Stephens' Paradox

"Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different," says Bret Stephens. https://t.co/XQngBOMqmQ

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) December 28, 2019

The point of Brett Stephen's controversial (on Twitter, at any rate, which is where I live, more or less) opinion piece seems to be that it is the cultural rigor of Ashkenazi Jews with respects to argumentation, defending one's opinions, and double-checking one's assumptions that accounts for the intellectual success of the group--it doesn't really rest on any pure race theory nonsense that Stephens has actually linked to. Which kind of makes it hard to fathom, then, why he linked to it. The inclusion of the race theory nonsense actually weakens his thesis which is that there is a learned cultural skill that certain Jews have that has enabled them to be survivors and deep thinkers.

But what he's saying makes sense if you consider his representation of the argumentative intellectual as an exemplar--he's decrying the closing of the American mind, I think. He's taking in the occasion of anti-Semitism to warn us that people of minority intellectual viewpoints are also marginalized, too.

I don't know what this para is for:

At its best, the American university can still be a place of relentless intellectual challenge rather than ideological conformity and social groupthink. At its best, the United States can still be the country that respects, and sometimes rewards, all manner of heresies that outrage polite society and contradict established belief. At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.

I think rewarding heresies is how we got the birther Trump, a climate science denier and all-around stooge. "Outraging polite society" isn't a kind of breaking down of a paradigm, a kind of busting of self satisfied gatekeeping. It is just asking for the right to offend regardless of the rightness of one's reasons. And I don't even think that right is what the argumentation and intellectual rigor of Stephen's mishpocha had been about. It's the right to offend that makes atrocities eventually spoken out loud slip into action.

The time was not ripe for this particular opinion because the time never is. There is a good argument for scientific paradigmatic explosion, but this seems to be about creating space for what is, sadly, old news, paradigms already exploded. But I don't even think this is the argument he's trying on, here. It really seems just like he's saying "let a certain kind of conservatism be what it is because some people are threatened anywhere".

Well, actually, all arguments are subject to rigorous criticism as a part of a healthy intellectual tradition, right? So I think I will continue to find it correct to brook argument with conservative ideas that are beat and broke regardless of whether the person delivering them is from whatever tradition at all. It's the least I can do to honor the best of that culture. And I also deplore the monsters that attack people of any faith or ethnicity for that artifact of their existence. Wrong is wrong.