THE PLANK NOVEMBER 25, 2009
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I don't normally read Victor Davis Hanson, who's a fruitcake even by the standards of National Review Online, but i was intrigued by the headline of his latest column, "The New War Against Reason." Hanson's thesis holds that, despite promising to heed science, the Obama administration has gone to war against empiricism. Since this is one of the few things the right has not previously accused Obama of doing, I thought I'd see what Hanson's evidence is. Here we go!
For decades, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has maintained a rational, scientifically based, and nonpartisan system of reporting the nation’s “seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.” Presidents of both parties respected its metrics. Their own popularity sunk or soared on the basis of officially released jobless numbers, as tabulated and computed by the nonpartisan Bureau. The public trusted in a common standard of assessing presidential job performance.
The BLS is still releasing its monthly report, but alongside it the Obama administration has created a new postmodern barometer called jobs “created or saved.”
Over the last nine months, the official government website Recovery.gov has informed us how the stimulus has saved jobs — even as hard data reflected the unpleasant truth of massive and spiraling job losses.
In other words, not the real number of jobs lost, but rather the supposed number of jobs saved by Barack Obama’s vast dispersion of borrowed money, was to be the correct indicator of employment.
Ok. Hanson doesn't say that the Obama administration has suppressed or altered the BLS's calculation of unemployment. He charges it with creating another website that attempts to calculate how many jobs were saved by the stimulus -- a premise that is shared by the major macroeconomic forecasting firms. Hanson seems to further believe that this figure is intended as a substitute for the unemployment level, betraying an inability to grasp the distinction between the current unemployment rate and how many jobs were saved as a result of the stimulus. How can anybody not understand the difference between these two things? His chain of reasoning is just so wildly illogical you can't even refute it.
Hanson's second data point is that the Obama administration advocates the view that increased carbon dioxide emissions increase average global temperature:
These controversies could be adjudicated through substantive debate, but instead politically correct hysteria again has followed. “Good” informed people — like those who adhered to every doctrine of the medieval church — “know” the planet is heating up, thanks to the greed of carbon-based industry. “Bad” heretics challenge official environmental dogma and exegesis. In such an anti-empirical age, if the “truther” Van Jones had not been there, ready for Obama to tap as green czar, he would have had to be invented.
If you click through, there's a lot more fulminating against climate science, oddly dressed up as a defense of empiricism against superstition when it's actually the exact opposite.
I point these sorts of things out periodically because I think a lot of people, even people who follow politics very closely, fail to understand just how low the standard of conservative discourse is, even at mainstream outlets like NRO. The debate is just dominated by ignorant cranks. It's frightening that this is the intellectual movement that dominates one of our two major political parties.
15 comments
Marty fits right in at NRO.
- WandreyCer
November 25, 2009 at 1:24pm
Leaving aside his "mission creep" from Obama and science to the way the Liberal Media handled the Fort Hood story, it looks as though VDH's alleged concern with inductive reasoning has led him to forget that deductive reasoning rests on sound syllogisms. All of Hanson's evidence seems to rest on this bit of "logic": Science is based on observation. Average people have observed X. Therefore, claiming Y is unscientific. But his main method of persuasion is to sprinkle in random references to the superstition of the medieval church, which leaves us with another syllogism: 'Pathos' is the appeal to emotion in an argument. Hanson's argument rests mainly on manipulating emotions. Therefore, Hanson's argument is pathetic.
- frippo
November 25, 2009 at 2:09pm
It's also a bit like scraping the barrel for Hanson, who often travels at loftier elevations.
- ironyroad
November 25, 2009 at 2:10pm
Close italics
- frippo
November 25, 2009 at 2:11pm
Chait, Victor Davis Hanson is not a right-wing crank -- he is a widely respected raisin farmer in the Central Valley and one of the Fresno State University's best-known academic experts on Ancient Greek warfare. Frankly, he's forgotten more about Epanimondas's revolution in hoplite tacicts in the 4th Century BCE than you would ever know. So there.
- wildboy
November 25, 2009 at 2:29pm
frippo, good one. and you too wildboy. Suffice it to say I gave up on reading Hanson (who has been published in TNR need I remind anyone) when he continued on insisting that Rumsfeld was the greatest Secretary of Defense up until he was given the boot. By the way, his article in TNR was the way to win the war was to kill the enemy. I shit you not. (never mind that in Iraq just knowing who was the enemy was one of the problems). 06/06/2004 Stop Talking. Here is a key quote: There are other advantages to a force of some 138,000 rapidly responding soldiers, rather than 200,000 or so garrison troops. The more American troops, the less likely it is Iraqis will feel any obligation to step up to the responsibilities of their own defense. The more troops, the more psychological reliance on numbers than on performance of individual units. And, the more troops, the higher the profile of culturally bothersome Americans who disturb by their mere omnipresence, rather than win respect for their proven skill in arms. Funny how history utterly and completely has proven him wrong.
- blackton
November 25, 2009 at 2:47pm
"... just how low the standard of conservative discourse is, even at mainstream outlets like NRO." Even at? Make that, "especially at." NRO has not been a serious publication of interesting ideas in at least a decade, probably more like 16 years. Honestly, The Weakly Standard has been an important publication more recently than has NRO.
- rhubarbs
November 25, 2009 at 3:06pm
Blackie, thanks for the compliment. The funny thing about Hanson is that he hasn't just been proven wrong by history that unfolded after he wrote things, but also by his willful inability to accurately describe past historical events (for example, his rather novel view that the Peleponessian War was started because Athens didn't do enough to deter Spartan aggression, which is rather at odds with Thucidydes).
- wildboy
November 25, 2009 at 3:17pm
And that's the real problem with VDH, wildboy: his reputation as a scholar rests entirely on early work that he claimed was based on strict empiricism. For example, how much labor is required to cut down an olive tree or a grapevine, anyway, and could Greek armies really have denuded entire groves in the times and manners attributed to them? Yet VDH's subsequent body of work demonstrates an active contempt for empiricism. It's reached the point where I no longer trust the integrity of VDH's alleged methodology in "The Western Way of War."
- rhubarbs
November 25, 2009 at 4:33pm
I wonder if this works . . .
- ironyroad
November 25, 2009 at 4:38pm
Let me try again
- ironyroad
November 25, 2009 at 4:39pm
Ok let's see . . .
- ironyroad
November 25, 2009 at 4:40pm
No.
- ironyroad
November 25, 2009 at 4:40pm
I regret using the italics now. I'd go back and edit, if I could, although I can see where that sort of power would be abused in a heated discussion here.
- frippo
November 25, 2009 at 6:16pm
Me, I choked at "postmodern barometer". There is no phrase more hackneyed in the hollowed, er, hallowed halls of Academe than "postmodern". Nothing I have so far read of the good Mr. Hansen suggests to me the existence of a sentient being there. Frippo: classic.
- icarusr
November 25, 2009 at 8:51pm