Likelihood of Success

Philosophers’ blogging song

Mar 26, 2007 Blogophilia, O Mores!

Or, rather, swan song as a blogging polemicist. Like my putative co-blogger David Nieporent, I stop by Brian Leiter’s blog from time to time. He’s a very intelligent guy — well, both of them are, but I mean Leiter — and Exhibit A+ of how sharp you can be and still absolutely refuse to be mugged by any modicum of reality in your political judgments. Brian and I used to do document review high-level antitrust work for Texaco when we were associates at a big law firm back in the day.

I do remember being struck, as we sat there stupidly sifting through hundreds of boxes looking for the word “oil well” doing substantive attorney review of the factual record in complex commercial litigation, at Brian’s vehemence in arguing against the morality of the first Gulf War. What was even more remarkable was when he insisted, a week into it, when the dreaded Revolutionary Guard took to their heels and ran home, that the moral imbecility of the war was more obvious than ever now because “it’s a slaughter.” His argument was that when you’re winning a war, it’s immoral to continue it. At this point even the mid-level associate (who today is happily helping run a race-car track) who was supervising us, and who by his own admission was no philosopher and no big fan of the war, thought this was among the dumbest things he ever heard.

But Brian is not dumb. He demonstrated just how smart he was by just not showing up for the rest of his life starting one morning and heading back to academia, and he has for years now had a comfy tenured chair in philosophy and law at the University of Texas. He has also run his very spunky, wildly left-wing blog, focusing on a lot of inside baseball in philosophy and law faculties (he seems always to be making my law school, Northwestern University, sound on the brink of extinction), writing about Kant but also dishing plenty of cant. It is a good, and hardly unexamined, life.

Whereas I stayed at that document production and at commercial litigation until blood ran out of the spigots and kept looking, as I do today, for that soft, pliable spot on the wall on which to continue slamming my head.

Brian recently announced, in fact, that he’s going to be toning down his political commentary and focusing more on “philosophy, academia (including academic freedom), and the broader intellectual culture,” partly because “The fact that the war criminals in Washington, DC are in retreat (happily) has also lessened my enthusiasm for dissecting them” and also because, he says, students were too tuned into his political views because of the blog. How Brian intends to return that genie to its lamp — and why he thinks these “war criminals” are “happily” in retreat (though maybe that explains this — Brian loves Instapundit!) — are truly philosophical quandaries. But Brian’s the guy with the laurel wreath here, not me.