Conversion Forensics
Andrew Fergusen has a fascinating article on how playwright David Mamet became a conservative. Here's a bit about the role his rabbi Mordecai Finley played in that conversion:
Before long, when Finley didn’t budge, the books from Mamet stopped arriving, and Finley asked if he could send Mamet some books too. One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the “constrained vision” of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet’s greatest plays—and the “unconstrained vision” of man’s endless improvement that suffused Mamet’s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.
“He came back to me stunned. He said, ‘This is incredible!’ He said, ‘Who thinks like this? Who are these people?’ I said, ‘Republicans think like this.’ He said, ‘Amazing.’ ”
Finley piled it on, from the histories of Paul Johnson to the economics of Milton Friedman to the meditations on race by Shelby Steele.
“He was haunted by what he discovered in those books, this new way of thinking,” Finley says. “It followed him around and wouldn’t let him go.”
For years Mamet and Finley talked by phone at least once, sometimes twice a day. He became friends with Sowell and Steele, another Hoover Institution fellow. Mamet dedicated his most popular recent play, Race, to Steele.
“I think he has the same values today that he did before,” Steele said. “He’s said to me he thinks he might have always been conservative without knowing it. All that happened was, he finally found a politics that suited his values.”
A former literature professor, Steele told me he’d been an admirer of Mamet’s work since the 1970s and thought he’d detected signs of incipient conservatism in the plays.
A Conflict of Visions is a book that I'd recommend giving to thoughtful liberals. It lays out the fundamental worldviews nicely and non-judgmentally.
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Oct '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
the best part of the article:
But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.
Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
Jun '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
This shows how effective the MSM and the liberal establishment has been in doing what Roger Ailes perfectly explains is keeping conservative ideas out of the conversation. Ailes replied when asked if Fox is a conservative news channel. He said that Fox news would definitely look more conservative than the other channels but that is only because of the simple fact that they included conservative content and commentary instead of keeping it out. How else to explain the fact that Mamet didn't know about Steele and Sowell?
Feb '11
Re: Conversion Forensics
"You wanna know how to get Liberals? They pull Thomas Frank, you pull Thomas Sowell... *That's* the *Chicago* way!"
May '11
Re: Conversion Forensics
High-profile conversions to conservatism can be a big deal. (I think Dennis Miller really helps the cause by getting a lot of cynical or apolitical types to give the Right a closer look.) I think Mamet is an extremely important 'get', and possibly even a 'Road to Damascus' level conversion. (No, I'm not comparing a foul-mouthed playwright to Saint Paul; I'm being dramatic.)
He is highly regarded as a thinker on the Left. His switching teams may get curious Lefties or herd thinkers (as Mamet calls them) to start browsing a Krauthammer article or give Dennis Prager a listen. And then they'll be ours
Sep '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
The Watsa Matta wit Kansas? tome always seemed a last gasp effort to explain to thoughtful but jittery liberals why they should remain with the herd.
Aug '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
If only that "A Conflict of Visions" could be made required reading in American high schools.
Apr '11
Re: Conversion Forensics
Songwriter, I'm with you but let's expand that to have everything Thomas Sowell has written be required reading.
If the left thinks the world is full of victims and oppressors, but do not hold to the reality of mankind's sinfulness, then why are they not trying to help us conservatives. There has to be a reason for us to think the way we do. It can't be that we are just evil without excuse or someone else to blame.
BooYah! David Mamet and rabbi Finley logical thought wins out.
Aug '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
I don't have a problem with that. Not at all. Not even a teensy bit.
Dec '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
Although I am a big fan of Sowell, I am not familiar with "Conflict of Visions". I have a liberal fiancee that has what I would consider incipient conservative values and may slide it her way. However, Sowell is an economist and she hates anything to do with numbers. She's good with money, but her eyes glaze over when numbers that are more abstract appear. Is "Conflict" more philosophic than economic? Thanks.
Feb '11
Re: Conversion Forensics
CJRun: "Conflict" is pure philosophy and history. No numbers. It also doesn't make the conservative case. It's completely objective and even-handed (though, obviously Sowell is conservative). It just lays out very clearly the philosophical underpinnings of the two sides. It never says that one is better than the other, just what both sides think, and how both sides use certain concepts (like justice) in such different ways that they are usually talking past each other. Get it immediately.
PS: My wife and I were members of Rabbi Finley's synagogue about 15 years ago for a couple of years. He's a smart, righteous dude. He's conservative, which is rare enough for a Reform rabbi, and served in the IDF. Terrific person.
Jan '11
Re: Conversion Forensics
Thomas Sowell and Milton Freidman helped me get through college. I would have gone nuts if it wasn't for them. I'd read them at night, after the assigned drivel.
Kudos to guys like Mammat and Miller for being intellecually curious & honest enough to revisit the view they held as adults. It is a testament to the power of thinkers like Dr. Sowell that they are able to affect the views of adults like these. Think of what they could do with a larger audience.
Sep '10
Re: Conversion Forensics
Albert Fuchs said it well, but let me add that it isn't light reading although it isn't inpenetrable. He uses the terms "constrained vision" and "unconstrained vision" which bogs down the flow - but it keeps things objective. Click the link and you can start reading for yourself.