With the recent addition of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate, attention has pivoted from the default Republican Party position of trumpeting its toughness to the odd spectacle of the Party trumpeting its intellect. Obviously they’ve concluded that they can’t out-drone attack Obama in this election, so they’re going to try to out-philosophize him. They’re ably assisted in this Bizarro World approach by the media, which has from the get-go portrayed Ryan as the thinking man’s Republican. And Ryan has done his porcine best to apply the lipstick just so by claiming that he was drawn to politics not by Founding Fathers or Godfathers or fathers-in-law or just plain dad like so many other politicians, but drawn instead by fem Russian intellectual Ayn Rand.
As irony would have it, like Ryan, I had a youthful infatuation with Ms. Rand myself. It lasted about three months…or for about as long as it took to soberly reflect on her writing and come down from the seductive narcissistic high induced by Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. I’d say that either of those Rand paeans to selfishness has enough power to sweep the average callow college sophomore off his or her feet with a philosophy best summed up in a song from Rand's unrealized musical, The Sound of Mammon:
Dough, a dear…dear means of exchange/Ray a drop of golden sun, (which can be privatized like air and water)/Me, a name I call myself and can stamp on everything I see and desire…
I know that ever since Romney tapped him to be his running mate, Ryan has been trying to put some distance between himself and Rand’s atheism (probably wishing he had redacted all those parts in the copies of her books that he handed out to impressionable young interns and eager-to-please staffers for so many years). I know how it goes. I have my intellectual influences as everyone who reads me knows, and I wouldn’t want to be held to endorsing everything that Norman O. Brown ever wrote either. (“To be castrated is to be a woman; but the woman is a devouring mouth which castrates”…oh, really, Nobby? Really?). So I’ll give Ryan a pass on Rand’s atheism (and her amoral sexual code as well, God bless her). Still, there is the nasty reality that in most un-Ayn-Rand fashion Ryan’s family built its construction business largely off government contracts for most of the 20th century, and he personally lobbied the Department of Energy for government stimulus money for his congressional district after making a rather big, whiny deal of how much he disapproved of such allegedly socialistic tax use.
Though not at Rand’s level on the brainiac scale, Charles Murray is another rather renowned conservative (ahem) thinker, who’s made his bones among the American Right by reasonably and civilly trying to promote one dog chew of an idea: that there may be a thousand and one reasons why there are poor and dispossessed among us—from bad genes to lousy family values--but economic inequality is not...nay, NEVER…one of those reasons. In his latest stab at making this case, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Murray wrote a paragraph that raised more than a few eyebrows among his more discerning readers:
Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.
In saying that it is not unreasonable to reject data in reaching or revising opinions, Murray is giving away the game on the great hoax of modern American conservatism. As many less sympathetic observers have been claiming and demonstrating for years now, modern American conservatives are simply opposed to real thinking if you regard the processing of new data as critical to serious thought. We see evidence of this disturbing development in practically every public policy debate. Produce data (which exists in abundance) that shows that bringing a gun into a home is far more likely to lead to that gun being used against a resident of that home rather than an intruder of the home and the modern conservative will still insist on bringing the gun home. Produce evidence (which exists in abundance) that the dissemination of condoms and birth control information will reduce unwanted pregnancies and thus abortions and the modern conservative will still insist on defunding Planned Parenthood. Produce evidence (which exists in abundance) that high crime and poverty were once as rampant among white European immigrants as they now are among Central and South American immigrants, and Charles Murray will still insist that there’s a racial component to cultural slackerism. And hold up the mirror of his own life—immeasurably enriched by his dad’s multitudinous government contracts and social security checks--and Paul Ryan will still insist that we’re all better off in an Ayn Rand world where government is limited to just three functions: police, military, and judiciary. And let food, air and water inspection; road and bridge building; and disaster relief be damned.
There have been numerous studies in recent years that confirm this closing of the conservative mind. At least three of them (here too) have shown that viewers of Fox News prefer news that confirms their beliefs rather than challenges them, and thus of all the nation’s news consumers, viewers of Fox News remain the least informed. One study from the London School of Economics (with an admittedly inflammatory title) “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent” is jam-packed with data making the case. I will not try to unpack it here…nor will I try to adjudicate the study’s working definition of intelligence. But the bottom line of the study seems to be nothing more than the flip side of Charles Murray’s coin: Liberals (and our friends the atheists) are more “intelligent” precisely because they are more open to data (as well as the more novel doors of perception) and thus more willing to change their minds about things…which if not exactly everyone’s definition of intelligence, is certainly the sign of a healthy mind.
The great Catch 22 for modern American conservatives is that if there is data out there that proves their minds are not functioning at optimum capacity, then the data cannot be trusted. I believe how we think and what influences our thinking is really far more important to moving us all toward that more perfect union than any debates we may have over more ephemeral issues like Medicare and balancing budgets. Those debates are merely symptomatic of how we all see the world at much deeper levels. Paul Ryan’s blatant hypocrisy about the role of government in our lives is far less fascinating to me than how and why it is that some people will desperately cling to discredited points of view in the face of mounting evidence against those views. And how can they, in an act of self-inflicted Owellianism, claim that it’s not unreasonable to do so? What level of denial are we up against here? And can we ever get far enough beyond it to reach a point where we’re all thinking…and acting…like we live in the same country?
(Now that Rage Against the Machine, Ryan’s favorite music group, has told him to go fuck himself, maybe Baby Paul should take up Woody Guthrie’s anthem to a better America than the one he and Mitt are trying to sell us. Before I hold my breath on that, Happy 100th Anniversary to Woody.)