"Original thinking often flourishes under conditions of intellectual marginality," writes Austin Bramwell in The American Conservative [via Arts & Letters Daily], worried that "as the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished":
Unfortunately, the conservative movement, having discovered a mass audience, risks squandering the intellectual marginality that once made it so interesting and daring.. . .Yet few worry that conservatism will go flabby. The tenets have already been settled, they think; all that is left is to promote them.
Few may worry, but some do, including ourselves. As we wrote here recently in a post about James Piereson's Opinion Journal capsule history of contemporary conservatism:
The forces of darkness are always waiting just beyond the campfire, and even as Hayek's individualism and the neoconservatives' cultural defense of capitalism are ascendant, this is no time to sit back and declare victory.
Bramwell recalls the rise and fall of the liberal project by way of warning:
Conservatives should not let the intellectual restlessness of their early years give way to decadent complacency. It has happened before in American political life -- to American liberalism—with unhappy consequences both for liberalism and the nation.
The story of liberalism’s decline is often rehearsed these days, by rueful liberals and gleeful conservatives alike. Few, however, tell the more interesting story of liberalism’s ascendance.
A few delectable details:
The people, in [the liberal elites'] view, remained stubbornly benighted, saw political problems in naïve moralistic terms, and could not carry out the project of reform. Accordingly, liberalism’s leading intellects began to fashion a new ideology that called for elite social scientists, rather than a virtuous populace, to address the problems of the modern world.
In his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued that ordinary people lacked the intellectual resources necessary for even the feeblest grasp of modern complexities. A piqued John Dewey then responded with The Public and Its Problems, billed as a refutation of Lippmann. It turns out, however, that Dewey conceded nearly all of Lippmann’s points . . . elite social scientists should rule.
Hillary -- despite carefully orchestrated protestations to the contrary precipitated by her purposeful quest for the presidency -- exemplifies this mindset. Bramwell continues:
Liberalism came of age in the New Deal, which finally succeeded in replacing representative government with a European-style administrative state, staffed by the nation’s ablest, most idealistic men. After World War II, when the national mood no longer favored reform, liberals turned to an even more elite institution—the Supreme Court—to continue remaking American society. For a generation, liberalism so dominated American life that, while conservatives saw conservatism as the taste of a saving remnant, liberals became convinced that their ideology expressed the natural sentiments of the American people.
Intellectual sclerosis, however, soon set in . . . As Nixon put it, the Democrats became the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion. They have been losing power ever since.
Will intellectual complacency condemn conservatives to go down that same black hole? Bramwell cites three strands of original thinking on the Right -- all libertarian -- that offer hope. Our ears perked up at one of them in particular, "a loose network of what John O’Sullivan has called 'evolutionary conservatives' [that] attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science":
Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray’s Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza’s End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking . . . Human biodiversity is important; we owe it to ourselves to try to understand it.
That's the same Steve Sailer of VDare.com who linked to our most recent Darwin vs. ID post a couple of weeks back in his provocative must-read essay "The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either." A few appetizers:
I'm not going to end that dispute, but please allow me to explain why it's not as dire an issue as most of the participants on either side assume. The logic of natural selection is widely recognized to be virtually tautological [and] most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism.
A belief in miracles, unlike a belief in magic, presupposes a belief in natural laws, which is a necessary condition for science. Thus, Christendom could develop modern science, while China could not.
Yet what critics of Darwinism fail to understand is that this a priori dislike of miracles is the appropriate professional prejudice of biologists.
No matter what the metaphysical implications, we can't forget Darwin's great insight about our world: selection matters. Life is not 100 percent Lamarckian. People vary, and we can't always mold them into whatever we want them to be.
The left has long hated this insight because it suggests that there are limits to the effectiveness of social engineering.
Haven't we always said?
The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature.
Herein lies the dilemma. If only the best of human intentions could be controlled, we could have a perfect society. It cannot be done. Human nature is what it is, and only a free society that strives for equal righs for those who abide by the rules can offer us hope of a rewarding life. Understand Darwin, but allow the human spirit to believe in miracles?
Posted by: goomp | August 22, 2005 at 06:18 PM
Although it progresses through the arc - I don't believe the pendulum has swung quite far enough for the conservative side to start getting complaisant. For one thing the mindset hasn't changed yet. They still consider themselves to be the underdog - even when they have a majority in Congress they still act in this manner.
It is when you start feeling as if you have control that you start letting the fuzzy thinking enter. There are always people who are just simply bad debaters (no matter the side), but on the whole I don't see the type of liberal lapses taking place quite yet in quite the numbers needed to cause a problem.
I also don't see the liberals getting any better in their debating style which is helping things along. I think we have to wait another 10 years to see where it goes.
Posted by: Teresa | August 23, 2005 at 09:33 AM
You might be interested in a new article by Charles Murray (of "The Bell Curve" fame - race and IQ and genetics). It is called the Inequity Taboo and was published on-line today. Info can be found at my blog.
www.intelligencetesting.blogspot.com
Posted by: Kevin | August 26, 2005 at 06:19 PM