The positives of powerful thinking (David Warren on Canada's best conservative pundits)

Western Standard ^ | September 11, 2006 | David Warren

[GMMAC]

The positives of powerful thinking
We rely on public intellectuals to rise above academics and journalists
to give issues the analysis they deserve

THE WESTERN STANDARD
David Warren - September 11, 2006

Rory Leishman should be a major figure in this country. He is a public journalist in the best tradition of Walter Lippmann et al.--learned, penetrating, and yet broad in his interests and accessible in his style. We have George Jonas in Toronto (whom I consider the doyen) and Barry Cooper in Calgary (somewhat encumbered by a professorship, but he can write). Alberta's Ted Byfield is such a character, of impressive range. David Frum has gone abroad. Robert Fulford is worth mentioning as the old stalwart, a man who has been doing "public intellectual" so well, and so long, that we take him too much for granted. John Robson might be a candidate in Ottawa, and Mark Steyn, wherever he wanders, though he eschews the role. I'm sure I could think of a woman if I tried harder.

These are men we read as journalists, but who are also thinkers in their own right, with some originality, and the ability to grasp a large picture. They do their homework, but wear it lightly. They have read much more than newspapers, and have what we used to call "the experiencing nature"--the ability to assimilate much from a little experience, which is the opposite of the ability most of us have. I have excluded from my list any "one issue" writer, no matter how brilliant. Public intellectuals are the purveyors of what the Germans call a world view: a sense of how everything fits together; of what is more, and what less, important.

Readers turn to them to help themselves fit things together, and in the confidence that they will not read fluff, but something rooted, and solid, and very well informed.

Journalism, until the advent of the Internet, was not a footnote medium, and while the great glory of blogging is the links that make it possible to trace any assertion of fact to a checkable source, these are also a distraction to thinking, and a goad towards the quick conclusion. The contemporary academic is also under obligation to attribute every statement--even of opinion, and no matter how petty--to a source. It can be a useful habit, though also a strange survival of the old medieval assumption that there can be nothing new under the sun, and that everything we know must come from some established authority. In the hands of the postmodern academic, it becomes a silly conceit, a bad joke--trash, with elaborate references to other trash.

But my reader might not even have heard of Rory Leishman, my topic du jour. His personal modesty is too efficiently protected by consignment to the pages of The London Free Press, which does not circulate much beyond Ingersoll, Ont. (There is another writer on that paper, Herman Goodden, an essayist of real charm, brilliance and wisdom, who ought to be the property of the whole country.)

I will not try to review Leishman's new book--Against Judicial Activism: The Decline of Freedom and Democracy in Canada (McGill-Queen's)--in the confined space of this column, for it would require several thousand words to discuss it adequately.

The book looks systematically, both topically and historically, through the development of judge-made law in Canada, touching all the celebrated cases we have heard of in passing, and drawing the common threads. It gives a sober assessment of the amount of damage that such vehicles as our 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms have done to our parliamentary government, by progressively freeing judges from legislative restraints. It documents the proliferation of "human rights commissions" that take us beyond the rule of law into the barbarism of kangaroo courts. It courageously assesses what must be done by Parliament to restore the old order, in which the people, and not an elite class of legal operators, had the ultimate right to make and change our laws. And it has the necessary footnotes.

It is a responsible book that patiently assembles a broad and definitive indictment of the revolutionary squalor in Canadian law. And it offers the kind of research and organized thinking that could only be done by someone who is larger than journalist or academic.

Leishman shows what "public intellectuals" are for.

[GMMAC]

Rory Leishman’s London Free Press home page

DavidWarrenOnline.com

[GMMAC]

PING!

[ChessExpert]

I especially liked to discussion of various aspects of citing, especially the last bolded below:

Journalism, until the advent of the Internet, was not a footnote medium, and while the great glory of blogging is the links that make it possible to trace any assertion of fact to a checkable source, these are also a distraction to thinking, and a goad towards the quick conclusion. The contemporary academic is also under obligation to attribute every statement--even of opinion, and no matter how petty--to a source. It can be a useful habit, though also a strange survival of the old medieval assumption that there can be nothing new under the sun, and that everything we know must come from some established authority. In the hands of the postmodern academic, it becomes a silly conceit, a bad joke--trash, with elaborate references to other trash.

How true!