Platt said:
Perhaps you will explain why you exclude John Locke, Adam Smith,
Ludwig Von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol,
William F. Buckley, Ayn Rand and other philosophical conservatives
from the intellectual level. Is this another case of "all those who disagree
with me are social level retards?"
DMB says:
Well, I think its totally unfair to criticize me for things I didn't say, as
if a person could say EVERYTHING and be totally exhaustive in a single post.
All we can hope to do is make a point, cite some examples and maybe try to
show how the thought process got us to the point. But your question does
raise an interesting issue. At the risk of seeming too personal, let me tell
you about my experience with so-called conservative intellectuals.
The college I attended was and is very closely tied to the conservative
movement. In fact, it houses the Von Mises library. Bill Buckley has been
there many times. It is good friends with the Heritage foundation, Clarence
Thomas spoke there to thunderous applause not too long ago and the students
basically constituted an Ayn Rand cult. I too was a huge Ayn Rand fan. My
point? I know conservatives. I know exactly what conservatism is. I used to
be one myself.
It seems to me that you, and Roger, have learned about the left largely from
the enemies of the left. But I learned about conservatism from
conservatives, who naturally painted it in glowing terms, who spent a great
deal of time demonizing the left. This is just one of the reasons I tend to
distrust what I hear from you on the matter. It seems you've never seen
liberalism and socialism for what it really is, you've only heard about it
from people who fear and hate it. That approach can hardly make for a fair
and honest appraisal. I've already heard that rap many, many times. I could
repeat it all verbatum by now.
The cracks in my faith in conservatism began to crumble in a big way during
the summmer between my junior and senior years at this conservative collge.
(HILLSDALE COLLEGE in Michigan. You can look it up to see if my
characterizations are accurate, if you like.) I was attending a seminar
sponsored by the college that included on its roster of speakers one George
Nash, author of THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT IN AMERICA SINCE WW2.
I read that book for an intellectual history class and in preperation for
the seminar. I was deeply troubled by what I found in that book and what I
heard from George, who was an insufferable nerd of the worst kind. These
so-called intellectuals were just a bunch of economist and theologians. It
was all about money and god. I could hardly find a bona fide idea anywhere
in the book. And remember this was a friendly author, a conservative booster
of consrvatism. Bill Buckley, for example, is a smart guy, has a tremendous
vocabulary and is very well read, but his political views are entirely
dominated by his Catholicism. Basically, he's a theologian with a large
vocabulary.
While attending a different seminar sponsored by the same college, I heard
one blue-blazered country clubber after another denouunce the modern world.
Every single one of them denounced the idea that humanity should dare to
believe that governments and thier laws had any meaning compared to God's
laws. We're talking about old time religious faith, medieval thinking,
pre-modern thinking anti-intellectuals. Oh, they were all very clever and
well spoken, but their values were completely anachronistic. (MY philosophy
teach found the whole thing quite sickening and called it intellectual
masturbation becasue of the utter lack of any opposing point of view. She
has since moved on to a different institution. Purdue, I think. Ha! Her
field was the pre-Socratics and she still thought those guys were a bunch of
antiquated cranks.)
So, yes, in some very real sense the value system and worldview of even the
so-called intellectuals is retarded, which is to say it represents the
values of a previous age precisely because of a lack in development or in
their evolution. I couldn't tell you what went wrong. I don't know if they
were raped by a priest of if dad beat them or what, but these guys were
warped. I was entirely turned off to the whole conservative thing by the
time I graduated. (Having studied philosophy and intellectual history.) And
I've become increasingly liberal ever since. That was twenty years ago. You
do the math. HA!
Thanks for your time,
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:26 BST