rock doctor speaks

I avoided blogging during our two months in the states, because I didn't really have anything to say. And I've avoided blogging since we got back to Thailand a month ago, because my wife usually says everything better.

For my dad's birthday in October, I set up for him a blog. I told him it could be any blog he wants (he's a hell of an unpublished poet), but encouraged him to take on (and work to elevate the discourse of) climate change. A year ago he told me he'd be willing to believe in man-accelerated global warming if the science was there, but that the misbehavior of climate change scientists and the general mindlessness of the media discourse about it was keeping him skeptical.

It's obviously a complicated issue, but one that's generally discussed with the same sense of self-reinforcing sneeriness as Yankees v Red Sox (or, say, anything on Fox News v Huffington Post) — an opinion reinforced with gusto by the recent climategate stuff. I was hoping that the thoughtful, open-minded way he usually describes his own global warming investigations could help.

dave, when he was cool

A month later, his first post is up, and the chosen subject is.. well.. something. But it's entertaining and random, and what we can expect in the future from this reader, thinker, scientist, author and poet.

So welcome to blogland, Dad. And if you can find the time to write, then I should too.

David Brooks speaks to Americans as if they were adults*

I'll read every column David Brooks writes, and this is why:

In the age of Rush and Hannity, here's Brooks explaining his careful opposition to the economic approach currently being taken by Obama, without belittling, demonizing or polarizing those he's criticizing.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell.

These writers - some left, some right - had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

...

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.
...

If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

Humble. Introspective. Respectful. Intellectually curious. Willing to be wrong. Aware of the limits of his understanding about the world. THIS IS HOW POLITICAL DISCOURSE SHOULD BE.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Trey for the link.



*To steal from Jon Stewart. Seriously.. quit watching cable news, folks.