You are probably familiar with much of this material – but you have probably only seen it through the eyes of fellow liberals. Which, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a little like getting your understanding of Catholicism from the Catholic Encyclopedia (another great source of the strange, BTW).

I’m not sure you are aware of the pervasiveness of the general postcolonialist perspective in the modern intellectual water supply. It is impossible for anything in that department to feel unusual or new. Yes, even to a conservative.

(Of course, such stuff can still feel unusual to a specialist in the field, because a specialist sees everything under a microscope. If you are a specialist in Turkish rugs, you can still be surprised and delighted by an unusual kilim. If you are not a specialist in Turkish rugs, a kilim is a kilim.)

Said is a difficult case because his work, at least the work for which he is best known, consists primarily of derisive (and often blatantly unfounded) impugnment of other scholars, who are dead and unable to defend themselves, whose lack of living defenders is most easily attributed to military history, and whose jockstrap Said is generally unfit to carry.

If this deserves any response at all, surely the response should be in kind. I guess you’ve seen some of my experiments along that line. I don’t sense that you have an interest in seeing more.

Since his name has been floated, I wonder if Edward Said wouldn’t be a fairly good entry-level test of a conservative’s taste for the unlike. I have the impression that some (a few? many?) of the folks who like to talk up intellectual diversity/pluralism haven’t got a much deeper or more realistic idea of Said than Moldbug’s little caricature. It seems like anyone worth taking seriously in an academic context should be able to bring a good bit more tolerance and intelligence to bear on Said’s work and his legacy. Is there an equivalent iconic figure in living memory on the right who could serve as a test case for the hordes of academics on the left? Harold Bloom, maybe, or Allen?

I have to say, Moldbug, that I appreciated the absence of offensive goads in your second comment.

One of Jonathan Haidt’s little discoveries is that American conservatives are good at thinking like American progressives, but the converse is not the case. Of course this makes sense, because it is impossible for a literate person to be unfamiliar with the progressive perspective (since intelligent, educated people are overwhelmingly progressive).

Moreover, for progressives, feeding your taste for the unlike on contemporary American conservatism – while possible – is difficult and unrewarding, for two reasons. One, the product of most conservative writers tends to be aimed at people much less intelligent and educated than you. Of course there are exceptions (try reading Larry Auster for a month or two), but they are hard to find – and do you really want to find them? Two, these people are your enemies in real life; you can’t forget that; and it is rather difficult to indulge your intellectual curiosity when blood vessels keep popping in your forehead.

This is why I feel it’s actually much easier, for progressives who are feeling a bit confined and want to broaden their minds, to start by engaging with safely-deceased writers from the past. Such as the Victorian high imperialists. If you can reconstruct what, say, Percy Arthur Baxter Silburn, would make of the world of 2009, not only will your free-ranging, non-judgmental curiosity be quite well-fed, but you’ll be permanently spared from subjecting yourself to Ann Coulter.

Of course, if your only reason for reading old books is to mock them, a la Edward Said, you won’t gain anything. But this is true of interacting with any foreign culture. A taste for the unlike is indeed a pretty rare thing. A hatred for it, sadly, is quite common.

Who can’t help feeling sorry for Masganda? Although I suppose her assailants, too, had something of a taste for the unlike…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag_and_bone_man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCVL0osLHJE

Wow, living history!