Logical reasoning v. relational reasoning

Thoughts on some school board clashes

There were a medley of interesting stories yesterday about Pride-related clashes at schools and school-board meetings, usually pitting school boards + progressive activists against Muslim and/or immigrant concerned parents… which makes for a little mental anguish for the progressive activist you’d imagine. But especially during the holy feast of Pride, LGBTism must trump all. Andy Ngo had some remarkable footage from a protest in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Muslim families are chanting “protect all children” and hold signs that say things like “respect and protect our religious freedoms”. The woman on team rainbow over there is saying “secular schools, secular schools, secular schools” over and over again which is… fascinating. It’s like we’re rebooting the Protestant v. Roman Catholic clashes from a century ago, only now it’s LGBTism v. Islam or something.

But it also made me think… your worldview is a religion. Their worldview is… well, they aren’t really even conscious of having a worldview, they just hold to the Obviously Correct and Progressive Thinking on the matter and you’re a backward religious person. But any extraterrestrial just showing up on the scene would observe what seems to be a symmetric situation - two sides in conflict, each with their symbols and most important beliefs about the world. Looks an awful lot like two religions in conflict to me.

(In a truly liberal society, such clashes would make a great case for school choice, by the way. Clearly we have some pretty serious divides in the population.)

Logical reasoning v. relational reasoning

Via Wesley Yang, from a Montgomery County councilwoman, I believe speaking at the same event.

(In theory, they’re against ideological colonialism. In practice, of course Muslim children must be indoctrinated into the Western progressive worldview. No opt-outs!)

I read that and I thought… this is a woman who is not engaged in what we would traditionally call “thinking through the issue”. Or, you might say, she is not engaged in logical reasoning, she is engaged in “relational reasoning”. She has been taught that the Bad People hold to viewpoint X and so, without doing any additional thinking about the topic (indeed, the goal of the teaching is to make sure no additional thinking happens), she had better support Not X. And now she has had it thrown in her face that some people who are not the Bad People also seem to hold viewpoint X, and it’s causing some uncomfortable sparking insider her head.

I’ve been engaged on Twitter on this topic the last few days, wrote some replies to some prominent people and so got many replies myself, and reading those replies I did think… the Left doesn’t bother to actually argue for its positions. Rather it polices the bounds of acceptable opinion by deploying insult and shame against anyone who deviates out of bounds. And part of that strategy is, “you know white supremacists think that. You don’t want to be like them, do you?”(But what if white supremacists also think apples are a healthy and tasty snack?)

Also yesterday, the absurd SPLC, which has long included the civil rights organization Alliance Defending Freedom on their list of “hate groups” as if these mild-mannered lawyers are akin to the KKK, added some parents’ rights groups like Parents Defending Education to their “hate map”. Why did they do that? They do it so people who “think” through matters via relational reasoning will, soon as they hear “someone from Parents Defending Education is at the meeting”, will immediately “know” to think “everything they say is bad and should be discounted without further thought”.

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