I happen to have been a graduate student at Dartmouth when some conservative undergraduates founded the Dartmouth Review. (This is the student paper that launched the careers of Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza among others.) The paper was controversial from the start and eventually the controversy gave rise to a formal debate on the …
I happen to have been a graduate student at Dartmouth when some conservative undergraduates founded the Dartmouth Review. (This is the student paper that launched the careers of Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza among others.) The paper was controversial from the start and eventually the controversy gave rise to a formal debate on the proposition that the paper was having a "deleterious effect" on the Dartmouth community. Arguing the pro-Review case was Professor Jeffrey Hart who published regularly in the National Review and whose son was one of the founders of the Review. I don't recall the name of the Professor who argued the anti-Review side. But what stuck with me is that both debaters spoke in favor of a kind of elitism - the idea that there is such a thing as a degree of authority that society would do well to heed.
Fast forward to today and we find the bizarre situation that the concept of authority has evaporated in the "conservative" party. Medical authorities are demonized. Science holds no dominion. The craziest conspiracy theories carry the day. The right cannot recognize that the most insane characters are exactly that - insane.
What happened? Why do the signals from the "top" about what is true now fail to make it to the "bottom?" I think part of the problem is that certain philosophical schools on both the left and the right have for centuries now attacked the very idea of authority. Instead of framing debate in terms of whether something is true or not, the new schools speculate endlessly on the motivations of the debaters.
There seems to be a great desire now to rehabilitate the ideas of knowledge and authority, which are essentially the same thing. Witness the success of the Jonathon Rauch book. This is going to be an extremely difficult project.
"certain philosophical schools on both the left and the right have for centuries now attacked the very idea of authority." I understand this to mean the Protestant Reformation challenged the authority of the Catholic Church in the 17th century and then the Enlightenment challenged the authority of religion in the 18th. Which is left and which is right? Those terms had no currency until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th.
I happen to have been a graduate student at Dartmouth when some conservative undergraduates founded the Dartmouth Review. (This is the student paper that launched the careers of Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza among others.) The paper was controversial from the start and eventually the controversy gave rise to a formal debate on the proposition that the paper was having a "deleterious effect" on the Dartmouth community. Arguing the pro-Review case was Professor Jeffrey Hart who published regularly in the National Review and whose son was one of the founders of the Review. I don't recall the name of the Professor who argued the anti-Review side. But what stuck with me is that both debaters spoke in favor of a kind of elitism - the idea that there is such a thing as a degree of authority that society would do well to heed.
Fast forward to today and we find the bizarre situation that the concept of authority has evaporated in the "conservative" party. Medical authorities are demonized. Science holds no dominion. The craziest conspiracy theories carry the day. The right cannot recognize that the most insane characters are exactly that - insane.
What happened? Why do the signals from the "top" about what is true now fail to make it to the "bottom?" I think part of the problem is that certain philosophical schools on both the left and the right have for centuries now attacked the very idea of authority. Instead of framing debate in terms of whether something is true or not, the new schools speculate endlessly on the motivations of the debaters.
There seems to be a great desire now to rehabilitate the ideas of knowledge and authority, which are essentially the same thing. Witness the success of the Jonathon Rauch book. This is going to be an extremely difficult project.
"certain philosophical schools on both the left and the right have for centuries now attacked the very idea of authority." I understand this to mean the Protestant Reformation challenged the authority of the Catholic Church in the 17th century and then the Enlightenment challenged the authority of religion in the 18th. Which is left and which is right? Those terms had no currency until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th.
Keep in mind that Dartmouth is Laura Ingraham’s alma mater.