Wednesday March 31, 2004

NEXT UP: WHY ENGLISH BULLDOGS ARE MORE LOYAL THAN FRENCH BULLDOGS. I'm just about sure now that I shouldn't be reading NRO's The Corner, let alone fishing clots of unreason out of it for public delectation. And I am sworn to rid myself of this enervating and anti-social habit (a few more prayers to my Dark Lord Satan should do it!). But not just yet.

Lately the Corner kids have been playing with a piece of intellectual debris extrapolated, to use a polite word, from Jonah Goldberg's exchange with Kevin Drum as to liberal vs. conservative traditionalism. Goldberg wondered why liberals "ignore their own intellectual tradition" while conservatives cry out the names of Burke, Hayek etc. every few minutes, like Tourette's sufferers. Drum suggested that liberalism's forward-looking nature disinclined its followers to idol worship ("The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what [Chares] Beard would have thought?"). A flip answer, I thought, and a little shakey (try telling the ACLU that they're insufficiently respectful of the work of the Founders!), but no more so than the question deserved.

This inspired a strange sub-theme that lasted for days: in his gloss, outrider Julian Sanchez posited a "divide between theoretical and engineering dispositions," and suddenly everyone was debating whether engineering was liberal or conservative:

Can you imagine if the Boeing engineers designed the next generation of jetliners the way liberals would design our next health-care system? (A Goldberg reader)

Back when socialism was considered "scientific" lots of engineers and other scientists were not merely liberals, but Marxists. (Goldberg)

Jimmy Carter is an engineer. 'Nuff said. (Steve Hayward)

I am pretty sure that Thorstein Veblen was a leader in the Technocracy movement. (Goldberg)

Catherine and I must have met a couple of hundred [engineers] during our research for the Apollo book... I met precisely one who was a liberal. Maybe others were too, but among everyone who even mentioned politics, being conservative was taken for granted. I think there is a distinction between the engineer mindset, which is definitely, "There's a way to fix that," and the impulse to extend that mindset to human problems, which seems to be a proclivity of intellectuals. (Charles "Negroes are Stupid" Murray)

I am pro-engineer in theory... engineers are, as I see it, a Good Thing. (John Derbyshire)

The Conservative Books thing was lame, but this is fucking quadraplegic.

(You might argue that it's all just a joke. Okay. So how then is it different from the rest of the site?)

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