Before I turned in last night I agreed with Ben's post on Heather Mallick but drew attention to two things that I saw as watering his points down a tad. Ben overlooked my sleepy English and came back with a comment and new post. Rather than swamp poor Ben's comment section, I'm copying his post here so that I can respond without overlooking anything.
Ben said:
Here's my take. Till recently, I have been among those who would, like those writers, describe ideas and people I didn't like as being "scary." Scary isn't that. When I have the luxury to sit around and get drunk with my friends and talk about books and horrible politicians (when that's everything, I mean; even in the middle of a world war, I'll find some time for it), I'm not scared. I'm part of a very lucky social class -- those who have not had to work for a living. (Not because I'm wealthy. Quite the contrary. It's because I've been a spoilt only child of middle-class parents.) But are we really that lucky? When we have the luxury to sit around in our little cocoons from the world, we tend to forget what actually matters and what is merely a fashionable pose for the season.I think the best thing I can do here is just groan and smile. It is a bit sheltered and thankfully most of us get past it. Sadly, quite a few of those who remain on campus do not. In fact, campus culture can be really odd, with students looking to their profs for leadership (as they should) but many of the profs unfortunately looking to the students for affirmation that they are still "with it." The result is a leadership vacuum that seems to me to fuel the zealotry and demonization ("scary") you describe. Jonah Goldberg says that the trouble the liberal profs have is that for them,
youth has a moral authority independent of the substance of its arguments. Youth politics is a variant of identity politics which imbues in young people an authority they did not purchase with work or with insight — just as liberalism does with gender, race, infirmity, etc.Goldberg, by the way, is a pretty good writer if you're not already familiar with him. Ben continues:
I'm not going to go all Bolshevik and rhapsodize about the working class. Far from it. There are informed and ill-informed opinions, and we've been stuck with those of both types since time immemorial. But I wonder whether the intellectual class of the West hasn't taken a wrong turn somewhere -- whether we mightn't have a death wish of some sort. And so it lies with the rest of the country -- the parts that do a lot of work* -- to pull us back into reality. [*Yes, I work hard too. I spent a lot of time at the library last year, and the year before, my thesis was a really hard slog. I work. But it's a different sort of work.] Education is a funny sort of thing. Someone like Mark Steyn, for instance, has little more than a high school diploma, yet he can run intellectual circles around people with doctorates. And he'll sound an awful lot more informed than they will. (Because he is. Well, when he's not talking about residential schools. He got that one awfully wrong. Well, the rest of that essay, "The Slyer Virus," is awesome, anyway.) There was a time when writers and artists took pleasure in shattering the little orthodoxies that bourgeois society held dear. Now, it is the rest of society (for that bourgeois society is at one with Nineveh and Tyre) that is beginning to shatter the orthodoxies of those who write and "create" for a living.I think you're on to something here. The way I see it, we need to find a way to "keep it real." The danger that occurs when you do a lot of work that is mental - not just scholarship but also jobs like writing or marketing - is that you tend to overlook or oversimplify logistics. My wife works with a sales crew and has to remind them from time to time that they can't promise things in an effort to close a sale, that she can't get for them. Students of history and things military know that a good grasp of logistics can make the difference in any battle. But how do you teach it? To some degree it's a school of hard knocks kind of thing. So upper class or lower class, we all have to respect people who have the experience in the subject at hand. The dentist might have ideas about the stock market, but I don't give them more weight than the ones I get from anyone else. If he tells me I need work on my teeth, though, I get the work done. The opinions of an English professor on Bush's economic record are no better than anyone else who lacks real world experience in understanding the data. And my plumber knows best about my plumbing, no matter what the professor says. Things that are said to be axiomatic on the campus are not beyond question and kudos for recognizing that. Sometimes I see left /right disputes as a struggle over what it will take to get a job done. We all want peace and we all want the truly unfortunate to be cared for. The question is how - how do we do it and how much is even possible?
I'm not about to give up the prospects of the academy for a life of "honest toil." For one thing, I wouldn't be good at it; I haven't been brought up for it. For another, I wouldn't enjoy it -- I wouldn't see the point (though there's always pleasure in a job well done). But the least I can do is not sneer at those who do live it, and to take their thoughts seriously. I might actually learn something new. Isn't truth the highest goal, in the life of ideas?Nor should you. Follow your talents while keeping a strong heart and an open mind. The academy needs people like that. Finally, I mentioned finding problems with Libertarianism. The problem as I see it is that liberty is not the highest good, even if it is a very good thing. People need love more than they need liberty. Liberty exists so that people can give themselves in love. They are free to start families if they wish and they are free to study or to work, or to some combination. But they are not free to do things that hinder others (obviously, although this has more impact that is first apparent) and they are not free to undermine the concepts or the high value of love or freedom themselves. I'll conclude with Goldberg again:
Personal liberty is vitally important. But it isn't everything. If you emphasize personal liberty over all else, you undermine the development of character and citizenship — a point Hayek certainly understood. Kids are born barbarians, as Hannah Arendt noted. Without character-forming institutions which softly coerce (persuade) kids — and remind adults — to revere our open, free, and tolerant culture over others, we run the risk of having them embrace any old creed or ideology that they find most rewarding or exciting, including some value systems which take it on blind faith that America is evil and, say, Cuba or Osama bin Laden is wonderful. That's precisely why campuses today are infested with so many silly radicals, and why libertarians in their own way encourage the dismantling of the soapboxes they stand on.
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