Horizon

McLemee on Miller

I'm not very keen on those now, more than ever wink-wink-nudge-nudge allusions to current affairs that advertisers are so fond of (now, more than ever, you need Kaptain Krazy's Doggy Treats), but now, more than ever, I think, we need posts like this one from Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (thanks to Clio), talking about - in part - his dead colleague David W Miller. This is perhaps obvious from the context, but let me be clear than the terms 'conservative' and 'left' in the quote below could be exchanged for one another without changing the truth or meaning of McLemee's article one bit.

"[Miller] was, as the saying goes, a “movement conservative,” in touch with the ideas and arguments being cooked up in the right-wing think tanks. But he was as intellectually honest as anyone could be. Around the time we first met, he had just published an article on the famous “broken window syndrome” — that basic doctrine of conservative social policy — showing there was scarcely any solid research to back it up. And when he did argue for any given element of the right’s agenda, it was hard to escape the sense that he did so from the firm conviction that it would bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

In short, talking with David meant facing a repeated obligation to think the unthinkable: that someone could be a conservative without suffering from either cognitive deficit or profound moral stupidity.

Of course, any person who spends very long on the left must come face to face, eventually, with the hard truth that a certain percentage of one’s comrades are malevolent, cretinous, thoughtless, or palpably insane. This is troubling, but you get used to it. What proves much more disconcerting is the realization that someone from the other side possesses real virtues — and that they hold their views, not in spite of their better qualities, but in consequence of them.