"The too open mind is an empty mind," writes Douglas Kern in "Beyond Peter Singer" at Tech Central Station:
I'm closed-minded. I've made up my mind on most major issues, and I foresee no likelihood that my most cherished principles and beliefs will ever change. I do not worry that my closed-mindedness presents any handicap to me in the free marketplace of ideas, because my life experience indicates that most genuinely new ideas are stupid. I have little time or mental energy to spend refuting the clever arguments of idiots who contend that black is white, night is day, Communism is misunderstood.
Though closed-minded, I am capable of careful, thoughtful reasoning, if given enough coffee and room to pace. What must the thoughtful leftist do, then, to convince me of the folly of my ways? What will open the closed mind?
The answer is not Peter Singer's new book, The President of Good and Evil. Whatever your biases, left or right, this book will reinforce them.
"Briefly: The President of Good and Evil is tedious, regurgitated left-wing cant," says Kern.
If you share Peter Singer's core beliefs -- atheism, statism, rationalism and a well-cultivated indifference to the value of human life as such -- you will find this book to be wise, fair and true. Otherwise, you'll find it inane, slanted and dishonest. There is nothing in between. No clever wit or grace of expression leavens the dry, condescending prose; not for Singer are shrewd insights into human nature or ironic glimpses into the folly of life.
"Are we slaves to our pre-rational preferences and beliefs? Is conversion -- or even communication -- possible between left and right?" asks the reviewer, arguing that "It must be, or free will is a lie," adding that "only when our hearts are captured by words [can] our minds follow."
There's some truth to that, but Kern changes the subject before really answering the question. Recent experiments using M.R.I.'s to compare Democratic and Republican brains' responses to threatening images-- where Democrats' brains reacted with noticeably more activity in the amygdala -- blogged here earlier, begins to suggest that such preferences may be based in physical differences. To what degree such differences are the result of nature or nurture would be the really interesting question. There may be more -- or less -- than meets the eye to the old adage that "a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality."
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
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