Last night, courtesy of John Andrews and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Miller Center, I had the pleasure of attending the Boulder stop on the great Harvey Mansfield's Jefferson Lecture Barnstorming Tour.
It's one thing to read the speech, but, as with Shakespeare's plays, it's really intended to be performed for an audience.
It's impossible to sum up a learned hour-long speech in a few sentences, but I'll give it a go. Mansfield's main thesis was that politics, properly practiced, is about what - and as importantly, whom - will be important in a society, and that the what and the whom are inseparable. The attempt to reduce politics to "political science" does a disservice to both politics and science. Individual humans, and human ego and human ambition are simply not reducible to mass "forces" and averages.
As a result, politics, properly practiced, in a dynamic political culture, is confrontation not negotiation, and the negotiated accomodations of current European politics, where the vanilla center-left parties negotiate over spoils rather than contest policy, and something to be feared rather than aspired to. Mansfield's biggest laugh of the night came here:
The demand for civility in our politics should instead be focused on improving the quality of our insults, using wit, rather than blandness. I recall Senator Harry Reid claiming that he, "wasn't going to get into a name-calling contest with an attack dog."
It may be the only laugh Reid's gotten in his whole career.
Personally, I think Mansfield's got the problem right but the source of the infection wrong. Rather than blame "social science" for trying to level mankind, a complaint that's been around since the early 18th century, Mansfield should instead blame the academic left for trying to shut off debate that threatens its orthodoxies. The European stagnation exists - and its challengers are so toxic - precisely because its ruling elites have ruled so many topics out of bounds for discussion in polite society that the peasantry quickly turns impolite.
Likewise, he significantly overplays science's "collective enterprise." The rush to establish priority for publication gives the lie to any submission to anonymity. Newton, Hooke, and the rest of the early modern scientists had egos every bit as large as Bella Abzug or John Kerry, and it's strange than Mansfield, steeped in academia, would fail to recognize the self-importance floating around the physics departments of Harvard and MIT.
Still, these are quibbles. Politics is a human contact sport, and Mansfield's basic point - that politics and politicians have more to learn about the practice of their profession from Shakespeare than from Einstein is self-evident.
The ISI is one of the great academic institutions operating in the US today; they have, at least, made the right enemies. And John had this to say about the Center for Western Civilization, something marginalized in contemporary academic life as only, well, western civilization can be:
...[the] tiny Center for Western Civilization begun at the university as a solo effort by classics professor Christian Kopff. "The permanent things, embedded in tradition, are good things for human life," his defiant prospectus continues. He invites students to join "in the fruitful exploration of the benefits and significance of Western Culture, from the ancient Greeks to the American Founding." For perspective on the center's pathetic $86,000 budget (just increased by Brown, with touching gratitude from Kopff), consider that CU spends $22 million annually on diversity programs.
If they keep bringing in speakers of this quality, it'll be money well spent.
