Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

Used to be 2Blowhards was my first blog stop in the morning and Steve Sailer second.  After the shuttering of 2Blowhards, Steve moved to #1 and he stays there.  I like the constant struggle to see what is in front of one’s nose, including Steve’s own struggling.  He has this nasty reputation, and in truth he can elide to the snide.  But far more often than not he can be found following his own advice to others, that they should be More Like Him.

Try to be extremely reasonable. Put yourself in other people’s shoes so you can understand the incentives they face. Learn a few important subject areas in depth, especially major topics where the quality of thought is typically shallow. Don’t assume you are an expert on complicated subjects such as macroeconomics or race if you are not. Check yourself to make sure your theories are level-headed. Read widely and carefully. Rethink your old policy favorites, especially when they’ve become popular because diminishing returns are probably setting in.

Sailer does not demand pat endings.  Still and all, I always feel there are some unaddressed, or underaddressed, tensions in the Sailer gestalt.

IMHO, the main one is this: as a thorough-going evolutionist, he surely knows that the adaptive value of ideas sits in perpetual tension with their truth value.  And that their adaptive value will often, and inevitably, trump their truth value when war between the functions breaks out.  Jeez, history is one useful error after another, and there is no progress without hypocrisy.  Yet the rightful place of useful falsehoods is seldom addressed.  Likewise the rational (in the adaptive sense) resistance to seeing what is at the end of one’s nose also seldom comes up–it’s just assumed to be a good thing to be nose-end-aware.

Well, is it?  The question was unearthed recently by Rod Dreher, in a post generally appreciative of Sailer.

Dreher acknowledges reading Sailer and enjoying the experience, in part because the Sailer world view forces him to examine things he would otherwise leave alone.  Yet he does seem aware of this tension between the truth of ideas and the uses to which ideas are put.  He frets over whether people can handle the truth–

especially as regards the treacherous territory of race and ethnicity, given our track record in the past.  And he suggests that civilizations may need to maintain the concept of “forbidden knowledge”.

Now, you are free to agree or disagree with Dreher.  At the least, it seems to me he is–in almost a Sailer-ish fashion himself–bringing up yet another inconvenient truth: that seeing what is at the end of one’s nose may be exhilarating and liberating, but that it is not the end of the story.  It’s just the end of one’s nose.

Daniel Dennett says that Darwinism is dangerous given its properties as a universal acid.

. . . and as this cartoon suggests, that proposition holds for the the idea and even the holder of the idea, even when the idea is the unassailable trump value of truth.

Sailer’s response to Dreher is appreciative in its own way, and acknowledges the challenge that Dreher lays down.

Sailer starts by quoting Dreher:

Put another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true — and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of truth.

And then Sailer’s answer, more blunted than blunt:

Perhaps.

At which point he drops the head-on challenge, and sort-of changes the subject.  Right when it could have gotten interesting, Sailer chooses to rip into a truly mindless piece by Brad De Long on how Dreher is bad because among other things he is a shill for that racist Sailer!

In other words, since De Long won’t see what is at the end of his nose, and since De Long is a fool, it must be foolish not to acknowledge nose end contents.  But if that’s the argument, evolution would suggest it’s not logical, Captain.  Saying de Long is a fool does not fully address Dreher’s challenge.