Don’t judge ideas by the characteristics of their proponents

A friend of mine lamented that he despises “Zeitgeist”, a terrible, hackneyed, and deeply flawed conspiracy theory documentary about the origin of Christianity and its implications for contemporary global politics and international banking (yeah) , on the grounds that it gives the detractors of religion a bad name. Indeed, a reasonable atheist will likely agree that in some aspects the movie is correct in its general spirit, namely, that it's fine to think critically about Christianity. But the makers of Zeitgeist, and more importantly, its majority viewership are uneducated quacks who have no devotion whatsoever to the concepts of reason, logic, and education. As an atheist and a disciple of reason and scientific inquiry, one must loath the company of such people. As an atheist myself I would prefer the company of intelligent Christians to the slow swimmers in the atheist gene pool.

I feel this way about libertarianism too. There are lots of really stupid libertarians. Many of them are members of the Tea Party. Others, militias with anti-government sentiment; furthermore, you can find many weird pseudo-libertarian ideas among the ranks of the conspiracy blogosphere. I’ve long been sceptical of arguments for the abolition of the U.S. federal reserve (a position that is actually well articulated by some economists and libertarian thinkers) almost entirely because I’m so turned off by Fed conspiracy theories. They have, in a sense, poisoned the well. Indeed, I cringe every time I hear “libertarianism” and “Michelle Bachmann” mentioned in the same sentence. As I have written before, even the wacky Ron Paul is far from a shining beacon of libertarian intellect. Certainly no match for his liberal equivalents, like Bill Clinton, or even lesser Conservatives like Newt Gingrich.

It is deeply unfortunate that ideas are often judged by the characteristics of their followers. The two should not be conflated. While it is tempting to blame crazy animal rights lunatics who go after grad students doing science experiments (etc) for discrediting the very sensible ideas of animal rights, to use another common example, this is not sufficient. If you consider yourself to be a reasonable, open minded person, I thus make the following suggestion. If you come across a new idea or a new argument, even if the person making the argument is a little nuts, try and judge the idea as if it were coming from someone who you respected. To conflate idea and messenger is to commit an error of logical reasoning: argumentum ad hominem, or an attack on the man, not the point.