As I pointed out in Bush’s Bastardized Conservatism, the anti-intellectual tribalist is easy to spot. He’s a, “You are either with us or against us” kind of a guy (or gal). Adherents of this tradition judge ideas and opinions not on their merit but according to whether they comport with preordained positions. Or according to who originated them. These sorts usually have a High Priest or two from whom they take their cues. They seldom deviate. They even blog in boring unison on almost every topic.
The skirmish over Harriett Miers typifies this group think. No sooner had a welcome conservative opposition arisen to this comical crony than “establishment Republicans” endeavored to crush it. While quite a few libertarians cogitated alongside conservatives over substantive issues—the dangers of cronyism, the patent lack of qualifications and a discernable judicial philosophy in Miers—others argued along tribal lines, ala GOP groupies.
Their first proposition: we hate neoconservatives-cum-conservatives. Their second proposition: we hate Coulter and Krauthammer. Their Third: Coulter and Krauthammer hate the idea of Harriet for judge. Ergo, we like the idea of Harriet for judge. Talk about succumbing to a non sequitur.
Not that reasoning by default doesn’t have its place, but as a habit it’s plain slothful. For example, from Nancy Pelosi’s left-liberal credo, it follows that, in general, when she opens her mouth to speak, out will come gibberish. But her political stripe doesn’t necessarily mean everything she says will be silly. “It’s a fine day,” for example. More seriously, her accurate assessments of Bush (“the emperor has no clothes”) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (it’s “not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist”).
The point being, libertarians should consider the issues, not the individuals involved. Sitting on the sidelines and hooting derisively might make an already marginalized group feel superior. Nevertheless, to feel superior isn’t necessarily to be superior. Intellectual superiority is impossible without substantively and persuasively addressing issues and winning debates. A good start is to think outside the tribe.
The Elusive Jewish Gene
I’m getting sick of the determinists who whittle down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages, or something. This article in the New York Magazine puts paid to such reductionism:
“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”
At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really. The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.
Jay Homnick writes insightfully about the topic:
“In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start. Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture, the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation, the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?”
He follows up with equal bite in an e-mail exchange:
“As for that rubbish about Jews suddenly getting smart because they had to suddenly figure out that 8 percent of a hundred dollars was 8 dollars, while in the old days they could just farm without having to figure out their overhead and the necessary profit margin to make it profitable, how crass is that?!”
True, “Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world’s population and a mere 3 percent of the United States’, [yet] they account… for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe’s chess champions.” But if this Jewish menace upsets you, take comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of stupid Jews to go around.
Plamegate: A Storm In A Cesspool
Writes Dave Lester:
Hi Ilana, I am a bit surprised you have said nothing about the Valerie-Plame situation. I have found myself more and more irritated by the way the talking heads treat this as a sort of inside-the-Beltway joke with everyone betting on what will happen if Karl Rove is outed. [When do they ever address principle? This aspect of the talking twits’ thinking I addressed here, here, and in so many other essays.—ILANA] So little is said about the impact on those who work undercover in foreign countries—of their identities becoming a political football. As someone who spent a little time undercover 40 years ago in Europe with the Army, I can tell you that your sanity hangs on the notion that those in your chain of command regard your identity as essentially sacred. If those sent on such missions cannot have absolute confidence in those who sent them keeping the faith, there is no possibility that people will volunteer. I, for one, think that whoever okayed the release of this information should spend 20 years in the nastiest prison we have with much of it in solitary. Let them find out what it means to feel you have been utterly cut loose and deserted by those you trusted.
I did mention the affair, but only in passing: I celebrated the incarceration of Mrs. Judith Chalabi. But Dave is generally correct: this storm-in-a-cesspool doesn’t much interest me—and I suspect I speak for most classical liberals-cum-libertarians. To understand why, consider a fictitious, but true-to-life, criminal gang. To settle scores, its assassins regularly kill people. In one anomalous instance, these crooks confine themselves to merely kneecapping their victims. That’s how libertarians view Karl Rovegate in the grand scheme of government corruption: breaking the bones of a single foot soldier hardly stacks up against the War, Katrina, deficit spending, and so on. If anything, had this scandal been the government’s worst offense, libertarians would rejoice. Instead of killing, stealing, and counterfeiting currency, it has only outed one undercover agent. What restraint!
Libertarians are astounded when, irrespective of its unfailing treachery over the years, Americans continue to bawl about their government’s betrayals. Most of what government does is either unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, or all of the above. In this respect, Demopublicans, Republocrats; they’re interchangeable, although the current band of brigands has set a new Gold Standard for criminality and corruption. The Founding Fathers were classical liberals too. Their thinking was animated by the same understanding of the evils of unlimited power, which is why they sought to limit and delimit it. By all means, if he’s guilty, incarcerate Rove, but how about chocking these (and future) chickens for once and for all by going to the source, and repealing the 16th Amendment? Such a course of action would spell the difference between temporary and long-term solutions to government corruption.
Wordless About The War
Ilana Mercer, Iraq, Islam, War
I attempted to explain to conservative Australian writer, Rob Stove, why, after chronicling the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I’d fallen silent:
When my daughter was seven-years old, her school assigned her the task of describing her parents. On her father, daddy’s darling heaped unrealistic praise (the tables have since turned. Excellent!). For her affection-starved mother, the little lady reserved a matter-of-fact appraisal. “My mother,” she wrote in her girly cursive, “is a quiet woman who speaks mainly when she has something to say.” (Rob’s riposte: “if everyone rationed speech thus, the entire mainstream punditocracy would cease to exist.” Amen.)
Pinpointed by my perceptive chatterbox of a child, this economy explains the lack of gush on Barely a Blog. And it explains why I’ve not written much lately about “Mess-opotamia.” I’ve nothing new to say. Few have. This is not to say there’s no place for repetition. But it’s not my place. I’ve said what I have to say, starting in September 2002. And here .
Fine, I’ll elaborate on a fresh observation Lawrence Auster originated: Bush and his devotees showcase their underlying hate of America by continually comparing the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America. As The Wall Street Journal put it, “There were a few glitches 200 years ago in Philadelphia too.”
Yes, the hoots, hollers, and blasts emanating from members of Iraq’s tribal troika capture to a tee the tone of the debates in, what’s that document called? The Fedayeen Papers?
Jalal (Talabani), Muqtada (al-Sadr), and Muhammad (Bahr al-Ulum) are just like James (Madison), John (Jay), and Alexander (Hamilton). Why didn’t it occur to me? Only a fool would fail to trace the philosophical link between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu. Mr. Auster is right: what a hateful comparison.
The war is even more hateful. And everything that needs to be said about it has been said—to no avail. Words have failed to bring us closer to a moral reckoning. So watch Do You Ever Wonder What 2000 Looks Like—and weep (link courtesy of antiwar.com).