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“Even
a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind. …
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”
The
tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue.
Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always
right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do
everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.
Robert Pirsig remarks, in Lila, that “truth stands independently of social opinion.” George Orwell understood that to speak or write without fear of social opinion incurred the risk of being accused of heresy, or of being anti-social. Furthermore, orthodoxy, whether it is the political correctness of the “progressive” or the dogma of movement conservatism, tends to involve something which is “always right,” regardless of evidence. As Yakovlev noted, it doesn’t listen. Where such commitment to the received wisdom prevails, the victim is the concept of truth.
In a second selection, Belle Waring assesses the notion that reasoned, evidence-based argument—as contrasted with argument based on feelings—is unfeminine.
George Orwell’s The Prevention of Literature:
In
the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of
rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A
heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who
refused to outrage his own conscience. … From the totalitarian point of
view history is something to be created rather than learned. ...
Totalitarianism
demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the
long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective
truth. …
The
imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective
feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and
caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot
misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any
conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he
disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his
creative faculties will dry up. …
Even
a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind,
because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely
followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. ...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
A lively post by Belle Waring:
There's
just one way to check whether something holds together, and that's to
try and shake it apart. You can do it yourself, but you have blind
spots, so why not engage in a community barn-levelling effort and let
your colleagues help?
I'm
not winding up to any big conclusions here, but I'll try to disentangle
a few strands. First, if you are a woman (or a man) who genuinely
thinks it's “mean” to offer counter-arguments or counter-examples, or to
ask tough questions after talks are given, then you are confused and
you have a serious problem. The problem is not male power or structures
which privilege the male voice. You have badly misunderstood the nature
of the whole enterprise. There is nothing your male colleagues can do
that will make this be OK for you unless you retreat into a charmed
circle of like-thinking people hedged round with forbidding jargon.
Please don't. There are enough of those already and they are cluttering
up the landscape. Relatedly, it is the rankest sexism to say that
rational argumentation is inherently male while woolly, nurturing
conversations about personal experiences are inherently female. It
wouldn't make it any better if that "math is hard" Barbie were being
sold by N.O.W.
Secondly,
being afraid to speak up even when you have a good idea is not some
special women's way of knowing that's really great. It is a drag, a
handicap. It's the mental equivalent of having bad body image. Women who
preface their statements with self-deprecating remarks like "you've
probably all already noticed this, but..." and such like are suffering
from intellectual dysmorphia: they look in the mirror and see a stupid
person even though we can all see they're perfectly smart. Losing this
negative attitude would not result in becoming more masculine; it would
mean becoming more free.
-
homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/giant%20thoughts/tannen.html
[Belle Waring, around 2004. The above URL no longer works]
Also check Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html
