When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I came across a small news article about the energetic Ayn Rand Club at MIT. I had read three of her novels in high school, the appropriate time for sophomoric works. Along with Catcher in the Rye, Winesburg, Ohio, and many other books, I had already – at the age of twenty – begun to think of her novels as part of a wasted youth (too much reading, not enough sex). No one over twenty should – or could – take them seriously.

Apparently Rand was different, and appealed to a kind of person plentiful at MIT. She presented a logical social philosophy for people who knew little about social life. They were immature, yes, but there was no sign they would ever grown up. They were smart, not wise. Today we might suspect them of Asperger syndrome.

Paul Ryan is smart, too, in the style of an autodidact who has read widely without putting what he knows together into the big picture. Or perhaps putting it into a too simple a big picture. There is no mystery why a partially educated fellow like Ryan might cling to an adolescent worldview. The mystery is why he has accumulated followers who seem to find him some kind of profound guru. Even most Republicans, who as Rick Santorum reminded us do not even hope to attract smart people any more, must see through Ryan.

Or maybe not. Ryan reminds me of another would-be politician who used a similar kind of pseudo-intellectual style to attract a small but viciously devoted following, Lyndon LaRouche. There was one thing constant in LaRouche’s bizarre move from the authoritarian Left to the authoritarian Right: his use of impenetrable prose and technical jargon to “prove” his worldview. His main publications were couched as “executive reviews” and a magazine on the technical details of the fusion energy that would save the world. The very idea that a worldview can be “proven” is a telling mistake.

At the risk that I’ll sound like a crowd theorist of the 1950s, LaRouche’s followers seemed like social misfits. When they lurked around airports, their opening gambits for engaging passersby in conversation tended to be insults. “Even guys with beards can be for nuclear energy,” I remember one saying to me. Perhaps so, but not in my case. It took only a minute of conversation for him to turn contemptuous and end the conversation. An interesting way to win friends and influence people.

But the LaRouchies did not expect to win many friends (and they did not). It was more important to be right, to show off a few technical terms, and to feel superior to the rush of humanity. This is almost the definition of a cult: a group isolated from its surroundings by its own self-righteousness.

This pseudo-intellectual political style is linked to two other styles in American politics, famously analyzed by Richard Hofstadter a generation ago: anti-intellectualism and paranoia. Of the former, the great historian commented in 1962,

“Just as the most effective enemy of the educated man may be the half-educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that outworn or rejected idea.”

Ten years earlier he had written of the paranoid style’s pedantic concern with demonstration and facts:

“The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming ‘proof’ of the particular conspiracy that is to be established.”

The implausible conclusions are hidden in the forest of details.

In their local social circles, individuals often gain reputations for being profound thinker by deploying arguments like these, now easily available on the Internet, ready to send along or to cite at dinner parties. In addition, I suspect that there are certain professions, or semi-professions, where there are lots of people who appreciate the pseudo-intellectual style. Lower-level engineers, perhaps, or math and science teachers in middle schools: people whose sense of their own status depends on scientific facts, not social skills. More men, no doubt, than women, for that very reason. The laws of nature exist independently of what we think of them, and only a few understand those laws. That works fine if you are a scientist trying to discover a new neurotransmitter. But the laws of the social world – even economic markets – are not so simple.

Unfortunately the pseudo-intellectual style does get applied to social life, and that is when it turns dangerous. People with this worldview are rarely professional social scientists. In fact, the pseudo-intellectual aura of hard facts does not appeal to social OR natural scientists. The latter take a more pragmatic approach, seeing all findings as tentative and open to eventual refinement and revisions. There are no easy, complacent truths. But that does not stop quasi–intellectual occupations like math teachers or journalists from trying. Take a look at some of Glenn Beck’s elaborate diagrams of historical influence, linking Barack Obama to Angela Davis to Woodrow Wilson, and so on. It looks complicated, so it must be right.

The notorious hero of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, John Galt (tellingly, a double major in physics and philosophy, two fields revered but rarely understood by outsiders) proclaimed a contemptuous, anti-social philosophy “that I will never live for the sake of another man” because “you are your own highest value.” Surely Paul Ryan and his quasi-intellectual fans are a bit old for this sophomoric ranting?

“I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life.” With this sentence, I opened my book Civility and Subversion. Motivating the writing of that book was a developing misinformed (to my mind) consensus that intellectuals played an important role in the democratic opposition to the Communist order, but they would be relatively unimportant for the post Communist making and running of democracy. I thought that this was a terrible mistake, and I tried to show that in the book. In short, my argument was that intellectuals play a democratic role, not when they purport to provide the answers to a society’s problems, but when they facilitate deliberate discussion. Intellectuals are talk provokers. Discussions at Deliberately Considered over the past week demonstrate my point. We have considered and opened discussion about important problems.

On Monday, Vince Carducci introduced and analyzed the photography of John Ganis, art that confronts the damage we do to our environment, showing beauty that displays destruction. Carducci observes that “Ganis describes himself as a ‘witness’ rather than an activist. And yet his subject matter and its treatment clearly indicate where the artist’s loyalties lie.” But it is the ambiguity of the work, its internal tension that provokes and doesn’t answer political questions that facilitated a discussion between Felipe Pait and Carducci, comparing the destruction of the BP oil spill with the devastation in Japan. This could inform serious discussion about my reflections on man versus nature. We are present. We have our needs. How does it look when we satisfy them? What are the consequences? I think that this reveals that the power of the witness can sometimes be more significant than that of the activist. Carducci and I have an ongoing discussion about the value of agit prop. He likes it. I abhor it. I think Ganis’ work, with Carducci’s analysis of it, as the devastation in Japan was unfolding, supports my position.

On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, I reported on and reflected upon some local happenings in my hometown: the closing of an A&P and threatened budgetary cuts at a community center in a primarily African American neighborhood. Logical business decisions and business as usual local governance were having profound unjust effects. I was particularly impressed by the replies to the posts. First, my Town Supervisor responded, asking if he could pass my criticisms of the A&P closing on to A&P. Then a series of replies to my post on institutionalized racism, which pointed to analogous situations. Rafael reported from Texas about the schools there. Regina Tuma’s noted how the conflicts in Wisconsin and the experiences in Ohio are a manifestation of the same problems. And Scott made the general point: “The powerless throughout the country are being asked, or more properly forced, to bear a disproportionate cost for a problem that was, by and large, not of their making,” and speculates about the likelihood of “a counterpoint to the Tea Party.” I also had discussions at the community center about the post. Staff and community members think that the protest I reported on may be having an impact. They seem to have a sense of empowerment, as they try to figure out how they are going to buy their daily bread, along with their other groceries. I’m struck how two parts of my life, one embedded in the academic world, the other in my hometown, met virtually through the post.

I tried hard to facilitate a careful response to the Japanese catastrophes.  I have difficulty responding to natural disasters.  To use a silly cliché, they are beyond my pay grade. I generally listen to the experts, turn off the cable news and try to act as a responsible citizen. Intelligent public deliberation and discussion are difficult.

The complaint of Pait in his response to Fine’s post on joking about Japan underlines the point. “This conversation is too much about the talk and too little about the act. There are people who like it. As an engineer, I don’t.” I am a man committed to talk, but I know that sometimes talk is cheap.  Pait is right, action is imperative in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear disasters. Talk is secondary. But eventually it is important.

We need to confront the relationship between the human and the natural world.  We need to know when we can tame nature, when we must accept its overwhelming destructive force, and we need to be aware when we are the destructive force, as it is connected to our pursuit of oil and our attempt to create easy alternatives in the form of nuclear power. That requires informed talk, when intellectuals, including artists, not only experts, are necessary.

And then there’s Gary Alan Fine, Deliberately Considered’s intellectual provocateur, mixing high and low brow insight. He established his learning by presenting a classic reflection by Adam Smith on distant suffering. Fine, in his first post this week, highlights that Smith recognizes both the problem of empathy at a distance, but also reflects on how reason and principle reach out, leading us to do the right thing. But, in his second post, he explains the humor in horror, justifying the politically incorrect jokes of: “Mr. Gottfried, Mr. 50 Cent, and Mr. Haley Barbour’s press secretary.” Fine in his appreciation of troubling humor, makes a classic conservative point about the human condition, “let us treasure those who begin the process by which we realize that we cannot change the world, but must distance ourselves from it, amused. We can wallow in the pain of others or we can recognize that our life continues.” Have I found an intelligent conservative intellectual within our midst?

Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial?  I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.

For many people, this decision would be straightforward.  For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go.  For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear.  But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.

In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.

Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing.  They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.

While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire.  I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives.  The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and the standards of academic review, in established ways:  both have their advantages.

DC is an experiment in reviving a kind of critical culture.  Perhaps it was never lost, but it needs new platforms.

A few days ago I asked the question “Where are the conservative intellectuals?”  I posed the straightforward question, but also gave a reason why I, as a person who is generally on the left, asked:  I used to be challenged by conservatives, but not these days, and wonder  if there are any out there who are still challenging.  I received interesting replies.

Michael suggested the Heritage Foundation, and  Alex suggested Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution Blog and Kosmos, a career networking site for classical liberals.  I found the Heritage site very predictable.  The Cowen site an interesting place for the discussion by conservative economists, or more precisely classically liberal economists,  and Kosmos a networking site for like minded people.  Scott later pointed me in the direction of American Conservative Magazine, Reason Magazine, and sometimes the Frum Forum: a site of traditional conservativism, one for significant libertarian thought, and a kind of Huffington Post for conservatives.

So there are places to explore, but as a looked around, I didn’t find anything that challenged me.  Where are the conservatives who have ideas that I must consider because of their intellectual power and insight?

Scott poses a hypothesis why I am having a problem.  He wrote:

I think there are conservative intellectuals, but they use their brainpower however towards electioneering and must necessarily for the most part remain in the background. That is, they can’t be public intellectuals, or at least appear to be intellectual in public, but follow their own narrative which says that the elitist intelligentsia is out of touch with the majority of Americans.

This is ironic. There are conservative intellectuals, but because of their practical commitments and principled convictions that intellectuals are dangerous, they dare not show their faces, nor their ideas.  In the past, they avoided this problem by calling themselves “men of letters,” reserving the label of intellectuals for despised leftists.  This was the position of Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sarte and Chomsky.

Now, apparently, or at least according to Scott, they are not doing this.

But Tim in his reply found more than this.  He had his own appreciative take on conservatives, which tells me that I need to pay attention:

It seems to me that a fundamental conservative posture in American intellectual discourse is still soundly rooted in our history and traditions as a people. That posture rests on the respectable ideal that at the conclusion of the American Revolution the sovereignty of the crown passed not to a government nor to a select elite (though it certainly did pass to a propertied white, male elite for a time) but to “The People” who then delegated carefully circumscribed powers to government through elected representatives. Of course, the historical reality was far more complex, but the ideal of “The People” setting constitutional restraints on public power is not.

This understanding of limited government places a burden on those seeking to expand its writ to explicitly and narrowly justify almost any exercise of power. To a progressive liberal, as I would describe myself, that burden does not create an insurmountable obstacle to public action — only a serious rebuttable presumption. Concentrated power — from any source, but particularly from government — must be justified in light of constitutional limits, settled public expectations and the exigencies of the moment.

A good and constructive conservative is therefore a natural critic of government power, constantly probing and challenging changes that encroach on private prerogatives. When I recognize such people I actively support them. For example, I supported a candidate for Congress from Long Island, Frank Scatturo, who recently lost the Republican primary in his district to a less impressive choice of the local party bosses. Scatturo has a brilliant conservative mind and would have been a thoughtful dissenting voice in Congress. For the same reason I am glad Antonin Scalia is on the U.S. Supreme Court, though I disagree with most of his decisions and wish he were the only conservative voice on the Court.

But the conservatives I describe and respect are hardly the conservatives we routinely witness in political life today.

Perhaps he is right about Scalia, but I have my doubts.  He is smart and learned.  But his notion of original intent makes no sense to me as a sociologist, given how I understand the sociology of knowledge. I will address this issue in an upcoming post.  I will have to look into Scatturo.

Indeed looking further reveals some interesting developments.  In yesterday’s Times, Ross Douthat presented a genuinely interesting conservative critique of the Wall Street bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, on the grounds that it establishes a custom of crony capitalism and undermines the moral foundation of sound economic life.

Something worth considering, I would say.  I am not persuaded, but it is intriguing.

The political right has been successful in swaying the general public for the time being, but American intellectuals remain unconvinced: are there any serious conservative intellectuals?

I am not worried that the universities are dominated by tenured radicals, as one right wing ideologue or another regularly discovers.  While the political center of American academics is significantly to the left of the center of the public at large, I see no reason to be particularly upset by this.  Career soldiers are probably to the right of the American consensus and this too doesn’t put me up in arms.  Better not, I guess.  The experience of particular vocations informs political judgment, and people with common world views make common career choices.

But I do worry about the absence of intelligent conservative commentary and criticism in American intellectual life.  It does seem to me that almost all serious thought these days is to be found on the left, and I don’t think that this is a good thing.  The conservative tradition contributes too much for it to come down to this.  And given the swings from left to right in the public mood (which I do regret, all I am saying is give leftists a chance) it would be a good thing if there were a sensible right.

Ideologues of the right, of course, do exist, those who know that there is a clear and present danger, and we must be vigilant, these days against “Islamofascism. “ I think that’s what they call it.  But these use fantasy and fear to empower their arguments, not reason and careful observation.  How else can you find a liberal Sufi cleric to be a terrorist sympathizer?

And there are those who cling if not to their guns and religion, to their absolute dogmatic beliefs and their assertions of the moral high ground, while fearing actual moral inquiry and debate.  Better to worry about the attack on Christmas.  And also those who know with certainty that the market is magical, and condemn government waste and inefficiency, who never met a tax cut they didn’t like, won’t ever concede that tax increases may sometimes be a good idea.  They won’t debate with me my strong conviction that there is no civilization without taxation.

I find Fox news intolerable, not because there are people on it that I disagree with, but by the way they assert their positions and the way facts are disregarded.  And when I read newspapers and magazines and search the web, I still can’t find conservatives that force me to take them seriously.  Here and there, I find the witty or the apparently educated, but they don’t challenge me, as great conservative thinkers do.  I deeply admire, Burke, Tocqueville, Arendt, Oakeshott, even my teacher with whom I had a difficult relationship, Edward Shils.

Soon to be on display at the Natural Museum: Republicanus Intelligus

They were all conservatives or at least influenced by significant conservative insights.  Shils taught me the importance of tradition and custom, and to worry about the limits of reason, as he introduced me to the conservative tradition.  We didn’t get along, but I had to take him seriously, and in the end I was flattered that he took me seriously.  But I can’t find conservatives to have a discussion with now.

That’s not my conclusion but my challenge.  Who are the intelligent conservatives out there?  Do you think it is necessary to find them?  And what should we do, when we do?  My guess is that we will find an intelligent conservative intellectual or scholar, and if I am lucky and they read this post, they will assert themselves in no uncertain terms.  But what about an intelligent, serious public figure, a conservative politician that acts in a way that is worthy of respect.  Are there any out there? At least over the past year, they have become not simply an endangered species but apparently, extinct.