Prof. Knippenberg at No Left Turns has taken up for Jonah Goldberg on account of the recent…strong disagreement that I have had with the latter over his treatment of several of his interlocutors over the last year.  In objecting to shoddy debating tactics and what would seem to be an unwillingness to engage the ideas of others, I have sometimes become quite angry, since I generally find this kind of debating offensive and unfortunately quite typical of the way certain conservatives attempt to set the limits and define the terms of the debate in such a way that only they will prevail.  It is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that should not go uncriticised. 

Each of the controversies I have cited previously fit this pattern of someone raising objections to some kind of prevailing idea or conventional wisdom or stigma and Goldberg slapping them down with at least as much disrespect as there has been in anything I have written.  In Prof. Knippenberg’s view, that shabby behaviour gets a pass, but when I call Goldberg on this tactic in the strongest terms and then draw some unflattering conclusions about what it means it is hateful, perhaps because I don’t cloak my ridicule in a supposedly “amusing” or “jokey” style, a style that, as it happens, isn’t even funny.  So I have criticised this tactic of tarring interlocutors with what are intended to be very nasty associations and focused on one of its more egregious users.  This has led some people to consider me hateful, which I think is the wrong characterisation inasmuch as they mean that I actually feel hatred for the people I am criticising.  I don’t believe that’s the case.   I will allow that I can and have been swept up by what probably is undue anger, but I firmly reject the idea that people should not be outraged and get genuinely angry when they encounter someone who uses his position of influence to belittle and insult those whose ideas he doesn’t understand and furthermore doesn’t seem to want to understand.  If a teacher did this to colleagues on a regular basis, he would reasonably be regarded poorly and would be viewed as a much less serious person who cannot let his evidence do the talking, but must run down those with whom he disagrees because he knows his argument isn’t really very good or interesting to start with. 

If I have harmed or set back this critique because of some flaw or excess on my part, I do regret that.  I would find it obnoxious if errors on my part were allowed to obscure the main point.   

Prof. Knippenberg remarks (without providing links) that I have criticised him a couple times in the past, which is true.  He once wrote against Fukuyama when Fukuyama was engaged in his public break with neoconservatism, and I countered what I thought to be the mistakes in his response.  I wasn’t bowing and prostrating myself as I made these statements, of course, but neither was I really rude or, as he claims, disrespectful.  The other comes in the context of my dispute with Claremont last year, where the followers of Harry Jaffa made it their business to belittle, mock and insult Claes Ryn and his understanding of historicism as much as they possibly could.  I don’t remember Prof. Knippenberg taking any of them to task for referring to Prof. Ryn’s conservatism as a “cartoon” or taking any number of other disrespectful pot shots at him, but perhaps I missed the stern lecture that he gave them back then. 

Prof. Knippenberg jumped in with what struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as a flawed statement about Ryn’s idea of synthesis (which he then clarified and thus revealed that he didn’t actually disagree with Ryn about very much at all, making his earlier attack seem all the more odd).  I was intentionally copying the tone that Prof. Knippenberg used in his post, and in my remarks I said nothing that was more disrespectful than his attack on Prof. Ryn when he said:

Argh, I can’t help myself! I have a preliminary thought, subject to much revision. Ryn makes much of incarnation and synthesis, and, apparently, of the Incarnation as an example of synthesis. Which comes first for him, synthesis or Incarnation? If the former, then he strikes me as, ultimately, a polytheist opposed both to Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and to philosophy as Strauss understood it, on the other.

Now theological labeling games can be quite harmless, but it seemed clear to me that initially accusing Ryn of some kind of polytheism was intended quite plainly to discredit him as somehow being an apostate from the main of Western religious tradition.  If that’s what was going on, that is a pretty harsh and lousy thing to say based on little more than an impression, but let’s remember that I am the disrespectful one and Prof. Knippenberg is in the position to set the rules of conduct.  I probably did respond a little impatiently in my response, because I had been up to my ears in Claremont chatter from any number of people who didn’t seem to know much theology (or history).  As part of that argument, Prof. Knippenberg’s intervention seemed to be just one more flawed attack on Prof. Ryn. 

I invite readers and critics to investigate this claim that I have been disrespectful to Prof. Knippenberg.  I believe you will find that it is not an accurate claim.  If Prof. Knippenberg still feels as if I was attacking him unfairly or disrespectfully, I would like to say now that I apologise for any offense that I have given.

His interpretation of my recent blast against Mr. Henninger seems, however, to be mistaken in at least a couple places.  Prof. Knippenberg wrote:

He offers two justifications here for his tone. First, the objects of his scorn deserve it. Second, if he, and others like him, can’t do this in print, they’ll explode in other, less pleasant ways.

I stand by the first idea.  Obviously, if I didn’t think the targets of my criticism deserved withering scorn, I wouldn’t heap it on them.  What I was referring to with this second idea, which was probably not stated as well as it could have been, was that the stifling, homogenising effects of ever more unaccountable media and government will end up creating some kind of backlash in our society.  Opening up political discourse through media such as blogging and allowing bloggers to be relatively unconstrained in what they say are necessary to channel the very natural opposition to this concentration of power into some rather more constructive activities.  Naturally, Prof. Knippenberg makes this remark to be mostly about me and my state of mind, which is, I’m sorry to say, not a very serious response.   

It seems evident to me that the reason why those in the institutional media of newspapers, cable news, etc., such as Messrs. Henninger and O’Reilly, would want a “blogger code of conduct” is less because they want to raise the tone of debate (which their own institutions have done their fair share of coarsening as well!) and more because they want to try to impose rules on the media they and those of like mind with them currently do not control.  I took a particularly sharp tone with Mr. Henninger himself because his newspaper’s op-ed pages and their online journal, particularly the work of the awful James Taranto, are only too happy to treat their targets on left and right with disdain and disrespect.  Perhaps Prof. Knippenberg acknowledges this, which is why he made most of his post about me and not about the things I was saying against the WSJ history of smearing political opponents.  My point was partly that people at the Journal have to be pretty cheeky to claim some high ground against the “hyper-aggressive language of bloggers,” since their op-ed page is much more influential and prominent and they nonetheless use it even more pointedly to smear or insult, for instance, immigration restrictionists, opponents of the war and all those opposed to policies that favour concentrated wealth and power.  Do those who do these things deserve respect?  Maybe a little, but not very much. 

Such is the way of things that these far more harmful and stifling enforcers of the narrow political consensus in this country are considered the responsible and respectable voices in our discourse.   

Update: Thanks to Rod for this.