Your Assumptions and Mine ...

Tim Burke's got a thoughtful piece,"As I Would Not Be A Slave, So I Would Not Be A Master", at Easily Distracted. It's under discussion this morning over at Crooked Timber, thanks to Chris Bertram, at Dean Nation, thanks to Brian Ulrich, and at Matt Yglesias. It's telling, somehow, that Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram initially mis-read Tim's post. Telling because, otherwise, they are intellectual compatriots. If we so easily mis-read the work of people with whom we are largely in agreement, how much easier it is to mis-read or, worse, not read, perhaps because we don't even care to understand, those with whom we have substantial disagreements. As Adam Kotsko notes, it is intellectually lazy to avoid reading the work of people with whom you know you're going to disagree.

At Gnostical Turpitude, Ed Cohn points to a recent profile of National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice,"Blindsided or Blind," in the recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. How can we be nearly four years into a Bush administration, with Rice at his elbow, and yet not have a close, critical reading of Rice's scholarship? As Ed suggests, the closest thing we have to it is last year's column on"Revisionist Historians" by AHA president Jim McPherson. Has our intellectual polarization reached the point at which we don't even read the work of people we know we may disagree? What a delicious and tragic irony it would be if some future historian could show of us that Condolezza Rice's scholarship passed critical review because we were too lazy to give it critical examination and because conservative political powers needed a showcase African American female scholar.