Academics and others have categorized what pollster Allan Gregg last week called “a classic culture war cleavage” as a clash between the role of knowledge, evidence and reason and the role of intuition, “common sense” and “decency.” In this view, the elimination of the mandatory long form is seen by Mr. Harper’s philosophical critics as an expression of the current small-c conservative ideological tendency to value belief and conviction over “data” and rationality.This one makes a certain amount of sense to me, because it fits with much else that we've seen from the conservative movement for decades. Think of the so-called "Common Sense Revolution" in Ontario, in which decades of experience and mountains of data were simply flicked aside in favour of a pet theory; the result was the beginning of the province's inexorable slide to have-not status. Or, think of the Bush administration's famous contempt for "reality-based" policy, and the various disasters that have resulted from that attitude.
The most famous example of this sort of thinking was probably Ronald Reagan's quip that "facts are stupid things." Of course, he got the quotation wrong (John Adams had actually said that facts are stubborn things, and Reagan did in fact correct himself), but that slip of the tongue in a way illustrated his point. The real statement by Adams may have been on the historical record, but the brief misquotation apparently felt right to Reagan. And because it felt right, it superseded the facts. Decades later, Stephen Colbert would invent the word "truthiness" to describe this phenomenon.
As far as I can tell, the first real description of this sort of thing was written down in 1948, in a slim book called Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard M. Weaver. Weaver's not much known today except among movement conservatives: Google the title of his book and just watch how many links pop up, and note what they consist of. This book was to a large extent a founding document of modern conservative thought.
Weaver argues that “a shift from the truth of the intellect to the facts of experience” is the characteristic intellectual trend of modernity. Once upon a time, he says, intellectual life in the West focused on truth, which was spiritual, abstract, and Platonic; now, intellectual life has changed its focus to fact, to the provable, the material, the measurable. This shift, he argues, has resulted in a disastrous cultural decline.
Although he acknowledges the material advantages of the modern West's mastery of science in such areas as medicine, communication, and general technology, he insists that what has been lost is far more important than what has been gained. Although modern people may be more comfortable than their ancestors, Weaver argues, they are spiritually desolate, lost without direction in a confusion of meaningless data, a Babel of incomprehensible jargons. No longer able to contemplate the basic moral truths of creation, people drown themselves in factual and material trivia, as if forlornly hoping that the next little bit of information or stuff will lead them at last to a meaningful life.
Weaver was writing in the wake of the Second World War, so it's no wonder that he was contemplating moral disaster in this way. And it's certainly true that there's been a certain sense of malaise in modernity since then. Yet I often wonder whether this lack of a spiritual centre is really a problem for anyone other than a certain stripe of moral worrywart. The fact that crime rates, for example, have been falling not rising for decades ought to tell us that ordinary human beings really don't get their moral sense from abstract contemplation of Platonic ideas, and don't lose it by living in a world admittedly soaked in data.
Still, this central idea is one to which Weaver returns on numerous occasions, as when he argues that “knowledge of material reality is a knowledge of death,” or, echoing Nietzsche, sneers at the idea of a scientist spending his life studying something as ridiculously unimportant as “the brain structure of the leech” – a scientist who, by Weaver's lights, is no different at heart from a person who wastes his time collecting stamps. For Weaver, the mastery of material facts is a low and unworthy thing. Transcendent truth, only, is worth knowing, and if the facts at hand happen to contradict that truth, well, that's the facts' fault.
"Facts are the enemy of truth," said Don Quixote. Weaver agreed wholeheartedly with Cervantes' mad knight.
You see where this is going: the question then becomes, how do you establish what the truth is, if it isn't connected to or based on the facts at hand? How do you see the big picture if you don't know what its elements are? Weaver's answer, predictably enough, is that the truth used to be known until we lost track of it. He proposes going back to the past, even as far back as the 14th century (!) to recover it, before William of Ockham invented his razor -- before the ghastly mistake that is the modern world. His past is an imagined past, of course, but that's not important because really, Weaver's answer could be exchanged for others. In actuality, when you jettison the facts in favour of some a priori truth, you're turning things over not to principle but to the sheer power of the will. The "truth" that governs will, nearly inevitably, be the ideology of those who happen to be in charge at the time, whether that ideology contains any truth or does not.
This is, of course, a very fancy glorification of ignorance. It is also a profoundly elitist point of view, and that leads us to the paradox at the heart of this version of conservative thinking: while allegedly proceeding from a respect and sympathy for ordinary individuals -- why make them fill out a census, providing private information to their government? -- it ends up by cutting them away from their society, and therefore from any hint of power. People have duties to their society; in ours, one such duty has always been filling out census information. It's one of the things we do, like voting, paying taxes, or serving on juries if required, that make us citizens. Insofar as we pare away those duties, we make people into wholly private beings without a public presence. Not only do we make our society ignorant of itself, but we also strip it of the means to coordinate itself in response to reality.
Now, the ancient Greeks had a word for the wholly private person: the idiotes. It's where we get the modern word "idiot." They were the vast mass of people left outside of the circle of the decision-making few, and such a person was called idiotes precisely because his life was wholly idios, that is to say, private. It was relatively recently that the modern word "idiot" came to mean "stupid person," but the notion of ignorance has always been part of it. An idiot, classically speaking, is someone outside the centre of power, who does not know what is going on and cannot therefore address what is happening. He is completely at the mercy of those in charge. And, because the idiotes is completely private, the people in charge don't know about him and wouldn't care if they did. Without the facts, they are free to pursue the truth: that is to say, whatever ideology serves their own interests regardless of the vast invisible masses.
That's where moves like this push us, tiny step by tiny step: away from the facts, towards truthiness; away from citizenship and towards idiocy. No thanks.
