Left as an Exercise

Everyone knows the basic frames behind liberal-conservative stereotyping: the liberal positions are full of wishy-washy flipflopping and the conservative ones are hypocritical. I’d always assumed that this was an exaggeration on a kernel of truth (due, for instance, to message discipline - if a liberal group values freedom of expression then conflicting opinions will appear in the group, while a conservative group values existing authorities leading to an image of infallibility, so admission of a mistake becomes impossible), combined with a healthy dose of political opportunism on both sides (just interpreted in different ways), but now, I’m not so sure.

A few days ago, I saw an interview between Rachel Maddow and J. D. Hayworth, a conservative former Representative currently challenging John McCain from the right. During that interview, something happened that crystallized a thought in my mind, which may actually explain the entirety of the ideological communication gap. Here’s the followup to the video, highlighting the exchange in question at 3:10:

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In the interview, Hayworth makes a statement of fact about the contents of a Mass. Supreme Court ruling, which Maddow, having read the ruling, contests. (I’ve checked the ruling too; it does not contain anything like what Hayworth is saying.) When pressed on this, the following exchange happened:

Maddow: What you said… I don’t think it’s true, sir.
Hayworth: Well, that’s fine. You and I can have a disagreement about that.
Maddow: Well, it either is true or it isn’t. It’s empirical.
Hayworth: Okay. Well, I appreciate the fact that we have a disagreement on that…

My initial thought was “Hmm. This guy actually things empiricism is a matter of opinion?” followed by thinking about the obvious links to truthiness. I would normally have filed this away and moved on, but it was still on my mind the following morning.

By now I’m thinking: What if these guys actually do hold that verification is just another opinion? That empiricism is just one way of “knowing”, and fact-checking is no better than soul-searching?

These misconceptions are downright dangerous. We’ve seen them in academia before - specifically, this is one of the core principles behind the kind of postmodernism we saw during the so-called “Science Wars“. Go ahead and read that, I’ll wait.

When applied to politics, this same pattern - treating fact-checking (arguably the political equivalent of the search for truth) as equally valid as opinion - appears to be prevalent through the current leaders of the right. (The irony here is that academic postmodernism was mostly practiced by the academic left.) Of course, if only the right views reality as opinion, then naturally anything chained to reality is seen as biased, which only helps to reinforce this particular delusion.

A spectacular example of this, by the way, would be comparing messenger-conflation amongst the postmodernists (for instance, choosing to reject fluid mechanics because it was developed in a male-dominant society, and thus we needed a feminist theory of fluid mechanics - oh, how I wish I were joking) with something like the basis for Gore’s Law (which, as I understand it, is something like this: “global warming = Al Gore (Democrat), therefore everything said about warming from any source must necessarily be Democrat”). In both cases the message is rejected due to some negative impression held about the messenger (with or without justification, and in any case unrelated to the content of the message itself, making this essentially an ad-hominem fallacy).

Going back to Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias” takes on new meaning in this light.

Time to bust out Sokal and Jacoby and hope for some insight.