Grak. . . Choking on my own incomprehension. . .

Via Pandagon, Jonah Goldberg writes:

I guarantee you that among PhD candidates in America’s leading universities, for every “conservative” who believes the world was created in six days there are 100 who would think “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was really onto something if it hadn’t been exposed as a hoax. And all of this leaves out the well-publicized anti-science lying-for-justice we get from environmentalists and public-health advocates. Does no one remember the 1990s Left’s fetish with Neo-Luddism and their apologetics for the Unabomber?

Here’s a question I’ve asked before. I’ll ask it again, I know.

Is Jonah Goldberg a liar or just a moron?

I’ve been in political science for eight years or so, I’ve known hundreds of academics, and I don’t think I know anyone who took the claims of the Sokal article seriously. The academics I know are left, no question. As a rule, they are moderate to leftish Democrats, with a few exceptions on either side. They tend to have a deep appreciation for science, even if they’re skeptical about some of its most far reaching claims and about the applicability of certain procedures of science to social and political questions. Jonah here is either dumb enough to believe his own magazine, having apparently not the faintest experience with actual academia, or he’s engaged in straightforward falsification.

It gets worse. Jonah tries the old “But I was never as radical as my opponent claims someone else was” trick: I don’t like the resurgence of creationism and I’m unfavorably disposed to intelligent design. Yeah, Jonah, but that’s hardly the point. The problem is that the political positions you hold are shared by a tremendous number of people who believe that the world was created in six days some 4000 years ago, and would still believe that the sun revolves around the earth if Galileo hadn’t gone after the Catholics first. The “post-modernist” left that Jonah describes is vanishingly small, even in academia, and is completely irrelevant to American politics. The anti-science right is huge and growing in power and influence. And you wonder why scientists, who are themselves “pointy headed intellectuals,” find more common ground with the left than with the right.

Jonah makes a last desperate effort:

I’m sorry, I’ve known too many brilliant young scholars who dreamed of academic careers who were barred by the grotesque intellectual bigotry of a few tenured priests who couldn’t tolerate serious questioning of their worldview to just let this nonsense go.

Really. My response is the same as Jesse’s; name one. I have NEVER met a conservative who was chased out of academia by intellectual bigotry. I have met conservatives who couldn’t hack it intellectually, I have met conservatives who didn’t want to go through the seven years of mind-bending bullshit required to get 25% chance at a $35000 a year job, and I’ve met conservatives who have done very well in academia. I’ve met liberals of all three varieties, as well.

I think that Jonah is feeling the walls close in a bit. In spite of what David Brooks might like to believe, modern conservatism is desperately anti-intellectual. I suggest that you take a look at the comments on this post if you want to get a sense of how conservatives think about intellectuals. I think Jonah also knows that the screeds against “pointy headed East Coast elite intellectuals” used to be screeds against “Jews”. And I would hope that somewhere, deep down, that bothers him a lot.