A Monopoly of Virtue and Omniscience?
So it turns out my colleague is not the only person out there who finds Crooked Timber irritating. Not a bit of it. There is for instance Oliver Kamm who has just posted about his decision to unlink the Timberites. His reasons are strikingly similar to those Jerry S has alluded to in passing.
Of Kant’s observation about “the crooked timber of mankind”, Isaiah Berlin, in his book of that title, wrote:
To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.
Recently the authors of the Crooked Timber blog have excelled not only in the neatness of their uniforms, but also in their eagerness to congratulate themselves on how they look. It is an unendearing rhetorical tick to commend one’s own uniqueness among bloggers in commenting on a particular subject, and Crooked Timber’s authors appear to have caught it from each other. But if it were only their perspicacity, I should still find it tolerable; it’s their monopoly of virtue and omniscience that gets me down.
That’s a good quotation. We should have it as an epigraph somewhere. Again – it’s another one of those neat, eloquent statements of what we say in ‘About B&W.’ It’s probably a very unendearing rhetorical tick of mine to keep mentioning that – but I don’t do it for reasons of vanity, I don’t think. I do other things for reasons of vanity, no doubt, but not that. I don’t think. I think I do that 1) to reiterate the basic point because it is a point worth reiterating, if only because it’s a mental trap we’re all liable to, decidedly including me. I’m reminding myself as much as (if not more than) anyone. And 2) simply by way of quotation, aesthetic pleasure, etc. To enrich the point by offering particularly eloquent statements of it. And 3) to point out other people who think and say the same thing, by way of demonstrating that there are a lot of us. There are more of us than we think. A lot more. That’s been one of the major surprises of doing B&W, as a matter of fact: finding out what a lot of us there are. As I think I’ve mentioned a few times, Jerry S thought when we started B&W that we were going to get a lot of hostility (he looked forward to it) and not much of the other thing. It hasn’t turned out that way. That seems to be an indication that dislike of irrationalist strains and conformist pressures in the Left, by the Left, is quite widespread. Well what a good thing that is – there may be some hope of getting rid of them then (by exerting conformist pressure to be anti-irrationalist).
I’m not sure I understood this Notes and Comment entry, but I will say that Crooked Timber is my favorite blog. They talk about interesting topics (you don’t have to agree with them), and often topics that I haven’t known about or thought much about before. And their blogroll is great, so I use it to surf blogs.
It seems that the weakness of their contributors is that they are too ivy tower, too ignorant of the lives of ordinary people outside academia. (I’ll never forget the time I said something about professors being spoiled by the tenure system, and one of the Crooked Timberites responded that he guessed that the number of employees who effectively had tenure was at least 100 times greater outside academia as inside. I think this guy needs to try working in a real job for a change.)
As far as congratulating themselves, that’s nothing new on the Internet, and Internet message boards are full of spontaneous agreement and praise for fellow posters. There’s a not-so-polite term for it (“circle—-“). The growth of blogs brings together journalists, teachers, and other know-it-alls with similar opinions, and allows them to praise each other and feed off of each other’s thoughts and ideas. I don’t see how group blogs are particularly unusual in this respect.
Ah, I remember that tenure discussion! You weren’t the only one who made a comment along those lines. ‘Ever worked in a factory/hospital/slaughterhouse?’ one wanted to ask.
I like CT too, but I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite any more. But I’m not sure how much that’s because I begin to see my colleague’s point about it, and how much is just because I’ve been reading it for a long time.
(You can say circle-jerk here, we’ve said worse things than that.)
Third-rate academics from second-rate universities holding forth as if they were the world’s greatest thinkers.
Of course, I’d be a fourth or fifth rate academic if I’d not given it all up a long-time ago – actually, come to think of it, I doubt very much whether I could even hold down a university job – but it’s the pretension, the apparent lack of self-awareness, the unceasing self-congratulation, the absence of self-deprecation, the incestuousness… oh, you get the picture, they’re just a tad irritating.
Apart from that, I love Crooked Timber! Except for the whole pretentious name thing. And their obsession with the minutiae of George Bush’s life – sorry OB – Bush falls off bike, CTite checks weather forecast to determine if it had been raining.
Maybe I’m just jealous. That’s probably it!
They don’t read us, do they!? :-)
No I don’t think they read us – much. Except maybe occasionally.
No need to say sorry about Bush thing, I’m not interested in the minutiae of his life – I ignore him as much as I possibly can. But of course that’s because I detest him so much, not because I’m above it or anything.
I read CT regularly, because I want to be balanced. When I started hunting out cognitive bias and critical thinking information, I also found that there existed what CT would call right-wingers.
I was thrilled! From the mainstream media I thought the right wing was just maniac nazi skinheads, and here were a small coterie of people who could write, hold reactionary viewpoints AND chew gum at the same time. Not all of them of course… I find some rightist blogs get old very very quickly. But to read the mainstream (eg Australian ABC, BBC, The Melbourne Age)is like going nature-walking in a pine plantation.
But CT despite a delicately anti-Bush orientation at least SEEM to be smarter than me, better educated than me, and point me to debates I knew nothing of. Point and link to interesting information, while having personal respect for the authors – that is a great niche. Mind you, they DON’T link as much as I would like.
So I love Instapundit, CT, Critical Thinking on the Web, Richard Webster, and the excellent Butterflies and Wheels.
I think the most annoying recent thread on CT was the one on Foucault and the stoning of women. I hope I was not the only person to be irritated by the failure of some people to answer the simple question “Is the stoning of women wrong?” It made me feel that they had something to hide.
Yes, CT tells me about a lot of subjects I know nothing of, too. That’s one reason I still like it.
Yeah, the one on Foucault and the stoning of women irritated me too, quite a lot. I posted a rude question or set of questions there.
I don’t know CT, but I’ll check it out. While on the topic of links, I recommend the David Stove website, which includes some of Stove’s writings [irreverent to say the least], including the complete text of his classic skewering of the irrationalist philosophers of science — Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerbrand. Even if you don’t agree with him, he is a good read — nice writing and a clear thinker [also hilarious at points; he has a nose for the jugular]. I also recommend Keith Windschuttle and his website, The Sydney Line, a website doing battle with the PM’s in Australia, with a nice collection of writings.
Here’s a teaser from Stove, from his essay, “What’s Wrong With Our Thoughts?” — a generally hilarious assay of various ideologies, and human thought in general, ranging from Plotinus to Derrida.
“My four examples above are, then, sufficiently representative, respectively, of Christian theology, of neo-Platonist metaphysics, of German idealism, and of whatever it is that Foucault represents. Those four things, in their turn, are sufficiently representative of what human thought, in its highest reaches, has been. My four examples, however, are also examples of thought gone hopelessly wrong. A damning verdict therefore follows, on past human thought: a verdict essentially the same as the one which was pronounced on it by the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and repeated, with even greater vehemence, by the Logical Positivists in the twentieth century.
Of course it is a verdict against most past thought, not against all of it. Exempted from it are, for example, Greek mathematics in antiquity, and most importantly of course, natural science in the period since Copernicus: this being the ground on which the Enlightenment in general, and Logical Positivism in particular, took its stand. But both Greek mathematics and modern science are, in the overall historical scene, mere points of light in a boundless and impenetrable darkness. Most of even the highest human thought is what David Hume said religion is: ‘sick men’s dreams.’4 By contrast, rational thought – what Hume called the ‘calm sunshine of the mind’5 – is historically rare, local, and ephemeral.
From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume’s point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.”
Must agree with the recommendation of Stove and Windschuttle; refreshing as a dose of Drano clearing the fatuosity-clogged cloaca of the intellect.
FWIW, I read B&W regularly, but only just caught this thread because I’ve been away. If people like CT, fine, if not, not. But just for the record it simply isn’t true that we are exclusively academics. Ted, Tom, Maria and Daniel aren’t and Micah is a grad student. As for Oliver Kamm complaining about people who claim a monopoly on virtues and omniscience …. Has Oliver Kamm read Oliver Kamm recently?
(BTW I’m completely devoid of both knowledge and virtue myself.)
CT manages to raises topics I didn’t know existed while at the same time exhibiting a rather smug complacency about academia.
Overall though I try not to base my blog reading on people I agree with. The sites that really make me scream but which I still – for the moment – read are the Adam Smith Institute Blog and Samizdata. I keep reading not because I find what they say in the least bit edifying, but because in working out a response I am forced to clarify my own thinking – and every so often someone says something sensible.
MD – logical positivism is self-defeating, because it does not qualify as rational by its own criterion.
Ah, Chris does read us regularly. Well then it’s what Jerry S said – he’s just jealous!
Anyway we can’t talk; I do nothing but boast and I know nothing about anything. (I am very virtuous though, that’s a fact.)