The Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Nietzsche recognized that without courage we cannot have truth:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

Bari Weiss' newest article discusses the relationship between courage and truth. The title: "Some Thoughts About Courage We are living through an epidemic of cowardice. The antidote is courage."

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history

. . . .

As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”

What caused our leaders to buckle under? To say things they don't believe and to refuse to say things that they know are true? Weiss blames the lack of courage:
There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility — that is how we got here.

I'll conclude with this excerpt from a conversation between Bari Weiss and Brian Stelter:

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Rogan Pushes Sanjay Gupta to Cough Up the Truth About Gupta’s Employer, CNN

Sanjay Gupta is one of the good guys. During the pandemic, he has provided a lot of good information regarding COVID. That said, Joe Rogan had him on the ropes as Gupta tries to defend the misconduct of CNN, Gupta's employer. Well worth watching and excellent analysis by Krystal and Saagar.

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Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers

This Tweet by Christopher Rufo summarizes what too often passes for journalism in the left wing media. This misconduct by NSBA and the AP are apparently behind Merrick Garland's unwarranted letter suggesting (without offering any examples) that parents passionately complaining at school board meetings about Woke Ideology and masking mandates for children are acting as domestic terrorists.

What's really going on? Reason sums it up:

Has some great number of teachers, principals, and district leaders come under violent attack? Of course not. What both the Justice Department and the concerned school boards are really talking about it is the increased number of recent community meetings that have featured angry feedback from parents. These parents are sick of COVID-19 mitigation efforts that have relegated actual students to afterthought status within the education department: the farce of virtual learning, mandatory closure when asymptomatic cases are detected, ceaseless masking. Young people who have the least to fear from the pandemic—the severe disease and death rate for the under-18 crowd is extremely low—have been forced to make tremendous educational and social sacrifices to bend the curve of COVID-19. Families are fed up with a public education system that puts the needs of students last, and they are speaking up about it.

Many parents are also increasingly concerned about the curriculum in their schools. Garland's memo garnered widespread attention in conservative media circles yesterday after it was shared on Twitter by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who works to expose what he has termed "critical race theory." As I wrote previously, whether or not CRT is literally being taught in many K-12 schools hinges in part on a semantics argument. CRT, the obscure academic theory positing that the structures of U.S. society are racist to their core—and thus it is impossible to separate or ignore racism when confronting other issues—is not exactly sweeping U.S. kindergartens; but CRT—the tendency to reduce individuals to crude racial stereotypes that is pushed by divisive and misguided anti-whiteness gurus like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi—has certainly become an important component of corporate and university diversity training, and is, to some extent, trickling down to K-12 instruction.

The above explanation by Reason anticipates the deception offered by the NYT version of the Garland letter:

The attacks faced by educators, the organization wrote, include verbal attacks for approving Covid-19 safety policies such as masking, as well as physical threats stemming from false allegations that schools are teaching “critical race theory,” a legal framework primarily taught in graduate school that examines racism as a social construct embedded in policies and institutions. In recent months, some parents and politicians have invoked the phrase in seeking to restrict teaching about racism in public schools.

[Emphasis Added]

Whatever you'd like to call it is beside the point, but Critical Race Theory" is often used and for good reason. Contrary to the NYT assertion, it is not a "false allegation." Many parents are justifiably angry that many schools are doubling down on race essentialism and many other simplistic, divisive and destructive racial training teaching K-12 students, for example, that all black students are oppressed and all white students are oppressors.

The NSBA tactics and the AP false claim that it fact checked the NSBA are entirely predictable. Rather than face the fire of understandably outraged parents, NSBA would rather shut the parents up with claims that they are "terrorists" rather than have meaningful conversations.

One more thing about the nomenclature. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has it right about "Critical Race Theory":

Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes:

[R]egardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.

James Lindsay would summarize the Woke strategy as two-fold:

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The Best System for Determining What is True

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). Rauch has written an extraordinary book offering a detailed airtight case for why we need each other in order to determine what is true. We need a mediated social system in order to filter out the despots and crackpots, but who will mediate such a system? The incredible answer is no one in particular. The system powers the process, but the system cannot function in the absence of three prerequisites. The following passage sums up what we need to get the job done:

An epistemic regime—that is, a public system for adjudicating differences of belief and perception and for developing shared and warranted conclusions about truth—should provide three public goods.

First, knowledge. The system should be competent at distinguishing reality from non-reality, and at building on previous discoveries so that knowledge accumulates, thereby generating even more knowledge.

Second, freedom. The system should encourage rather than repress human autonomy, creativity, and empowerment. It should welcome and exploit human diversity, especially diversity of opinion, and it should not allow any person or faction to use force or intimidation to control what others say or believe.

Third, peace. The system should reward social conciliation, maximize the number of disagreements which are resolvable, and compartmentalize and marginalize disagreements when it cannot resolve them. It should inculcate intellectual values which abhor violence and bullying, and it should establish institutions and norms which tolerate and even embrace disagreement and doubt.

No one should expect any knowledge-producing system to be perfect, or close to it. Still, many centuries of history show that the liberal system—the reality-based community—comes closer to perfection than any other human social invention.

Next, we need two rules (p. 89):

The fallibilist rule: Ho one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and onlyinsofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’sfallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based. The Constitution of Knowledge

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

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