Alterman & Lilla lovefest

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sat Nov 10 21:54:55 PST 2001


Mirk Lilla od the Chicago Committee on Social Thought says in his interview with ALterman:


>
>The intellectuals of our time I have most admired as models of
>probity and good sense were Raymond Aron and Isaiah Berlin. Aron,
>because he punctured the myth of the intellectual as moral critic
>"speaking truth to power." He understood that thinking responsibly in
>modern democratic society means mastering the complexities of that
>society and putting oneself in the shoes of those who must make
>decisions

This is an extraordinarily revealing comment. We are not, it seems, to speak truth to power. We are instead supposed to figure out how to exercise it for ends that are taken as given. How utterly vile and contemptible. If Washington and Jefferson had taken that line, we'd still be singing "God Save the Queen," and if William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe had done so, we'd be thing about how to ameliorate the lot of the slaves. jks

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