On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote

In the comments of the Critical Mass post linked in Blue Anti-Intellectualism Timothy Burke (I know, I link him too often, but he's so interesting) attempted to imagine a more diverse, and so more intellectually demanding, syllabus.

...though many of us might cite ourselves as exceptions (since I've also taught Fukuyama, Hayek, and Ferguson) I would say that I regard myself as atypical in this regard. There's no way to know for certain without a comprehensive survey of a huge number of syllabi in my discipline or across the humanities, but I think it's a reasonable guess that these are uncommon and non-canonical inclusions.

What I think would be a more theoretically principled kind of conservative literary criticism would basically derive from Edmund Burke, that would see literature as the expressive conservation of existing forms of cultural and social consciousness and practice, and to violently contest statist attempts to set cultural "policy" or use culture as an instrument of social transformation.

He also sees difficulties with this approach. I say that this is a feature rather than a bug. It is when there are conflicts that thought occurs. This is one reason why I find neo-conservatives fascinating. It isn't the content of their views that are interesting so much as the process they used in forming them. The necons have a broad range of views that are continually evolving. There is no dogma, no scripture. This is what allowed the early neoconservatives to include minds as diverse as Patrick Moynihan and Irving Kristol. The power of a creative ferment comes from attracting capable thinkers who are not doctrinaire, who have broadly shared concerns but not shared views. That diversity continues and still spans both major parties. They thrive on contradictory data and world views, it is all grist for the mill. You can't engage intimately with alternative views and not be affected. This is what keeps them evolving.

A possible example of this is pointed to by razib in a recent post (one of a series) at Gene Expression.

In my post below on the evolution-skeptic sophist David Berlinksi, who even relaxes in a pretentious manner, I did not address the reason that Commentary, a journal aligned with the neoconservative movement, might publish articles like this against evolutionary psychology. Steve and others have suggested this is part of a bank shot in solidifying the ties between evangelical Christians (who are often, but not always) evolution-skeptics and Jewish neoconservatives. Since some leading lights in the "the movement" are Straussians who have admitted that the beliefs of the masses might sometimes have to be at variance with reality for the sake of social amity, it is plausible to me that Irving Kristol & co. might feel it a worthy trade-off to an intellectual pursuit which they truly don't disagree with to please their allies. This is probably signalled by an essay 8 years ago in Commentary titled The Deniable Darwin by the same David Berlinski. But, that begs the question, why move on to evolutionary psychology??? The Weekly Standard has also thrown some grenades in the direction of evo-psych so I don't imagine this is simply an isolated incident.

What I see is a continuation of the intentional inclusion of diverse views in an intellectual round table discussion rather than a political strategy intended to bind disparate elements into a coalition. Moynihan and Kristol were in different political camps, had divergent views, but had fruitful interactions that I suspect enriched them both. When well formed arguments are taken seriously and rebutted in careful detail, rather than dismissively ignoring them as beyond the pale, the effort is doubly rewarding; you not only rebut ideas you oppose but also improve understanding of your own views. It may be that you discover defects in your views, perhaps not sufficiently important to reverse your position but enough to scratch an itch or two that had been pestering the back of your mind, creating nonspecific and unwanted doubt which too often is expressed as dogmatic refusal to think about touchy subjects and rudeness to those who broach them.

It isn't always pleasant, it's often work. I didn't enjoy Berlinksi's essay entirely but it wasn't his bald assertions that bothered me or even his sometimes florid prose...

CHARLES DARWIN presented On the Origin of Species to a disbelieving world in 1859 - three years after Clerk Maxwell had published "On Faraday's Lines of Force," the first of his papers on the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory has by a process of absorption become part of quantum field theory, and so a part of the great canonical structure created by mathematical physics.

By contrast, the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought.

"It is just a matter of time," one biologist wrote recently, reposing his faith in a receding hereafter, "before this fruitful concept comes to be accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar system." Time, however, is what evolutionary biologists have long had, and if general acceptance has not come by now, it is hard to know when it ever will.

IN ITS most familiar, textbook form, Darwin's theory subordinates itself to a haunting and fantastic image, one in which life on earth is represented as a tree. So graphic has this image become that some biologists have persuaded themselves they can see the flowering tree standing on a dusty plain, the mammalian twig obliterating itself by anastomosis into a reptilian branch and so backward to the amphibia and then the fish, the sturdy chordate line - our line, cosa nostra - moving by slithering stages into the still more primitive trunk of life and so downward to the single irresistible cell that from within its folded chromosomes foretold the living future.

This is nonsense, of course. That densely reticulated tree, with its lavish foliage, is an intellectual construct, one expressing the hypothesis of descent with modification.

Evolution is a process, one stretching over four billion years. It has not been observed. The past has gone to where the past inevitably goes. The future has not arrived. The present reveals only the detritus of time and chance: the fossil record, and the comparative anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of different organisms and creatures. Like every other scientific theory, the theory of evolution lies at the end of an inferential trail.

The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin's theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead...

... it was the conclusion that loomed at the end that threatened my certainties.

"Darwin," Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude, "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." This is an exaggeration, of course, but one containing a portion of the truth. That Darwin's theory of evolution and biblical accounts of creation play similar roles in the human economy of belief is an irony appreciated by altogether too few biologists.

Berlinksi is absolutely correct that evolution is a theory not yet proven and perhaps unprovable though it is so compelling, has such great explanatory power, that it seems as if it must be correct and that we will in time demonstrate this. Even if there are gods - or sufficiently advanced alien intelligences - that tinkered with life on earth to cause the precise life forms we see now and in the fossil record that doesn't disprove evolution, it just alters the details of evolutionary history. But that may be Berlinski's goal, to shake the certainties of evangelical atheists such as Dawkins who use evolution as a support for their beliefs and a weapon to attack enemies.

I find this useful. Certainty isn't conducive to thought. It harms social and scientific thinkers, blinding them to insights that might even support their cherished illusions if they were capable of doubt and so pursued an inquiry. I'm comfortable with the idea that everything I know and all that is written in all of the books will in some future be shown to be naive if not wholly mistaken. All of my positions are pragmatic and provisional, subject to revision or complete reversal as new information and frameworks emerge. We proceed wholeheartedly on our current best information knowing that we are surely wrong, perhaps fatally wrong, but that there is no alternative nearly so useful and effective.

This may be the sticking point; there are those who cannot proceed without certainty, that freeze up in indecision or fear when certainty is lacking, and retreat to ground assumed to be safe, hiding under the bed in effect, hoping that they aren't discovered and required to confront their fears. There are those who behave as razib suggests, calculating each position and assertion, weighing its possible worth for advancing their agendas. We see all of these approaches and others at all times and can't always distinguish one from another. We use all of these approaches like tools in a kit, selecting the one thought best for each task.

The proper tool for intellectual inquiry is open and honest consideration of diverse arguments pursued in a spirit of humility that assumes there are discoveries to be made. The existence and use of that tool is what needs teaching, is what is missing from those excoriated in previous posts. This lack is painfully obvious to those denigrated as anti-intellectual though they may not do well in articulating their observations or speak a language comprehensible to the chastising monks. My view is that it would be intellectually profitable as well as politically useful for those who aspire to being intellectuals to embrace this understanding and work to develop concepts and language that allow communication between various political camps, to assume that others are smart, deserving of respect, and worth talking to once a shared language is developed. This isn't only intellectually satisfying, it advances the most basic objectives of progressive politics by granting full suffrage - not just a vote but a place in society, a piece of the action, charter membership - to all who seek it, a birthright that can't be taken away though it can be rejected.