“Philip’s perspective typifies the tautological nature of intellectual consensus . . .”
— God and Man at The American Spectator
While I was proofreading that little essay just now, Mrs. Other McCain asked me, “What are you grinning at?”
She knows me too well, and recognized the mischievous smile of a man who is up to something, and expects to get away with it.
Earlier today, I called my friend Joe Marier to seek his assistance in overcoming tip-of-the-tongue syndrome. A specific word was required, and I knew exactly what it was, except that I couldn’t quite get the synapses to connect and conjure forth le mot juste.
“Tautological!” I exclaimed, when Joe finally prompted me.
My wife heard that, too, and commented that her friend Lynne had complained about my occasional tendency to sling around fancy five-dollar-words: “She said she had to keep looking up words in the dictionary.”
Guilty as charged, ma’am. And when I’m in that mood, your dictionary should also include a glossary of phrases in French, Latin and German. Likewise, you should be prepared to Google the names of various authors cited and historical phenomena to which I allude.
Better Than the Crossword
What I’m up to, of course, is employing a mode of discourse I learned to love as a boy, when the Atlanta Journal would arrive at our home and I’d apply myself to the task of comprehending the latest column by William F. Buckley, Jr.
For a boy of 10 or 11, reading Buckley was a puzzle more challenging than the crossword or the Daily Jumble. Buckley had a way of casually throwing out some brobdingnagian word, invoking the name of an ancient philosopher or referencing a battle in a once-famous war. He performed these rhetorical feats in such a confident manner that any intelligent reader felt compelled either (a) to look it up, or else (b) to abandon any pretension to literacy.
So it was that as a boy I’d find myself spending the afternoon in our living room in Lithia Springs, Ga., thumbing through the two-volume Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary and the World Book Encyclopedia in quest of the answer to that persistent question: What the hell is Buckley trying to say here?
Sure, you could infer his meaning from the context, or skip that fancy word and concentrate on the political point he was trying to convey. But anyone who genuinely desired to be educated would be so confounded by Buckley’s high-falutin allusion — e.g., “As Napoleon remarked to Marshal Soult at Austerlitz . . .” — that the resulting mixture of shame and curiosity would obligate him to look it up.
Was this Buckley’s purpose? Was he a journalistic schoolmaster or, perhaps, a smug intellectual show-off?
No, not at all. Rather, Buckley was demonstrating to the arrogant intellectual elite, and to anyone who observed his combat with them, that liberals did not possess a monopoly on erudition.
Forensic Genius, Q.E.D.
By the time I was a schoolboy driven into the bookish embrace of Messrs. Thorndike and Barnhart by Buckley’s discursive method, he had been up to something for two decades. And I imagine Mrs. Buckley sometimes noticed him grinning mischievously while he proofed his copy.
Ever since the 1951 publication of his great bombshell, God and Man at Yale, Buckley had exasperated liberals by undermining the strongest bulwark of their mid-century dominance, namely their intellectual prestige.
By the middle of the 20th century, liberals had become accustomed to winning arguments because they had all the great professors and pundits on their side. With a few rare and brilliant exceptions like H.L. Mencken and G.K. Chesterton, critics of liberalism tended to bluster reflexively about God, Mom and the American Way of Life.
To which the liberals would respond, “See there? He’s just a bigot, as all conservatives are. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
Buckley was able to turn the tables in part because of his wide-ranging knowledge, extensive vocabulary and eloquence. He did not argue like a jingo or a woolhat. His rhetoric was refined and his arguments were well-informed, so that the reasonable observer of his combat with liberalism could never say that Buckley was intellectually outgunned. Even if you disagreed with Buckley, you could not dismiss him as ignorant.
Yet Buckley was more than merely eloquent. He was a genius of forensic strategy who confounded his opponents by maneuvers that his opponents could never anticipate.
Like Stonewall Jackson stealing a march on the Yankees in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of ’62, Buckley siezed the initiative and exploited every advantage he could gain by the element of surprise. Locating in his adversary’s argument some logical fallacy or factual error, he would suddenly come down upon the opponent’s weak point with overwhelming force, so that the opponent was obliged to attempt a defense of the erroneous premise or fallacious syllogism.
Knowing that he had his foe on the defensive, however, Buckley would bear down with bulldog tenacity until the opponent was forced either to yield that particular point or else look like a fool.
Monkey see, monkey do. My feeble emulation of Buckleyism is nothing innovative, but even this pale shadow of the great man’s art often has a similar effect, inspiring others to join in the chorus proclaiming that the liberal emperor has no clothes.
Saturday I employed Robert Knight’s column as an occasion to fire a couple of salvos at the arguments for overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” including a good jab at my young friend Philip Klein. Klein responded Monday and today, our fellow American Spectator contributor John Guardiano piled on.
Shortly thereafter I expanded on my earlier theme in “God and Man at The American Spectator: Intellectuals vs. Ordinary Americans,” which was why my wife caught me smiling. See if you can figure out why.
UPDATE: Via e-mail, Joe Marier informs me that Duck Hollow University — “Where Learning Is the Aim of Education” — offers a thorough, complete and comprehensive course in the science of tautology.
