Roger Scruton (R.I.P.) discussed being recently misrepresented in the pages of a major publication, effectively purging him from an unpaid government architectural committee job.
Come to think of it, Charles Murray and the Middlebury College administrator he rode in on.
Definitely witches:
On a semi-related note, a reader points out that a major flaw in utilitarian logic (attached to probably the most comprehensive moral liberal philosophy thought and written) might find some expression in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.‘
Dear Reader, I’m not entirely persuaded while skimming Jackson’s story. The townsfolk didn’t necessarily have stated reasons for their collective act, other than ‘this is the way we’ve always done things.’ That’s kind of the point, which is to say people don’t always have have good points for long-established traditions, but many rocks do.
The people claiming sound reasons and empirical evidence for creating national seatbelt laws to save the lives of X number of citizens had, well, a lot of empirical evidence. One visualization technique, as I understand it, to aid in this particular critique of utilitarian logic involves building a machine in the town square, which will, with good evidence, save about twenty lives a year.
The problem is you’ve got to feed one person into it every year.
This machine is working for other towns, though. In fact, it’s so important it’s become law for all towns. Regional machines will be necessary. Have you guys visited The Machine in D.C.?
Thousands saved.
Come to think of it, maybe I could see the selection process being somewhat akin to what occurred in The Lottery. People haven’t changed much and most of the village elders run on how well The Machine is run.
Long ago in Atlantic City: I got my palm read by a girl under an aluminum scaffold covered with a cheap, white tarp. It cost $15. She took my hand in hers and led me through the other booths to a canvas folding chair. She traced my palm lines and told me I would be rich. There was salt in the air, and a smell of tar rising from the boardwalk. A fly kept landing on her cheek and she kept extending her lower lip, exhaling a breath to blow it away. She was busy looking into my hand, my eyes, then off into the sea or seemingly within herself, as if divining some deeper meaning. The fly would land again, crawl slowly over her cheek, and rub its two front legs together and over its eyes.
Perhaps aestheticizing a city isn’t necessarily good for long-term prospects, at least not at the cost of actual jobs. Maybe it’s at best a second- or third- order priority.
Perhaps aestheticization can bring good to a city if there are already enough people providing goods in the city. Curating and criticizing art can be valuable, of course, but both seem second- or third-order priorities to actually making art (citizens, be wary of leaving arts in the hands of many enbalment-oriented Arts Councils, public radio and college professors, docents, Mayor’s Offices…they [often] have other interests and incentives aside from the art).
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There are some things (bullshittery) which don’t sit right with me about the below video, this packaging of chocolate with high middle-brow tastes and vague Self-oriented hipster collectivism.
It strikes me as the kind of thing people from smaller towns and suburbs might imagine an ideal city to be on a visit, which is to say, potentially imbued with a lot of high middle-brow tastes these days (creative, urban, vibrant etc).
Such is my read, anyways, which probably says quite a bit about me.
The Mast Brothers invite customers into their process. They’re giving you bits of their individual Selves to mix with your individual Self as you band together towards the future that awaits. Come to the glittering Brooklyn upon the horizon.
Few chocolate-makers take pains to mention Mark Twain & Ralph Waldo Emerson in their promo videos:
‘Hidden away in the far western corner of New York State and straddling the Canadian border, Buffalo sometimes feels like the city that time forgot. Many of its storefronts, bars, and bowling alleys look like they haven’t been updated since the 1970s.’
Vincent Gallo has Italian roots and comes from an industrial, hard-working city full of Catholic immigrants and is also interested in the Arts. He was a visual artist who went to NYC, then L.A., and turned to film as a means to self-expression and potential financial success. Did he want Celebrity? Money? Fame?
This, apparently, is one aspect of ‘culture’ that’s been created: The pursuit Self through celebrity, money and fame, as a thing that many, many people all share as an artifact of ‘culture.’
Probably all of the above in addition to self-expression and the pursuit of beauty and saying true things by creating images.
I can say it’s rare to find a tradition-defending aesthete and iconoclastic supporter of the Republican party. Maybe it’s the Buffalo roots.
It makes for great T.V. taking on the critics in a USA track-suit while defending the vision behind ‘Buffalo 66‘, even though he seems like, potentially, quite an asshole:
American cities relying on industries such as textiles, furniture, various light and heavy manufacturing, railroads, steel, coal, oil, automobiles etc. have seen good times come and go.
Sometimes the good times came and went one generation ago, sometimes three. Buffalo is certainly among those cities.
Will the good times come again?
It’s certainly making for ‘interesting’ politics.
The arts can be one lens with which to look at these problems and places…
Another lens to understand the world as a citizen is the social sciences, and this blog favors the contrarians amongst what is increasingly monolithic and received opinion:
Here’s a fine example of how to exchange ideas. Two people gather in a forum to present and dispute the data used, the methodologies applied, the empirical evidence offered, and the conclusions and conjectures both might draw from their own thinking. There’s some light moderation and Q & A from the audience:
Maybe vocation, purpose and meaning have A LOT to do with our current issues. How to live and what to do?
‘In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley, and in the aftermath of the faculty mob that coalesced to condemn gender studies professor Rebecca Tuvel, many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public rituals with more than a passing resemblance to witch-hunts.’
Again, and again:
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.’
‘Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. ‘
‘Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. ‘
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”
Long ago in Atlantic City: I got my palm read by a girl under an aluminum scaffold covered with a cheap, white tarp. It cost $15. She took my hand in hers and led me through the other booths to a canvas folding chair. She traced my palm lines and told me I would be rich. There was salt in the air, and a smell of tar rising from the boardwalk. A fly kept landing on her cheek and she kept extending her lower lip, exhaling a breath to blow it away. She was busy looking into my hand, my eyes, then off into the sea or seemingly within herself, as if divining some deeper meaning. The fly would land again, crawl slowly over her cheek, and rub its two front legs together and over its eyes.
‘Overall this is a serious and well-written book that presents a great deal of scientific evidence very effectively. Anyone reading it will learn a lot. But it didn’t change my mind on much, least of all the most controversial questions in this area. If anything, in the Bayesian sense it probably nudged me away from geneticist-based arguments, simply because it did not push me any further towards them.’
As to being able to discuss these ideas, I think most ‘men on the street’ are predisposed to looking at such research as supporting their previously held ideas and experiences (racist, anti-racist, non-racist etc).
What worries me more at the moment: On the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein debate (Klein either can’t get out of, or wishes not to engage on the level of Murray’s work; his logic displaying a lack of censure for the kind of violence which followed Murray to Middlebury):
From Mike Nayna’s Youtube channel: Radical students and some of their thought-leading administrators have a talk at Middlebury.
Surely you don’t trust some of these morons with your ability to think freely?
A potentially interesting thought: Let’s all take a moment to recall Jeffrey Dahmer, shall we?
What if through the social sciences and American institutional innovation (IQ tests for the military, academic placement testing), there dripped-down a battery of tests given to all American schoolchildren. After an hour or two taken out of a child’s day, a thick envelope would arrive at home a few weeks later; to be examined or unexamined by the parents and/or child:
While possessing above-average intellience, JEFFREY scored high for violent imagery and/or ideation. JEFFREYmight display a predilection to become fixated on objects, animals and/or other living things in his attempts to understand and navigate the world. Providing positive and rewarding outlets for JEFFREY will likely enhance learning opportunities and the chance to develop fruitful interpersonal relationships.
Gurri offered an interesting take on matters socio-cultural:
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.
Hmmm…:
‘The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. Muslims trusted Muslims, and no one else. Some archetypical essence of “woman” or “Muslim” made internal communications possible, and separated each group from the rest of the human race. It was, to be sure, a disaster of biblical proportions – the story of Babel told in the times of the tweet – and it left the men in charge desperate to put forward individuals of a different sex and skin coloration, to say the things they wanted to hear.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.’
‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.
‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’
There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me He looked from the back like one more professor.
And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage Which foreigners always note in American men, combined As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,
Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,
Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely? Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something
Maintaining a healthy skepticism:
Previous ‘elite’ links on this site, arriving at some yet predictable, unrealized truths: Via Marginal Revolution via American Affairs: ‘The Western Elite From A Chinese Perspective:’
‘Our criticism of [Judith] Butler was quite independent of the merits or lack thereof of Derrida – but perhaps a criticism of his defender amounts to a criticism of him and is therefore not allowed. At any rate, Butler’s open letter to the Times is a classic example of precisely this evasive non-substantive suggestion of impropriety that you mention. It’s basically an argument from celebrity. ‘How dare you publish such a snide obituary, Derrida was hugely influential, he was celebrated, he was a big deal.’
‘These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.’
Strolling along, Avital Ronell, professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU, invites you for a walk in the park, for whom 10 minutes of profound explication can never be enough:
I’m guessing that in the past, and maybe still in the present, some Nimrods find both the Catholic Church and/or the Priesthood of Impenetrable Jargon attractive life options.
It is not always the best among us who pursue ideas:
‘In September 2017, New York University launched a Title IX investigation into Avital Ronell, an internationally acclaimed professor who had been accused of sexual harassment by her former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman.’
Roger Scruton suggests that the co-opting of university philosophy and literature departments by similar postmodern schools of thought (post-ish Marxist) does a disservice to young people interested in both philosophy and literature:
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On that note, it doesn’t matter so much if ideas are true, or falsifiable, but rather if they can be held with conviction, made into policy, and acted upon in the world. People are going to do politics, whether you like it or not. It’s a basic human activity.
I’d argue that the decline of religion along with the intellectual currents in many academies have conspired to produce enough space for the following in our politics: Morally righteous people interested in how you should live your life. People who are deeply anti-religious and narrowly ideological:
“There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” @AOC says in response to criticism that she’s made factual errors. https://t.co/sKf3sHl9F6pic.twitter.com/xKc2eB7GEk
Moving along still, Sam Harris and Ezra Klein (editor of Vox) debate Charles Murray’s work, which goes to a central critique of progressive doctrines which conflate moral and political reasoning: How to live and what to do become intimately united with immediate political action and coalition-building (forgetting, or perhaps never understanding, what politics can actually do and at what costs).
My take: There’s an inherent belief that political activism is ‘scientific.’ This belief is strong enough that when decent and conflicting social science comes along, it becomes morally suspect and a threat to money, politics and identity (the royal road to utopia):
It’s actually less important whether or not you agree politically with Charles Murray, but rather whether or not you’ve understood what he’s saying. It used to be, at least, that if you couldn’t understand what someone was saying, you still didn’t prevent his saying it in public.
Both Sam Harris and John Derbyshire (of differing political views) seem to understand quite well the crux of Murray’s reasoning:
Even the most positive reviews always have something that I think the reviewer has misunderstood. Probably true of all writers about all reviewers. But in my case there is one exception: @DissidentRight. I've never seen him misunderstand anything. https://t.co/zbagl8QBAD
Colonists practicing freedom, becoming slowly habituated to running their own lives and affairs, taming an often hostile wilderness, ruled by a distant and increasingly controlling crown, require certain conceptual definitions of freedom.
Activists practicing liberation, colonizing existing newsrooms and administrative hierarchies, tending to totalize all personal and public relationships into an oppressor/opppressed worldview, require other conceptual definitions of freedom.
‘The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism.’
and:
‘But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end.’
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As previously posted:
Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here.
‘Coates fails to notice that his blanket exoneration of the perpetrators actually dehumanizes them. On his view, when the young perpetrators pull the trigger or thrust the knife in they are only vectors of forces, not agents with purposes, desires, plans, or motives. Therefore they are not really men at all, so that, ironically enough, they become for him Invisible Man writ large.’
Many black writers in America should be recognized as having crossed bridges over chasms in communicating their experiences, experiences which have often made even the best radicalize to some degree in the face of such injustice.
Regardless, I’m guessing we’re all best off if the same high standards are universally applied when it comes to quality of prose, depth of thought, scope of imagination and moral courage. Good writing deserves as much: Genuine, even if grudging or even if unfettered, respect.
Works of art are going to do what they’re going to do, polemics what they do, and I tend to believe that respect for the freedom, responsibility, agency and complexity of the individual ought to be central. Realizing the interior lives of others, especially if they’re just characters in a novel, even when they fail miserably and do horrible things, is what I’ve taken to be a core feature of writing which has moved me. This, much more than ideological solidarity and what may be the shared popular sentiment of the moment.
To my mind, there’s something comic about a man (and I can’t be alone) espousing rather radical political views (theories of victim-hood, a lack of individual agency and anti-white racism, postmodern ‘body’ talk etc.) while being feted, possibly with the intent of appeasement and assimilation, by mostly less radical (and often very white) audiences.
That’s got to create some tension.
As to politics and social institutions, sent in by a reader, here’s a talk given by John McWhorter about his views in ‘Losing The Race‘, a man who strikes me as politically amorphous, unsatisfyingly moderate for some, and often very sensible. As has been the case for a while, there [are] a whole range of views out there:
James Baldwin’s works are there to be read and thought about, his words and ideas echoing in your mind; your words formed in response.
Take or leave those words and ideas. You can write a paper, and forget them. They may deeply move and stir your moral imagination, or not.
Such is freedom.
A lack of freedom is demonstrated by uttering James Baldwin’s words as incantations seeking solidarity; chanted mindlessly by a mob of moral/ideological purists, shouting down anyone who might disagree.
Most of these low-rent, post-Enlightenment ideological re-enactors are happy to become stars; each of their own scripted passion-plays and soapy little dramas; tacitly cradled by the academics and administrators off-camera.
In this blog’s opinion, John Derbyshire has extended his own experiences into broader truth claims about race and empirical reality. He uses statistics and evidence to bolster his arguments. There are, frankly, quite a few people who agree with him. What he says may simply be true, or contain truths, partial truths and misconceptions. Some central claims may not be true.
Should one disagree, it must be demonstrated to him, and to others, why he might be wrong. Derbyshire’s intellectually honest enough to present his arguments clearly and cogently, as presumably he believes what he’s saying is true.
Become part of a much nobler process, dear reader. Most decent people already know better than to claim all the truth, moral goodness and virtue for themselves.
Here’s a fine example of how to exchange ideas: Two people gather in a forum to present and dispute the data used, the methodologies applied, the empirical evidence offered, and the conclusions and conjectures both might draw from their own thinking. There’s some light moderation and Q & A from the audience:
An example of how not to exchange ideas: Individuals are encouraged to simply show up and participate as part of a mob, likely getting a sense of identity, purpose, and accomplishment by righteously shouting down an invited speaker.
Free inquiry is chilled, the passions incited and engaged, and the hatreds organized. This approach clouds the truth and the civilities and methods by which we more reasonably can arrive at truth.
The truth, for the most part, has already been decided in many minds (enough to act in such an ignorant way). The administrator who had injury done to her in trying to exit the event was just getting in the way of the truth, dear reader.
Such thinking has been institutionalized in many settings: Here’s how the Washington Post portrayed the affair, labeling Charles Murray not by the quality of his ideas, nor his reasoning, but by a rather laughably inaccurate representation of events, sympathetic to the mob:
This is how WaPo reports on an out-of-control mob that physically assaults a speaker and a professor? https://t.co/hrGA5MfeHo
As previously posted: Below is an example how similar stewardship of our institutions by those who share in such ideology themselves, or who offer tacit approval of such ideology (tolerating the intolerance through capitulation, or in a kind of enemy-seeking ‘brownstone activism’), has gone on for a generations now.
As FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors has said: “You cannot say to people, you’re too weak to live with freedom. Only that group is strong enough to live with freedom.”
But that’s exactly what Adam Falk, the patronizing president of Williams College, has said to the college’s student body. Yesterday, Falk unilaterally canceled a speech by John Derbyshire, who was invited as part of the student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series.
‘Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn’t invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him.
Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it.
We’ve found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community.
We respect—and expect—our students’ exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it’s our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.’
‘There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following. ‘
Of course, what better place than a liberal arts college to talk these matters out?
Sigh.
Read up. Get your reasons and arguments together. Show up at the debate, alone or with friends. Listen to the other fellow. Think. Respond. Think some more. Debate.
Publishing and disseminating the thoughts and ideas of others is not necessarily an endorsement of those thoughts and ideas, but it is absolutely vital in maintaining a free and open society:
Out of principle alone, here’s Derbyshire discussing his general worldview:
“…it is emblematic of liberalism’s intention, articulated in the Progressive era and pursued ever since, to replace constitutional politics with a system of interest group (and racial) competition, of bargaining for government benefits within the administrative or welfare state presided over by activist judges, policy “experts,” and bureaucrats (in collusion with congressional committees).”
–Charles Kesler-Buckley Jr., William F. & Charles R. Kesler. Keeping The Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought-A Revised Edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Print.
The term ‘activist’ judges has become very loaded these days. The nomination process has become politicized and nearly toxic, to be sure.
I looked up Kesler’s quote in context and found he defined 3 conservative camps. Here’s my brief summary, so feel free to add, subtract, or disagree:
1. Traditionalists–Often coming from literary and historical backgrounds, Kesler’s traditionalist standout is Russell Kirk, and he mentions Robert Nisbet. Many traditionalists are more likely to be religious, and find greater wisdom in religious doctrine and teaching about how to live and what to do than most anything else. Some can see an unbroken line back to Aquinas, and they tend to view Enlightenment rationalism with great suspicion. Kirk and Nisbet adopted Edmund Burke’s defense of the British Constitution against what they saw as the ahistorical universalism of the French Revolution.
Many look around and see cultural decay, decline, and often times a moral corruption in society.
I’d say Ross Douthat, currently at the NY Times, is an example of a practicing Catholic and conservative. He’s written a book about the decline of institutionalized religion in the public square and the rise of new-age, mega-churches, self-help and “spirituality.” He also is addressing a contemporary audience at the New York Times.
Robert Bork, despite his faults, was railroaded as an ‘activist’ judge and could be defined as a traditionalist.
2.Libertarians–On Kesler’s view, libertarians are more comfortable with Enlightenment rationalism than the traditionalists are, but the original sin for libertarians is collectivism. This collectivism arises from basing the Enlightenment rationalist foundation in virtue. Marxist, Socialist, and Communist leaders advocated and sometimes succeeded in bloody revolution, and many genuinely believed they were leading humanity to some dialectically “progressive” point in the future, seeing materialist reality for what it was, and acting for the good of all. They were ‘virtuous’. Many in these systems believed they knew better than individuals what was best for them, deciding how they should live, and what they should do. As is common knowledge, this had disastrous results, including food shortages, external aggression, mass murder, forced labor camps, and the systems eventually rotting from the inside out.
For Kesler, libertarians often come from economic and philosophical backgrounds, and he breaks them into two groups. The first group consists of Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Friedrich Hayek. For them, freedom simply works, scarcity is all around, and you don’t need to deduce your way back to an underlying rights-based moral theory to justify your defense of individual freedom. Adam Smith’s invisible hand might be a good example.
Kesler’s other group are those who need to deduce the morality of the market from the rights of man. If the rights of man don’t come from God, is there some sufficiently transcendent source for our knowledge and thus our moral thinking? Is there a source that would justify giving some people moral legitimacy to rule over others? Where do man’s rights come from? J.S. Mill’s utilitarianism may not be enough, so, the search continues. Kesler offers Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and Richard Epstein as examples.
In my experience, personal liberty is primary to libertarians. Libertarians often draw a ring around the individual, and proceed from there. How one draws that ring is of some importance.
3.Neoconservatives–Often coming from backgrounds of academic social science, chased away from the New Left and ‘mugged by reality’, Kesler’s neoconservatives would include Norman Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and James Q. Wilson. On Kesler’s view, they come to distrust ideology, rationalist political theory and have been partially persuaded by the fact/value distinction. Doubts are bred from within the social sciences and political sciences about how one can be sure of what one knows, especially when that knowledge becomes a source for public policy and a way for a few people to run the lives of many others.
