The Burden of Bad Ideas

I've been burdened by a boatload of bad ideas all my life: sinful ideas, unwise ideas, or just plain idiotic ideas. The burden is both from ideas I've held and ideas others have held. As Richard Weaver (should have - I haven't managed to make my way all the way through his book) taught me, ideas have consequences. What are some of these bad ideas, and why are they so bad?

1. Man is basically good. This is one of the worst and most egregious lies ever created, and it goes all the way back to Satan in the garden. In fact, it's one of the father lies - lies that generate a lot of other lies.

2. There are no absolutes. This is perhaps best illustrated by one of the dumbest movie lines ever, in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-wan Kenobi is about to fight Anakin, and he says, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." Really? Is that true of all Sith? And make no mistake, Obi-wan is making a statement about all people: everyone who is not a Sith does not deal in absolutes. Is that true for all people? Then you've got yourself a truth that is true for everybody - and hence an absolute. The badness of this idea lies in obliterating the basis for knowing anything. It's logically incoherent, and no one can consistently hold to this.

3. Marxism, communism, socialism, postmodernism, identity politics, intersectionality, and critical (race) theory are good ways to think about history, and good ways to combat injustice. Actually, these ideas all tend to intolerable totalitarianism. Together, these ideas are responsible for over 100 million murders. Think of that: don't you think there's something wrong with ideas that are that murderous?

3.a. Antiracism can only exist within the framework of identity politics, critical theory, and intersectionality. This is one we're seeing a lot recently. And I flatly deny this one as much as any of the others in this list. First of all, you must define racism carefully. I define racism as the sin of partiality applied to people based on their people group (as the concept of race itself certainly has no scientific basis). There can be such a thing as "systemic racism", where the system itself treats people differently based on their people group, but I would argue that the systemically racist aspects of the US system today have more to do with Affirmative Action and welfare and Planned Parenthood than anything else. I would certainly deny that capitalism is inherently racist, but I would argue that all forms of Marxism, based as they are on the erroneous doctrine of evolution, are inherently racist. Affirmative Action and welfare and Planned Parenthood are most definitely racist. Nothing has held down people with more melanin in their skin more than government welfare (more on that in 4.b. below) and Planned Parenthood.

4. Solving societal problems is largely the job of the government. Um, no. The government's job is to solve a few very specific problems: national defense, making and enforcing and interpreting just laws. And I'm willing to pay taxes to support roads. Otherwise, the government's job is to get out of my way so that I can largely try to solve my own problems, my family can solve its problems, and so that the church can help as well. At the root, the government should be absolutely the last resort to solving any problem, mainly because the government (especially the US government) was actually designed to be terrible at solving problems! The Founding Fathers of the US knew what they were doing, both in setting up so many checks and balances to prevent a lot of power from getting concentrated in one place, and in locating the US capital in a swamp so that people wouldn't want to be there very long. The best guarantee of freedom is a limited government from which the people can protect themselves if necessary.

4.a. The government should be in the business of educating people, because we need educated people for a good society. This is related to 4, which is why I've labeled it 4.a. What we have seen is that government education, particularly the near-monopoly that public education in the US is, is one of the greatest instruments for perpetuating totalitarian ideas ever conceived by man. The public schools and the public universities now do more harm than good by spewing out their Marxist garbage. Students are not taught how to think, they are taught what to think: that Marx was actually a good person, and that his ideas are the best way to solve the world's problems (inevitably defined as inequities or disparities among people groups). 

4.b. The government should be in the business of helping people out of poverty. If you read the book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor ... And Yourself, by Corbett and Fikkert, which I have read, you realize just how complex the problem of poverty is, and how utterly inadequate the "solution" of throwing money at it is. The government is totally unable to solve this problem. In the US, the first amendment (with which I certainly fully agree) alone makes the kind of solution the authors speak of absolutely impossible for the government to do. This means that all the liberal policies starting with LBJ onwards are not only completely ineffective, they hurt the people who advocate those policies, and they hurt the people the policies are supposed to help! Now I would also add that the typical conservative approach of simply getting out of the way will work for some people, but not all. So I'm not saying the conservative approach is complete, but it will work for some people. The liberal policies work for no one. What we need here is for the church to step in and do what it should have been doing all along: helping poor people by coming alongside them, as Corbett and Fikkert have shown us.

4.c. The government should be in the business of solving COVID. This is the job of the medical community, and of people in general acting wisely. Do the people advocating these draconian lockdowns and mask mandates actually think people want to get the virus and perhaps die from it? If so, I would simply claim that such people are radically mistaken, and out of touch with reality. People always act in their own perceived best interests: that's the Law of Human Action. 

 5. Logic and careful definitions and good statistics are outdated ideas. This idea goes back a ways - all the way to "... William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience." - Ideas Have Consequences, p. 3. We absolutely must get back to good logic, careful definitions, consistency, and well-done statistics (I would argue with the new causal revolution folded in). 

6. Disparities imply discrimination. Thomas Sowell has taught us that this variant of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is no more valid than its parent fallacy. Just because Asians do better academically than Americans with pale skin doesn't mean that the Americans are discriminated against. There are all kinds of causal questions bound up with why disparities exist, and not all of them are bad. The liberals (and particularly the critical theories and intersectionality folks) would have you believe that if people with more melanin in their skin don't do as well in college as people with less melanin in their skin, that therefore there must be discrimination against those with more melanin. Sowell has effectively destroyed that argument in the book to which I linked; I would highly recommend that book, which I have read. 

7. Christianity has been tried and found wanting. This one is, of course, older than the hills (literally). Chesterton's refutation cannot be bettered: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." And this is really the most important of all the bad ideas I've listed. For it is in the Bible that we find the refutation of these bad ideas; perhaps not specifically, but we get wise principles that guide us. We need God the Holy Spirit to show us what the Bible means, for sure.