One wonders whether "Episcopal clergy" could be substituted for "left-wing intellectuals" in the following article excerpted from the online edition (4/23/03) of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Are our public commentaries predictable and ignorable by policy makers, not because of insightful, prophetic responses, but because of a habitual display of dogmatically "living in the 60s"?
A glance at the spring 2003 issue of The Public Interest: The "against it" mind-set of left-wing intellectuals. See information about the journal is available at http://www.thepublicinterest.com/
Left-wing intellectuals continue to cling to a legacy of knee-jerk dissent, even distorting and ignoring the facts to that end, writes Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics in the University of Chicago's Divinity School. "Somewhere along the line the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you had to be against it, whatever 'it' was," she writes. This mind-set came out of the tumult of the 1960s, according to Ms. Elshtain: "The Vietnam era opened up a fissure that still transfixes us and freezes our thinking."
Ms. Elshtain was among the 60 academics and intellectuals who released "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America" in February 2002, a statement supporting the U.S. war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The letter asserts five "fundamental truths," including a statement that "freedom of conscience and religious freedom are inviolable rights of the human person."
In contrast, the critical response to that statement in "Letter From United States Citizens to Friends in Europe," released by another group of scholars and intellectuals in April 2002, was tainted with distorted facts and faulty or simplistic reasoning, Ms. Elshtain argues. As an example of such reasoning, she points to leftist claims that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda "are creatures of a flawed U.S. policy, and more broadly, that the 'root causes' of September 11 are to be found in a long history of Western arrogance."
"The great bulk of America's intellectual elite has chosen, in making its adversarial case, to disregard evident facts and to employ disingenuous and highly misleading arguments," she concludes. "This serves no cause well, least of all the calling of intellectual life."
See Prof. Elshtain's "A Just War?" Boston Globe, Oct 6, 2002 at
http://www.americanvalues.org/html/1b___elshtain.html
and her website at
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/profile_jelshtain.html/
The Chronicle of Higher Education is at