The New York Sophist

The 1940s – 1960s were full of such figures. These public intellectuals went to bat for conservative ideas in smart ways and persuasive ones to boot. They were giants. People like William F. Buckley, Jr., George F. Will, Norman Podhoretz, Sydney Hook, and Leo Strauss.

But no figure even close to any of these people (except for George Will who has all but dissapeared) that exists as a voice of conservatism today even comes close of licking the boots of this list.

Who do the conservatives have instead? Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and a number of other two-dimensional figures.

The conservative movement in the United States has replaced the public intellectual with the political celebrity.

It’s really a shame that I am forced to conclude that the conservative public intellectual is extinct.
Why and how did this happen?

At first glance it is quite obvious: The right in the United States has shifted toward a religious base and not an intellectual one.  When religion is the centerpiece, there’s little space for intellectualizing.  Often times, intellectual work is seen as the doubt of the non-believer or the act of the willfully evil. There’s not much to think about when higher beings are involved.

The religious capitalization of the Republican party has sent the intellectuals who might have defended conservative ideas into the realm of moderates, or perhaps the realm of non-existence. There’s no real reason to practice intellectual activity on the right; it just isn’t rewarded. It’s more rewarded to keep attention with cheap tricks.

This isn’t to say that Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al. don’t have important concerns worth discussion. Unfortunately, they offer the concerns as being beyond discussion – there’s no place for dissent in the realm of absolute correctness.

I’m also not saying that the left is free of these issues. Just look at that loser Al Franken. But in the past when the left had celebrity in its intellectuals it was at least somewhat legit. Herbert Marcuse was a towering intellect and wrote in a way that his books still command respect and attention from the reading public as well as academics. Phillip Rav and Stan Greenberg produced and wrote in journals that they hoped would enlighten the general working-class public to the point of revolution. Limbaugh and Coulter however will command only morbid curiosity for their books in a generation. They will be as interesting to the future as anti-masturbation books from the Victorian age are for us.

Where are the conservative intellectuals? Have you spotted one recently? These ideas deserve representation, but not by people who could just as easily be rejects from reality television programs.

This is from Debate Mate, a UK debate education organization.

The Format:

    1.  Fishbowl

This involves two concentric circles of chairs – the inner circle with
6-8 chairs and the outer with approximately 10. To start with, the inner
circle has a facilitator, some participants who support particular
positions on the topic in question and some vacant seats.  Everyone else
sits as an audience in the outer circle.  The facilitator introduces the
topic and a discussion begins.  After a while, anyone from the audience
can come up, take one of the spare seats and join in the discussion.  As
more of the outer circle move in those who have been the longest in the
inner circle are asked to move out.  The format combines the coherence
of small group discussion with wider inclusiveness.

    2. Consensus voting

This involves a discussion followed by all participants ranking the
various positions in preference order.  The higher the preference, the
greater the number of points ie.  if there are 6 participants the voter
gives his 1st preference 6 points, 2nd preference gets 5 points, and so
on. The winner is the option with the most points and the higher the
number of points the winner gets, the greater the degree of consensus. 
The aim of this type of debating is that even if you strongly disagree
with someone else’s views, you have an incentive to have a proper
dialogue with them so that they rate your opinion higher in the list of
preferences.

An event would involve two consensus votes, one part-way through a
debate and the other at the end. You win if your proposal either comes
top in the final vote, or improves the most between the two votes.

Maybe this could be a format worth trying in undergraduate courses on debate and argumentation?

However, as a part of a larger online course, it could be a better idea than a glossary.

Seems a bit more interactive in the sense that it’s an explanation and not a definition. An explanation would broaden the meaning, a definition would nail it down, so to speak.

I don’t think lecturing is transmission. I think it’s exploration if done well. I don’t think there’s anything good to come out of the idea that lecturing is full of “excess verbiage” – transmission theory is bad, but you don’t know bad until you link transmission theory to pedagogy.

The problem isn’t the length, the problem is that access to lectures are tied to going to a particular physical place at a set time every couple of days. Podcasting, Netcasting, Virtual Worlds all mitigate that concern. Focus should be on those technologies in order to bring the lecture – still one of the most effective teaching strategies – into the 21st century.

For a good defense of lecturing, I suggest Woodrow Wilson’s essay on Adam Smith.  Too bad it’s not on the web yet. I suggest the alternate technlology of books but beware the excess verbiage.