The Judean People’s Front delivers an ultimatum
(oops, forgot to h/t the originator of this analogy – Jeffrey Tucker, editor of Agora Inc. owned Laissez Faire Books. The h/t is not an endorsement of any views expressed on that site, or of the owners of the site. Quite the contrary. In fact, I thought I came up with the above on my own. However, I try to be as scrupulous as possible, and this morning, I suddenly recalled reading an essay in which Tucker expressly made this joke. We’ll give the devil his due..
Note 2: And Bryan Caplan at Econlib seems to have noticed the similarity to Life of Brian before Tucker)
Oh dear.
So much fun and me with no time to bone up on my synthetic a priori judgments …or I’d join in.
Some people like their libertarianism (or, in my case, classical liberalism) ala Rothbard.
Other people don’t. Intellectual tastes differ. Why is that a problem?
Word to the wise.
Tempting as they are, these kinds of intellectual food-fights are better left to what Bruce Charlton calls “clever sillies.”
“Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain, this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost exclusively with others of similar intelligence generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.” [1]
AND“Yet, whatever else, to be a clever silly is a somewhat tragic state; because it entails being cognitively trapped by compulsive abstraction; unable to engage directly and spontaneously with what most humans have traditionally regarded as psycho-social reality; disbarred from the common experience of humankind and instead cut-adrift on the surface of a glittering but shallow ocean of novelties: none of which can ever truly convince or satisfy. It is to be alienated from the world; and to find no stable meaning of life that is solidly underpinned by emotional conviction. Little wonder, perhaps, that clever sillies choose sub-replacement reproduction.” [2]
AND“If some humility could be taught to the clever silly before he begins to form an idea about a matter of widespread social and political importance, perhaps then he could be persuaded to bear in mind a paraphrase of a line by Groucho Marx: Any idiot could understand this matter; fetch me an idiot!”
[2] Ibid., pp.3-4. David Stove was also good on clever sillies. See, for instance, his “Righting Wrongs”, in On Enlightenment, ed. A. Irvine (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), and “The Oracles and Their Cessation: a Tribute to Julian Jaynes”, in Cricket versus Republicanism, and Other Essays (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995).