THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Rational argument is the only response to Norway

Rational argument is the only response to Norway

An editorial in "The Australian"

THERE is a diabolical symmetry between the slaughter of 76 people in Norway last week and the terrorism of Islamist extremists.

Anders Behring Breivik and terrorists such as 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta choose violence to express their rage against globalisation and employ a messianic justification for their actions. Their atrocities serve no rational political purpose and it would be useless, not to say unconscionable, for civilised people to offer appeasement.

While it is reasonable to draw a moral equivalence between the acts committed, it is entirely unreasonable to presume a moral equivalence in our response to the murderous rampage in Oslo and Utoya Island and 9/11. The organised nature of Islamist terrorism, the scale of the atrocities, the preparedness of rogue nation-states to bankroll their operations and their ability to exploit the anti-modern fears of hundreds of millions of people puts the Islamists in an entirely different league from the lone operator in Norway.

Yet the horror of the killings last week has been employed by some commentators to slander their cultural and political opponents and delegitimise views that do not conform to their own narrow code. They suggest that because Breivik was troubled by modernity, everyone who expresses concerns about radical change in Western society in recent decades is implicated in his crimes. They seek to appropriate the event to further unrelated, progressive political causes here. Some have used the attack to smear anyone on the Right of politics and call for opponents of the government and the Greens to back off.

It is not the first time. Earlier this year, there was a similar effort to blur and slur when a madman shot a US Democrat congresswoman and killed six people in Arizona. Commentators blamed the attack on strident right-wing political rhetoric but were silenced when it was revealed the gunman's politics, such as they were, came from the Left, and that his grievances were beyond reason. In Breivik, these political opportunists have found their right-wing perpetrator.

The instinct to close down debate by conflating evil with a desire to question is a worrying phenomenon, and not restricted to devastating events such as this one. We have seen in this country in recent months the development of a febrile atmosphere in which people at extremes of the ideological spectrum feel empowered to attack their opponents or even their questioners, with scant regard for civility or rational argument. It is difficult to pursue genuine public debate about important social, political and cultural issues without being accused of running an agenda. Yet rational debate has never been more necessary at a time where virtually everyone has access to free, unfiltered publication of their views.

Each day brings new cases of illiberalism. On Monday, the Greens deputy leader, Christine Milne, was applauded on national television for citing The Australian's opinion pages as reason to exercise parliamentary oversight on media bias. On Thursday, former Labor leader Mark Latham went into print to urge the government to "strike hard" against "the evils of Murdoch journalism" while the activist organisation GetUp! announced it would try to force the hand of the broadcasting regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, to censure a prominent radio host for stating his view on climate science. For the record, we believe the radio host in question, Alan Jones, was wrong on this occasion and his rhetoric sometimes crosses the boundary between strident and offensive. But we respect his right to say what he thinks and note that he gives voice to many Australians excluded from the debate by many other media outlets.

The disintegration of our national conversation into a blogging, tweeting, cacophony is an unfortunate development in a civil democracy. Yet it is pouring fuel upon the fire to respond to the illiberalism of one's cultural opponents with equal intolerance. An ad-hominem tweet, or inflammatory invective on talkback radio, will never win the argument, but that is not what their authors intend. It takes effort to assemble a rational, logically sound argument; it is easier to intimidate and shame your opponent into silence and thereby, in the manner of Steven Bradbury, triumph by being the last man standing.

Many fair-minded Australians hold legitimate concerns about the effects of globalisation and are troubled that the nation and the patriotic values they hold dear are threatened by an influx of people from different cultures. They are concerned, as we are, that government policy that celebrates difference and ignores the values that bind us together is bad for the nation. They are concerned that we are surrendering the values implicit in our succinct but effective de facto bill of rights: the fair go. To hold these opinions may be unfashionable in some circles, but they are not a crime, and the correct response is to reason, not to censor.

This newspaper has always supported Australia's open-migration policies. We believe the mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds is a national strength but that does not blind us to the complexities of change and the need for a common set of public behaviours and values. We believe, too, that most Australians are not racist, regardless of their views on immigration or asylum-seekers. It is wrong to assume that those who object to boatpeople are doing so on grounds of race. Their argument is with asylum-seekers jumping the queue and with people-smugglers. Maintaining the order of the system underpins community support for immigration.

In the shock of Islamist-inspired terrorist acts, the faith of Islam has been served a grievous injustice. Terrorists who claimed to act in the name of Allah have damaged the reputation of a noble religion. But that does not justify a similar denigration of Christianity in this case. News reports, including in this newspaper, have claimed Breivik is a fundamentalist Christian. Whatever his churchgoing habits, it is wrong to smear Christians generally with this appalling crime. It is people, not religion, who are to blame for evil acts.

If any encouragement can be drawn from this tragic, dispiriting week, it is in the work of people such as former British prime minister Tony Blair who are prepared to stand against the tide of rampant secularism to declare that interfaith dialogue may indeed be the answer to fractured globalisation.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Rational argument is the only response to Norway

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