It's amazing how right-wing academics get a pass from critics on the old ivory tower accusation. Left-wing professors are routinely dismissed for being muddle-headed, ideologically drive, & cut off from the real world; but here we have a professional ethicist, Jean Bethke Elshtain, of the University of Chicago, who argues for an imperialist American foreign policy & who dismisses our own government's attack on civil rights as trivial praised by Paul Berman in the Pages of the New York Times Book Review. Professor Elshtain is presented as an intellectual who cuts through the soft-headed balderdash of the left. Now, I am responding to a book review, not the book itself, but if Berman's characterization of the book is accurate, I detect two problems, both logical. The first is Elshtain's characterization of "the left"--in short, her left is a caricature based on selective generalization. That is, the picture she paints of the left is convenient to her purposes. The second logical problem is endemic to academic philosophy--it is called reasoning in a vacuum. In this case the vacuum is historical. Elshtain's reasoning appears to be completely removed from a century of American foreign policy. This is the worst sort of ivory tower intellectualizing, but it's all perfectly legitimate, apparently, when it comes from the right.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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