"the majority of the great intellectuals in history have been conservatives"

James Lewis:

Plato was a great conservative.  Cicero was a great conservative. The American Founders were conservatives, with rare exceptions. The wisdom books of the Bible are full of conservative sayings. That's what the Ten Commandments are about. "Honor your father and mother" is a profoundly conservative idea.

 

All high civilizations have been built by conservatives. You can't accumulate the cultural capital needed to build any high civilization if you try to destroy the past, as the Left constantly tries to do. You can't build a chariot if you have to reinvent the wheel every generation. The batty idea that kids have the real answers in life is just a modern delusion. It is just ignorant.

 

Conservatism builds. Leftism overthrows. That is the meaning of that pop word "revolution." The all-destroying revolution is an adolescent fantasy, and the Left hangs on to those fantasies a lot longer than conservatives do.

 

The idea of a "revolutionary" intellectual class is also a modern invention, made up to prop up the cult ego of the scribbling classes -- the teachers, newspaper writers and bureaucrats. Doctor Johnson called them the ink-stained drudges, and he was one himself. (A conservative, needless to say.) Professional word merchants only go back to 1800 or so. 

 

Most prominent thinkers in history were talented amateurs, and didn't need to ride the wild horse of social revolution to gain control over other people.  They kept their powerlust in check.

 

Socrates didn't have a college degree. He became an intellectual through constant dialogue. The Socratic dialogue is the origin of Western thought.  Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, who in turn was the pupil of Socrates, founded the original "college" -- Aristotle's academy, which met in an Athenian grove. Mathematics goes back to Pythagoras and Euclid and many others,  25 centuries of cumulative thinking by talented amateurs. Almost nobody got paid for doing advanced mathematics until the 19th century. All from amateurs -- "lovers" -- of knowledge. 

 

The same is true for the sciences and the other "departments" of human thought. But even the idea of "departments of thought" is a modern invention: As Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, "Nature has no departments." Neither does the human intellect. All that is just a bunch of paid professors trying to divide up the loot.

 

Intellectual creativity arose in thousands of places in the ancient world. We just happen to know more about Greece and the Hebrew and Christian sources than about the others. But they existed. Good thinkers are found all over, like good athletes and musicians. When they find other, they start to learn from each other, and then you see a spurt of creativity. It only takes a few to get it started.

Mr. Lewis is sure to piss off so many of our progressive elite with this one.

I love it.