Fencing Bear at Prayer

It is surely one of life's more precious little ironies that the only time (thus far, at least) I have featured in an article over at the National Review was some ten years ago when I was being accused (by Stanley Kurtz , no less) of complicity in the "gutting" of our History of Western Civilization core sequence at the University of Chicago.  Glancing over the article now, I well remember my blood pressure going through the roof when I read how I had been the one caught out in lying about the purpose of our changing the title of the sequence from "Western" to "European" so that I and my colleagues could "teach to [our] personal [specialties]," particularly given that the only reason I was serving as chair of the sequence in the first place was because I believed in teaching the history of Western civilization, not just courses in my field.  Because, you see, and on this I am rock-solid, I believe in Western civilization, and not just as ...

"That so many grandiose social schemes which sound plausible to the intellectual elites not only fail, but prove to be disastrously counterproductive, is by no means surprising when these schemes are analyzed in terms of the characteristics of the processes by which they operate, rather than the goals they seek or the visions to which they conform [however idealistic these visions may be].  At the heart of many of these schemes is third-party decision making .  Third parties typically know less, even when convinced that they know more, in addition to lacking the incentives of those who directly benefit from being right and suffer from being wrong. "The knowledge brought to bear in even 'ordinary' processes--the manufacturing of a pencil, for example--usually exists as a sum of many small, overlapping circles of individual information and skills which altogether add up to a vast expanse of information, experience, and understanding.  As was pointed out in a celebrate...

"One of the fertile sources of confusion in discussions of ideological issues is the dichotomy between the political left and the political right.  Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the left and the right is that only the former has even a rough definition.   What is called 'the right' are simply the various and disparate opponents of the left.  These opponents of the left may share no particular principle, much less a common agenda, and they can range from free-market libertarians to advocates of monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or innumerable other principles, systems, and agendas. "To people who take words literally, to speak of 'the left' is to assume implicitly that there is some other coherent group which constitutes 'the right.'  Perhaps it would be less confusing if what we call 'the left' would be designated by some other term, perhaps just as X .  But the designation as being on the left has at least some hi...

"The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink--and for those with one percent of knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.  The difference between special knowledge and mundane knowledge is not simply incidental or semantic.  Its social implications are very consequential.  For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.  That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters. "Where knowledge is conceived of as Hayek conceived of it, to include knowledge unarticulated even to ourselves, but expressed in our individual habits and social customs, then the transmission of such knowledge from millions of people to be concentrated in surrogate decision-makers becomes very problematic, if not impossible, since many of those operating with such...