Repost: Some Links On Meritocracy-Many People Want Politics To Be Interested In You

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In light of all the flak Ross Douthat was getting for his opinion piece on the death of G.H.W. Bush ‘Why We Miss The WASPs.’

As posted, let me offer this quote from ‘A Modest Proposal’:

‘But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England.’

Of course, some criticism is coming from predicably Left and activist elements (amplified on Twitter).

I don’t think a lot of people already in positions of authority have thought this through.

What needs replacing, exactly, and why? Compared to what? Which kinds of ideas and habits ought to be those someone holds close and puts into practice while in positions of authority? What about incentives?

The consent of the governed?

From this article in the Independent on American novelist Louis Auchincloss:

How did money actually work among those in America’s elite?:

But the old monopoly of power had gone, and the country was the poorer for it. “The tragedy of American civilization,” Auchincloss wrote in 1980, “is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place.”

Here’s another Auchincloss quote from a reader (haven’t checked this one out…probably a quote site). The prose strikes me as kind of post-Wharton, mannered and dull:

“I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life — a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it — filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction…”

If such things be true, then many of the best and the brightest seem busy contructing a meritocracy in the old WASP establishment’s place; an enterprise of many unresolved personal conflicts between political ideals of activist change, progress, and ever-expanding personal freedoms on one hand and deeply held religious beliefs, traditions and customs on the other.

There seems to be an ex post facto character to much of the ol’ meritocratic enterprise, in my humble opinion, where a healthy skepticism is warranted.

In fact, it’s probably made [more] room for the same old Socialism.

On that note, I have a healthy respect for contrarians, frankly, when merely speaking out in favor of…:

‘the importance of traditional marriage values in ensuring children’s future success…’

…involves controversy and professional censure.

It’s so bland!

In fact, what will you do with your own blandness, dear reader, entombing the flaming desire to be woke within; the little half-opened doors of ecstasy and ‘environmental justice’?:

Earth Quaker Action Team is ON IT. (I’m not sure the Quakers ever had much institutional authority…so this could well be a marketing ploy to start more Quaking)

—

Full discussion here.

Helen Andrews offers a critique of the meritocratic system she sees dominating U.S. education (more grades, achievement and performance-based…less legacy and WASP based).

Yes, the old system had its problems and horrors, but she cites its end in a Victorian redesign of the British civil service, a redesign whose counterpart is now thriving here in the U.S. since the 1960’s.

Andrews from her original piece:

‘Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls “pseudoscientific measures of excellence.” She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.) This is even less likely to work than fiddling with the equality-of-opportunity end. For one thing, the minority of families willing to do whatever it takes to get into Harvard will still do whatever it takes to get into Harvard.’

and:

‘My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy—so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label.’

Is there proof of a causal mechanism from which this meritocracy will thus harden into an aristocratic elite?

If so, will it just be an elite of different ideals, assumptions, blind-spots and stupidities…now with top-down social-science and pseudo-scientific bureaucratic/administrative oversight?:

As I see it, yes, these schools were always about grooming ambitious, wealthy, and well-connected people to some extent; grooming them into institutions that often govern the rest of us.

***I’d add that much like the deeper logic behind a more general multiculturalism, its practitioners and the younger people raised within this system can easily lose sight of the lenses they’re using to view the world (shared ideals and assumptions about moral virtue, truth and knowledge claims, the idea of moving towards the telos of a ‘better world’ which can now become the social glue of the institutions themselves).

***I should add that I’m rather sympathetic to Andrews’ slow-change, tradition-favoring, conservative-ish, position.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of this quote by Ken Minogue:

‘We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be reintrepreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring harmony. In other words, in the new form of society, human beings are becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral ideas.’

-Minogue, Kenneth. Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Pg 111).

If we are coming apart, who’s putting us back together? : Via Youtube: ‘Are We Really Coming Apart?’ Charles Murray and Robert Putnam Discuss…Repost-Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People

Related On This Site: Once you take apart the old structure, you have to criticize the meritocracy you’ve helped create: David Brooks At The NY Times: ‘Why Our Elites Stink’

The anti-intellectual’s intellectual: Repost-Via Youtube: Eric Hoffer-’The Passionate State Of Mind’…

Leo Strauss:From Darwinian Conservatism By Larry Arnhart: “Surfing Strauss’s Third Wave of Modernity”

A deeper look at what education “ought” to be, which is remarkably like it is now: A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

How dare he?: Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?From The Harvard Educational Review-

Still reliving the 60′s?: A Few Thoughts On Robert Bork’s “Slouching Towards Gomorrah”

The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”… From George Monbiot: ‘How Freedom Became Tyranny’…Looking to supplant religion as moral source for the laws: From The Reason Archives: ‘Discussing Disgust’ Julian Sanchez Interviews Martha Nussbaum.New liberty away from Hobbes?: From Public Reason: A Discussion Of Gerald Gaus’s Book ‘The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom And Morality In A Diverse And Bounded World’…Richard Rorty tried to tie postmodernism and trendy leftist solidarity to liberalism, but wasn’t exactly classically liberal: Repost: Another Take On J.S. Mill From “Liberal England”

Theodore Dalrymple, Twitter Ignorance & The Latest In Titan II Living-Some Links

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‘Rigid Diversity‘ by Theodore Dalrymple:

‘The present totalitarian threat comes not from government, as it once did, but from the universities and the intellectuals, or semi-intellectuals, that they turn out.’

Just a reminder: People who want to control how you think and feel are letting you know now how they will behave in the future.  You can’t necessarily count on institutions, politicians and authorities to maintain your freedoms, should you suddenly find intolerant people with bad ideas wielding influence over you.

The previous two cents and two cents more gets you close to a nickel: Twitter as a platform is what it is (especially good at brief bursts of condensed information, data gathering, and disasters). All you need is a device, free software to download, and voila, you’ve become a node on a vast network. This has advantages.

Communication, however, is obviously a pathetic prosthetic for human contact and real conversation.  I suspect the people curating Twitter of playing a dumb, dumb game by favoring their favored biases (like all of us, to some extent) instead of just letting speech flourish.

This creates echo-chambers.

Via David Thompson, I don’t think I’d want to live in a Titan II Missile Complex, but it’s only $495K. Get in on the ground floor, and go down from there.

As posted, Land Art is often about removing the monetary value, commodification and fungibility of a piece of art and making something big enough, weird enough, useless enough; maybe making a beautiful/ugly enough imitation of Nature or man’s design within Nature.

Here’s Wikipedia, keeping it simpler:

‘Land art, earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked.’

Radical Academics Jumping Turnstiles, Decadence & Tilting At Windmills

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From the NY Post:

‘A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls.’

Spring 2020 tuition at the NYU Gallatin School of Individual Study seems a little high.  Can’t I just show up at the next rampage for free?  With a mask and a bat?

On that note, Peter Thiel reviews Ross Douthat’s new book.

Sexual, moral and political liberation movements (the ’68ers) have a lot of downside costs.  There’s been lots of talk of freedom, the (S)elf, and intentions, but little talk of responsibilities, other-directed loyalty, and results.

I don’t expect folks caught up in liberation movements to accept that they may, in fact, be responsible for their own behavior as well as the political economy they’re helping to create:

Are we making progress? Not so much, Douthat answers. Baby boomers will wince at his title, since “decadence” sounds to them like the complaint of an old curmudgeon. They cannot stand to think of themselves as old, nor can they bear to think of the society they dominate as dysfunctional. But this is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era.’

Are you convinced?  Kirkus review here.

Hmmmm…

Mike Shellenberger leaves the environmental reservation.

Would you like more people staying warm, being able to read at night, and eating food without parasites?  Hopefully, yes.  You can still care about the natural world, genuinely sensitive ecosystems, remarkable creatures and, you know, other people.

But wherever you go, there you are. This probably means living in a place, (alas, a Nation), stuck with yourself, your family, your friends, your responsibilities, your duties and your own boredom.

What does scale?

Globally, nuclear energy produces nearly twice as much electricity at half the cost. And nuclear-heavy France pays little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions as renewables-heavy, anti-nuclear Germany.

Whatever you may think about conservation and your relationship with the natural world, the environmental movement has become big business, big politics, and big money.

I have never really been a member of what I see as rather Romantically Primitive, collectivist utopian groups, overlapping with Left causes and producing much economy-regulating techno-bureacracy in practice.

It’s good to see some reasonable discussion.

Tuesday Poem-Robert Frost

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The Wood-Pile

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day
I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther – and we shall see’.
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

–Robert Frost

Catholic Thinking Applied To Modern Political Orders-Edward Feser & Some Links & Sunday Thoughts: It’s Getting Tougher To Defend Quiet Paths

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Having a little extra time this Sunday, I’ve taken Edward Feser’s thinking from his post The Socialist State as an Occasionalist God and added a few links to dictionary definitions of the terms to help myself understand his reasoning (perhaps I’ll be accused of ‘Jesus-smuggling’).

As a layman predisposed to philosophical skepticism, I’m sympathetic to the idea of well, examining ideas with skepticism.  I wouldn’t call myself a believer, really.  I tend to see myself as walking around the edges of secular humanism, liberal idealism and American pragmatism.  Additionally, I’m trying to put the current American political landscape into some context, as well as the unfolding logic found within much Romantic, Modern, & Postmodern schools of thought.

I prefer conservation and slow change as regards many current legal and social battles (closer to Constitutionalism), but am a pretty live-and-let-live guy.

Here’s Feser logic as best as I’ve understood it in about an hour or so (I’m bound to get some things wrong).

Feser borrows from this paper:

The linked parts are what I’ve filled in, coming directly from dictionary definitions, and the rest comes from Feser’s post.  I basically just swapped out ‘God’ for ‘The State’ to extend Feser’s analogy in the bottom portion:

Pantheism:  Pantheism is the belief that reality is identical with divinity, or that all-things compose an all-encompassing, transcendent god. Pantheist belief does not recognize a distinct personal God.

Occasionalism: God alone has causal efficacy, and the apparent causal power of created things is illusory.

Concurrentism: God not only conserves things in existence, but also must concur or cooperate with their activity if they are to have any efficacy.

Conservationism: Created things not only have causal power, but exercise it completely independently of God.

Atheism:  Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.

Now Feser applies these concepts to certain political orders (more or less, swapping out ((God(s))) for ((The State)) or ((God)) for ((Modern Concepts of Political Order)), to extend his analogy.

Totalitarian Socialism: The belief that reality is identical with Statism, or that all-things compose an all-encompassing, transcendent State. Totalitarian socialist belief would not recognize a distinct personal State.

Occasionalism (Socialism): The State alone has causal efficacy, and the apparent causal power of created things is illusory.

Concurrentism (Natural Law): The State not only conserves things in existence, but also must concur or cooperate with (individuals’, things’?) activity if it is to have any efficacy.

Conservationism (Libertarianism): Created things (individuals?) not only have causal power, but exercise it completely independently of The State.

Anarcho-Capitalism:  Anarcho-capitalism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of States. Less broadly, anarcho-capitalism is a rejection of the belief that any States exist. In an even narrower sense, anarcho-capitalism is specifically the position that there are no States.

—

Let me know what I may have gotten wrong, or what you think Feser may be getting wrong.

—

Please be advised that what follows is a rat’s maze of gathered links and thoughts.  Enter at your own risk.

I’ve always loved this Ralph Waldo Emerson quote (or my idea of the quote, anyways):

‘I hate quotations.  Tell me what you know.’

This morning I had the thought that the minimalist/deflationist response might be:

‘About what?’

Simon Blackburn, speaking at the University of Toronto, discusses the minimalist or deflationist view:

‘Along comes someone like Pilate, Pontius Pilate, and says something like: ‘What is truth?’ and everybody goes sort of dizzy, and you look to the philosopher to provide a suitably abstract and highfalutin answer. The minimalist says you shouldn’t answer Pilate, or rather, if you answer Pilate, you answer should take the form of a question…which is “What are you interested in?’

So basically, you throw the question ‘What is truth?’ back until the person who’s interlocuting you… gives you an example and says ‘Well, I’m interested in whether penguins fly’ and you say ‘Okay well the truth there…the truth would consist in penguins flying…’

…that’s very disappointing:’

Blackburn on Richard Rorty here.

From Kelley Ross, who takes a step back from moral relativism and good ‘ol American Pragmatism:

‘It is characteristic of all forms of relativism that they wish to preserve for themselves the very principles that they seek to deny to others. Thus, relativism basically presents itself as a true doctrine, which means that it will logically exclude its opposites (absolutism or objectivism), but what it actually says is that no doctrines can logically exclude their opposites. It wants for itself the very thing (objectivity) that it denies exists. Logically this is called “self-referential inconsistency,” which means that you are inconsistent when it comes to considering what you are actually doing yourself. More familiarly, that is called wanting to “have your cake and eat it too.” Someone who advocates relativism, then, may just have a problem recognizing how their doctrine applies to themselves’

And on Richard Rorty:

‘Pragmatism is really just a kind of relativism; and, as with Protagoras’s own strategy, it is a smoke screen for the questions that ultimately must be asked about what it means that something is “better,” or now that something “works.” Something “works,” indeed, if it gets us what we want — or what Richard Rorty wants. But why should we want that? Again, the smoke screen puts off the fatal moment when we have to consider what is true about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. All these responses are diversions that attempt to obscure and prevent the examination of the assumptions that stand behind the views of people like Rorty. It is easier to believe what you believe if it is never even called into question, and that is just as true of academic philosophers like Rorty as it is for anybody else. Being intelligent or well educated does not mean that you are necessarily more aware of yourself, what you do, or the implications of what you believe. That is why the Delphic Precept, “Know Thyself” (Gnôthi seautón) is just as important now as ever.’

This Wendell Berry quote, from on “tolerance and multiculturalism,” from his essay “The Joy of Sales Resistance”, has stayed with me:

‘Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.’

Please do keep in mind Wendell Berry is NOT going to buy a computer.

Hmmm….he’s a little out there, but Alexander Stoddart’s a classicist, working in a medium with less immediacy but long pedigree:

Related On This Site:

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Repost-Ah, Look At All The Lonely People-‘Jeff Koons Is Back’ Via Vanity Fair

-Banksy’s website here. Newsweek’s piece: ‘See You Banksy, Hello Invader.‘

Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom

Thanks to a reader.

Quite a varied discussion on Bloom’s surprise 1987 bestseller: ‘The Closing Of The American Mind‘

Does rock/popular music corrupt the souls of youth in preventing them from evening-out the passions; from pursuing higher things that a quality humanities education can offer?

Might such a lack allow political ideology to offer young people something to do, something to be, and something of which to be a part?

A questioning of premises, with varied disagreement, including that from an Emersonian.

–Heather McDonald At The WSJ: ‘ The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’

-Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

–Repost-From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Nietzsche–Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?’

-Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’

– Various Products Of Radical Reason And Reactions To Them- John Gray At The New Statesman

From The Archives-‘From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington’

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Full article here.

Fukuyama has some disagreement with Huntington’s later “The Clash Of Civilizations” argument as too narrow and confining, and I think in the long run, worries that it despite its prescience it could lead us into trouble:

“Sam, in my view, underrated the universalism of the appeal of living in modern, free societies with accountable governments.  His argument rests heavily on the view that modernization and Westernization are two completely separate processes, something which I rather doubt.”

and

“The gloomy picture he paints of a world riven by cultural conflict is one favored by the Islamists and Russian nationalists, but is less helpful in explaining contemporary China or India, or indeed in explaining the motives of people in the Muslim world or Russia who are not Islamists or nationalists.“

Fukuyama argues that Hungtington came of age when modernism was dominant.   He also seems to take issue with the epistemological foundations of this largely social-science driven and philosophical worldview that has drastically shaped the last century and a half:

“Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late nineteenth century European social theorists like Henry Maine, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber.”

By the same token, some of the American right’s response has been to look to such thinkers as Friedrich Hayek, Von Mises, Leo Strauss and perhaps Karl Popper.  Here’s a quote from Popper that may be illuminating:

“…and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important that equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”

We’re still importing a lot of our ideas from the failures and triumphs of Europe…and not just the Anglo tradition.   Fukuyama thinks Huntington was quite at the center of those ideas, and an American vision.

See Also On This Site: From Bloggingheads: Eli Lake And Heather Hurlbert On Samuel Huntington…From The Atlantic: Samuel Huntington’s Death And Life’s Work

Samuel P. Huntington - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2004 by World Economic Forum

from The World Economic Forum’s photostream.

 

Real And Imagined Houses-Two Poems & A Few Short Stories

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Southern Gothic

Something of how the homing bee at dusk
Seems to inquire, perplexed, how there can be
No flowers here, not even withered stalks of flowers,
Conjures a garden where no garden is
And trellises too frail almost to bear
The memory of a rose, much less a rose.
Great oaks more monumentally great oaks now
Than ever when the living rose was new
Cast shade that is the more completely shade
Upon a hose of broken windows merely
And empty nests up under broken eaves
No damask any more prevents the moon,
But it unravels, peeling from a wall,
Red roses within roses within roses.

–Donald Justice

Interesting written interview on Southern Stoicism, with mention of Walker Percy.

Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style often flirts with the grotesque, and can traffic in the macabre, but there’s reason behind it, and a brilliantly skeptical, humane eye.

The world is changing, and so is the South.

Julian’s mother is living in the past in

‘Everything That Rises Must Converge:’

‘They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket’

Well, that’s a story:

Nelson, composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched
him with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, “I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again!”

William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose For Emily‘ read aloud

And on real and imagined houses, from a Northern poet who vacationed in Florida:

Postcard From The Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

–Wallace Stevens

Ah, The New Yorker-You Never Go Full Butler

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To start off, below is Mike Nayna’s Evergreen State documentary.  Maybe there’s a lesson here for some folks at The New Yorker.

Free-thinking and reasonable people, including free-thinking Lefties, have my sympathies when turning to face the rigid ideologues and totalitarians.

Affixing one’s moral compass, sentiments and institutional commitments, however, upon the axis of change, rather than conservation, is one way to end up in an equity canoe headed over a revolutionary waterfall.

Some collected links over the years at The New Yorker.

Judith Butler Wants To Reshape Our Rage (your rage isn’t even your own at The New Yorker, these days, it belongs to the collective).

Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler: ‘The Professor Of Parody‘

‘These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.’

Not the ‘right’ kind of emptiness for Richard Brody, at The New Yorker, in Todd Phillips’ ‘The Joker.’

‘“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering.’

Brody’s review is as much about historical events (The Central Park Five), and moral judgments surrounding these historical events (racist and nothing else, Trump is horrible) as it is about the movie.

Basic plot, aesthetics, and stylized choices are kind of what I’m after in a movie review, with some of the reviewer’s own expertise and respect for the reader’s intelligence thrown-in (should I see this movie?).

The Boston Evening Transcript

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

—
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”

–T.S. Eliot

 

Ira Stoll here:

‘There was a wonderful article by an editor at the magazine, Mary Norris, about commas. Wonderful, that is, until this passage, “That was during the Reagan Administration, when many of us suspected that Reagan had some form of dementia, but no one could do anything about it. The country was running on automatic.”

Such politicization can make for bad stewardship of the arts, certainly.

Perhaps New Yorker features are increasingly flogged to maintain readership in a competitive marketplace, or are being put to use for other purposes, like reaffirming political ideology and identities to signal the right beliefs and in-group/out-group loyalties.  Many of the liberal pieties can be found on display at the New Yorker.

***Who do you trust for discussions of the arts and culture, and would you just rather publications be up front about their ideological bents and loyalties?

Or will this simply take care of itself?

As posted: Maybe some deeper currents from Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism are worth thinking about. As I see things, many people who care deeply about the avant-garde also can bind themselves to ever narrower political and ideological commitments.

The journey of The Western Self bears proper care.

According to some folks at The New Yorker magazine, the only answer to injustice is radical and revolutionary equality.

To be fair, the logic embedded within much radical chic usually reveals itself to be cool at first, the same old murderously bad doctrinaire utopianism a little later on:

From The New Yorker: ‘Writing Powered By Amtrak’

Thanks, reader:

Related On This Site:Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’

A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

See Protein Wisdom for a discussion about language and intentionalism, and how it gets deployed.

-Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism And Truth’

Related On This Site: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’ Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-’Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

Repost-Just One More Brutalist Link Or Two

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Via Mick Hartley via the BBC-‘The Brutalist Divide: Concrete Monsters Or Concrete Icons‘

Earthlings were visited, many times this past century, by beings from the planet Utopia. Little is known about these curious creatures, but they were advanced, and went about vigorously erecting structures across our planetary surface.

What were they trying to tell us?

Concrete, as a material, was used, presumably because it was so common and functioned as our ‘lingua franca’ (so hard to use well). Shapes were decided upon that might please and delight us (flowers, blocks, dodecahedrons), but also shapes that could disconsole, consigning some souls to work and live in an eternal present, possible futures winking upon the horizon.

Dear Reader, rumor has it these beings whispered in Esperanto, but only into the ears of those most ready to receive such comprehensive knowledge and advanced understanding; humans beings closer to knowledge of Universal Shapes and Human Destinies.

Personally, I like to think some of these humans being reside at the BBC.

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‘The Architect As Totalitarian:‘

‘At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered Le Corbusier, who were we laymen, the mere human backdrop to his buildings, who know nothing of the problems of building construction, to criticize him? Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.’

I noticed a mini-brutalist revival there for a minute.

[Readers of this blog will know that the idea there exists comprehensive knowledge of ‘reason’, or the idea that political science will arrive at solutions to all previous political problems, or the idea that modern doctrines can provide ‘systemic’ blueprints for either buildings or political systems are all ideas viewed very skeptically here.]

You’ve got to be careful where you go looking for what’s good, true and beautiful.

As for Boston City Hall, it was built in ’69 and aims to be open, accessible, and [to] connect with Boston’s past:

Confusing inside!

As posted, a podcast on raw concrete in NYC here.

Brutalist architecture flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, having descended from the modernist architectural movement of the early 20th century. The term originates from the French word for “raw”, as Le Corbusier described his choice of material béton brut, meaning raw concrete in French.’

Some buildings mentioned: 375 Pearl Street is being worked on. The ‘Krull‘ Long Lines building is not for use.

Well, at least it isn’t Buzludzha, The Communist Spaceship plopped down as though from a world of Pure Ideology, Nature properly subdued:

Some Links And Thoughts On The 2nd Amendment, Brexit & Libertarianism

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I’m pretty sure human nature hasn’t changed all that much, nor have our founding documents.

Some of what seems to have changed is public sentiment around which many people are gathering.  Certain ideals are helping to define and describe the type of society such folks would like to live in, with consequences for all of us through law and public policy (interpreting the Constitution).

I know and have known people living in rural areas, hunting as a part of family and generations’ long tradition (yes, there are always a few nutballs and losers).  I’ve witnessed careful duty and patient instruction (as well as drunken and foolish behavior in the woods).  I’ve witnessed people who own guns as a pleasurable pastime placing them within nature, almost sacredly so.

Valuable survival skills, lots of time spent and knowledge gathered outdoors, and a respect for living creatures are not uncommon.

I also know and have known some inner-city folks, decent, honorable people (living amidst a lot of family and civic breakdown), law-abiding and reasonable people (dealing with much violent and dangerous adolescent gang and criminal behavior as well as crap policing).  Many such folks have trouble seeing guns as a pleasurable pastime, which strikes me as not unreasonable, given their experiences.

A different, but no less valuable, set of survival skills can be found; lots of time spent and knowledge gathered within a city within nature, and where a respect for people and moral decency are not uncommon.

When it comes to gun ownership, David Harsanyi doesn’t agree with some Supreme Court justices:

‘The singular purpose of the Second Amendment, they argued, was to arm militias, not individuals. For some reason, they contend, the Second Amendment, unlike most of the Bill of Rights, actually empowered the government rather than the individual. Any other interpretation was an antiquated and destructive reading of the past. But history has never backed up this contention — not then, and not now.’

The public debate is still a mess, and I believe this short-changes us all.

I still don’t trust those with authority to oversee a society with guns anymore than I trust those with authority to oversee a society without guns. Your ambition and knowledge has limits, and so does mine.

Merely defaulting to the authority such ideals would produce (by influencing real courts or appealing to abstract concepts in the ideal society to come) strikes me as a failure of the moral imagination.

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More broadly, so you get a better picture of my thinking, dear Reader, I also don’t trust peace idealists to properly manage the instincts and reasons we humans go to war.  Bad maps, in my opinion, tend to lead to worse handling of the terrain.

A quote from this piece over at the Atlantic: From The Atlantic: Samuel Huntington’s Death And Life’s Work

“Although the professional soldier accepts the reality of never-ending and limited conflict, “the liberal tendency,” Huntington explained, is “to absolutize and dichotomize war and peace.” Liberals will most readily support a war if they can turn it into a crusade for advancing humanistic ideals. That is why, he wrote, liberals seek to reduce the defense budget even as they periodically demand an adventurous foreign policy.”

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On that note, an interesting thought from Carlo Lancelotti:

This seems to me a primary question regarding the European Union (started as an economic project), which has slowly morphed into a political, legal and cultural one.

A very slight majority of Britons wanted out, and now they’re out.

Partly, this is why I harbor unresolved doubts regarding the anarchic foundations of libertarianism, and mission creep.  If individuals, keeping their promises and not doing violence, form the basic unit of modern civilization, than does it follow that some sort of equilibrium will be achieved?  I’m not sure this kind of anti-establishmentarian, decentralized authority vision of a civilization is practicable.

I remain skeptical, but this may say more about me than libertarianism, or that some libertarian principles lead to a kind of ‘economic-union first’ politics, upon which the European Union is arguably failing.

Any thoughts and comments are welcome.  What have I gotten wrong?

Related On This Site: A Few Thoughts On Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia”…Anarcho-capitalism:  Pro-market, anti-state, anti-war…paleo-libertarian: Link To Lew Rockwell Via A Reader…Anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian socialist and sometime blind supporter of lefty causes:  Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…Two Sunday Quotations By Albert Jay Nock in ‘Anarchist’s Progress’…

Catholic libertarianism: Youtube Via Reason TV-Judge Napolitano ‘Why Taxation is Theft, Abortion is Murder, & Government is Dangerous’

New liberty away from Hobbes…rule-following punishers?: From Public Reason: A Discussion Of Gerald Gaus’s Book ‘The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom And Morality In A Diverse And Bounded World’…

Steven Pinker curiously goes Hobbesian and mentions an ‘international Leviathan’:   At Bloggingheads Steven Pinker Discusses War And Thomas Hobbes