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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - May 27, 2010
A Closing of the Conservative Mind?
by: Allen McDuffee
truthout|Report
In an election year when Republicans are mounting a come-
back, the last thing they need is in-fighting among
conservatives. But that's precisely what is happening
thanks to a series of exchanges kicked off by a blog post
from Cato research fellow Julian Sanchez, who is warning
of a closing of the conservative mind. The firestorm that
has ensued has become something of a spectator sport,
with, among others, Andrew Sullivan writing regular posts
called "Epistemic Closure Watch" at the Daily Dish.
Although Sanchez admits he didn't intend to coin a phrase
with "epistemic closure," he meant to point out the ways
in which conservative media had "stopped engaging in a
useful, corrective way with the larger public conversation
and congealed into this interconnected and self-contained
alternate universe, itself insulated from factual correct-
ion by a narrative that says, essentially all non-movement
information sources are not just slanted a bit to the left,
but barely distinguishable from the old Soviet Pravda."
Epistemic closure has another meaning in philosophy that
Sanchez says he's forgotten about and was "probably
jangling around in the back of my head." Possibly also
the philosopher Colin McGinn's phrase "cognitive closure,"
which has a meaning much closer to what I was talking
about - although McGinn's talking about domains of know-
ledge where our brains are just wired in a way that makes
it impossible for us to acquire certain kinds of knowledge.
And even if it does have these other uses, it's not some-
thing Sanchez would change now. "I mean, I doubt any
logicians dipping into the debate are getting confused
and imagining that we're talking about the technical sense
of 'closure under entailment' or whatever," says Sanchez.
"I've seen folks using zingier phrases like "information
loop" or "bubble world" - but part of me suspects that a
clinical sounding phrase like "epistemic closure" made it
easier for conservatives to start engaging the problem."
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As for the root causes of epistemic closure, Sanchez says
the proliferation of media has lots to do with it. "In
principle, it would be nice to have all these conservative
media acting as a corrective to a press corps that over-
whelmingly self-identifies as liberal," a hotly contested
assertion, but Sanchez insists nonetheless that "they've
been so focused on being 'the conservative alternative'
that the fundamental journalistic mission to report fairly
and accurately ends up taking a distant second place."
It's a problem that is exacerbated by the connections that
are made when individual outlets are integrated into the
larger conservative media sphere, says Sanchez, leading
to a point where "the lines between serious think tanks or
journals of ideas and the talk radio entertainers and wacky
fringe sites get blurred, because there's a sense that
they're all on the 'same team' in a self-conscious way," a
feature that Sanchez says is unparalleled on the liberal
side.
Some on the right are pleased with Sanchez's assessment,
but more are not and are even less pleased about him going
public with it, making the counterattacks wide-ranging.
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, is treating
the matter like it is business as usual and the fact that
there is even a heated discussion by others over epistemic
closure proves conservative intellectual health, writing
at National Review's blog The Corner, "This is called
having a blog where people are free to disagree."
Jonah Goldberg, contributing editor at National Review and
author of "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the
American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,"
somewhat unsurprisingly turned it back toward liberals.
On the American Enterprise Institute blog he wrote, "For
more than a generation, liberalism craved and ruthlessly
enforced epistemic closure."
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Further, Goldberg posited, "I would suggest that one of
the main reasons so many liberals are in a flop-sweating,
bowel-stewing panic over Fox News and the Tea Parties is
that they understand such developments are a real threat
to epistemic hegemony of liberalism that has been unravel-
ing for the last decade and half. The Obama surge in 2008
looks more like a last gasp for progressivism than a
rebirth. If the Obama Era was actually similar to the New
Deal, his healthcare plan would be popular - and so would
he. Neither is the case."
And yet others have made the counterattack personal,
making some of the controversy healthy and aspects not.
"I am not sure that the term 'epistemic closure' serves
anyone very well in this controversy," says intellectual
historian David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis professor
of history at UC Berkeley and president of the Organization
of Historians. "The flap over 'epistemic closure' is not
so different from earlier controversies in which this or
that party to a dispute will accuse the other of being
narrow-minded, of failing to take a sufficiently wide
expanse of experience into account."
But Hollinger is also quick to point out that these things
are not all the same and that sometimes a seemingly small
argument has a lasting consequence. "Quarrels happen all
the time," he said, "but a small number of willful people
can create the agenda and make it last for a while."
The duration and the intensity have as much to do with
ideology as anything else, according to Hollinger.
"Ideologically-defined disputes are more likely to entail
the tone we see in the current quarrel among conservatives,
reflecting the more impassioned styles characteristic of
political as opposed to academic disputation."
What happens now remains to be seen, but according to
Sanchez, "If there's a way out, I think it starts with
what we're seeing now, which is folks on the right start-
ing to acknowledge the problem and talk about it, and
realizing that in the long term an informed base that's
in touch with reality is more important than a maximally
riled up base."
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