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Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. [Knowledge is power](#knowledge is power), of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.
Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
Not long ago, in an op-ed colum...
What an opening salvo! I shouldn't trust someone more for writing like this, but it is honed to hit my weak spots.
Many other good quotes:
Any day now in Sweden, it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.
Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another name for late-modern liberal individualism.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form.