A self-described leftist writing in to Andrew Sullivan summed it up well:
[Y]ou see classic conservatism as the defense of liberty from brutality through doubt, caution, common sense and rigorous self-examination[.]
Freud asked, "What do women really want?" It is the kind of question people ask when they do not want to know.
-- Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, pg. 150.
I used to tease Frank about the way he opposed the state while becoming obsessed with it. He thought of nothing else, day or night. It had even greater power over him than he thought it was trying to get. Once one defines oneself primarily by opposition to one other thing, the essential surrender is made. One resembles those Christians who defined themselves in terms of opposition to the devil. The devil himself became their operative god, the thing that filled their thoughts and limited their actions. The obsessed person longs for some Ahab showdown with his own white whale. He grows to resemble the cruel thing he opposes, becomes its antitype or photographic negative[…]
-- Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, pg. 59.
We can learn a great deal about something without learning of something; we can perceive the outline with remarkable clarity without perceiving the essence; we can see how a thing is seen without feeling how that thing is felt.
Maybe Fox News knows something about liberals. Maybe atheists know something about Christians. Maybe Americans know something about Iran. Maybe Ohio State fans know something about Ann Arbor. Maybe I know something about a thousand things.
But how important are the things known when compared to the things unknown? And in the absence of the things unknown, what worth exists in conclusions drawn from the things known?
Martha Nussbaum's review of Harvey Mansfield's book Manliness is a demonstration of what can make a book review worthwhile. She explores not just the intellectual failings of a book purported to be an intellectual work, but goes on to examine how those failings could plausibly have been a deliberate attempt to increase Mansfield's appeal and marketability to a certain audience.
Nussbaum shows how the image of "Harvey Mansfield" differs from the reality of Harvey Mansfield. That sort of exposé is necessary but too rare.
Image is nearly empty when detached from reality. An intellectual image so detached can do little more than provide a brief thrill of knowingness that seems like knowledge before you stop to think about it.
Humility is a virtue because it restrains us to the hard work of reality when the easy charm of image tempts us. And when people are not humble, as with Professor Mansfield, sometimes it is in the public interest to humble them.
In a recent post, Ross Douthat at The American Scene asks his readers to accept (without evidence) his characterization of the new book by Ramesh Ponnuru as smart and worthy of serious debate.
Douthat begins his post with a series of questionable presumptions about people who disagree with him. He distorts Jon Stewart's interview of Ponnuru. He expresses his "genuine curiosity" about the views of people he insults and belittles throughout his post.
All of which makes me wonder why I should accept Douthat's word about what is smart and serious.
The book itself? It was written by a writer for the National Review (granted, he is their best writer) and is published by Regnery Publishing. The book's jacket copy begins with:
Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?
If you look at their agenda they are.
In any given year, more than 100,000 titles are published in the English language. If I were to read two books a week, and limited my reading to books published within the year, I would be able to read only 1 in 1,000 of those titles.
Why in the world would I waste my time with a book that seems so unpromising?
Sorry, Ross. I think I'll pass.
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.
From an article in the once-august Times of London:
Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. “The early human beings in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and they were forced to hunt big game,” he said. “The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in southeast Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat which are essential for brain development.”
He added that differences in intelligence across Britain could be attributed to bright people moving to London over hundreds of years. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, higher than Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. People living in London and the South East average 102. “Once in the capital they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations.”
Let me see if I understand this…
In Europe, living in the relatively mild climate of the southeast retards IQ.
But in Britain, living in the relatively mild climate of the southeast enhances IQ.
RedState is a prominent Republican group blog. On consecutive days this week, it featured:
Ben Domenech is a hollow man, notable for glorifying the military without serving and marriage without wedding. His writings (the parts that were not plagiarized) are exemplars of a style of punditry that treats the different as inferior, the exotic as risible, and the uncomfortable as perverse; a style suited for the immature, the inbred, and the inexperienced.
I started to leave the conservative movement in the mid-'90s because so much of what passed for thought and discussion within it was done in this style. Almost everyone cited the same canon and came to the same narrow range of conclusions. Few were willing to engage (as opposed to mock) non-conservatives and their ideas.
And that's the fatal flaw of the conservatives of my generation: They talk only amongst themselves. The graying conservatives who built the movement had to appeal to all kinds of people in order to build it. Conservatives in their 20s and 30s — the Jonah Goldbergs and Ben Domenechs — simply can't do that, and I would guess that they don't see the need to do that because they take for granted the power and permanence of the conservative movement.
RedStaters are not going to inherit the conservative movement. RedStaters are going to watch helplessly as the movement recedes back to the fringe from whence it came.
[I]f morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
-- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg. 206.
The Multnomah County Library has a set of the Everyman's Library six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Volume 1 has seen hard use: The cover bent and frayed at the corners, the fabric threadbare in places, the spine lettering illegible because mostly worn off.
Four of the final five volumes are in pristine condition.
The distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports. Heterodox opinions within the Soviet system always ran the risk of being condemned as subversive. […] [O]ne-party states have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to intelligence analysis, since analysts usually fear to tell the Party hierarch what it does not want to hear.
-- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, pg. 555.
Last week, the national secretary of the College Republicans said the following about one of his college classmates (a Democrat) in a newspaper interview [bolding mine]:
I applaud Mr. Houx for his service, just as I applaud any other soldier who is brave enough to take up arms in defense of this country. I find it troubling, however, that one of the most vocal opponents of our president, our country and our mission in Iraq has chosen to fight for a cause he claims is wrong. Mr. Houx's rhetoric against the war on terror places him in agreement with the most radical fringes of the Democratic Party, and I am left to question his logic and motivation.
Yesterday, a contributor to the RedState blog wrote [bolding mine]:
We should not underestimate that "outing" Valerie "Undercover Brother" Plame was a bad thing. But, let's keep this in some perspective.
[…]
Next, let us just keep in mind that Valerie Plame was recalled from the field during the Aldrich Ames mess and she never re-entered the field. Let's also keep in mind that no one, no one, has been charged with outing an undercover agent.
Yeah, it may be a tragedy that Robert Novak's reporting will get Valerie Plame a great book deal and an appointment in Hillary Clinton's administration while undermining NOC's who help appoint their husband to go on visits to Niger and come back to beat up the administration by distorting the President's 17 words, but it would also be a tragedy if we did not deal honestly with this issue in the media.
Why make a pious proclamation, and then negate it immediately afterwards? Why not figure out your true feelings and thoughts, and then say something?
I once read that translating a passage into a foreign language can be an excellent test of how well you understand that passage.
Something tells me that the following (from the Macedonian Press Agency) made no sense in the original Greek, either:
Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis in statements he made after the formal doxology at the church of St. Dimitrios in Thessaloniki today stressed that the morbid climate cultivated by certain circles will not stop the efforts underway and declared that the government will proceed with the reforms it has announced.
He stressed that the cries of those who want things to remain as they used to be will not have an intimidating or disorientating effect while he noted that the people condemn the practice of bulldozing everything.
Main opposition Socialist Party President Giorgos Papandreou stated that the people feel that Greece is stagnant in the rationale of political party interests, cliental relations, lack of transparency and vision.
Our favored [psychological] defenses become habitual mental manuevers. What has worked well in key moments, keeping anxiety under control with rewarding results, is likely to be tried again. Epstein, the novelist, found as a child that isolation fended off the sorrow of his father's death; that same cutting off of feeling offers itself years later when he confronts the horrors of Holocaust. Anna Freud's patient, whose feelings were damaged by her father's scorn, grows up to be a sarcastic, scornful woman.
Successful defense becomes habit, habit molds style. […] We set bounds on the range of our thoughts and feelings, limit our freedom of perception and action, in order to feel at peace.
-- from Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman, pg. 131 [italics mine]
When I was a teenager, I was an avid reader of George Will. I liked the style of his writing; a style that seemed learned, authoritative, and acerbic; qualities to which I aspired.
Reading those columns from the 1980s now, though, I see a different side of that style: peevish, obtuse, strangled.
The difference? When I read those columns the first time, 20 years ago, I was wound very, very tight. I feared. Feared everything. I circumscribed my life. I thought I needed to protect myself.
Will's style resonated with my way of living. If I could be confident in my grasp of reason and tradition, and ground myself in those, then I would not need the self-confidence I did not have. And, as a bonus, I could see myself as a better person than people without as strong a grounding in philosophy and history (i.e., everyone around me at the time).
Habit molds style.
Thank God it can re-mold it later.
How does your style reflect you?
Paraphrased from "Logic and Conversation", an article by H. P. Grice:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required -- do not add any potentially distracting extraneous information.
3. Do not say what you believe to be false.
4. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
5. Avoid obscurity of expression.
6. Avoid ambiguity.
7. Be brief (avoid unnecessary words).
8. Be orderly.
…inspired by reading and participating in blog and Usenet arguments over the years.
Let's stipulate that there is a Subject A, and that to fully understand that subject, one needs to know 1000 things.
If Person X knows 100 of these things, then he understands enough to discuss the subject at length with some detail, but not enough to really understand the subject. He understands the subject better than Person Y, though, who knows only three of the 1000 things.
Then there's Person Z, who knows 100 things about Subject A, but a completely different 100 than Person X knows.
Now, a potential pitfall of getting into an argument is that it can harden your position on the subject being argued. And once you've hardened your mind, you're more likely to doubt any evidence that challenges the position you've taken and believe any evidence that supports it.
If Person X and Person Y argue, clearly Person X is the more knowledgeable of the two of them, and will probably "win" the argument. But does that mean Person X is right? After all, there are 900 things about the subject Person X doesn't know. And if Person X takes his victory in the argument to mean that he is right, and as a consequence hardens his mind against learning the 900 things he does not yet know, then is that really a victory?
If Person X and Person Z argue, how can they find the common ground they would need to engage each other in a discussion? They each see Subject A from a completely different angle, and, although each knows as much as the other about the subject, they don't recognize it. In the usual case, these arguments end with accusations that the other person is dishonest, deluded, ignorant, or nonsensical.
I believe that these problems can be solved at least in part by humility about the limits of our own knowledge and a willingness to ask the other person questions that would help illuminate their point of view. It's a harder path, and God knows I rarely take it myself, but I do think it's the only way to make the argument give off light rather than just heat. (With people who argue like this, though — and they are out there — there's not much you can do.)
What do y'all think?
I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just "grown" in response to myriads of individual human decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose hand it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as naturally as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer!
-- Herbert A. Simon, quoted by Philip Ball in Critical Mass (New York: FS&G, 2004), pg. 154.
From an interview with baseball statistics guru Bill James:
[Question: ] I have to ask you this. On an internet baseball fan site, I recently saw you quoted to the effect that veteran leadership had enabled the Red Sox to come back from down 0-3 in the ALCS. But, in that forum, the immediate response was to doubt your sincerity. Bill couldn't mean that! And these were people who held you in high regard. Are you resigned to your reputation at this point in time?
[Answer: ] Well, believe it or not, I don’t worry about my reputation in that sense. I’ll let that take care of itself.
This is probably a long-winded answer, but I’ll try to explain it this way.If I were in politics and presented myself as a Republican, I would be admired by Democrats [but] despised by my fellow Republicans. If I presented myself as a Democrat, I would [be] popular with Republicans but jeered and hooted by the Democrats.
I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world—a paradigm, if you will—and we need those, of course; you can’t get through the day unless you have some organized way of thinking about the world. But the problem is that the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by our theories—no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.
As in politics we have left and right—neither of which explains the world or explains how to live successfully in the world—in baseball we have the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the sabermetricians against the scouts, however you want to characterize it. I created a good part of the analytical paradigm that the statistical analysts advocate, and certainly I believe in that paradigm and I advocate it within the Red Sox front office. But at the same time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that paradigm.
It is one thing to build an analytical paradigm that leaves out leadership, hustle, focus, intensity, courage and self-confidence; it is a very, very different thing to say that leadership, hustle, courage and self-confidence do not exist or do not play a role on real-world baseball teams. The people who think that way. . .not to be rude, but they’re children. They may be 40-year-old children, they may be 70-year-old children, but their thinking is immature.
[Link courtesy of Daniel Drezner.]
The examples given are ill-chosen, but the basic point is sound:
If not for Christian fundamentalists, after all, we probably wouldn't have punk rock. Or rap, Goth fashion, skateboarding and lots of recent art. Strong art comes from cultural ferment, from the clash of ideas, not from homogeneity. Liberals have failed to recognize that the "diversity" they so celebrate includes people who disagree with them -- churchgoers and mosque-goers, pro-lifers and hunters. And the life has gone out of liberalism as a result.
-- Ann Marlowe
On the other hand, one of the reasons why I dropped out of the conservative movement in the mid-90's was because it seemed like such an intellectual ghetto, where everyone read the same books and only a few honestly engaged the ideas of the world outside. If anything, it appears to have gotten worse:
I don't mean to impugn all righty blogs, but the ones I'm told to read - [Belmont Club], Powerline, LGF - are increasingly full of "know your enemy" shit that really bears no knowledge of the "enemy."
-- David Weigel
A final point about the Marlowe quote: most of the liberals I have known personally who fit her description (and certainly not all liberals do!) either grew up in fundamentalist Christian families or at least grew up in the Bible Belt. They themselves are the products of "cultural ferment" and do indeed try to create "strong art".
Today is the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth. Cathy Young at Reason Online notes a weakness of her philosophy that always stood out for me:
In its pure form, Rand’s philosophy would work very well indeed if human beings were never helpless and dependent through no fault of their own. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that so many people become infatuated with Objectivism as teenagers and “grow out of it” later, when concerns of family, children, and old age—their own and their families’—make that fantasy seem more and more impossible.
Whittaker Chambers, when he reviewed Atlas Shrugged for the National Review in 1957, put it this way:
Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children -- it suddenly strikes you -- ever result.
The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children.
Rand's defense of capitalism and attack on altruism are both worth taking seriously, but Objectivism as a whole never seemed to have much to do with real life.
From a professor I know:
This morning I gave a guest lecture about modeling. My slide about the modeling process starts with an amorphous cloud labeled "Reality". Naturally some wise-acre asked "What is reality?". I told him it's that which doesn't change to suit our beliefs.
Art is a mirror not because it is the same as the object, but because it is different. A mirror selects as much as art selects; it gives the light of flames, but not their heat; the colour of flowers, but not their fragrance; the faces of women, but not their voices; the proportions of stockbrokers, but not their solidity. A mirror is a vision of things, not a working model of them.
-- G. K. Chesterton, 1910
I own and respect several of the books on this list, but…"moan with intellectual pleasure"?
Talk about a cheap date…
Two parts thought-provoking; one part hippy-dippy silly.
2 > 1.
(Towards the end of the movie, "Someone Somewhere in Summertime" by Simple Minds looped insistently through my mind; but that's probably an idiosyncracy.)
I hate to think of myself as being part of "an eccentric fringe", but Johann Hari makes a good point about the death of Burkean conservatism in his article about the philosophy of Agatha Christie.
(Also: Hari notices that "The minute a character is described as an idealist […] you've found your murderer." A good observation. Actors were automatically suspect as well.)
[Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.]
From the lead article in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly:
Many of you young people of [today] have not heard of Cassandra, for a little Latin is no longer considered essential to your education. This, assuredly, is not your fault. You are innocent victims of a good many haphazard educational experiments. New ideas in pedagogy have run amuck for the last twenty-five years. They were introduced with much flourish of drums; they looked well on paper; they were forthwith put into practice on the hapless young. It has taken nearly a generation to illustrate their results in flesh and blood. Have they justified themselves to you?
The rising generation cannot spell, because it learned to read by the word-method; it is hampered in the use of dictionaries, because it never learned the alphabet; its English is slipshod and commonplace, because it does not know the sources and resources of its own language. Power over words cannot be had without some knowledge of the classics or much knowledge of the English Bible—but both are now quite out of fashion.
[…] I recall serving upon a committee to award prizes for the best essays in a certain competition where the competitors were [college] seniors […]. In despair at the material submitted, the committee was finally forced to select as 'best' the essay having the fewest grammatical errors and the smallest number of misspelled words. The one theme which showed traces of thought was positively illiterate in expression.
Did I forget to mention that this article leads off the February 1911 issue of the Atlantic Monthly? I did? My apologies.
(And a tip o' the hat to Eddie Thomas.)
…should be your writing prejudices. Check them out.
(They remind me that I need an editor sometimes.)
His similes are terrible, but his points are good…
[T]he art critics and the dramatic critics [...] are separated by a great chasm of "culture" and fastidiousness from the people for whom they write. They [look upon] the amusements of the public, not as wine-tasters oversee wine-drinking, or horse-doctors inspect horses—that is, by right of knowing more than most people about something which most people know. Rather they oversee them as teetotalers count the [pubs], or as a giraffe, with lifted head, might oversee a fish-market. This division and disgust is a dangerous attitude, even when it is a right attitude; for there is in all arrogance the beginning of ignorance. [...] Obviously the right condition for a healthy community is that the people and the critics should have the same basic joy in beautiful or comic things; but that the people should not know why they feel the joy, while the critics should tell them. [...] As men they should laugh or cry at a theatre; and then afterwards, as critics, defend themselves for having done so. They should justify to the public its own feelings in the act of justifying their own. But [...] something has gone wrong with this natural relation of the critics to the commonwealth. The writers in question never attempt to explain why humanity likes this or that; generally they get no further than explaining why they do not like it themselves. [...] [A] critic, even if he differs from the [general opinion], ought to be able to explain it. That is his business.
-- G. K. Chesterton, 1909
Over at 2 Blowhards, Michael Blowhard describes what he sees as "the difference between the movie-person's view of the world and the book-person's view of the world":
[F]or the sake of this discussion, I don't mean book fans. I mean people who spend a hunk of their professional lives in the books world -- as agents, retailers, critics, editors, writers, designers, etc.
[...]
Practically speaking, many people who join the books world do so because they're scholarly and quiet sorts. You won't find many movie professionals who spend a lot of time regretting that they left academia, or who went into the moviebiz hoping to find a quiet refuge from the stresses of business, ambition, competition, chores, and sex. But you'll find a lot of such people in the book world.
Also, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school -- while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so life in the books world is for many books pros a way of trying to continue living life as though in school. [...]
As a consequence, the books world has a quiet-study-and-thought-at-war-with-everyday-distractions feeling. IMHO, many of the characteristics, and many of the endlessly recycled arguments and discussions that preoccupy bookworld people -- standards at war with money; the way striving for the good becomes a matter of holding the world at bay; a dreamy leftism -- can be explained from this simple fact: many books people are bugged by life outside of school. They wish life were like school. They were happy in school, and they did well there. Money, business, leaky roofs -- it all interferes with how they want to live, buried in their books. They feel put-upon by life [...]
I can't deny that the man has a point.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft scorns how silly many of "the literary intelligentsia" were when responding to September 11:
Imaginative writers are distinguished not by a sweeter character (too often very much not), greater intellectual honesty, or even deeper intelligence, but—apart from the gift of expression which is their stock in trade—a way of looking at the world which is interesting because it is exaggerated or distorted. After an event like 11th September, such expressive gifts might be more hindrance than help; some things are best said simply rather than dressed up in look-at-me prose.
[Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.]
A book review in the New Statesman pinpoints two valid parts of Michel Foucault's work:
"[...] [I]t is easy to forget that Foucault's influence stems from a simple but penetrating insight, developed early in his career: that the history of western civilisation is also the history of what that civilisation despises and excludes. Foucault was far from being the first historian to realise this, or to construct a version of the past upon it. But he was a leading figure in the generation that, in the wake of the convulsions of May 1968, sought to change contemporary society by interrogating it as 'a construction'."
Society is a construction, but a society, like a building, can be built so improperly that it collapses upon itself. You cannot construct it in any way you please; and an ugly building can stand for centuries, while a beautiful and theoretically correct building can crumble in months.
"[I]n the wake of the convulsions of May 1968", many people started communes. They discovered that constructing even the simplest society was harder than it looked.
[Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.]