More on National Review’s house nihilist

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It’s becoming an old topic, but I think just one more foray into the stubborn blindness of John Derbyshire regarding our civilization might be worth the effort. He writes at the Corner, “If no American ever again paints anything as good as Cole’s Garden of Eden, my guess is that the republic will survive anyway. If we give up tinkering, we might survive, but only as a bureaucratic empire of paper-pushers and lotus-eaters.” Derbyshire writes in this vein constantly. When railing against the evils of anti-Darwinism, he writes that Western Civilization itself is at stake, and by God he won’t see it go down without a fight! For him and others like him, the West is the scientific method and those who employ it, and everything else is utterly superfluous. (How that discovery came about, and why it should have been made only within Christendom and nowhere else, is of no consequence to such deep thinkers as the Derb. He is almost admirably unfazed by the bald fact that the West predates the scientific method by many centuries, and could have gone on being great even had Francis Bacon never been born.) The death of the Christian religion, of Western art, language, and culture, is accounted by him no serious loss, a perhaps regrettable curiosity of history, but ultimately having no inexorable connection with civilization as such. Even to the extent it is regrettable, it is only because, hey, the Derb kinda likes that stuff. [LA replies: Just as he has nothing against about Islam as such, but wants us to stop letting in any more Muslim immigrants, because the Derb kinda dislikes them.]

Technology, for men like Derbyshire, simply is civilization, and all that junk about God and music is so much background noise distracting us from the main theme. What he fails in his specially determined way to see is that it is precisely scientism, the view of all knowledge as merely instrumental and ultimately limited to the scientifically verifiable, which leads to the phenomenon he so deplores—that of Americans seeking jobs only as bureaucrats and manipulators of symbols, the “community organizers, hospital diversity consultants, and professors of literary hermeneutics” for which he expresses such righteous contempt. In other words, if Derbyshire’s view of civilization is correct, and if society ought to prioritize only the kind of knowledge he prizes and organize itself along those lines, then only technocrats of various orders will have any serious role to play in society, and all prestige will accrue to those who are expert in the management of our affairs in rationalized terms. Everyone, after all, cannot be a mechanical engineer, nor does everyone want to be. So we’ll become “a bureaucratic empire of paper-pushers,” and it’s surprising that he doesn’t consider this “paper-pusher” society began to come into full flower at the exact same time we were at our most tinkersome.

Derbyshire’s premise that “the republic will survive anyway” even if it exists within no common moral or aesthetic context strikes me as self-evidently dumb. Either that, or we are to take his words literally to mean that if no other work of art surpasses Cole’s Eden, then we still might survive as a people, which is trivially true and clearly not what he intends to convey. His drooling love affair with the works of science, combined with a galling disdain for people less scientifically literate than himself, has made him an actual enemy of the very West he so angrily claims to be defending. Heaven forbid that people should ever conclude that the theory of macroevolution cannot be sustained by the available evidence—the poor man will have seen the whole of the West die before his very eyes (though the rest of us will have failed to notice it). In fact, he may have said exactly this at some stage, and it would not shock anyone if he did.

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Jim N. writes:

Sage McLaughlin’s remarks are extremely insightful and 100 percent correct. I just want to echo his remark that Derbyshire is not alone in this. Many other so-called conservatives share his myopia. One in particular who comes to mind is the celebrated Thomas Sowell, whose weekly economic analyses of our cultural rot inevitably reflect the Baconian dogma. Like Karl Marx, he sees man as a purely economic animal and the world of human intercourse as nothing more than the arena in which the clash of economic forces is played out. We are in trouble, according to Sowell, because our schools are failing to educate our youngsters. (Ok so far. He’s right that that’s one problem, anyway.) What we need is to shore up our public vo-tech system so we can produce enough scientists, engineers, and worker ants to remain competitive with the rest of the world. Sowell never says a word about humane learning and the things actually required to sustain a culture and a civilization, nor about how a free society in a Sowellian world should deal with the vast majority of citizens who find science and technology—not to mention assembly lines—stultifylingly boring. (Bzzt! I’m sorry, Tom. Man does not live by bread alone. But thanks for playing.)

LA replies:

While there may be something to what Jim N. is saying about Sowell’s being too much into the view of homo economicus, Sowell has never pushed a reductivist, sneering view of man, culture, and religion as Derbyshire has done. It’s hard to see them as being in the same category. The homo economicus view is common in our society, you could even call it the ruling idea of our society, and by itself it is probably enough to destroy us. But Derbyshire seems distinct from that, and worse than that. I wonder what is gained for undrstanding by joining Sowell with Derbyshire.

Jim N. replies:

“I wonder what is gained for understanding by joining Sowell with Derbyshire.”

Please reread Mr. McLaughlin’s second and third paragraphs. The point is that Baconian scientism—with or without an accompanying disdain for the less “educated”—is rampant among our maleducated elites and it is the root cause of Western decay. Dr. Sowell is simply another prominent example of a nominal conservative holding such a view—which makes him, like Derbyshire, anything but conservative in any authentic sense.

LA replies:

I don’t see your point, as I’m not aware of Sowell’s having pushed a scientistic view of man. Saying that Sowell cares about economics first and foremost doesn’t demonstrate that Sowell is an exponent of scientism, the belief that the only real knowledge is the knowledge gained from material observation. Perhaps you can present us some quotes of Sowell’s work in which he takes this position.

LA continues:

While I haven’t read Sowell in a while, my memory of him does not correspond to what you say. Yes, he is an economist, and focuses on the economic angle of things. But I’ve never seen in him the reductive view of which you speak, which is common in many economists, but not Sowell. If anything, he sees people as beings structured by culture and morality, not as mere economic, self-seeking units. I don’t have material at hand to prove my point, but my sense is that you’re giving him a bum rap.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 14, 2008 04:11 PM | Send