Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The pursuit of an independent foreign policy by House speaker Nancy Pelosi is obviously a bad idea no matter what one’s political persuasion.
Yet the Democrats’ abrogation of powers and roles comes as no surprise to students of the modern Left. Pelosi is merely the last instance of a long evolution by the Left away from the Rule of Law and towards the rule of men.
I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.
In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.
[Note: This is one of my long comments at another site that I thought I would post here.]
I think our economic lives profoundly influence how we think about broader issues. The degree to which any individual can disagree with one’s superiors and peers without suffering harm to one’s career varies significantly from field to field. In turn, the degree to which mere human opinion plays a role in an individual’s success within a field determines how conformist to common opinion within a field an individual must be to succeed.
James McCormick discusses Stoicism in war; the training that prepares men for these contests is the subject of Jonathan Smith’s “The Texas Aggie Bonfire: A Conservative Reading of Regional Narratives, Traditional Practices and a Paradoxical Place” (pdf format), which he concludes with
conservatives need conservative culture theory to better understand the social institutions and practices that are necessary to conserve conservative goods like community, authority, piety, solidarity, and manliness. Conservatism must become, in spite of its own best instincts, more theoretical, if only to understand how and why it must become more conservative.
Ginny’s post got me to thinking about a topic I muse over every once in a while. I have two firm beliefs about scientists. One is that they do not need to be as much of a bunch of egotistical buggers as they tend to be. (I have devoted multiple posts on my blog to that effect.) The other is that the natural political state of the scientist (and of most engineers) should be libertarian / conservative, because the core non-technical skill required for scientific work above the B.Sc. level is the ready acceptance of personal responsibility.