Assessing the Damage

 Obviously I didn't take part in this Spivak event, partly because I thought that it would just be a repetition of the same old debate (and more importantly because I just had way too much to do). But it seems to me that just the opposite has happened. The tired old debate has been completely surpassed. The contributions of the Long Sunday "side" seem to me to have shown where the real enthusiasm and the real intellectual seriousness lie. (This should not be intended to take away from Amardeep's contribution, which appeared at The Valve, as it were by accident.) The sheer variety and the number of people coming out of the woodwork to participate is impressive, to say the least.

And I'd be willing to bet that if someone had suggested a Trilling essay or something in the analytic tradition, similar levels of enthusiastic participation would have been in evidence on the Long Sunday "side" -- as long as it wasn't some type of attack piece, like half the stuff in Theory's Empire. (For example, I don't think that most of Quine's work dealt in dismissive polemics based on lazy stereotypes.)

So as far as I can tell, the debate between The Valve and Long Sunday is over, and Long Sunday has won by a mile. There's a lot of cool stuff going on at The Valve that has nothing to do with this debate, of course -- I certainly hope that that will continue, and I will visit there for such materials. But there's no more use in repeating this particular set of arguments, and I look forward to never discussing the concept of "Higher Eclecticism" again.