[PLEASUREMAN]

An obvious drawback to the formation of a cognitive elite is that it will begin to value only the idea set its members are predisposed to favor. This elite will be excessively drawn to diversity, complexity, and large scale systems, all things which appeal to its desire for novelty and high reward scenarios.

A confounding problem is that because its high IQ has secured for it an equivalent high status, the cognitive elite employs markers for IQ, such as credentialism and cultural signifiers, to exclude views that appear outside its mainstreamed social values. Notwithstanding their correlation with higher IQ, such markers are dangerous in that they greatly increase the insularity and conformity of elite views. Particularly after multiple generations of cognitive sorting has led to social and intellectual distancing, it is probable that lower IQ groups will possess intuitive knowledge and a broader range of experiences that would inform--and correct--the cognitive elite's perspective. Indeed, the negative effects of stratification by IQ was one of the chief warnings of Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve.

The mainstream elite worldview can best be summed up as "managerial liberalism", a kind of technocratic oligarchy which sees itself as administrators of a highly complex and pluralistic society with a large, low paid workforce spread across the world. Its social values are liberal-conformist and derive from attitudes and temperament common among the high IQ, including discomfort with well-defined sex roles, avoidance of emotional displays, and a desire to confine and ignore unacceptable views. In fact effeminate behavior and signaling is common.

We are now seeing the final transformation of elite views into a series of unchallenged and highly moralized beliefs. This moralization is usually put in terms of cognitive function, in keeping with the cognitive elite's main source of self-worth. Therefore it was not surprising when a blog post by Julian Sanchez which asserted that conservatives were victims of "epistemic closure" was uncritically and enthusiastically accepted as proof that conservatives were intellectually inferior. In fact this episode bears similarities to the aftermath of the 2004 election, when a fraudulent IQ chart was used to assert that those who voted for Bush over Kerry were in fact less intelligent.

What Sanchez means by "epistemic closure" is that conservatives reject all sources of evidence that do not confirm their pre-existing beliefs and increasingly talk only to themselves. Sanchez writes:

Julian Sanchez:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. [...] Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

To prevent breach, the internal dissident needs to be resituated in the enemy camp. [...] It’s a much deeper sort of purported betrayal, because it’s a choice that would implicitly validate the status claims of the despised elite. You’re supposed to feel as though you’ve been snubbed socially—discarded for “better” company—which evokes both more indignant rejection of the quisling and further resentment of the liberal snobs who are visiting this indignity on you. In a way it’s quite elegant, and you can see why it’s become as popular as it has. But it’s fundamentally a symptom of insecurity—and a self-defeating one, because it corrodes the kind of serious discussion and reexamination of conservative principles and policies that might help produce a more self-assured movement.

Presumably, the "reexamination of conservative principles" would bring them more in line with the values espoused by people like Julian Sanchez. In fact Sanchez' preoccupation with status in all this betrays the reality that those of whom the cognitive elite disapprove really are snubbed, not just socially but culturally, and when they are spoken of at all much is made of their backwardness, low social status, lack of education, and "intolerant" views. Sanchez assumes that managerial liberalism's hegemony over mainstream politics and culture has nothing to do with any of the insecurity or anger he detects--in fact he seems to argue that people who don't like the limited perspective presented in The New York Times should perhaps listen more closely to what the The New York Times has to say! What else is there? (By the way, Sanchez' blogroll illustrates the range of his ideological voyages: he links to both libertarians and liberals.)

Perhaps even more amazing, David Frum's reputation on the right is the source of Sanchez' ruminations, suggesting that "epistemic closure" is behind conservatism's inability to take criticism. This is a fantastic suggestion given the insideous influence that neocons like Frum have had on the right. Sanchez seems unaware (despite citing instances) of Frum's long career making vituperative attacks on any conservative he disagrees with, attacks which nearly always involve a divisive character assault and very little in the way of coherent argument. In fact Frum's attacks fit a pattern of hostility toward social conservatives that neocons appear to have brought with them from the Left. Frum's sinking reputation among conservatives suggests not ideological insecurity, but the very strong likelihood that conservatives have simply tired of this behavior.

Sanchez also conflates the populist appeal of organizations like Fox News with conservative ideology, while ignoring similar links between MSNBC, Air America, the Huffington Post, and liberal ideology. In a follow-up post, Sanchez confirms the confused and incomplete state of his thinking here:

Julian Sanchez:

As a few folks have objected, I don’t really make any attempt to “prove” that the right is worse on this front right now. I think many of the responses from the right, even where they disagree on various points, bear out the broad intuition that this is a real phenomenon and a problem. Nobody’s saying: “What on earth could he be talking about?” I could marshal a tedious list of examples, but they’d be redundant for people who already see the problem, and probably unpersuasive to people who don’t—especially if they happen to hold some of the beliefs in question. Still, just as a brief refresher, recall that over the past two years, the movement’s flagship publications and most prominent pundits have found it urgent to discuss: Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor… I could go on, and others could try to compose a list of equally nutty notions in circulation on the left to show it’s just as bad on the other side, and presumably still others could argue earnestly that one or more of these are actually Very Serious Issues after all. It would be a spectacular waste of time and change nobody’s mind. So I won’t bother, because no enumeration in the span of a blog post will, or really should, outweigh the general impression an attentive person will have already formed from observation of the media landscape.

Of course, without contrasting the "epistemic closure" of conservatives with the comparative openness of other groups, Sanchez' posts are spectacularly pointless, no matter how much he asserts otherwise. If in fact the same phenomenon exists on the Left, and is a product of today's more polarized and unrestrained political discourse (as well as the lowering of intellectual standards brought about by cognitive and cultural sorting), then his entire take on the subject is hopelessly wrong. By the end of the paragraph, Sanchez has without a hint of irony announced his own "epistemic closure"--"It would be a spectacular waste of time," he says, after bringing the subject up. This is muddled thinking at best.

It is actually somewhat shocking that Sanchez' thinly argued and poorly thought-out blog posts managed to cause a stir, but for the aforementioned theory that the cognitive elite is preoccupied with demonstrating intellectual superiority and reaffirming the wisdom of its own intellectual embargoes on various subjects deemed too sensitive or anxiety-inducing to go into.

Similarly, Sanchez attempts to elaborate on his point in another post, bringing up the Fulton, Mississippi high school prom which inspired a lawsuit because it would not allow a lesbian couple to attend.

Julian Sanchez:

The attitude of the students and parents who spoke up there was characterized less by overt homophobia than by a resentment of the effort, characterized as attention-grubbing and selfish, to upset local traditions and “force” the school to cancel the dance by demanding equal treatment.

As Sanchez goes on to describe the belligerant response by liberals, he does not appear to notice that their intense and angry advocacy of questionable social values is as free from "epistemic openness" as anything he has described on the part of conservatives: "They’re not attuned to the injustice because it seems like almost a fact of nature. Except they’re now flooded with undeniable evidence that a hell of a lot of people don’t see things that way, and even hold their community in contempt for seeing things that way." Indeed, sex differences not only "seem" like a fact of nature, the Fulton high school's "epistemic" grounds for promoting a dance that helps boys and girls socialize with each other exists on surer factual footing than liberalism's denial of the importance of well-defined sex roles to normal adolescent development.

Sanchez does make one interesting statement:

Julian Sanchez:

Fulton is an extreme case, but I think there are probably a lot of conservative communities that feel a lower-grade version of this all the time. So here’s a hypothesis: Epistemic closure is (in part) an attempt to compensate for the collapse of geographic closure. A function no longer effectively served by geographic segregation—because the digital equivalents of your local hangout are open to invasion by the hordes from New York and London—is being passed to media segregation, bolstered by the sudden demand that what was once tacit and given be explicitly defended.

Here we have the kernel of a good idea--Sanchez' first--and if one strips away the myopic focus on social conservatives, one can see that most people are indeed turning to media segregation to combat what Sanchez does not quite identify correctly: an increase in social conflict brought about by changes in diversity, communications, social complexity, and generalized anxiety over heightened competition for resources. "Epistemic closure" is the wrong term for this development, which is motivated by the desire for insulation from overbearing levels of hostility and complexity. Homosexuals and homophiles strive for a similar reduction in conflict by making illegal, or by silencing, objections to their approved lifestyles. Black and Hispanic chauvinists attempt to deal with status insecurities resulting from group competition for resources by advocating policies that lead to proportional rewards (affirmative action, race norming). Liberals marginalize scientific findings that bring to light racial performance deltas, particularly those involving intelligence, because such findings attack their cherished (but, alas, groundless) notions of group equality.

My argument, given more extensively elsewhere, is that these are all symptoms of a society massively out of scale, and my proposed solutions amplify the effects of media segregation, on the grounds that societies cannot stably function amid such disruptive and anxiety-filled environments as are the inevitable result of large, diverse populations linked together by worldwide communications and trade. However, I am not hopeful that our cognitive elite are open to such a radical criticism, particularly as they remain fixated on adding to the already burdensome levels of conflict faced as a consequence of scale.

[BushrodButtram]

It's stuff like this that makes me question (despite its usefulness) the term "cognitive elite." Julian Sanchez seems like a fluent, shallow bullshitter, nothing more.

[PLEASUREMAN]

BushrodButtram, 26 April 2010 - 05:31 PM:

It's stuff like this that makes me question (despite its usefulness) the term "cognitive elite." Julian Sanchez seems like a fluent, shallow bullshitter, nothing more.

Well he works for CATO and subs for a fag who won't let AIDS stop him from having unprotected anal sex.



IS THIS THE FACE OF A FLUENT, SHALLOW BULLSHITTER?

I know what you mean though, at times it seems like an extreme misnomer.

[PRCalDude]

PLEASUREMAN, 26 April 2010 - 02:41 PM:

BushrodButtram, 26 April 2010 - 05:31 PM:

It's stuff like this that makes me question (despite its usefulness) the term "cognitive elite." Julian Sanchez seems like a fluent, shallow bullshitter, nothing more.

Well he works for CATO and subs for a fag who won't let AIDS stop him from having unprotected anal sex.



IS THIS THE FACE OF A FLUENT, SHALLOW BULLSHITTER?

I know what you mean though, at times it seems like an extreme misnomer.

He needs to get fitted for a yarmulke. What kind of a fag name is "Julian Sanchez," anywaysy? You can almost hear the last name being pronounced, "Thanchez."

[antistoic]

Quote

Contemplate how vertigo-inducing this must be. You’ve got a local community where a certain set of cultural norms is so dominant that it’s just seen as obvious and natural that a lesbian wouldn’t have an equal right to participate in prom—to the point where the overt hostility isn’t really directed at Constance’s sexuality so much as her bewildering insistence on messing with the way everyone knows things are supposed to be. They’re not attuned to the injustice because it seems like almost a fact of nature. Except they’re now flooded with undeniable evidence that a hell of a lot of people don’t see things that way, and even hold their community in contempt for seeing things that way.

This is a handy encapsulation of a common liberal fantasy -- that values ('norms') must be explicated by force of reason for them to be defensible, let alone true; that they must be the product of a conscious choice. They see the furious reactions of social conservatives against visible homosexuality and chalk them up to a blind, visceral hatred of 'the other' because their anger lacks articulation.

This is absurd, and once we begin thinking like this, subjecting everything to the lens of rational scrutiny, we will end (and have!) in the dissolution of reason itself. Why should men and women assume separate and complementary sex roles? You might as well ask why we move our limbs, or why we nourish our bodies with food, or why we exist at all. Or indeed (apologies to Hangly), why reason should be even necessary in the first place. Nobody needs to question these things, because they take them on faith -- particularly the latter, as the Scholastics knew ("faith precedes reason"). It is left to the so-called 'clever sillies' to overturn the obviousness of these norms, these 'values'.

The crux of the matter is how moderns envision the idea of values. Since Nietzsche, and likely before him, values have taken the place of moral commitments, and values are couched in voluntaristic, rationalist terms -- we 'posit' our values after coming to a reasonable decision about them.

But as Heidegger points out, values, once put forth, can be revoked with equal ease, and the permanence of those values, as well as the underlying moral principles from which they emerge, is shattered. Thus the modern age is the age of 'values', and simultaneously the age of nihilism, because values are no longer shared commitments, or even commitments as such, but merely individual choices which carry no imperative beyond the person. As Heidegger said, "No one dies for mere values.". The commitments which conservatives make to certain principles -- the distinctions and proper roles of the human genders, for instance -- sprout from the very bed of our social existence, and nobody should think of requiring their explanation; nobody, that is, save today's foolish liberals.

This post has been edited by mlad: 27 April 2010 - 12:40 AM

[HopeAndChange44]

the dissolution of reason itself

[antistoic]

HopeAndChange44, 27 April 2010 - 02:13 PM:

the dissolution of reason itself

Yeah, yeah...

[Mercutio]

BushrodButtram, 26 April 2010 - 06:31 PM:

It's stuff like this that makes me question (despite its usefulness) the term "cognitive elite." Julian Sanchez seems like a fluent, shallow bullshitter, nothing more.

Holy shit it's Latino Hypnotic!
(Teasin' ya Jerry ;) )

[rho]

I've been formulating a similar, if contrasting topic in my head, summed up as "What could be possibly wrong with 'What could be possibly wrong with...'?" It's a notable and noticeable trait among those who have consumed enough of their favorite and--probably--sole source of information. ("Epistemic closure" writ large, I suppose, but it doesn't make it any less true from a predictive standpoint.)

Basically, anyone who suggests "what could possibly be wrong with X", where X runs the gamut from gay orgies in Sunday school to mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, is somebody who has not thought through the question with sufficient rigor. Even such clearly admirable things as puppies and fine single-malt whiskeys are not free from the curse of abundance--as anybody who has visited an overloaded animal shelter or the scene of a three-tractor pile-up on FR2673 can attest to.

Both mainstream political classes follow this instinct strongly. PLEASUREMAN seems to suggest that, in toto, the intermingling of these instincts without undue prejudice would be beneficial. An assertion that I agree with. But its success would rely on increasingly polarized groups to address the same question of introspection--"What if I am wrong?" While I believe that a goodly number of people will grudgingly agree with this, I suspect that the high-IQ elite will largely reject it due to unwarranted self-importance, and the low-IQ proletariat will reject it because there's nothing in it for them. People too smart to doubt their intelligence on one side, and people too dumb to make future value calculations on MasterCard statements on the other.

[PLEASUREMAN]

That is why I think ultimately a reduction in scale is needed, because it is through massive scale that human folly grows exponentially, and the defects in human reason begin to threaten the stability of governments and societies. Reduction in scale will reign in the extreme imbalances and asymmetries that currently plague us.

The problem we have today is that we have indeed found the limits at which manageable societies can function--but because we are now reduced to atomized individuals only out for ourselves, we don't notice that we've breached those limits. Instead we are driven inexorably forward, and our fragile economic systems now depend on unsustainable growth to avoid collapse.

I of course do not want collapse either, any more than one would look forward to a heart attack to provide the motivation for a change in lifestyle. What we need is to somehow inject this idea that we have grown too large and complex into the mainstream of discussion.