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My Ilk and I
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 Have you ever noticed that
there is no such thing as honest and rational disagreement? Your own
opinions are grounded in reason and truth, of course, but people who hold
different opinions are stupid, dishonest, paranoid, or otherwise irrational.
Their motives are evil, too. (The people who agree with you are generally a
decent, sensible lot. No need to delve into their motives.)
Take me,
for example. Having recently published a book on the Shakespeare authorship
question, I’m discovering how crazy I am and how dark my motives
are. As some of my readers may
recall,  I
believe the real author of the Shakespeare works was the
wayward But the
orthodox reviewers — those who believe that “Shakespeare is
Shakespeare” — insist that there’s simply no room for
honest doubt. So, rather than discussing the evidence on its merits, they
feel compelled to explain why I, and others of my ilk, won’t admit a
truth that is so radiantly clear to them. (Notice that nice people don’t
have ilks. The moment someone refers to your “ilk,” you know
you’re in trouble.)
One
academic reviewer calls my views “multiculturalist” and
“Marxist” (and these terms aren’t meant as
compliments!). He adds that the anti-Stratfordians — those who
question Shakespeare’s authorship — usually have “an ax
to grind,” adding that “English upper-class snobbery fuels the
questioning of Shakespeare’s authorship.” I didn’t realize
I belonged to the English upper class. In the future, I’d appreciate it if
you knaves out there would address me as “my lord” or, better,
“your lordship.”
It
isn’t just me. The defenders of Stratford’s son think the
anti-Stratfordians in general have a thing about aristocrats. A British
professor finds aristocrat-worship an American trait: “Over the years
more than a dozen Elizabethan aristocrats have been dusted down and
presented to the public as the true author of the plays. Americans have been
especially fascinated by this bizarre pseudo-mystery. Perhaps because the
only two things that the British have got and the Americans have not are
Blue Blood and William Shakespeare, it has proved all too tempting to suppose
that Shakespeare was an aristocrat in disguise.”
Another
Stratford partisan surmises that we anti-Stratfordians are self-deluded
pseudo intellectuals: “I believe that a large number, if not a majority,
among our best and brightest secretly or not so secretly imagine themselves
to be intellectual Columbuses.... Many of these would-be conquistadors have
sought their El Dorado in an ironclad proof that William Shakespeare’s
works were written by someone other than [the Stratford man].”
A Texan
professor offers another psychological explanation: “Part of the
anti-Stratfordians’ appeal is the anti-establishment cachet that goes
with belonging to an exclusive group. As such, their purpose is not so much
to expose the truth as it is to propagate an unpopular, often irrational,
belief, rather like those who believe that behind every political assassination
lies a conspiracy or that the Holocaust is a lie.” He calls the
anti-Stratfordian position “a product of paranoia and our rampant
culture of conspiracy.”
Oh, man!
I’d better dial 911 and get a psychiatrist here, pronto! I’m a
self-deluded, paranoid snob, the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, with no real
interest in exposing the truth!
I knew I was
a sinner, but until I questioned Shakespeare’s authorship I had no
inkling of the true depths of my depravity. That goes for the rest of my ilk
too. A bad lot!
Never mind
who wrote Shakespeare’s works. The interesting thing here is that
the orthodox reviewers can’t make their case with rational,
impersonal argument. They feel compelled to adopt a tone of haughty scorn,
making irrelevant ad hominem charges against large numbers of people they
have never even met. Without these tactics, they seem to have no way to
defend their position.
I’ve
always met the same tactics in political debate. The defenders of an
exhausted establishment can be relied on to attack their critics, accusing
them en masse of evil motives, rather than to refute their arguments. So
when people you disagree with have to smear you, take heart: It probably
means you’re winning the debate.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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