I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Somewhat irrelevant comment, but the people on Alternative Right have taken the strange stand of adopting their opponent's language.
ReplyDeleteThe word "right wing" really doesn't mean anything, but is widely used by certain groups to paint a broad brush stroke across their disparate, unrelated opponents, from religious traditionalists to pro-NAFTA wonks to supporters of interventionist wars.
If you were one or the other of those things, you wouldn't necessarilly relegate your views to that of people with entirely different agendas. A pro-NAFTA wonk would call himself pro-NAFTA, not necessarilly "right wing" in the same sense as Pat Buchanan.
In the French National Assembly, they only concocted the word "left wing" to refer to the Jacobins who sat at the left side of the house. Everybody, who was scared of them, sat a little further away. Being scared of Jacobins does not mean being of another monolithic agenda. It just means you are scared of the Jacobins! Given the craziness of Jacobins, that could mean just about anybody.
It's like entire generations have grown up hearing their far more nuanced views being reduced to a part of a broader group, and hence those people can now only think of things in terms of their opponent's categorizations.
I have been told that the web site on which this article appears has become something of a White Nationalist site. That's too bad. In any case, that is not the position of the article to which I linked nor of its author.
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