April 19, 2003
The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter By EMILY EAKIN
So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the argument that most criticism < and I would include Noam Chomsky in this < is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways."
Mr. Fish nodded approvingly. "I like what that man said," he said. "I wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work. And especially, I always wish to counsel people against the decision to go into the academy because they hope to be effective beyond it."
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Jesus.... everything you read in the newspaper is either out of The Onion or out of a chapter of "Atlas Shrugged". These guys are Ayn Rand's comprachicos come to life. "Why do you think you think" indeed!!
This is why I have always had sort of a guilty soft spot for the old Objectivists. [Not the current crop of epigones.] Of course they were enemies and wanted to destroy us all, etc., but at least they understood that theory was important, and the mind is to be used, and that questions of morality have to be addressed. They and we were soldiers on opposite sides, trying to understand and use the weapons that we have, each to destroy the other; that gave us something in common, that we do not share with self-contemptuous charlatans of the Gilman variety.
(And you can argue that Atlas Shrugged had cardboard characters and was clearly set in a parallel fantasy universe and a hundred other things, but damn, what a successful polemic-as-novel. When will someone on the US left write anything as effective, I'd like to know.)
LP