The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is

I still have a dream. It is deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. - Martin Luther King

An earlier post on this blog noted that rulership is illegitimate in our society:

In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that.

In a free country no one is subject to the will of another. Yet Mark Lilla detects

The aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”

This trickles down to popular culture. In the second season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" the socialite Cordelia says, "Certain people are entitled to special privileges. They're called winners. That's the way the world works."

This is the inegalitarianism of conservative Social Darwinism:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added.)

No reason is given for this. It just is. In Why I Am Not A Conservative [PDF] Hayek wrote:

But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. (Emphasis added.)

In Conservatism Simply Is, self-labeled conservative Andrew Sullivan tacitly accedes to this view of conservative conceptual impoverishment:

Scott Galupo scoffs at the idea and makes a broader philosophical point:

In a 1974 appendix to his study Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, [Peter] Viereck wrote that classical conservatism, of the mostly British but also French variety, is “an inarticulate state of mind and not at all an ideology. Liberalism argues; conservatism simply is.” Once conservatism becomes conscious of itself—becomes aware that it is a thing set apart—it changes irrevocably; it becomes another species of rationalism. ...

The inarticulate tendency in conservatism is what led John Stuart Mill to say the following:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. - www.goodreads.com/quotes/76179-i-never-meant-to-say-that-the-conservatives-are-generally

Sullivan adds,

Of course, I think that’s a misunderstanding. The inability to articulate the value of something you have come to love or do is, to my mind, part of its value. Some things in life are ineffable and to explain them almost a violation of their essence.

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

The only reasonable response would be, "OK, so you can't explain what you're talking about." Why does this matter? Because what what the Founders, echoing Cicero, called "right reason" is a necessary bulwark against the crude machinations of power. The democratic vote, for example, represents an attempt to substitute informed public choice for force in determining the succession of leaders. Justice is the attempt to substitute principle for violence in adjudicating disputes between citizens. A reasoned, principled equality powered a liberal society's rejection of public racial discrimination in the last half century.

Otherwise, we have “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” but why the ostensibly fittest are superior is never explained. Logic texts, after presenting an invalid syllogism, note, "the argument cannot guarantee its conclusion, and no one should be persuaded by it."

Even more so, in the case of those who valorize "the inability to articulate."  It-just-is-ism is an avoidance of responsibility for implied claims. The non-argument argument stands alongside the non-apology apology.

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will?

In The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom there was, among other things, a discussion of "the recurrent claim that science 'proves' that free will is an illusion." In an article in The Weekly Standard, "The Heretic," Andrew Ferguson reviews Thomas Nagel's analysis of the same issue in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. "Contemporary philosophers," Ferguson writes,

have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, ... Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.

What this means, Ferguson continues, is that as geneticist Francis Crick wrote, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Does this sound familiar? In a previous post we cited a liberal philosopher of science:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Plato's Realm Of Forms states, "this material world ... can only present appearances, which lead us to form opinions, rather than knowledge." The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science.

The contradiction requires a certain amount of double talk:

["Cognitive scientist" and "philosopher of mind"] Daniel Dennett ... [cautioned that] we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

Ferguson adds:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” [Nagel] says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

It leads to a reductio ad absurdum:

[Nagel's] working assumption is, in today’s intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.

One of the things which make science wonderful is that science does not have the concept of heresy. A scientist may advance a hypothesis which is new and unorthodox if he or she can back it up. Reproducible experiment has moved our science well beyond Newtonian science, for example. But as Ferguson notes, materialism "is a premise of science, not a finding."

The Dissenter previously argued, "Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality—and behavior—is deterministic." Ferguson makes a related argument:

Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

It is not surprising that these proudly immoralist materialists don't walk the talk:

Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

And finally there's that problem of the missing reproducible experiment. Is there an experiment which proves that free will (and by implication the possibility of choosing to do good rather than evil) is an illusion? What would such an experiment look like?

How Fares The Republic: Movement Cruelty Ctd.

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates, In Veritas Vino

Dissenter post How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market noted:

Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added)

Wednesday Tim Carmody of The Verge, in an article on Scott Prouty, the banquet staffer who photographed Mitt Romney's 47 percent remarks, revealed another aspect of conservative insensitivity to the working poor which was revealed in the recent presidential candidate's presentation:

One section in particular stuck with him: Romney excitedly describing touring an appliance manufacturing factory in China where girls in dormitories were "stacked three high." Romney's company paid these girls "a pittance," but barbed wire fences and guard towers were supposedly in place to keep outsiders from coming in to work.

Romney's lack of empathy, both for the Chinese workers and the Americans whose jobs he'd outsourced there, disgusted Prouty.

The remarks for which the candidate's presentation became famous were:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49...he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. ... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Romney later disavowed these statements:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has described his disparaging remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes as "not elegantly stated." Now he's calling them "just completely wrong."

But as How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty noted, after the election the candidate revealed that he hadn't really meant the disavowal:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor.

As the Dissenter noted in The Condition of Equality Today:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added)

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom

The title of this post is from 1st Corinthians 1:22, by Saul of Tarsus, known to Christendom as St. Paul. It is an acute observation by Paul, who was both Jew and Greek (and who, as a Roman citizen, could "appeal to Caesar"), of the difference between the third world outlook of his birth religion and the European rationalism of the Hellenistic Near East in which Christianity emerged. (Why the scriptures of the new religion are written in Greek when its founder spoke a third world language is a topic for another article.)

However the subject today is the wonders (i.e., signs) and wisdom of science.

Irene Klotz remarked on a little-noted side effect of the recent apparent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): It could portend, in what hopefully will be the far future, the "collapse of the vacuum."

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” said [Joseph] Lykken, who also serves on the LHC science team. ...
“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said.
“Essentially, the universe wants to be in different state and so eventually it will realize that. A little bubble of what you might think of an as alternative universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us. So that’ll be very dramatic, but you and I will not be around to witness it,” Lykken told reporters before a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston this week. 

What is this collapse? Over a decade ago the following appeared in an article about possible doomsday scenarios:

Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. "It makes for a beautiful story, but it's not very likely," says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more about threats that scientists are more certain of--such as rogue black holes. 

The universe may be safe for the time being, but science as the systematic study of the testable may currently be at risk by the mind-set of string theory.

First, string theory has not posed any new predictions which can be tested, which any scientific theory must do. (As Lawrence Krauss wrote, "Science isn't fair. It's testable.") In other words it is, as Karl Popper argued, "falsifiable." There isn't even a formulation of string theory. Lee Smolin writes in The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, "We are left with as many as 10^500 distinct string theories, ... more than all the atoms in the known universe. ... String theory cannot be disproved."

Second, the feedback from reality characteristic of science, exemplified in formulability and testability, is absent from string theory, so that it lacks the objectivity of science. "How do you fight sociology?" asks a chapter of Trouble With Physics. Genuine science would answer, "with the evidence." But string theory has come to resemble cultism more than science. Smolin notes that many times, "someone invariably asks, 'Well, what does Ed [Witten, a pre-eminent theorist] think?'"
 
The need for string theory is itself occasioned by a rift at the very heart of science. In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Physicist Lee Smolin described a situation in which "The Holy Grail of modern physics is a theory of the universe that unites two seemingly opposing pillars of modern science: Einstein's theory of general relativity, which deals with large-scale phenomena (planets, solar systems and galaxies), and quantum theory, which deals with the world of the very small (molecules, atoms, electrons)."

As a customer review notes:

Quantum theory radicalizes our assumptions about the relationship between observer and observed but pretty much buys into Newton's ideas of space and time. General relativity changes our notions of space and time but accepts Newton's view of observer and observed. This situation is deemed unacceptable by most physicists . . .

The fundamental worldview of quantum theory and that of general relativity cannot be reconciled. You might say we have a little problem here.

Another hiccup of science practice today is the recurrent claim that science "proves" that free will is an illusion. A post in Andrew Sullivan's blog asks, "Is free will compatible with physics?":

Sean Carroll:

If there were a vast intelligence — since dubbed Laplace’s Demon — that knew the exact state of the universe at any one moment, and knew all the laws of physics, and had arbitrarily large computational capacity, it could both predict the future and reconstruct the past with perfect accuracy. While this is a straightforward consequence of Newton’s theory, ...

Jerry Coyne, also responding to Pigliucci, thinks determinism should change our understanding of morality:

It’s my contention that, in light of the physical determinism of behavior, there’s no substantive difference between someone who kills because they have a brain tumor that makes them aggressive (e.g., Charles Whitman), and someone who kills because a rival is invading their drug business.  We need to reconceive our judicial system in light of what science tells us about how the mind works. And that’s why discussing the bearing of neuroscience and philosophy on free will is far more important than our usual academic discourse.

A year ago, a New Scientist article asserted:

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A week after he announced it, two eminent mathematicians showed that the theory has profound implications beyond physics: abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will.

Note how the author psychologizes the position criticized, as if the possibility that free will is valued constituted evidence against it. This fails the test of scientific objectivity.

The problem with these "scientists" is that they are are acting if science is an a priori discipline. It is as if a colleague of Newton's time were to declare, based on his understanding of "known science," that the postulates of quantum mechanics and general relativity are disproved by science. This colleague would have been elevating his understanding of scientific theory above genuine science, where practice--experimental result--trumps theory.

Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality--and behavior--is deterministic. Unless a scientific experiment can be devised which provides a definitive test of free will, science cannot be said to either prove or disprove free will.

To conclude, a wonder of science (well, mathematics):

e^(πι) = -1

(e to the power of pi-times-i equals minus one) where e is the base of the natural logarithm, π is the ratio of circumference to diameter, and ι is the square root of -1. This formulation shows a profound relationship between fundamental constants of nature.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?

‘The theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy.’ (cited by Alvin Lim, below)

The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. - Plato, Laws 659a-b (also Laws 659a-b)

Whatever quibbles one might want to offer about Lilla's discussion of particular cases, he makes a convincing case that the impact of philosophical Platonism on European history has been overwhelmingly negative. Lilla amply confirms the view of Karl Popper that Plato, speaking in the voice of the fictional Socrates of the Republic, was the first and greatest enemy of the open society. - John Quiggin, reviewing Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. ... The anti-empirical taint ... survives to this day. ... What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. ... In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. ... The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)*

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato (Cited in The Condition of Equality Today)

The word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and ... this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes ...
Generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)**

In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. — Angela Hobbs***

This is a continuation of some of the arguments in Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture. The proposition is that there is a theory, originating symbolically with Plato, that the intellectual has a privileged form of knowledge which l'homme moyen sensuel—the average nonintellectual man—cannot know. Plato taught that the reality experienced by the senses is an appearance generated by invisible Forms (ideas) existing in a sort of Platonic heaven:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

The philosopher (the intellectual) sees this underlying reality via a faculty—a form of "insight"—not available to the rest of us:

Alvin Lim: Plato’s argument for the inherent weakness of democracy in its potential to collapse into tyranny is strongly linked to his metaphysics, in particular his Theory of Forms. [4] In Plato’s ideal city the rulers are the Philosopher Rulers who have undergone the education sufficient for them to gain access to the Form of the Good, which allows them to know what justice is and hence to be able to rule the city justly (479e-484e). Since it is only the philosophers who have access to the Form of the Good, non-philosophers lack access to the Form of the Good and hence do not know what justice is. And since non-philosophers do not know what justice is, they cannot rule the city justly. Hence Cross and Woozley cite Adam’s comment that ‘the theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy’, [5] and this also explains what Finley describes as ‘Plato’s persistent objection to the role of shoemakers and shopkeepers in political decision making’. Zeitlin notes that in Laws 659a-b, Plato argues that:

Whether it is a matter of art, music or politics, it is only the ‘best men’ who are capable of true judgement. The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. Nothing must compel him to hand down a verdict that belies his own convictions. It is his duty to teach the multitude and not to learn from them. [6]

[Original link no longer active: web.singnet.com.sg/~chlim/plato.html]

Is there any truth in this? I repeat what I wrote in Analysis of Intellectual Subculture: "Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual."

As that long-suffering intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews, wrote:

["Skeptical Engagements"] By the mid-eighties, many academic humanists had already contracted the bad habit of labeling “right wing” all dissent not only from the overt politicizing of academic life but also from poststructuralist theory, including its component of esoteric Lacanian Freudianism. In the increasingly conformist atmosphere that has ruled the universities from then until now, scorn is routinely heaped on the ordinary liberalism to which I have long subscribed. And anyone who explicitly upholds rationality within the framework of a discipline will now be suspected of following a sinister hidden agenda,
... Those themes are the specific failings of Freudian psychoanalysis; the nature, appeal, and consequences of closed, self-validating doctrines; the resultant indispensability of an empirical (evidence-oriented) point of view; and the dubious effects of literary-critical methods that spurn that point of view. The several themes really come down to just one: the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand.
To “do theory” these days, as that expression is understood by department chairs who hope to load their ranks with a full panoply of “theorists,” is not to maintain a thesis against likely objections, but rather to strike attitudes that will identify one as a loyal follower of some figure—a Roland Barthes, a Jacques Derrida, a Michel Foucault, a Jacques Lacan, a Fredric Jameson—who has himself made unexamined claims about the nature of capitalism or patriarchy or Western civilization or the collective unconscious or the undecidability of knowledge. Such gurus are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence. The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds. (some of this material from www.cybereditions.com/cyextract.pdf)

Notes on starred material:
(*) Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron [because it was thought to represent a fifth essence (quintessence) that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies]. p. 151
A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. p. 152
Xenophon's opinion was: "What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities." [Cf. disdain for the banausic.] As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. . . . What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. p. 153
In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay mouldering, the Ionian approach . . . was finally rediscovered. The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became once more respectable. . . .
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)

(**) In philosophy [idealism] refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow.
And that was why you could figure it all out: if you could somehow attune yourself to that higher order of existence, you'd automatically know it all. And those who had come closer to achieving such enlightenment were therefore more wise than anyone else, and should be able to wield power over the others.
It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. ...
Of the three sides, [philosophical idealism] as a political force is the oldest. There's continuity going back to the pre-Christian Greeks, and generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)

(***) Plato's radical conceptions in the Republic of justice, social harmony, education, and freedom are enormously rich and have informed the thought of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, and J. S. Mill; his attitudes to property, the family, and the position of women have also proved highly influential. His ideal, however, has also come in for some fierce criticism. The convenient match claimed between the division of natural talents and the class divisions required by the state has been regarded as entirely without foundation. In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. Their methods of rule are also problematic: the analogy drawn between the Producers and the unreasoning appetites raises questions about whether the Producers can really be willingly persuaded or whether they have to be forced, and Plato's language is ambivalent on this point. In any case, the means of persuasion are themselves disturbing, involving both propaganda and extreme censorship of the arts. — Angela Hobbs