Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "spiked"
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I don't think I've ever been on here at "Spiked" before: I don't know your politics but i want to comment on this interesting bit at 25:00 mins, where a link is made between Christianity and Progressivist politics in terms of the view that both share a structure of reason that allows its supporters to just replace making judgement in responsibility, with following a kind of deduction. That is replacing reasoning in a judgment in a situation, with reasoning as the subsumption of a description of the situation under a rule or law. The former type of judgement requires experience wisdom and the acquired ability to aesthetically discern a situation maybe its truth, the later though in the real world is not a simple deduction of a case under a rule but rather the tactical trialgualtion of the description of the case and the rules appealed to along with the forward looking rational commitments on possible future cases. This tactics approach i think goes back beyond Socialism and Marx to Hegel who replaced the conflict with the other model for Kant's epistemology or intentionality model. The later is not simple, far from it, it is very difficult to work out how best to tactic a description and appeal to a rule along with future possible risks of contradiction in inconsistency. But this is very different from attempting to judge situation as it is in itself.
What ahs become tactical approach to reason under rules and conventions then started off as Natural Law. It well set out by Aquinas as deduction, but he thought errors in deduction were due to vice and different cultural context (he gives the example of the Germans). So Aquinas recognises a gap, but not i think that this gap means a space for cynical and self interested tactics. People think these days that politics is all about tactics and this is where intelligence fits in, the virtue of clever in the pursuit of self interests. In fact this is too clever for most on the left that just read the answer from an appropriate paper or progressive guru. The context here is Natural Law as Universal Human Rights. Because of it's legal context and model then, the kind of tactics people train in is law. Both Natural Law Christianity and Human Rights Law, share a similar structure of reason and logic, but whereas the Christian tradition sees the gap as a problem of casuistry, the modern Human Rights tradition sees he gap as a space for freedom and tactical affordance for self interest.
The link between the Natural Law, and Human Rights law , is thin in the extreme, theology is a almost opposite cosmology and image of man, to the scientific cosmology and its casual behavioural self interested image of man. (See Wilfred Sellars The Manifest and Scientific Images of Man and John McDowell "On Sellars Thomism)
Only a burocrat in the extreme would really think these two are cosmologically and humanly isomorphic, but from the context of an office it might seem that the day to day practices are similar and one can distort into the other. Indeed the church can end up like a legalism of tactics too. but these are very different notions of human freedom here. I'm not a psychologist but its seems the Natural Law Human Rights tradition has absorbed some of Aquinas on the gap, in that errored judgement is a kind of result of vice, if the error is by a friend then its a vice of stupidity, if the error is by an enemy its due to vice effecting their epistemology. Academic types fear above all else being thought of, or spoken of as stupid. Their enemies fear charges of the vice of racism and the "punishment" or "cure" by Cognitive behavioural psychology sciences.
Maybe the Cognitive Behavioural therapist is more like a Nun then.
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