Horowitz v. Bérubé

I’ve always thought Berube seemed very bright when I’ve read his commentaries. And I thought Horowitz seemed the dimmer of the two in the linked exchange.

You’re misparsing the sentence. Read it like this:

Horowitz… all in all, doesn’t seem particularly bright.

(Wow, three of us in as many minutes with that concern… and let me just add that in that exchange, I didn’t feel that either of them came off as particularly bright.)

… and, all in all, he doesn’t seem particularly bright.

This just underscores a very important point that has been drilled into me over the last few years.

Many things have been said about arguing on the internet, and we all know about flame wars and forum discussions devolving into chaos. Internet conversations can really become embarrassing for all involved, including the casual reader who happens to witness them. The internet brings out the stupid in people, and until I read this transcript, I would have thought that academics and others who are used to conversing via text would be immune to its effects, but apparently that isn’t the case.

It’s edifying to see two passionate intellectuals resolve some long-standing disagreements over a single face-to-face meeting. It implies that even they are affected by the difficult-to-interpret nature of written communication and the spontaneous and unedited nature of internet text. Bloggers beware: if you treat your written words more casually because you can publish them so easily on the internet, you are apt to fall victim to the same kind of animosity based on misinterpretation.

this transcript brings out one of the weird things about Horowitz:
when you get him away from the Hannitys and Limbaughs, face to face with some real academics, he’s not only conciliatory and eirenic, he is practically obsequious.

It’s this weird mixture of envy and hostility–wanting to belong and hating those who exclude him.

The poor guy–I’ve seldom seen a worse case of wanna-be academic disease. If only somebody had taken him to the Faculty Club years ago and said, “you know, David, we really respect you–we think of you as one of us.” That probably would have placated him enough that the rest would never have happened.

“It’s edifying to see two passionate intellectuals resolve some long-standing disagreements over a single face-to-face meeting.”

Well, it might be edifying, if we were to see that. I doubt, however, that any real long-standing disagreements were resolved.

“. . . a worse case of wanna-be academic disease . . . Newt Gingrich.”

According to that unimpeachable source, Wikipedia, Gingrich has a PhD in history from Tulane, and spent 8 years on the faculty of West Georgia College (and was denied tenure).

More a case of not-very-successful academic than wanna-be academic . . .

I dunno — I thought the exchange was pretty even-handed. Horowitz was more serious about it, but neither dim nor at a loss. I expect Berube is smarter, but that dialogue doesn’t show it.

o joy!

“Horowitz doesn’t seem particularly bright”

Not the only one. We get, in audio, an “excerpt” of the interview in some weirdo proprietary streaming format, rather than an mp3 I can download and listen to on my iPod. Goodbye, Chronicle of Higher Ed; enjoy your life in the 20th century, but most of the rest of us have moved on to the 21st, where life is too short, and the options too numerous, to put up with this sort of crap.

I disagree with most of the commenters above, in that I think it’s Horowitz who doesn’t seem all that bright.

A disturbing number of commentators here seem overly concerned with who “seems bright”. Outside of academic discourse, that’s largely irrelevant.

Horowitz, I think, did a better job of restating his own opinions and thereby getting them out there; Berube, on the other hand, said little or nothing to explain why he disagrees with Horowitz or sees Horowitz’s arguments as dangerous and inane. Some witty waffle about there being “2 David Horowitzs” and “8 or 9 Berubes” notwithstanding.

I should add that I say all this as someone who thoroughly agrees with Berube and finds Horowitz both politically repulsive and deeply manipulative. But really – Berube came across, by and large, as a fairly stereotypical liberal, sneering at his enemy’s views rather than combating them.

I must agree with passing fancy’s comment in 23. I come from the same perspective, and I’ve generally been disappointed in my trips through the blogsphere at how well my philosophical compatriots express their views. Crooked Timber is one of relatively few examples I’ve found where the discourse is often of a quality similar to the better libertarianish blogs.

But this post isn’t a very good example of why I like the place. Whether Horowitz seems “all that bright” or how he responds when people don’t take him seriously isn’t particularly relevant to the merits (or lack) of his argument.

Mocking plays great to the permanently converted, but it’s time more of us on the left realized that a majority of the population is at best skeptical about many liberal shibboleths. The right has been more consistently out in the public sphere making arguments for 40 years now, and over the last 20, they’ve largely co-opted the mainstream media. We cannot take it for granted that most people understand liberal ideas. It’s been twenty years as the minority AFAICT and things are still looking pretty bleak in the public sphere based on my survey of blogs over the last year.

I think Berube is absolutely correct that the largely leftist academy is *bad* for the left. Many leftist intellectuals are university professors, and the colleagues they mostly come in contact with are also leftist. There is a tendency to read or hear somebody’s devastating critique of some right wing position, and just file that question away as “answered” and never go through the actual critique with many people and spread it. Why? Because you don’t need to if everybody you meet already believes the same thing. The problem is when this attitude spills over into a public sphere filled with those who disagree. We “know they are wrong” and don’t take them seriously enough to go back to the critiques that convinced us they were wrong and spread that information out for others.

If we don’t take criticism seriously, it’s hard for those who don’t already agree with us to take *us* seriously. Berube shows his own political Limbaugh-ish personality throughout most of this exchange as much as Horowitz does in his tv appearances.

Aren’t we supposed to be better than those guys?

Liberal intellectuals tend to believe that measured rational discourse triumphs over dishonest demagoguery. Right-wing pundits usually know better.

But so far, nobody has really come up with a strategy that’s both effective and workable for the liberal intellectual. Note lack of money may be an under-discussed factor.

What works depends on the environment, and on what you want to achieve. The long haul of winning over a majority of people to a left wing vision of social justice and support for the practical programs needed to realise it in a way that is sustainable against the inevitable setbacks that will be placed in our way probably needs all sorts of methods; one of them is measured rational discourse. In our, very right wing, environment, by the way, I suspect that demogoguery serves right wingers well, but not left wingers. Measured rational discourse is what we have available to us. Lets use it.

The poor guy—I’ve seldom seen a worse case of wanna-be academic disease.

So what am I, dog meat?

Self-consciously liberal intellectuals like to say so, but in practice resort more often to sneering.

Shelby likes to say this, but in reality is completely deluded on this matter. Your move.

Engels: the quip is supposed to be witty.

Shelby, you say that it is, but in actual fact… (continued on page 107)

I think Shelby is quite right about a typical liberal intellectual, there’s a lot of dogmatism and rigidity there

No shit, there probably is. Then again, what you say is so vague that it would be hard for anyone to object to it. But this isn’t the claim I took issue with, which was that “liberal intellectuals… resort more often to sneering [than to rational argument]”.

A commitment to rational discussion as a means of getting at the truth and resolving disagreements is one of the ideals of liberalism, and something which distinguishes it from conservatism as well as some forms of socialism. Of course liberals often fail to live up these ideals, but droning on about this, as if it were a failure which were peculiar to liberalism, seems to me hypocritical at best and, when it comes from Horowitz types, deliberately dishonest.

Am I now a “Horowitz type”? I think that’s the insinuation, as I haven’t seen anyone else level the “sneer-and-quip” charge.

A commitment to rational discussion is indeed a hallmark of the liberal tradition, which has little to do with the modern political/intellectual left-liberalism I was tweaking. In any event, I was making a joke as much as a serious point — though Engels’ first response merely proved its accuracy.

By the way, I think we can all be United Against Sneering. It’s nasty and mean. (By definition.)

Or at least, that’s my own, unsupported, rather weird opinion.

Shelby, as far as I can see, you have made three claims in this discussion.

i) Self-consciously liberal intellectuals… resort more often to sneering [than to rational discussion]

ii) the liberal tradition… has little to do with.. modern political/intellectual left-liberalism

iii) people who identify themselves [as liberals] rarely demonstrate that they have absorbed and are guided by the liberal tradition, rather relying on polemics and cliquishness and pretending they have made an argument

Breaking this down, I think we can say that (iii) is roughly equivalent to (i) and at neither point did you give an argument for it. Your argument for (ii) is, apparently, that it is entailed by (iii).

I think it is fair to say therefore, as I said above, that your argument has consisted of little more than a repetition of your original assertion: that liberals are not rational people and hardly ever give arguments for their views. I do not believe this is true, and I do not think that argument-by-repeated-assertion-that-one’s-opponent-is-irrational is a very convincing style of debate.

As for your complaint about quips, or “sneers” as you insist on calling them, has it occurred to you that it is sometimes possible to make a substantive point in an oblique or humorous way? If American conservatives do not understand this, then they really need to read more, or get out more.

I think if conservatives in America really did have lots of good arguments for their views I think I would hear about them more often. From my experience of arguing with them on the internet, what I hear far more frequently is just this endless complaining that “liberals” are not rational, are ideological, are driven by groupthink, knee-jerk reactions, bias, ideology, emotional urges, yada yada yada. This suggests to me that most the American conservatives I have met either don’t have many good arguments available to them, or aren’t bright enough to work out what they are.

abb1 – No, that is not the point we were discussing at all. Thanks anyway.

No, Chris, I think Horowitz made an important point in calling Hayden White a phony and calling the entire History of Consciousness Program at Santa Cruz a “corrupt department,” and Bérubé should have engaged Horowitz’s important point more thoroughly and thoughtfully instead of responding with a typical liberal sneer and quip.

I agree entirely with thoughtful commenter’s comments. Why can’t we all be more thoughtful and serious? And those silly typical liberals… why can’t they be as thoughtful as I am? And seriously people, no more sneering. Turn that frown upside down!

Was no one struck by the fact that Berube just agreed with almost everything pejorative that was/has been said about Ward Churchill and about Sami al-Arian? What is that? “I am a good liberal, and they are baddies; I can talk to Horowitz; fuck those radicals”?

Aren’t we supposed to be better than those guys?

Yes, but the point is to act like it. As you can see from “thoughtful commentator,” even when you respond to what little substance they have, they’ll always claim that you just “sneered” at them.
.

Maybe Ward Churchill does, in fact, deserve perjoratives? Dunno.

OK, then, abb1. But why lol at the research question? If Daniel Goldhagen can answer that one reductively, so can Ward Churchill.

And you know, Churchill has a pretty haughty and disdainful attitude toward people like me who defend his right to speak but not the content of his remarks. So I’ll just let him look for allies elsewhere.

DH is a Trofim Lysenko for our times.

Is Horowitz a Lysenko, or a sloppy researcher? There is an important difference. Lysenko cooked the books and made certain that his research came out supporting the ends desired by Comrade Stalin. So there was intent to deceive. Is that somethig proved with Horowitz? I’d agree that his work is sloppy, and not of a quality that I would like to associate with research universities.

However, let’s note that many academics (Professor Berube excepted) seem to be perfectly willing to support the research fraud of Micheal Bellesiles and Ward Churchill. Bellesile and Churchill fit the comparison to Lysenko much more aptly than Horowitz.

Lastly, Hayden White is greatly over-rated, as are most of the folks who quote him approvingly.