To follow up on my last post...
It is said that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather indifference. Two kinds of passion differ less with each other than they both do with a lack of passion.
In the same way, the opposite of a left-wing polemic is not a right-wing polemic, but rather a good book. Two kinds of ignorance differ less with each other than they both do with wisdom.
At Ohio State's main campus, April was usually the time for protests: The weather was nice and thousands of students had senioritis. Marches would be held, demands would be presented, promises would be made, and all would be forgotten by September.
But at OSU-Mansfield? I never thought they had it in them.
Scott Savage is entitled to hold his opinions in peace if they do not interfere with his conduct as a librarian. Unless there is more to this story than I have seen, his actions were hardly harassment.
As a librarian myself, though, I am disappointed that Savage chose such a weak polemic to recommend to freshmen. Was that really the best he could do?
Colleges should introduce their students to viewpoints that challenge mainstream values, but should also ensure that those viewpoints have intellectual, philosophical, literary, or historical heft to them.
Why waste student time — why waste anyone's time — with Kupelian's shrill ravings? Why, when Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is available? Or Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism? Or Pope John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope? Or, as Savage is a Quaker, the pastoral letters of George Fox?
That the Savage case has become a "conservative" rallying point is a sign of how weak a grasp many "conservatives" have of conservatism. Life has more to offer than fear, anger, hate, and paranoia.
President Bush made a characteristic error this morning while speaking to the press:
[O]n Friday I stood up and said, I don't appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld; he's doing a fine job, I strongly support him. […] I listen to all voices, but mine is the final decision. And Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He's not only transforming the military, he's fighting a war on terror. He's helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense.
Actually, the President does not "decide what is best". He decides what he wants.
And what he wants is not always for the best.
Tertullian considers flight from persecution as an imperfect, but very criminal, apostasy, as an impious attempt to elude the will of God, etc. etc. He has written a treatise on this subject, which is filled with the wildest fanaticism and the most incoherent declamation. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that Tertullian did not suffer martyrdom himself.
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XVI.
Many of today's "conservatives" are not conservative.
Their reaction to the fall of Saddam three years ago was a telling case in point. Rather than burning with radicality and hubris, wouldn't remembering the wisdom of Edmund Burke have been the conservative thing to do?
If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious Pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive leniety of the government, had at length provoked the Divine justice.
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XVI.
The Bush administration believed that the Iraqi war would be beneficial in the long run because the Iraqi people would accept an imposed government led by Ahmed Chalabi.
The administration now believes that an Iranian war would be beneficial in the long run because the Iranian people would accept an imposed government that would forgo developing nuclear weapons.
Do President Bush's people do any kind of thinking other than wishful thinking?
President Bush carried every state of the old Confederacy in 2004, most by substantial margins. White people in those states have generally supported the President's Iraq policies by greater margins than people in the rest of the country.
Which is odd, because most white Southerners are familiar with some portrayal or other of Reconstruction, which was the 12-year period (1865-1877) after the American Civil War when federal martial law was either a reality or a plausible threat throughout the defeated South.
Given that familiarity, why did so many white Southerners think it would be a "cakewalk" for Iraq to be invaded to free one people from the persecution of another? Or for it to be occupied by federal troops convinced of their moral superiority and with no understanding of or sympathy for the local mores? Or for the right of self-government to be first withheld completely, then granted only subject to military sufferance? Or for the existing elites to be disenfranchised in favor of carpetbagger exiles?
What did they think would happen? Did they think there would be no resistance; no equivalent of the original Ku Klux Klan? Did they think there would be no lynch mobs or brutal lawlessness? Do they think there will be no lasting bitterness; no "Iraq will rise again"?
A minor buzzword on the right wing of the blogosphere has been "Jacksonian", used to describe populists who support the occupation of Iraq.
But anyone who is familiar with Andrew Jackson will know how bitterly he resented the British occupation of his native South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. Jackson blamed the rigors of the occupation for the deaths of his family. For the final 62 years of his life, he carried the scars he received from the sabre of a British officer whose boots he refused to clean, and his hatred of Great Britain never died.
Do the people who call themselves Jacksonians see the possibility that the American occupation of Iraq will prove as lastingly counter-productive as the British occupation of the nascent United States?
[Christians] refused to take any active part in the civil administration or the military defense of the empire. […] This indolent, or even criminal disregard to the public welfare, exposed them to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans, who very frequently asked, what must be the fate of the empire, attacked on every side by barbarians, if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect?
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XV.
How often is it the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign! Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects.
-- attributed to the Roman Emperor Diocletian by Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XIII.