A parable on right-wing relativism
"Relativism" is a charge that is often leveled at left-wing intellectuals. But lately, it is the left that has been styling itself the "reality-based community", which if you can believe it was used as a disparaging term by a "senior Bush advisor". Here's the quote from Suskind's "Without a Doubt" cover story for the New York Times Magazine in October of 2004:
What could be more radically postmodernist and relativist than saying, "[W]hen we act, we create our own reality."? I guess that reality does not include death in Iraq, global warming, or massive budget defecits. Unfortunately, we don't get to join the Imperial President in is alternate reality. We're stuck in this one, reality-based lunkards that we are.
Digby observes this phenomenon and links to this post which contains a fun parable illustrating the difference between these two notions of reality. The Bush administration really is insane, if insanity means an inability to deal with reality due to constraints on your mental capacities.
Once more, why are elected Democrats not more openly contemptuous of this administration? The Democratic base certainly is, as are most independents and even many Republicans. The Republicans were certainly quite contemptuous of Bill Clinton, even though he was quite popular throughout most of his administration. To put a game theory spin on this: If you can't even play tit-for-tat properly, you're gonna get rolled in any iterated prisoner's dilemma, which is a pretty good model for today's partisan political conflict.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
What could be more radically postmodernist and relativist than saying, "[W]hen we act, we create our own reality."? I guess that reality does not include death in Iraq, global warming, or massive budget defecits. Unfortunately, we don't get to join the Imperial President in is alternate reality. We're stuck in this one, reality-based lunkards that we are.
Digby observes this phenomenon and links to this post which contains a fun parable illustrating the difference between these two notions of reality. The Bush administration really is insane, if insanity means an inability to deal with reality due to constraints on your mental capacities.
Once more, why are elected Democrats not more openly contemptuous of this administration? The Democratic base certainly is, as are most independents and even many Republicans. The Republicans were certainly quite contemptuous of Bill Clinton, even though he was quite popular throughout most of his administration. To put a game theory spin on this: If you can't even play tit-for-tat properly, you're gonna get rolled in any iterated prisoner's dilemma, which is a pretty good model for today's partisan political conflict.
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