity is converging. Mankind is one because the transcendent Truth to which human beings have unique access is One. Leftism in any form whatsoever proceeds in the opposite, descending direction: E Unum Pluribus, out of One, many. Gravity takes care of the rest.

I apologize for quoting all of this material instead of condensing it into a summary. However, in this case, I thought it best to let Bob speak for himself before I addressed what he said. This way, no one can accuse me of misrepresenting him. I’ve allowed him to represent himself with his customarily sparkling and learned prose.

It’s reassuring that Bob says he doesn’t claim to “possess objective truth,” because one reading his blog could readily come to just the opposite conclusion—that he and those who are an accepted part of the OC community are absolutely convinced not only that there are absolute truths but also that they know precisely what they are about politics, spirituality, economics, and everything else worth discussing and are rightfully and scornfully “intolerant” of anyone or anything that contradicts them. And, of course, two of the absolute truths that they possess are that I’m a tyrannical and totalitarian,” “pseudo-thinking,” amoral and immoral leftist, and that leftism is one of the great scourges of the Earth. It’s refreshing to hear Bob imply that he’s not absolutely certain that this is true. He IS implying this, is he not? If not, then doesn’t his disclaimer ring hollow?

For the record, I share Bob’s belief in the existence of objective truth and his desire to be aligned with it. Nowhere have I suggested otherwise. He might realize this if he responded to what I’ve actually posted here and on his blog instead of critiquing his simplistic idea of me as a stereotypical leftist and distorting everything I say through that warped interpretation. What I HAVE suggested is that truth is not to be found solely at one pole of the political spectrum but at all across the spectrum—left, right, and center. All bands of the spectrum have true and important things to tell us about ourselves and our society and culture, and we would be remiss or worse if we didn’t take them all into account and weave them all together into the best approximation of absolute truth of which we’re humanly capable.

For instance, socialists are correct in arguing that unadulterated capitalism engenders exploitation and obscenely unjust distributions of wealth and power that create widespread and egregious poverty and suffering. Capitalists are correct in arguing that unadulterated socialism has traditionally resulted in totalitarian states that suppress our spiritual need for transcendence, our psychological need for development and expression of our uniquely individual qualities and capacities, and the economic need for efficient rendering of reliable services and the efficient production of quality goods at affordable prices. The ideological center is correct that we need to somehow optimally meld capitalism with socialism in a manner that provides all of us with the best opportunity to avoid needless suffering and to pursue true happiness.

Another example of truth coming from all bands of the ideological spectrum concerns the understanding of the causes of social problems and their solutions. People on the left tend to blame poverty, crime, and other social problems on “the system” and strive to solve these problems by throwing more tax money at the system. People on the right tend to blame these social problems on individuals and focus on severely punishing crime and removing what they perceive as the “big government” economic and social disincentives to developing personal responsibility and initiative. People in the center intuitively understand that these problems result from interacting systemic AND individual factors and that we need to find ways to foster individual responsibility and initiative AND have a social system in place, supported by federal, state, and local tax dollars as well as by private charities, that encourages and empowers people to grow in this regard.

Thus, when I wrote that my perspective is “fluidly transforming into something that increasingly draws from all aspects of the political spectrum,” I was NOT saying that I don’t believe in objective or transcendent truths. I was saying that I’m more willing to look all over for them and more able to find elements of them everywhere I look, including the political right. As Ken Wilber says, no one is smart enough to be completely right or wrong. Everyone has a piece of the truth, and our task as human beings seeking truth is to open our minds and hearts to finding it everywhere it exists. Contrary to what Bob says, this doesn’t mean that I’m simply latching on to whatever people happen to fashionably believe at the moment, and that as fashion changes, so will my beliefs because they have no grounding in “anything permanent or transcendent.”

These are some of the “transcendent” truths I hold as self-evident:

(1) We are all instantiations or manifestations of a divine Ultimate Reality called different things by different people and different religions.

(2) Our foremost purpose is to be happy in the Aristotelian sense of fulfilling our highest human and personal potential.

(3) Our highest moral potential is to love, honor, and respect everyone as instantiations or manifestations of the divine, and to do our reasonable best to foster their “pursuit of happiness.” We may disagree on the particulars of our “reasonable best,” but we are not fulfilling our moral potential when we mock, ridicule, demean, and devalue, much less hate, those who disagree with us or even do harm to us. As the Bible says, we may hate the sin, but we should endeavor to love and go on loving the sinner. This, aside from what Carl Rogers may have meant, is what I mean by according every human being “unconditional positive regard.”

Frankly I was rather surprised that
Bob--a clinical psychologist who says he believes in absolute, objective truths such as the “transcendent unity of mankind,” specializes in “the treatment of psychological barriers to spiritual growth,” and sub-specializes in transpersonal psychology—would condemn my embrace of “unconditional positive regard—with such sneering vehemence, calling it “sinister,” “totalitarian,” and “tyrannical.” But what was really shocking was his insistence that it is perhaps only an infant who is worthy of such regard and that people intrinsically have no value but must earn it, presumably by believing and acting the way Bob thinks they should believe and act and by not, under any circumstances, judging by the obvious contempt for Islam and leftism that pervades his blog, being Muslim or leftist. It’s ironic that Bob, who repeatedly stresses in his blog the importance of sound intellectual discernment and distinctions seems unable to distinguish between human beings, who are intrinsically worthy of our unconditional love and respect, and the things they believe and do, which are not. I agree with Bob that we should emphatically NOT positively regard such actions as casting out “barren” women, executing women for adultery, making the legal testimony of one man equal to that of two women, forcing little girls to undergo ritual circumcision, perpetrating slavery, and suicide bombing, but I disagree with his apparent conviction that should hate the “sinner” along with the “sin.” I’m very surprised that Bob, who appears to be Christian, would disagree.

Yet, at this point, I guess I shouldn’t be terribly surprised at anything Bob says and does, unless he were to suddenly admit that he was wrong about something or that there is actually merit in anything I’ve said. I won’t hold my breath waiting for such a surprise.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

I daresay that the two of you are talking past each other.

Bob, thinking in generalities, thought he found an example of the Mean Green Meme so he endeavored to fit it into that category. He probably doesn't know about the MGM, but that is what he is describing.

You know specifically what you meant and know that what you wrote isn't what Bob is describing. So, with your knowledge of the specifics, you understadably feel insulted.

To Bob's credit, what he is describing is truly a common worldview found in the Left.

I would quibble with Bob about his suppositions of what The Founders of our country were looking for, and whether these now quite-dead white guys opinions about anything matter any more. [America is a land of the living, much changed from what it was in the 18th Century.]

I also question his suppositions on what the motivations of the Left are. Should the Left come to power in America, I would agree that things would go badly, but it would not be Stalinism Redux. It would be its own maladaptive thing, poorly incentivized and admin heavy, pulling us down to an egalitarian nightmare.

In the rest of your post, you descibe what wrote and what you meant. Clearly, you are not the stereotype Bob is chasing after.

You are a straw man if Bob came to realize that what you had written does not fit the stereotype he was motivated to unbraid.

Anonymous said...

Interesting response to Bob's freigthened treatment of anyone who might expose him for who he really is! Bob seems to me like the Wizard of Oz, blustery and boastful on the big screen but only a little scared man when one sees behind the curtain. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

I consider myself rather conservative but I gained Bob's rancor when I defended a friend's right to express alternate views in response to One Cosmos, and then again when I asked Bob if he is a Christian, which I had my doubts about. Not that Bob needs to be a Christian, mind you, but since he often alludes to scripture and Christian philosophy I wanted to be clear about who I was reading for my own sake and for the sake of others who "subscribe" to his blog. I got a very strange angry response to that question, not a "how dare you ask me that!", kind of response but what seemed to me an "oh-oh, someone's got my number" kind of response. Bob deleted all of my posts that day, and denied deleting them until one of his "former" regulars called him on it. On Easter I was deleted for responding to a blog he posted on the ressurrection when I proclaimed that the ressurrection was a literal physical get up from the dead ressurrection.
I may not agree with you, or Bob on everything but I respect your right to voice your opinion and strongly disagree with Bob's banning of anyone. To my mind, dissenting voices is the price he has to pay for posting his views on the open world net- if he doesn't like it he should get a room some where.

It would be an interesting study to list men throughout history who have not allowed dissenting voices in their circle- the list might scare us all.

BTW, since the day I asked Bob about his specific belief system I haven't seen the "former poster" on Bob's site, maybe someone was ,in fact, "saved" that day.

Anonymous said...

Doing a survey of both blogs it would seem to one of even minimal intelligence that you are hopelessly outclassed. A wise man would do a better job of picking those with whom he does battle.
Though perhaps your target audience are the perpetually aggrieved

Anonymous said...

Some battles need to be fought- at least until one's point has been made; I suspect that this blog will evolve into something all its own in the near future.
BTW, flowery prose, name dropping and boorish quotations of obscure philosphers do not necessarily equate to class, in my book straight forward statements out-class Bob's windy essays any day.
As to being aggrieved, to be honest, I kind of think the whole thing is rather funny!

Anonymous said...

"Though perhaps your target audience are the perpetually aggrieved."

The point is made.

Steve said...

Tom, I think you make several good points. (1) Bob thinks I personify the MGM because as soon as I or anyone post something that sounds even slightly "green" to him, he falsely assumes that we fulfill the whole stereotype in its most "pathological" form, and he responds to everything we write in that way, even when we've made it clear that there are many aspects of MGM beliefs that we don't embrace. (2) I agree that Bob is describing a "worldview found on the left" side of the political spectrum, but I'm not sure that the entire MGM worldview that Bob attacks with the virtually daily regularity of a bowel movement is embraced by more than a small percentage of the population with relatively little political, economic, and social power. In fact, it seems to me that far more power resides in the hands of those closer to MBM and MOM stereotypes. (3) I agree with you that something needn't be true just because the "Founding Fathers" believed it; it should be judged on its own merits. (4) I agree with you that if the Left were to come to power here, the result wouldn't be the catastrophic collapse of Western civilization that Bob seems to envision. I also believe that if things did go badly in some respects, they are going badly now as well, with government largely in the hands of the Right.

Anonymous, I agree with you that Bob is inordinately disdainful and rejecting toward anyone and anything with which he disagrees, and that this raises legitimate questions about just how secure he is with his own beliefs.

Nathan, I don't deny for one moment that Bob is far smarter and more learned than I am and a better writer too. But aside from your stating the obvious, can you share with us just what Bob wrote in his post that was right about me, and just what I wrote in my post that was wrong about him?

Anonymous, I agree that "some battles need to be fought," but I don't necessarily agree that I'm fighting any battle with Bob in the sense of trying to harm him or win any contest with him. I'm just trying to address his points. This blog is certainly not entirely about him. It's been online since January of 2005 and has addressed whatever's captured my attention enough at the time to write about it. Lately, my attention has been focused on One Cosmos and some of the things that have transpired there. Tomorrow, it may well be focused on something else entirely. But I agree with you that I envision my blog "evolving" in terms of the breadth and depth of its content.

Namaste,
Steve

Anonymous said...

"Though perhaps your target audience are the perpetually aggrieved."
The point is made.
Nathan H

You are wrong- the point has not been made; the statement has been made, but a point is made only when a statement, once made, resonates with those who recieve it.
So where does that leave us? A statement of opinion made by an individual who chooses to believe that he knows more about strangers posting a few words on a blog than they know about themselves.An insistance that, despite said strangers denials of his statement, he is right and they are wrong about themselves.

To make a point one needs to base one's statements on fact and have the wisdom and knowledge to back them up. Simply saying point made doesn't cut it.

Steve said...

Anonymous, I agree. One can make a statement without making a point. I would add that one can make a point without proving it. It seems to me that many in the Godwin camp confuse the first with the last. They constantly make statements that they confuse with proven facts. And those statments are often disparaging judgments of the intellectual capacity or psychological maturity of those with whom they disagree rather than sound refutations of the arguments and opinions of those with whom they disagree.

Nathan's posts illustrate this very well. Instead of explaining what I posted that was wrong and why it was wrong, the best he seemed capable of doing was telling me that I'm "hopelessly outclassed" when I challenge Bob Godwin on anything he says. He made no point. He made a statement, and it was, judging from the available evidence, an exceedingly dubious one.

Anonymous said...

"A statement of opinion made by an individual who chooses to believe that he knows more about strangers posting a few words on a blog than they know about themselves.An insistance that, despite said strangers denials of his statement, he is right and they are wrong about themselves."

You got it! Take a long look in the mirror.

Anonymous said...

Wow, what a snappy come-back nathan!
The problem with your logic is that all I have done is to report my expience on Bob's blog. Are you saying that the events I reported in regard to Bob's treatment of me, my friend, and several other individuals never happened? They did happen and there is a difference between reporting facts as I have done and assigning motive to an individual's actions as you have done.
Check out that mirror nathan n, dispenser of convoluted logic, I wonder who you're going to see looking back at you...

PS I came to this blog because I saw the link posted by another individual who had been banned by Bob and I thought it would be funny to check it out.

You seemed to be implying that you did a (casual) survey of both blogs. Would you share how you found out about this blog and why you visited? Are you a regular poster on Bob's blog? What keeps you coming back?What is your psuedonym over there?Finally,do you wish you could delete dissenters over here the way they get deleted at you -know- where?

Anonymous said...

I have come to the conclusion that blogs and boards are not productive venues for my thoughts. So, this will be my last post anywhere for some time. nathan n- we may well have a lot in common- so I am laying down my keyboard for gentler hobbies.