This article doesn’t imply nihilism or the view that no one should ever make a value judgment. Rather, the implication is that some such judgments are unreflective while others are reflective and therefore ultimately paradoxical and self-negating. When I say the elites are better than the masses in certain respects, I’m assuming the paradoxical sense of “better,” one based on pantheism, cosmicism, transhumanism, the postmodern deflation of modern metanarratives, an aesthetic reconstruction of morality, the tragic heroism of existential authenticity, and so on.
Precisely because of the complexity of that more viable but deflationary account of values and ideals, though, I don’t really say that artists are simply better than the sell-out entertainers, charlatans, and demagogues. Often, I just make the descriptive point that there’s some such difference between those classes, and I leave it to the reader to evaluate them. My assessment would require bringing up those complexities which would often take me too far afield.
But yes, I do make value judgments, and I try to make them consistent with the whole of my philosophy. My ideals and values are grim, not complacent or simplistic because in the back of my mind, roughly speaking, are cosmicism, pantheism, existentialism, and postindustrial cynicism.
I agree that conservatives might be more anti-intellectual than liberals, at least in their rhetoric and policies. But I’m not challenging knowledge. I’m contrasting unenlightened and enlightened perspectives on knowledge. None of what I say implies that science is on an equal footing with pseudoscience. If you want to talk about science, I’d bring in pragmatism.
I agree that there’s low art and high art. But the aesthetic perspective I explore entails that everything is just art, given pantheism and the Promethean/Faustian/Satanic (progressive) revolt against the wilderness.
Perhaps our main disagreement is that your defense of liberalism seems to me more tribal than mine would be. I share many liberal progressive values, and I’d justify them in existential, aesthetic, and transhuman terms. When I put on my cosmicist hat, though, I can’t help but deflate liberalism too. It’s a matter of viewing the human enterprise as the cosmos would if it could.
The faults of liberalism and conservatism are quite different. One contradiction in late-modern liberalism is that we liberals claim to be more high-minded than we typically are. Planet-trashing consumerism is part of the progress we act on, but it’s not part of the progress we have in mind. That’s hypocrisy.
And a contradiction in classic liberalism is again that the intentions behind the defense of capitalism depart from the effects of that economic system. Capitalism was justified on humanistic grounds of maximizing freedom, but the laissez-faire variety ends up being plutocratic, exploitative, and oppressive of the majority that lacks wealth.
