Saturday, July 31

Cherries! Pick 'em while they're hot!

Postmodernism encourages people to sift through culture (art, literature, history, etc.) to find something about race, gender (which usually seems to mean something connected with women or gays), or class, or any combination thereof. Then they hold up the handful of examples they find, using them to prove their argument that these various groups have been unjustly oppressed. It's not that I disagree that they've been oppressed, but to me, that's only a tiny part of what most culture is about, so I'm distressed by the way they cherry-pick examples to prove their case.

So it's disheartening to see Bryan Caplan's evaluation of Roderick Long's "Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism" (pdf) as "an amazingly interesting and learned paper". While Long is right about Laozi not being much of a libertarian, his argument that the Confucians are much more supportive of libertarian principles seems to completely ignore the fact that Confucians are far more interested in discussions of morality, and not in a way that generally concerns libertarian principles.

Meanwhile, I'm writing a literature paper now. Writing about literature almost inevitably seems to encourage cherry-picking.

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