We owe our bitterest intellectual foes some gratitude for drawing existing problems into sharper relief.
Take Brisk, for example. The “formalism“, the rejection of the mind, the contempt for halachic analysis, disregard for realia, and status quo biases, all existed earlier to some degree. But Brisk (and others, too) made it all of a piece, so the problem is now easier to attack, and easier to counter with its diametric opposite.
Mussar and Chassidus both helped crystalize the “unconstrained vision” of humanity and its concomitant antinomianism. Which birthed Leibowitz and the Chazon Ish, lehavdil.
Rabbi Yisrael Rosen of Machon Tzomet enabled Morenu Rabbi Yitzchak Brand’s oeuvre against worthless legal fictions as a foil.
And so on.
Here is Murray Rothbard saying the same in the economic realm:
It is the fashionable belief that an idea is wrong in proportion to its “extremism” and right in proportion as it is a chaotic muddle of contradictory doctrines. To the professional middle-of-the-roader, a species that is always found in abundance, the demagogue invariably comes as a nasty shock. For it is one of the most admirable qualities of the demagogue that he forces men to think, some for the first time in their lives. Out of the muddle of current ideas, both fashionable and unfashionable, he extracts some and pushes them to their logical conclusions, i.e. “to extremes.” He thereby forces people either to reject their loosely held views as unsound, or to find them sound and to pursue them to their logical consequences. Far from being an irrational force, then, the silliest of demagogues is a great servant of Reason, even when he is mostly in the wrong.
A typical example is the inflationist demagogue: the “monetary crank.” The vast majority of respectable economists have always scoffed at the crank without realizing that they are not really able to answer his arguments. For what the crank has done is to take the inflationism that lies at the core of fashionable economics and push it to its logical conclusion. He asks; “If it is good to have an inflation of money of 10 percent per year, why isn’t at still better to double the money supply every year?” Only a few economists have realized that in order to answer the crank reasonably instead of by ridicule, it is necessary to purge fashionable economics of its inflationist foundations.
Demagogues probably first fell into disrepute in the 19th century, when most of them were socialists. But their conservative opposition, as is typical of conservatives in every age, never came to grips with the logic of the demagogues’ position. Instead, they contented themselves with attacking the emotionalism and extremism of the upstarts. Their logic unassailed, the socialist demagogues triumphed, as argument always will conquer pure prejudice in the long run. For it seemed as if the socialists had reason on their side.
See the rest of it here.
Well, there.
Now I paid my due respect, my intellectual enemies should do the right thing, and all stop saying the wrong thing, already!