Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't: Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right by David M. Ricci

Author:David M. Ricci [Ricci, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594518744
Google: 06uhAQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 9583595
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Gresham Problem

Yet by conservative lights, Mill’s recommendation for intellectual combat, if implemented, may produce social and cultural disaster starting from the fact, as remarked by conservatives, that when ideas compete, the “best” do not always win. Thus Robert Bork complains that “[t]he winner in the marketplace [of ideas] is not always, or perhaps even usually, the superior product. The economic marketplace penalizes bad decisions. The intellectual and cultural ‘marketplace’—in which the ideas of politics, the humanities, and most of the social sciences, and popular entertainment are offered—imposes few or no penalties for being wrong.”76 Roger Kimball agrees. “It is a melancholy truth,” he says, “that good arguments often prevail over better ones, and that very bad arguments sometimes gain a virtual monopoly in the court of public sentiment.”77 Irving Kristol is equally pessimistic. “In a free market,” he notes with regret, “Gresham’s Law can work for books or theater as efficiently as it does for coinage—driving out the good, establishing the debased. The cultural market in the United States today is being preempted by dirty books, dirty movies, dirty theater.”78

But which propositions will succumb to competition? Mill thought that many precepts in nineteenth-century England were inadequate relics of earlier Christian traditions and explanations. Thus he argues that much of what constitutes Christianity, going back to St. Paul and other church fathers, was “one sided and incomplete.” Even when original Christian teachings took shape, says Mill, practical men supplemented them with Greek and Roman ideas, especially concerning “obligation to the public.”79 Therefore, after praising “secular standards” as necessary additions to Christian principles and practices, Mill goes on to insist that “[i]t can do truth no service to blink the fact … that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.”80

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