I was listening to Charlie Kirk’s radio show in the car just now and he was on a bit of a rant about various intellectual enemies: postmodernism and deconstruction, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida — and, just when I thought it was going to be a 1990s campus-radical nostalgia hour — he added: Spinoza.
Damn you, 17th-century rationalists!
I am not a scholar of philosophy by any stretch of the imagination, but I think of Spinoza as an early advocate of freedom of thought and, by implication, freedom of speech and of the press and such, a forefather of American-style liberalism. I associate him with a utilitarian view of religion (that it is probably false but socially useful) that I find distasteful but that is very common among contemporary conservatives, Dennis Prager being a regular offender here.
(Just today, Prager said “American Judeo-Christian values” are “the healthiest religion,” when, of course, “American Judeo-Christian values” are not a religion at all.)
The transformation of the conservative movement into an insanely baroque enemies list has made it very difficult to keep up with whom I am supposed to loathe and hate, and, if Spinoza is now on the list, I missed the memo. But then, I haven’t been going to the meetings, and my last undergraduate philosophy course was a long time ago.
I’ve never read Leo Strauss’s famous book on Spinoza, but now I want to.
If Charlie is reading (or if Jason Steorts has any idea) I’m really curious: What’s the beef with Spinoza?
(Also: Spinoza would be a great name for a White House press secretary.)