Not the Sort of Disengagement I Was Thinking About

The Disengagement I’m referring to are two posts (here and here) wherein I suggest that perhaps the only solution to the intractable problems of the Middle East would be to walk away, and cut these dictatorships out of our economic and trade benefits. Though, as the comments section of this follow-up, it’s less about walking away and more about not being hypocrites in what we care about in foreign relations. But that has nothing to do with the post here, which is about one side of the political debate seeking to disengage from the other.

This comes direct from the Vanity Press

It had to happen, I guess. At TCS Daily, right-winger Lee Harris argues in favour of stupidity:

Today, no self-respecting conservative wants to be thought stupid, not even by the lunatics on the far left. Yet there are far worse things than looking stupid to others—and one of them is being conned by those who are far cleverer than we are….

It is not easy to outfox the fox, and those who try often end up on the unpleasant end of the food chain. Thus, it is safer simply never to begin listening to them….

If traditional marriage needs to be defended by good arguments, then it stands or falls on the validity of these arguments, and where good arguments can be put forward to justify alternative “experiments in living,” then the authority of tradition as tradition is overthrown, and whoever comes up with the best argument carries the day. The end result of this process is that intellectuals, trained to be good at arguing, inevitably gain an undue influence in the shaping of public opinion, while those who adhere to traditions simply because they are their tradition are left vulnerable to attack and ridicule because they have difficulty defending positions they have never found cause to question. In such a case, the traditionalist must either abandon his sacred ground, and learn to argue, or else he must be prepared to accept the derogatory label fixed upon him by the intelligentsia. In short, he must not mind too much being called stupid.

In a world that absurdly overrates the advantage of sheer brain power, no one wants to be seen as a member in good standing of the stupid party. Yet stupidity has been and will always remain the best defense mechanism against the ordinary conman and the intellectual dreamer, just as Odysseus found that stuffing cotton in his ears was his best defense against beguiling but fatal song of the sirens.

Or, to put it more succinctly: intelligence has a liberal bias. Here’s how to defeat it:

  1. Stick left index finger into left ear.
  2. Stick right index finger into right ear.
  3. Hum loudly and chant “lalalalala! I can’t hear you! lalalalala! I can’t hear you!”

The spitefulness of this approach is truly astounding, and it really exposes the agenda of those who think this way. Democracy, after all, is supposed to be a discourse of ideas — a marketplace of ideas, if you will. But now that demagogues like Lee Harris feel threatened by the saleability of the ideas offered by his perceived opponents, he wants to throw that out the window — take his marbles and go home, as it were. I suspect that if the shoe were on the other foot, he would lampoon the lazy “just ‘cause” thinking on the other side, but now that he finds himself unable to defend the traditions he holds dear with arguments that hold rational weight, up come the tariffs. It’s intellectual freedom for me, and not for thee.

But not only is this line of thinking undemocratic and whimsically immature, it is ultimately self destructive. Consider what it says: “those who adhere to traditions simply because they are their tradition are left vulnerable to attack and ridicule because they have difficulty defending positions they have never found cause to question.”

Harris is implying that tradition should never be questioned; that the statement “things should be this way because they have always been this way” is a perfectly valid argument. But it isn’t. It’s circular reasoning, and circular reasoning is what turns tradition into dogma, and too many lives have been lost at the altar of dogma. Moreover, while the ideas that have become traditions are likely to have been good ideas to begin with, anybody with an ounce of sense will tell you that the world doesn’t stand still. The conditions that produced those good ideas change, and if you fail to remember what those good ideas where that formed your traditions, you’ll be unable to change with those times, and thus stand an even greater chance of having your tradition thrown, baby along with bathwater, out the window when a situation comes along that actively challenges your preconceptions.

The future goes to those who keep their eyes open and their ears tuned. It’s kind of a tradition.

Final word to Chet at the Vanity Press:

The strangest thing about this essay is that its author traces one aspect of the rationalistic approach — the one he finds so dangerous — back to the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. If he wanted to, he could have gone back much further than that. The age of this approach and its consistent application through time suggest, of course, that the rational approach is, in fact, a tradition of Western thought. Surely, reason is a tradition at least as worthy of preservation as any other? But of course, when Harris says “tradition” he doesn’t mean stuff like that. By “tradition” he means little more than unthinking habits and unexamined assumptions — in other words, for Harris tradition and stupidity are actually the same thing. Speaking as one who’s made a career out of studying and teaching part of the Western intellectual tradition, I have to say I find it more than a little unnerving to see the idea of tradition reduced and violated in this manner.

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