Thought provoking Rubin...

Barry Rubin writing at Pajamas Media;

I ran into an older, retired Israeli colleague who is a fine scholar in his field. We hadn’t met for 25 years and agreed to have coffee in a nearby Tel Aviv cafe. In the ensuing conversation I learned some key things about why current  intellectual and political discussion is such a wreck.

The retired professor has read nothing I’ve written. He is on the left-wing politically, in the historic non-Communist sense, but his work has always been first-rate and untouched by any political slant. In addition, he has worked amicably with people of different views.

And that’s why I was dismayed by his first question: “Are you left-wing or right-wing?”

I sighed, partly because I hate this starting point of dividing people into two categories. A more appropriate question would have been: “what do you think of … ?” To classify someone is to decide in advance to agree or disagree with whatever they say. To ask someone their view makes it possible to listen and think about the quality of their ideas.

A scholar or analyst, whatever his personal views, should do work that is beyond politics.

Many years ago I wrote a scholarly article on American radical professors of the 1930s and 1940s. I was almost unable to find a single case in which anyone had even been accused of politicizing their academic work or classroom teaching. They viewed such behavior as inappropriate, and perhaps some were worried about how being outspoken might hurt their careers. At any rate, even during the McCarthy era people were pursued for their organizational memberships and not their classroom behavior.

Today, all those old issues of professional ethics have vanished. Professors may spend most of their time being propagandists: throw away scholarly standards and energetically persecute dissenters.

 Back to my cafe meeting: if one puts people into a box, all that follows will either be banal agreement or total argument. If this encounter had been in an American context, the next hour or so might have been spent on endless consensus on how great or terrible Obama is. Alternatively, the discussion would have been characterized by a heated argument in which each person would not concede that the other had a single valid point to make. Either way, nobody probably would have learned anything new or need to exercise their brain

For myself, I have to say "Mea Culpa". Many of us do, I think. Yet, I see our once two party system as one party with two heads. Democrats, as well as some Republicans, go after Romney for his time at Bain, while they take contributions from the same company! It's called hypocrisy. If you don't know what it means, ask Newt, he can explain it. Later he writes;

I think these are the two points that people don’t understand, and they are destroying any productive discussion of intellectual or political issues at present. So let me repeat them:

1. Analysis should be separate from policy.  If people conflate the idea that the Iranian regime is extremely radical, intransigent, and dangerous and thus no deal can be made — the perception of reality — with what should be done about it, people will reject the correct analysis because they don’t agree with the proposed response. Example: We must lie about Palestinian politics or we will damage the cause of peace; we must lie about revolutionary Islamism or we will provoke a war. Of course, lying is most likely to hurt peace or to lead to creating a crisis that will end in war.
2. When moving from analysis to policy, one should think creatively and not just give a knee-jerk response. There are many alternatives to going to war with Iran. But an accurate assessment of the threat’s existence must be the starting point. Examine each issue and the needed policy response on an individual basis rather than impose an ideological template on it.

He then gives a couple of examples, but this one, I think, is the most telling;

Here’s an example closer to home:

There are those who say that the U.S. government has a huge deficit that’s only growing. Entitlements are unsustainable. Tax increases won’t even begin to cover it. But I don’t want to admit that is true (especially because conservatives are saying it and I hate those people!). So I will instead insist that everything is fine, we don’t really have to make any major changes, and all we have to do is raise taxes on the rich.

And that’s what’s killed historic moderate liberalism — which would have tried to come up with some solution to a real problem — and empowered radicalism, which ignores reality and just calls the other side nasty names. If you deny the problem exists at all because you don’t like your rivals’ proposed solution, then you are doomed, baby.

My central point: We should agree on what is real using proper and honest methods of analysis.

Then we can discuss what to do about it in a rational fashion. But disagreeing with someone else’s analysis because you don’t like their proposed policy amounts merely to lying deliberately, or to making a fool of yourself by denying what is obviously true and being totally unprepared to deal with the resulting crisis.

Many of us fall into this game. I honestly believe that it's what the Politicians want. With the populace so divided, there's no one to watch them. No one to keep them honest. So, we've almost lost the Republic. Will it continue, or are we doomed because the hate runs too deep? Wisconsin, it appears, is almost lost. Many other states are divided as well. Was it Lincoln who said "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." We are destroying ourselves.