Critical thinking

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Having spent many years at Cato defending Microsoft from charges of monopolization, this week I finally read the D.C. Circuit’s opinion for antitrust class. What I found challenged many conceptions I had taken for granted, and I was upset that I hadn’t been exposed to these ideas before. By complete coincidence, I came upon the following passage in Up From Conservatism by Michael Lind, an excellent book I’m reading now.

…”Why are there so few American conservative intellectuals?” By intellectuals I do not mean propagandists or causists, who provide the party faithful with the party line on the subjects of the day. I mean independent thinkers, who may be “conservative” or “liberal” or “libertarian” or “socialist” in terms of their basic principles, but who are free to draw their own conclusions without looking over their shoulders and fearing punishment for heterodoxy. A conservative intellectual, thus defined, might agree with the political right 80 percent of the time, or 60 percent, or as little as 51 percent; but he would freely and boldly side with the liberals, or even socialists, when he thought the conservatives were wrong on a particular issue. At his best, William F. Buckley, Jr. occasionally demonstrated this kind of independence of mind; it is a quality completely lacking, however, in most of the prominent members of today’s subsidized conservative intelligentsia.

Indeed.

Nov 25, 2004 | Comments

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2 comments posted

  1. Posted by aslam - 11/25/2004

    “Punishment for heterodoxy” can exist in any intellectual clique regardless of its professed ideology. This is fundamentally antithetical to the pluralism at the basis of Liberalism and, IMHO, a manifestation of Conservative proclivities. A liberal stance does not preclude a conservative process and vice versa. I’m inclined to think that it is the latter that is truely Liberal and that is what seems to me is at the heart of not only the U.S. Constitution but also “Western ideals” in general.

    In other words, based on the excerpt, it seems to me that Lind is arguing for a conscientiously liberal process even to arrive at a conservative conclusion.

  2. Posted by Jerry Brito - 11/25/2004

    I think that’s about right. What the passage doesn’t explain, though, is that what he specifically means by “punishment for heterodoxy” is excommunication from the Washington conservative network, especially exclusion from funding for scholarly work if it does not support the predefined party line.

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