eudaemonia

Darwin and the Blogs

There is simply no questioning the fact that the blogesphere is having a tremendous impact on politics. Hugh Hewitt broached this topic by stating that the Left's blogs are in the process of destroying the Democratic Party, while the Right’s have aided substantially in electing a Republican majority. For my part, the question is not just which side, if any, is reaching hegemony, so much as why? Here, I offer a a straight to the point assessment: The Right's blogs are rapidly moving beyond mere ascendancy to downright hegemony because the right has better ideas. It’s that simple.

We can analyze this 1001 ways, but Evolutionary theory is particularly apt. ET holds that certain phenotypes will thrive under certain conditions while others will perish. Allow me to suggest that natural selection by cognitive means is occurring before our eyes. It is occurring in the wake of the Net’s withering scrutiny of the Left’s ideas. At long last the curtains are flung open and the man in the street sees the left for what it is.

The net, or what I choose to call the distributed intelligence network DI, is an environment particularly hostile to the left's clichés, bromides, slogans, rumors, and especially its demagoguery. This is the genetic material of liberalism. In the age of DI, a struggling cognitive meme can expect to be set upon by the cascading logic from a million sources. Any conspicuous meme is subject to incessant empirical verification from a phalanx of PhDs representing the most arcane of subject matters. This screen is merciless and selection takes its course. The DI environment results in the selection of memes tempered by challenges and strengthened through chromosomal verity. Only cognitive memes phenotypically acclimated to such an environment can hope to survive.

Conservative ideas not only survive they thrive. For example: the assumption that because market capitalism is rooted in fundamental human nature, it is the most robust, flexible and efficient means for the distribution of goods and services is a proposition no longer in dispute. No more efficacious method for the promotion of society's health and living standards has ever been devised. Looking at the global success of market capitalism, the empirically grounded conservative will argue that what humanity lacks is not an even distribution of dollars, but a sufficient distribution of market capitalism. That is, the mechanism to wield against the scarcities of food, water, clothes and shelter have not reached those places where they can acheve their positive effects. In other words teach a man to fish……. This is how conservative ideas grow and mature.

Liberal ideas, on the other hand, are more genetically related to poetry than fact. To wit: Marx was a poet and not an economist. Observe that Das Kapital is shown to be almost totally fiction, and his Manifesto but a mere psychologization of economics. Thus despite many attempts at developing a communist economy that worked in the real world, these attempts have been an utter disaster for humanity. Communism's distributions were forced upon human nature by means of extreme totalitarianism. Nonetheless, this dreamy poetry of "good intentions" remains an object of curiosity in literature departments at our most prestigious universities. Popularizers either don't care that their policies are based on a horribly failed economic approach or they are immune to the facts.

Similarly, radical agnosticism, the bequest of Locke, Hume and Kant et. al., has impregnated modernity with both multiculturalism and its ugly cousin political correctness. In the nick of time, current events distilled via the DI have depleted the genetic population of these nearly ascendant meme variants.

Heretofore multiculturalism and political correctness replicated by means of a mutation in their “major premise” structure thereby suppressing the expression of logic during ratiocinative acts. When logic is removed from the production cycle the resulting meme is rendered immune to facts. This condition produces smarmy rationales where the coherence of a position is not relevant so long as the outcome is “correct”. When enough of these “correct positions” come together they form the nucleus of the "open mind". The "open minder" is delightfully unencumbered with “polluted” notions of logic, nor is the host troubled by facts. The “open minder” proceeds to conclusions in studied avoidance of high and low, good or bad, right or wrong. Openness forbids standards like human nature. As such open minders almost uniformly vote liberal Democrat.

But take heart, political correctness and multiculturalism are akin to poetry and have no empirical referents from where to form a viable base. The DI is an insalubrious environment for them. They cannot survive prolonged exposure to facts and logic. For it is “human nature”, the very thing liberals tell us does not exist, that impels us to defend ourselves against those who would kill America and the west. Against the parasitic Islamo-facist virus, liberal blogs offer paralyzing self-analysis and guilt. This position is reminiscent of the desire not to offend. Such positions may be a sound catechism for good table manners or social events, but are laughable when adopted whole cloth as a national security policy. And their hiliraty is their death knell. Conservatives believe violent religions/ideologies can be identified and pre-emptive measures taken. This is common sense. And the net through the Right’s blogs are showing this more and more every day.

Hegemony never felt so good.

posted by spelunker @ 9:21 PM