Lately we've been confronted with a debate inside conservative circles about a conservative flaw: "epistemic closure." That's the obscurantist phrase (who the hell knows off the top of their heads what "epistemic" means?) used by conservative writer, Julian Sanchez.
Wait! Don't dismiss the discussion. If you're flummoxed by conservatives' absolute refusal to deal with anything not defined in their terms and to their advantage, you need to know that some leading conservatives are with you. They have finally come around to believe that conservatives' inability -- no, deliberate refusal -- to accept reality is damaging the movement.
That means they may actually change. They may back off "givens" like Obama is an "alien" who's determined to impose "death panels" on decent Americans.
The very phrase Sanchez uses -- "epistemic closure" -- is being questioned. For a start, it obscures the issue (stupidity and intransigence) by cloaking it in fancy language. Anyway, clearheaded outsiders are chiming in with better descriptions of the problem. One British philosopher says no, not epistemic but cognitive closure, defined as "the inability to arrive at knowledge of some given subject matter." In other words, low IQ. That's okay, but a better suggestion comes from Australia: "'agnotology' — a word coined by the historian Robert Proctor 'to describe study of the manufacture of ignorance. '"
"The manufacture of ignorance" is perfect. Above all, it suits Fox and EIB, the engines driving all those followers of movement conservatism to criminal ignorance. The Australian offers a great parallel for what those conservative blowhards are up to: "the efforts of the tobacco lobby to cast doubt on research demonstrating the link between smoking and cancer." In other words, "epistemic closure" is nothing more or less fancy than the simple refusal to accept reality to a point where it become criminal behavior.
At the National Review, Jonah Goldberg has his usual "yo mutha" response: "For more than a generation, liberalism craved and ruthlessly enforced epistemic closure."
Of course, the phrase itself is way too much for most anti-education-elitism conservatives to handle (Goldberg is paid to deal with language like this). But even the dumbest conservative is practiced in handling the concept, "don't wanna know."
So we're back with the anti-American Americans -- about one-third of the population -- who are very familiar with epistemic closure, which they'd recognize as the same thing as "my mind is made up; don't confuse me with facts."
Comments