Chris Navin

Thanks, reader:

The radical and rationalist project, anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism: Repost-From Michael Totten At World Affairs: “Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian”

Somewhere from the old aristocratic Russia softly speaks a keen mind in beautiful, strange English: Michael Dirda At The Washington Post Reviews ‘Nabokov in America’

How might this relate to the Heglian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Via Youtube-‘Week 2 Leo Strauss-The Three Waves Of Modernity’

A proposition: Deeply embedded principles, ingrained into habit and character in a single individual, are rarely enough to withstand the force of a mob. When you were thirteen, maybe you were invited to a party. Excited, you picked a loud, purple shirt from your brother’s closet. A girl who will be at the party said maybe she thinks you’re pretty cute. A faint purple glow suddenly appears around the edges of the shirt as you try it on.

In the steaming hothouse of a suburban basement later that night, two cool girls are seen turning away, snickering, while a pretty audible ‘nice shirt faggot’ erupts from a pack of skaters devouring a pizza.

Perhaps, after waking up the next morning, you slip ol’ purp back into your brother’s closet; the aura now gone as it disappears from view.

I look around and see high IQ individuals within institutions no less subject to group dynamics, intellectual fashions and passing fads. In fact, upon examination, I see similar stuff within myself.

From my perspective, collectivist action under liberal ideals (‘democracy,’ ‘equality’, ) has already consigned individual freedoms (speech, religion, conscience) to secondary importance. ‘Culture’ comes to depend upon a series of emergent moral causes. Supposedly these causes are ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ but they function more as ideas, actors, belief and group-dynamics do.

At least within groups where truth and constraining principles are embedded within the pursuit of power, do individual principles stand a chance. You’d be hard pressed to find a religious commandment or Church hierarchy free from human ignorance, hubris, sexual dynamics and self-interest.

Or a military hierarchy for that matter.

What I expect, but don’t exactly predict: An American cultural and political center will be philosophically closer to Great Britain and other European centers (more stasis, more grievance and more rigid hierarchies). An American politics will likely display a more open spoils-distribution system. Perhaps we’ll see an American ‘center’ with its own unique saving graces and destructive vices (more commercial, more ‘Puritan’ cum ‘Romantic’ etc).

The recent growth and success of the DSA is but one consequence of the experiments we’ve been running, and I don’t expect the conductors of these experiments to ‘scientifically’ examine the results anytime soon. Many liberal individualists will lock arms some of the time (around sinecures, established interests and core beliefs more often…such is humanity). Such individualists will often do so against elements of the radical Left.

Elements of the right will be more European and identity-based than before, with no shortage of ignorance, ass-covering and rule-enforcement. Politicians are no strangers to navigating group-dynamics. Sometimes you go along to get along. Sometimes individual courage and truth is subject to party membership. Sometimes genuine truth and creative possibility are subject to practical power.

Perhaps we’re living through a kind of ‘unwinding’, but also a period of massive technological changes and genuine progress.

I dunno.

Published in Harper’s in 1989: ‘Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast‘:

‘One of the specialties of the realistic novel, from Richardson on, was the demonstration of the influence of society on even the most personal aspects of the life of the individual. Lionel Trilling was right when he said, in 1948, that what produced great characters in the nineteenth-century European novel was the portrayal of “class traits modified by personality.” But he went on to argue that the old class structure by now had disintegrated, particularly in the United States, rendering the technique useless. Again, I would say that precisely the opposite is the case. If we substitute for class, in Trilling’s formulation, the broader term status, that technique has never been more essential in portraying the innermost life of the individual. This is above all true when the subject is the modern city. It strikes me as folly to believe that you can portray the individual in the city today without also portraying the city itself.’

I’m just glad he was there for so long:

Website here.

Michael Lewis at Vanity Fair: ‘How Tom Wolfe Became….Tom Wolfe‘

‘New York City was—and still is—the only place on earth where a writer might set himself up as a professional tour guide and attract the interest of the entire planet. That’s mainly what Wolfe was, at least in the beginning: his job was to observe the sophisticates in their nutty bubble for the pleasure of the rubes in the hinterlands, and then, from time to time, venture out into the hinterlands and explain what is really going on out there to the sophisticates inside the bubble. He moves back and forth like a bridge player, ruffing the city and the country against each other. He occupies a place in between. He dresses exotically and is talented and intellectually powerful, like the sophisticates in the bubble. But he isn’t really one of them. To an extent that shocks the people inside the bubble, when they learn of it, he shares the values of the hinterland. He believes in God, Country, and even, up to a point, Republican Presidents. He even has his doubts about the reach of evolutionary theory.’

From ‘The Pump House Gang: Introduction‘

‘Hefner showed me through his chambers. The place was kept completely draped and shuttered. The only light, day or night, was electric. It would be impossible to keep track of the days in there. And presently Hefner jumped onto . . . the center of his world, the bed in his bedroom. Aimed at the bed was a TV camera he was very proud of.’

As posted:

Tom Wolfe on Max Weber on one conspicuous use of art in the ‘modern’ world:

‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘

The satire of the liberal intelligentsia is pretty rich, as well as the Southern Gentleman’s WASP ‘rejuvenation.’ You just know Christopher Hitchens had to get-in on that action:

From the Late Show in 1989 with Howard Jacobson:

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Was Tom Wolfe seeing things clearly, as they really are?

Certainly the liberal pieties and the conflicted, activist base is still ripe for the picking…for what is preventing the mocking of the Brooklyn hipster and the echoing of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ across the fruited plain?:

Peter Berkowitz review of Tom Wolfe’s Miami novel here.

What are you looking for in a novel: Ideas and the deployment of ideas? A reflection of your life/times/society? Good prose? Characters that pop into your life? Glimpses of the author? Pleasure?

‘The deeper divisions, as Wolfe’s novel compellingly presents them, are between those who believe that happiness consists in one form of pleasure or another — including the aesthetic pleasure of sensitively glimpsing one’s own sensitivities and the sensitivities of others — and those who, like Tom Wolfe and his heroes, believe that happiness consists in the exercise of courage, self-control, and the other qualities of mind and character that constitute human excellence.’

A New Yorker review here.

See Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s for a rich account of the 60′s. I remember reading ‘A Man In Full‘ a while back.

Any thoughts and comments are welcome.