Advice for Budding Intellectuals: Don't Waste Time Refuting Nonentities
My father-in-law took the attitude that refuting intellectual lightweights in print is a waste of time. He took on major figures in his books and articles, but he did not spend time refuting people who had neither intellectual firepower nor organizational influence. He thought it was wasting his time to interact with such people. I have generally stuck to his rule.
If some intellectual lightweight has a lot of supporters, and these supporters publish regularly in journals that other intellectuals read, then it might be worthwhile beating him up in full public view. You do this only because you want to make an example of him. You show that he doesn't have the right facts, or doesn't have any kind of coherent logic, and then you use ridicule to point this out. If he responds, you do it again. You keep doing it until he stops responding. Then you declare victory, and go look for another one. But it doesn't do much good, because beating up an intellectual lightweight, except for amusement, doesn't gain any followers.
The only intellectual I can think of who gained influence by beating up nonentities was Karl Marx. He never took on anyone of significance intellectually in his polemical writings. He would beat up intellectual lightweights in the far Left socialist movement, back when there was no socialist movement. He never was able to show that he had even read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or the other classical economist. He did not footnote them. He did not refute them. He preferred to beat up intellectual lightweights in German publications. Nobody read these publications. He got the reputation of being a bully, which he was. Posthumously, he got the reputation of being a coherent thinker, which he wasn't. He had little influence in his lifetime. Only because Lenin was a successful revolutionary in Marx's name in October 1917 did Marx retroactively gain his reputation as being a giant.
Once in a while, I do beat up a non-entity. If the non-entity has attacked me in print, and I have spare time, I will sometimes respond in such a way that the non-entity will not take me on again. But I don't make it a regular practice. It just is not worth my time.
Here are marks of non-entities:
No Wikipedia entry
No book published by an independent publishing firm
A blog or website with an Alexa ranking larger than 500,000
No TED talk
Assistant professor (no tenure)
RUSHDOONY AND BAHNSEN
Rushdoony took his strategy to an extreme. He never responded when somebody attacked him in print. That was a tactical mistake. If some non-entity gets away with this, and does so in a journal or a website that a lot of people visit, then silence appears to be either cowardice or intellectual incapacity. Never give the impression of either. If I think a critic may have intelligent readers who have not made up their minds, I want them to make up their minds on my side, not the critic's side. I am always after bright people who are on the fence or who have not quite committed to my position.
At the other extreme was Greg Bahnsen. He would respond to every lightweight who attacked him in print or in a letter. He would do so in pages and pages of single-spaced letters. The only critic of any intellectual substance who attacked him in print was Meredith Kline. Kline was afraid of Bahnsen, and for good reason. He knew what could happen to anyone who went into print against him. There would be a devastating response. So, he arranged a sweetheart deal with the editor of the Westminster Theological Journal. Bahnsen would not be allowed to respond to Klein's critical article in the journal. Kline would, therefore, not be subjected to public humiliation in front of readers who had read his article. So, I published his response. Download it here. Klein never again criticized Bahnsen in print. You only needed to go through one mauling by Bahnsen to convince you not to do it again. In my Prologue to his book, which I published, By This Standard (1985), I described the encounter as Bambi meets Godzilla. In this case, Bambi had attacked Godzilla. This was unwise.
Bahnsen was the ultimate bulldog. He would not let loose. He would respond and respond and respond until the person quit answering. The problem was this: with the exception of Klein, none of these people had reputations worthy of a response. They were not competent thinkers. They published in obscure little magazines: a two-page or three-page essay.
I think Bahnsen had the ability to have become the most effective philosophical defender of Protestant Christianity in my era. He was better than Van Til in public debate. He was a consummate debater. He could communicate in print far more coherently than Van Til could. Van Til is difficult to read. He was not intellectually organized. As Hayek described it, he was a puzzler, not a systematic thinker. (Hayek regarded himself as a puzzler.) Bahnsen was highly systematic and precise. Yet he never wrote a treatise on apologetics (intellectual defense of the faith). He wrote a layman's introduction, Always Ready, which is a collection of footnote-free essays. His lone academic apologetics book was published posthumously in 1998, two years after his death. It is a series of extracts from Van Til's writings: Van Til's Apologetic. He makes comments on them. It is a very good book, but it is not an independent book of his own. We needed those missing books.
He spent most of his academic life defending his 1974 master's thesis, which was the equivalent of a Ph.D. dissertation. It was published as a book in 1977: Theonomy in Christian Ethics. He had been converted by Rushdoony to this position. He did not come up with it on his own. I recall the first time I ever met him. He attended a 1969 seminar that Rushdoony organized and where I spoke. He was obviously brilliant at age 19, but he was neither postmillennial nor theonomic. He, therefore, could never be more than a footnote to Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law, which was published three years before his book came out. Rushdoony got him his initial audience. He convinced his publisher to publish the book. Bahnsen became famous only because Rushdoony had promoted him. Inevitably, he would have to play second fiddle to Rushdoony on the issue of theonomy. He offered an academic defense of theonomy, but he never spent much time developing the position in practical, real-world applications. That was where he was needed.
In 1974, when he had finished his Th.M. degree, I asked him to write two articles for a book I was editing in honor of Van Til. I wanted him to write the section on apologetics and the section on philosophy. He agreed to do this. I waited two years. He would never finish the two articles. Instead, he extended them into a manuscript on apologetics that he never completed, but when typeset years later was about 300 pages long. It has never been published. But he would not finish the two articles. That was when Rushdoony finally broke with him in 1976. He got tired of waiting.
I had a fallback plan. I wrote to Francis Nigel Lee, who had multiple doctoral degrees, and asked him to write the two articles. Lee cranked them out in a couple of months. Then, knowing what would happen, I sent photocopies of the two articles to Bahnsen. He finished his two articles within two months. He would not tolerate the thought that Lee was going to get into the book on Van Til. I think they were the best two articles he ever wrote. They appear in the 1976 book, Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective. I paid Lee for his articles. I don't know if he ever published them. He died in 2011.
Bahnsen always responded to critics, but he never produced a body of written materials that would have served as the foundation for the next generation of Calvinist philosophers. I realize that there are not many of them, but there would have been more if he had used the time he spent responding to critics for the purpose of building up a body of published materials.
American Vision has something in the range of 150 to 200 single-spaced pages of photocopies of carbon copies of letters he sent to his critics. Almost nobody has ever heard of his critics. I would like to see them posted online, but I don't imagine that anybody would actually read them unless he was writing a doctoral dissertation on Bahnsen.
CONCLUSION
Start with the big boys if you're going to gain your reputation as a critic. It doesn't do any good to gain a reputation for being a critic of non-entities. Marx built his career this way, but I can't think of anybody else who ever has.
Van Til did this with philosophy, although not theology. He never critiqued Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, or any other philosopher by citing their writings. Yet he could read classical Greek, and he got his training at Princeton in grad school by translating Greek philosophers and then debating the fine points in a small seminar. He never did this after he got out of grad school. The only people he ever took on, idea by idea, who were significant were Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. We search in vain in his books to find extended quotations from major philosophers and his responses to them. He always quoted obscure monographs written by obscure academics in the 1920's and 1930's. He let them summarize the major thinkers, and then he demolished their summaries. It was an extraordinary academic weakness on his part, and it helped keep him from being taken seriously by the secular academic community.
Time is precious. If you can write, you should write for publication. You should have a website on which you publish articles weekly. Build up a following of readers. Encourage them to write. Post their articles. Encourage them to organize institutionally. Encourage them to gain followers. The whole point of writing is to change people's minds. If you are not seeking to change other people's minds, you are wasting your time. If you are not equipping intelligent, dedicated followers to carry on the intellectual battle, you are wasting your time.
In my first book, I took on Marx: Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968). I was 24 years old when I began, and I was 26 when it was published. I did not start with some non-entity. Nobody should.
Don't spend your intellectual career training for a boxing match that you do not intend to fight in front of the public. The only purpose for training is to get into the ring and do your best to flatten your opponent. If you are successful, do it again with a different opponent.
There is something even more useless than refuting non-entities in writing: reading non-entities and then refusing to refute them in print. When you publicly refute a non-entity, you are getting practice in refuting people who matter. It is part of your investment of 5,000 hours to become skilled in written communications. But when you read the writings of non-entities, and you remain silent, you are wasting even more time. It doesn't do you any good to become skilled at reading non-entities, and then remaining mute. This is a bad habit. It makes you imagine that you are doing something beneficial in the battle for whatever it is you believe in. You're not.
Finally, there is the ultimate waste of time: exchanging emails with non-entities, in a vain attempt to convert them. Here is your problem. Even if you do convert one of them, he doesn't have any influence. Basically, exchanging arguments in emails with a non-entity is like slamming your fist into a bowl of Jell-O. It doesn't do you any good, and it doesn't do him any good, either.
Let the dead bury the dead.