"You're too stupid to know what's best for you. I'm from the government; I know better; and I'm here to straighten
you out...for your own good."
Insulting, eh? The essence of everything we, as Americans hate, right?
Well, comes now a $95 tome titled--are you ready?--Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.
No, I am not making this up.
The book's product description on Amazon notes that, in America,
to respect
autonomy is often understood to be the chief way to bear witness to the
intrinsic value of persons. In this book, Sarah Conly rejects the idea
of autonomy as inviolable.... Thus in many cases it would advance our
["our"?] goals more effectively if government were to prevent us ["us"?]
from acting in accordance with our ["our"?] decisions. Her argument
challenges widely held views of moral agency, democratic values and the
public/private distinction.
Quoth the author from her own faculty page listing:
I argue that
autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your ["your"?] own
decisions, is overrated—that the common high evaluation of the
importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we [including her?] are
much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence
from psychology and behavioral economics that we [her too?] are often
very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we
[her too?] need the help of others—and in particular, of government
regulation—to keep us [ditto] from going wrong.
This apology
for naked totalitarianism was written by one Sarah Conly, an
assistant professor of (what else?) philosophy at Bowdoin College--at least nominally an American institution of Higher Learning. A wet
dream for dictatorially minded "progressives," her book naturally earned the
honor of publication by the Cambridge University Press, and spotlight
review treatment in the New York Review of Books--the reviewer being
none other than Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama's very own former
Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs.
Prof. Sunstein, it should be noted, is author of his
own nanny-state tribute to technocratic governmental manipulation of the citizenry: NUDGE: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Sayeth
Sunstein, on his own book's Amazon product page: "We think
that it's time for institutions, including government, to become much
more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life
easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will
make their lives better."
Why, how kind and thoughtful of him!
Of course, those writing and enforcing government regulations (and
books like these) are NEVER part of the "we" who are irrational, the
"we" who are making so many "wrong" choices. Oh no: The progressive
nanny statists are always the epitome of uber-rationality, higher
education, dazzling expertise, superior taste, and sound judgment in all
things. Yes, what a wonderful utopia we would inhabit...if only us
rubes would surrender to them our damned autonomy. Who needs that Bill
of Rights with such technocrats to (their words) "coerce" and "nudge"
us?
When I say that the ultimate objective of
"progressives" is to impose totalitarian control over every aspect of
our lives--that they are motivated by an unquenchable lust for
unlimited power--some of you undoubtedly think I'm wildly exaggerating.
But
how, then, to deny their own words, as they spell it out so clearly and
ominously?
(A hat tip to my friend Bob Hessen for calling my attention to this, and
you also might give Ann Althouse's brief blog about it a look.)
As both a nonfiction author and a bestselling novelist, I've pondered certain puzzles for decades.
Why
do people find certain ideologies and philosophies appealing, but not
others? Why do we so often hold to our points of view dogmatically,
intractable to all facts, reason, and logic? What is the source of
dreams? Why do certain common myths seem to be indelible and universal,
across cultures and throughout history? Why does music conjure in us
mental imagery? What is the key to the kind of motivational commitment
that impels some people to face and triumph over incredible odds and
obstacles? Why do we find certain people, at first glance,
overpoweringly attractive, and others repulsive? Why do we love some
books and movies, and hate others?
These and many other mysteries
of the human mind and personality are central to the concerns of the
artist, psychologist, historian, or person plying any field of
communication or persuasion. But is there anything that links together
all of these apparently disparate things?
In his brilliant and engrossing The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall reveals the central, essential, and seminal role played by story -- or "Narrative," as I've called it
-- in human thought, action, and culture. Moving with seemingly
effortless creative ease from riveting personal anecdotes to abstract
sociological theories, from baffling historical phenomena to intriguing
psychological experiments, Gottschall offers a key to understanding much
that has baffled man throughout the ages.
For decades, I had
believed that philosophical ideas and ideologies reigned paramount in
the culture. But over time, events and experience began to collide with
that assumption. I began to wonder, for example, why people holding the
same ideas, nominally, could live so differently -- and why
some philosophies seemed to have more cultural traction and durability
than others. I was introduced to the extraordinary power of stories when
reading the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell. Aspiring to write
fiction, I also became fascinated by how timeless, transcultural myths
found their way into fiction and film. Building upon Campbell, "script
doctor" Christopher Vogler even uses mythological archetypes to help
craft hugely popular movies, and -- in his book The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers -- to school authors in the craft of fiction-writing. (Let me add that I employed some of these concepts in writing HUNTER;
the novel's success is at least in part a testament to their validity
and usefulness.) While conducting research on a nonfiction book project
about the roots of the contemporary environmentalist movement, I also
came to realize how certain ancient, mythic storylines served as the
basis for modern ideologies and major religions. (Gottschall himself
demonstrates this latter truth with his sobering account of the career
of Adolph Hitler, who was inspired and guided decisively by the heroic
operatic dramas of composer Richard Wagner.)
The Storytelling Animal
touches upon all of this, and much, much more, drawing the kinds of
interdisciplinary and personal connections that most of us would never
make in a hundred years. Yet even so, I think Gottschall has barely
scratched the surface of the far-flung implications of narratives and
stories in our lives. To take just one example, I believe our current
president has understood intuitively, and for years, the power of
crafting a compelling "personal narrative" in order to launch and propel
his political career to wildly improbable success -- and how he relied
on crafting a similar "morality play" about himself and his opponents in order to win re-election in 2012. But that is just one of the important implications to be drawn from this extraordinary work.
Let
me add that Gottschall himself is a wonderful writer and storyteller. A
book that could have been an imposing intellectual chore and bore never
flags for a moment in holding the reader and keeping him turning pages.
So as not to distract or interrupt his own narrative, he sequesters a
formidable array of endnotes and a vast, impressive bibliography
unobtrusively, after the text.
I love books like this -- books
that upend my previous understanding, books that augment my grasp of the
world, books that draw breathtakingly unexpected links among apparently
unrelated things. For all these reasons, I can't recommend The Storytelling Animal strongly enough. A joy to read and ponder, it's the most intellectually fertile nonfiction work I've read in years.
