June 21, 2008
Saturday Reading
I was tempted to link to Elizabeth Scalia's piece on critical thinking yesterday and embellish it with one of my 100 word comments.
I am quite glad I did not.
Roger Kimball does extremely heavy lifting on that topic and I am glad that his response will never be compared to mine. I invite readers to grab a cup of coffee and settle in; his post is long enough to be published as a magazine cover story.
He digresses from "Critical Thinking" to cover essential differences in progressive vs. conservative thought in the two imperfect vessels of Kant and Bismarck.
An inventory of the fearsome social, political, and moral innovations made in this past century alone should have made every thinking person wary of unchaperoned innovation.One reason that innovation has survived with its reputation intact, Stove notes, is that Mill and his heirs have been careful to supply a “one-sided diet of examples.” You mention Columbus, but not Stalin, Copernicus, but not the Marquis de Sade, Socrates, but not Robespierre. Mill never missed an opportunity to expatiate on the value of “originality,” “eccentricity,” and the like. “The amount of eccentricity in a society,” he wrote, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.” But you never caught Mill dilating on the “improvement on established practice” inaugurated by Robespierre and St. Just, or the “experiments in living” conducted by the Marquis de Sade.
The piece is too far reaching to be successfully excerpted. Read the whole thing. Did Kimball really compose this in a single day? It is a response to an article published yesterday. I consider myself a fast (as opposed to gifted) writer. This would have taken me a year. With a full time research assistant. And two editors.
Hat-tip: Instapundit