Guest blogger John Ray from dissectingleftism.blogspot.com
The stupid definition of conservatism as “opposition to change” is still something of a reality-defying mantra among Leftists — despite conservatives often being major agents of change — from Benjamin Disraeli to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And if George Bush’s movement of American power into two countries of the Middle East is not a major policy change, I would like to know what would be. It is Obama who hasn’t changed that, for all his talk of change.
The idea of conservatives being opponents of change is quite laughable, in fact. Every single conservative that I have ever met has got a HEAP of things he would like to see changed in the society about him. Conservatives are opponents of the brainless ideas of Leftism but that is far from being opponents of change — much though Leftists might like to think otherwise.
But, in terms of the stupid Leftist definition, it does make some slight sense to describe Islamic fundamentalists as “conservative” — though one could argue much more reasonably that Islamists are in fact reactionaries: Far from opposing change they want the major change of a sudden and violent return to 7th century ways.
However you look at it, however, the violent authoritarianism advocated by Islamists has NOTHING in common with the individual liberty orientation of American conservatives. So it is just Leftist propaganda to claim some basic similarity between American Christian conservatives and Islamists. But calling Christian conservatives “Taleban” is in fact a fairly common Leftist form of abuse — dare I call it “hate speech”?
This is all brought to mind by the following academic journal article:
Arch.europ.sociol., L, 2 (2009), pp. 201-230.
Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?
By Diego Gambetta & Steffen Hertog
Abstract
This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.
It turns out that the “mindset” they identify is religious conservatism. In a summary of the article we read: “Statistical analysis of poll data on US faculty shows that the odds of being both religious and conservative are seven times greater for engineers relative to the odds of a social scientist. Engineering as a degree might also be more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive “closure” and clear cut answers – a disposition that has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes.”
So they explicitly conflate American conservatism with the mindset that drives Jihadists. They also incidentally accept the junk-science claim that conservatives have a rigid cognitive style.
I am not going to comment on any of that right now. I already have a large historically-based paper on what is central to Anglo-Saxon conservatism here and I have a large number of academic journal articles on the claim that conservatives are mentally rigid oversimplifiers here.
But what I have said so far is criticism and there is an old axiom that bad science is driven out only by better science. So I am going to propose what I think is a better explanation of the phenomenon in question. I think it is all “cognitive dissonance”
It seems to me that engineers get intimately involved in a world of great rationality and logic. You can’t afford to let ideology dictate your design of a bridge, for instance, or the bridge might fall down. Christians are used to living in both worlds: The secular world about them and their private religious beliefs. But Muslims are not. The engineer’s mental world is quite opposed to the intense religiosity and scant regard for rationality that permeates the Muslim world. So the Muslim engineer is put into a situation of great conflict. He is thrown into a mental world that runs counter to all his religious assumptions and ways of thought. And sometimes he relieves the pressure of that — in psychologist’s terms he “reduces his cognitive dissonance” — by reasserting his Muslim identity in an explosive or extremist way. The violence of his reaction is a testimony to how great has been the dissonance and mental conflict he has been subjected to in an engineering environment
Cheers
JR
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
And for a “conservative” view on foreign policy, courtesy of the Hoover Institution, author of the Bush Foreign Policy in cooperation with the Heritage Foundation and Wolfowitz.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/11832051.html
Pay attention to the moral questions they DON’T pose… and the presumptions they make…
Hrafnkell,
Apparently the pagan ancient Greece and Rome whose philosophers came up with most of the concepts that found their way into the Constitution- Plato, Socrates, Pythagorus- never existed, according to Eric and Consti. You are in error.
Apparently according to Eric and Consti, the Patriot Act, attempted GOP squelching of Civil Rights and gay marriage and women’s rights, are all figments of your imagination. It never happened- you have no “proof.”
Apparently, accoding to Eric and Consti, the fact that just the term neocon exists is an error, let alone imperialistic plans like ones proposed by think tank gurus with no accountability like Paul Wolfowitz. Conservatives have no interest in radical change- that is the realm of liberals and other “progressives.”
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/bush-article.html
Appartently they have not looked up the definition of the word conservative from several different dictionaries, which I had provided in an earlier article about Putin. But maybe those definitions of Conservative that are very similar to yours were a figment of my imagination too…
Boy, since all of this is blatantly untrue, you must have one heck of an imagination to make all of these things up. And I must have some sort of collective Vulcan mind meld going with you because I read this stuff in the history books, dictionary and experienced it too, along with a bunch of other people…The people operating under a delusion are those who believe that the modern right is “conservative.” They are not. The modern right wishes to take radical action to move the world toward their vision of what they deem is right, based on a idealistic vision of a past that never was. If that isn’t at least as radical as they claim liberals to be, I don’t know what is…
Hrafnkell,
“And there is no evidence that American conservatives embrace the idea of individual liberty. In fact, it is conservatives who wish to limit or deprive people of rights guaranteed them by the Constitution.”
Where’s your proof? Or you just spouting the typical liberal talking points? Before Bush and 9/11 I can provide you TONS of examples refuting you claim. However, I doubt it will make a differece. So you first… where’s your proof?
Hrafnkell,
With no sarcasm or exaggeration at all, I can honestly say that I have NEVER seen such error in a mere 3 paragraphs in my entire life.
First of all, conservativism is about maintaining the status quo. That does not mean that conservatives will not invade other countries. That is a simplistic argument and doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny.
Secondly, individual human rights, free speech, democracy…none of those things are a product of the Judeo-Christian heritage. They come to us via the Pagan past and the European Enlightenment.
And there is no evidence that American conservatives embrace the idea of individual liberty. In fact, it is conservatives who wish to limit or deprive people of rights guaranteed them by the Constitution.
“Your mean-spiritedness shows your obvious bias and I don’t think you are then able to determine what is or is not “junk” science.”
And the pot calls the kettle black ladies and gentlemen!!
Read “Conservatives Without Conscience” by one of your own, John Dean. Also, look up the definition of the word conservative. The problem with pointing to someone like Dubya as an example of conservatism is that he was not a conservative, except in name only. Call him a CINO, if you will. He was a progressive with his own agenda that happened to be a non-liberal one. Since anyone who is not liberal is instantly labeled conservative these, days, Dubya’s own agenda became conservative in name by default. For a true conservative, you need to look elsewhere, like Goldwater and Ron Paul.
No one said conservatives do not take any action- they will- but it is toward a past that never existed except in memory and on paper.
Your mean-spiritedness shows your obvious bias and I don’t think you are then able to determine what is or is not “junk” science.
Excellent. It takes some hoot spa to take the Godless idealism of the leftist scientific community where everything is “blame-God” and written to leftist readers who “blame-America”, expose their conclusions to the light of truth, and make some common sense out of their pre-engineered hypotheses.
Have you ever noticed the huge percentage of trained clowns who vote Democrat. Just a thought for their next attempt at research and persuasion.