Some will ask why we should listen to people like Herb Gintis (see previous post) since he has been so wrong in the past? Until the mid 1980s he was a Marxist. I've written about this before.

This is a subject dealt with so many times here that I've taken to using the turn of phrase "cognitive kaleidoscope" as if everyone knows what it refers to. You may not if you haven't been following the extended discussion, but you can get the gist of it just from the words. But I think that Prometheus has missed the mark a bit by not giving sufficient weight to the fact that the apostates he cites weren't careful thinkers who formed pragmatic and provisional conclusions based on the evidence available, and then altered those conclusions in response to new and better evidence. They are dark-siders who took up arms to fight for a cause based on skimpy evidence floating in a lake of ideology. They are doubly defective in that the quality of their intelligence is questionable, and they launched crusades based on these defective analyses. They lacked the quality of great scientists for tolerating ambiguity, of being able to proceed and hold the mark while continuing to question even their own acts.

That's also a subject dealt with many times here. The Bernard DeVoto essay The Ex-Communists, though many years old, speaks to this issue.

Embracing communism, like religious conversion, is an act of the total personality. It is packed with private and even unconscious as well as rational and objective reasons, with emotion as well as intelligence. What the apostates have been saying shows that frequently intelligence played only a small part in it. Yet it played some part and they are eager to show that it was decisive in their apostasy, their repudiation of communism. I propose to discuss only their intelligence. We will agree that the American intellectual who became a Communist was, typically, a generous, warmhearted man, an idealist deeply disturbed by the catastrophe of the modern world and deeply concerned for the betterment of mankind. But how good was his thinking?

Moore's Greenpeace activities fit this pattern of emotion ascendant over intelligence as do Fukuyama's serial conversions. Earlier posts discussed former Earth First! activist Dan Dagget, now reformed and an advocate for human management of environments rather than human exclusion from them, and founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Great Britain Frank Furedi, using the name Frank Richards, now considered to be on the libertarian right wing.

There's a kerfuffle today about a Brendan O'Neill piece in The Spectator which says, in part:

Of course, Marx wanted to destroy capitalism because he thought it didn’t go far enough in remaking the world in man’s image and organising society according to man’s needs and desire. Today’s sorry excuses for Marxists and anti-capitalists think capitalism has gone too far in its development of the forces of production and encouragement of consumerism. I’m with Marx. Let’s replace capitalism with something even more dazzlingly cocky and human-centric. But let’s first deal with the luddites, locavores and eco-feudalists who have given anti-capitalism a bad name.

The objection to O'Neill's words - and for those of all of the old RCP gang - is that they have been wrong before, just like the others mentioned above.

Seriously, given the manifold failures of state central planning, and the various incoherent attempts by some thinkers to fashion "market socialism" (another oxymoron), it is not really quite good enough for a chap like O'Neill to pose as some sort of hip and clever critic of anti-capitalists, then to claim that he is still a Marxist, but then to leave a bloody great black hole of explanation of what his sort of society would look like.

This was triggered by a Stephan Pollard hissy fit:

There is something deeply annoying about being lectured by people whose every belief has been exposed as intellectual fraud, and turned over with the collapse of Marxism, but who are now 'more capitalist than the capitalists'. Their successor organisation, the Institute of Ideas, ought to be treated as the front organisation for a particularly deceitful brand of communists that it is. Instead it is a treated by people who should know better as if it was merely a sparky progenitor of debate.

They are. They do spark debate, just as Gintis has done, and we should listen because, as Gintis noted, "there are problems to be solved in order to enhance the lives of citizens, and it is our job to discover and publicize solutions to these problems". While doing so we need "the quality of great scientists for tolerating ambiguity, of being able to proceed and hold the mark while continuing to question even their own acts." All of these flawed thinkers that I have posted about - Gintis, Daggett, Moore, Furedi etc. - are former partisans, dark siders who failed to hold the mark and so slipped over into belief, like bad scientists who fall in love with their theories and stop thinking clearly. We can still listen to them and spark off their current ideas so long as we do not lose the ability to tolerate ambiguity. We can take pragmatic and provisional positions based on available evidence while maintaining our humility and sense of humor about our own inadequacies. When better evidence is found we can embrace it gleefully even though it overturns our current views. We can anticipate such evidence, though not predict the time of its arrival or its nature. I know that I'm wrong, and that my future self will laugh at me, again, and this helps avoid mental ossification.