Another Interesting Quotation

[hayekianxyz]

Political discourse is often shrill rather than dispassionate; and political adversaries often feel more comfortable neatly dividing the world into those who are evil, those who are stupid, and the enlightened who agree with them, rather than reasoned discourse where well-intentioned and smart individuals simply cannot come to an agreement on policies for a variety of reasons. As Frank Knight liked to point out, “man is a disagreeing animal” – we are opinionated, conceited, prejudiced, dogmatic, and addicted to believing our opinions are sacred and absolute.

Rational discourse is all we have, but it is also most elusive even in a free society. But we can, and must, do better if we hope to live better together. One of Knight’s main claims is that a consequence of the liberal revolution “is that all truth is provisional, all knowledge and all valuations are relative. The concept of truth is progressive, dynamic.” Disagreement doesn’t cause a problem unless men “confuse truth with goodness, to moralize and then to take a religious view of both truth and right, to hold that they are absolutely sacred dogma – not open to question.” Such attitudes are the product of a pre-liberal era, and survive in the liberal era in the form of dogmatism and intolerance, which have no place in liberalism.

Source.

[E_R_Olovetto]

Read Danny Frederick’s Two Concepts of Rationality**. I guess when one competing theory is so obviously weak compared to another, people are lent to employ the word “dogma” pejoratively.

[hayekianxyz]

You forgot to give the topic a one star rating.

[DanielMuffinburg]

So where do you put us, hayekianxyz? Evil or stupid?

[hayekianxyz]

Neither, I would have thought me quoting the passage above would have made that quite clear.