Signs of intellectual change

(This is a random aside: perhaps these can spur me to critical thinking in my field as well as outside of it)

Well, maybe not actual signs, but there is a growing momentum to the criticism of conservatism; Joe Biden stated definitively that there no more moderates in the Republican party on The Daily Show, and even if this is an exaggeration it tallies nicely with yesterday's news that Andrew Sullivan is leaving the "movement." I'm skeptical that Sullivan was as genuine a conservative he needs to claim to disavow it properly (Po-mo feelings: what do "conservative," "disavowing" conservatism," and doing so "properly" even mean, anyway?), but I do feel overall that these are hopeful signs. As I was telling A. yesterday, I firmly believe that moderate, but piquant conservative critics are important to the health of our country -- we may not like the lone wolf, but it's no good letting the sheep population get out of control.

Then CN. posted two devastating reviews, one of the new memoir by Cornel West, one of the new novel by Paul Auster. Both are wide-ranging castigations, not just of these individual works, but of the life's projects of these figures. In West's case, a powerful and new kind of mind seems to have been co-opted by fame. Auster's case seems much worse if this critic can be believed: he was never more than a hack, though some readers apparently believed mistakenly that he was "post-modern," and thus a more serious craftsman. There's a lot to argue with in both reviews, but taken together I wonder if they might represent a least an effort to revive no-nonsense, common-sense, critical thinking that seems to have dropped sadly out of the political world.