As I see things: When institutions are decayed, and stewardship involves addressing systemic problems with short-term incentives, and where technology pushes towards relentless ‘now’ bubbles and ‘moral crusades,’ you can end-up with a mess.
I remember watching the split in the conservative movement between the rising, populist Trump (border issues, economic growth, personal attacks and hucksterism) vs the Republican crowd (pro-Bush, pro-D.C., sometimes never Trump). If you think a small government is better precisely because it helps avoid such issues, you may feel like an individual lost in the wood, or a member of yet another competing faction jostling in a sweaty pit.
It’s mostly gotten worse.
I’m still bracing for a potential surge from the populist Left, against establishment politics. Obama often played the activism cards subtly (rule of law and sometimes anti rule of law with a lot of energy on controlling his image and placating different factions from a minority position). Joe Biden has been in D.C. for a few generations and is perilously old and grubby. We clearly have an institutional structure which likely reached its highest growth with peak Boomer influence (early to mid 70’s). It seems to have been calcifying ever since.
With general movements away from religion towards secularism, away from the family towards (S)elf, and away from Natural Rights/Law towards postmodernism and moral relativism, this wouldn’t be surprising. I figure we’re on currents heading towards a more hierarchical, ‘class-based’, slow-growth politics and economics, in the academy and media especially. The New Left (60’s surge), the New, New Left (identity movements), the dirtbag Left (glamorously nihilist), and the newer pro-speech Left (Weinsteins, Greenwald, Taibbi) are not particularly pro-Boomer.
—
I’m missing a lot, here, folks, but doing my best with current resources. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Video of the what I believe to be the tornado that traveled ~200 miles. Video from my dad’s front porch between Bremen and Sacramento, Kentucky. Terrifying. pic.twitter.com/CQ7aOHk2Gs
Are most of the modern doctrines constantly misunderstanding human nature, contemporizing and politicizing reasons for disagreement into (C)auses and (C)oalitions?
Are committed ideologues a necessary feature to be found in the postmodern fog, and do you trust liberal idealism to protect your property, life and opportunities against such true-believers?
Where shall meaning be found?
Well, in the immortal words of ‘Rasta Dale,’ founder of Peace Pavilion West:
‘Eat of my body of bug-paste.
Relax your body and mind. Center your heart-space.
Drink with me Gaia’s wine.
Are you ready?
Let’s go out there and give these fuckin’ animals nine hours of Beatles’ footage. $500 for a fuckin’ early release package. Jesus Christ.‘
Dale gets salty with his language, sometimes.
Another question about which I wonder: Are many secular humanists, liberal idealists, unitarian universalists and progressive do-gooders mostly just former W.A.S.P.’s and good Catholics without the fortitude to preach what they practice?
Some, definitely.
Do you agree with Charles Murray about preaching what you practice?:
Would you rather have the W.A.S.P.’s and good Catholics back in charge?
I believe it’s self-evident we need virtue, honor, and a lot of layers of self-control, as well as proper incentives, to maintain decent leadership. For much of my life, out in the public square, the refrain has been something like ‘freedom is next, this will all work out.‘
Or maybe, ‘explore your Self and be good to others.‘
Yeah, well…
As for inflation:
Here’s the updated wage growth vs inflation graph. It is getting worse, not better. Good thing to show people who ask why Americans don’t feel the economy is improving. For most, it’s not. pic.twitter.com/M6czZon3TL
This started around Spring 2020. The debt and deficit problems have been around a lot longer. Maybe you’re comfortable with softly corrupt, fairly incompetent leadership, managing ballooning debt while placating an activist wing. Managed decline. Or maybe you just want to pay more for gas and milk; your time and effort frittered away.
Welcome to the meritocracy, I suppose.
A deeper American idealism may be reforming before our eyes.
Is Trump coming back? Isn’t it really Trump (or something like him) vs Bernie (or something like him)? Is something worse on the horizon?
‘If Obama and Kerry had not spent so much time and treasure on the ill-advised Iran nuclear deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia would not be so worried about a potential nuclear-armed Iran. (See my article from earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and China nuclear cooperation – is Riyadh seeking nukes?)‘
‘This summer, word came that Keith Christiansen, perhaps the single most distinguished curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was beset by the mob. His tort? Commenting via his Instagram account on a drawing of the French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir devoted himself to saving French monuments from the all-consuming maw of the French Revolution. “How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve[?],” Christiansen wrote.‘
—
Just looking for contrary thinkers around here, standing against the prevailing winds, where tides of moral sentiment push into bays, inlets and swamps.
Edward Feser discusses the work of Paul Feyerabend, and the view that some people are turning the sciences into a kind of religion.
Feser:
‘First: science as an institution, and liberalism as its house philosophy, have taken over the role that the Church and its theology played in medieval society.
Second: the case for this takeover rests on the purported superiority of the methods and results of science, but crumbles on close inspection.
Third: when consistently applied, the most powerful expression of the liberal idea—John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty—tells against rather than in favor of the hegemony of scientism. Let’s consider these themes in turn.‘
—
As for me, I’m still sympathetic to the following.
‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’
I also tweeted this Haidt quote last night. Not only did a lot of people in the replies share Haidt’s pessimism, but quite a few said that they thought thirty years was being too optimistic, and that the collapse would occur before then.https://t.co/837tiZY1Rw
One thing which has struck me about the varying protests–>riots–>violence in American cities is the lack of political leadership, institutional strength and public sentiment required to address them. A lot of political actors and voting Americans apparently share overlap with the ideas leading many people into the streets.
Such events also seem localized and inchoate, pretty continuous in Portland and Seattle (many more Antifa), and in Chicago over the weekend, pretty indicative of the problems Chicago’s had for a long time regarding race relations, political corruption and crime.
Of course, many people are looking to our political leadership, institutions and broad public sentiment to address these issues at the moment, finding questionable leadership, overbuilt institutions and bands of unsatisfyingly balkanized public sentiment.
It looks as though we have systemic issues and lot of fluid change going on, and it’s getting more and more difficult to remain reasonable about what politics can do with the passions and loyalties it inspires.
Some years ago, now, Walter Russell Mead was arguing that the blue progressive social model was unsustainable (I suppose the red would be too, to some extent, on this view). The government can’t prop up what has been lost with unsustainable spending and a vastly increased Federal project. Mead thought we needed a new liberalism since the old had diffused itself upon the loss of manufacturing, private sector jobs and globalization.
It would seem Donald Trump disagrees about the role of the coal and oil industries, manufacturing, and what globalization means for an American worker he sees himself representing as President (peeling off many working folks, and some ‘minorities’ from the excesses of identity politics with economic growth populism).
Mead finishes with:
‘We’ve wasted too many years arguing over how to retrieve the irretrievable; can we please now get on with the actual business of this great, liberal, unapologetically forward-looking nation.’
Perhaps more liberal attitudes are becoming more prevalent in American society, or at least perhaps there is a waning of religious conservatism and Christianity in the public square.
I’m having trouble imagining how traditional belief will get along with the products of (R)eason, rationalism, materialism, determinism and atheism under some kind of big-tent (L)iberal project.
Strange bedfellows, anyways. This would seem especially so amongst progressive true-believers and practitioners of radical identity politics.
Charles Kesler took at look at how he thought Obama might have understood himself back before the election of 2012.
That is to say, Kesler envisions a liberal tradition bubbling-up during the administrations of Woodrow Wilson to FDR, LBJ through Obama.
During Obama’s fourth-wave liberalism, then, there there were visible ‘postmodern’ strands and Civil Rights strands. There were blessedly more evolutionary anti-history Hegelian historicist strands over revolutionary Marxist strands.
‘We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For‘ may be preferable to ‘Peace, Bread & Land.‘
Personally, I still think we’re on a longer trend-line towards more Continental problems, but, frankly, there’s high variability in such a prediction.
On Mead’s thinking, libertarians who point out the lessons of Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom‘, and Straussian conservatives who follow Strauss‘ end run around nihilism/moral relativism, and the three crises of modernity, may not be necessary. We’ve not arrived at these particular problems of Continental Europe.
Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest.
Charles Fried and Randy Barnett among others, testify as to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Nearly 3 hrs, but likely worth your time. You can skip to the parts you’d like)
Some years ago, now, Walter Russell Mead was arguing that the blue progressive social model was unsustainable (I suppose the red would be too, to some extent, on this view). The government can’t prop up what has been lost with unsustainable spending and a vastly increased Federal project. Mead thought we needed a new liberalism since the old had diffused itself upon the loss of manufacturing, private sector jobs and globalization.
It would seem Donald Trump disagrees about the role of the coal and oil industries, manufacturing, and what globalization means for an American worker he sees himself representing as President (peeling off many working folks, and some ‘minorities’ from the excesses of identity politics with economic growth populism).
Mead finishes with:
‘We’ve wasted too many years arguing over how to retrieve the irretrievable; can we please now get on with the actual business of this great, liberal, unapologetically forward-looking nation.’
Perhaps more liberal attitudes are becoming more prevalent in American society, or at least perhaps there is a waning of religious conservatism and Christianity in the public square.
I’m having trouble imagining how traditional belief will get along with the products of (R)eason, rationalism, materialism, determinism and atheism under some kind of big-tent (L)iberal project.
Strange bedfellows, anyways. This would seem especially so amongst progressive true-believers and practitioners of radical identity politics, which seem to be in a shorter-term decline, but mid- to longer-term advance.
Charles Kesler took at look at how he thought Obama might have understood himself back before the election of 2012.
That is to say, Kesler envisions a liberal tradition bubbling-up during the administrations of Woodrow Wilson to FDR, LBJ through Obama.
During Obama’s fourth-wave liberalism, then, there there were visible ‘postmodern’ strands and Civil Rights strands. There were blessedly more evolutionary anti-history Hegelian historicist strands over revolutionary Marxist strands.
‘We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For‘ may be preferable to ‘Peace, Bread & Land.‘
Personally, I still think we’re on a longer trend-line towards more Continental problems, but, frankly, there’s high variability in such a prediction.
On Mead’s thinking, libertarians who point out the lessons of Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom‘, and Straussian conservatives who follow Strauss‘ end run around nihilism/moral relativism, and the three crises of modernity, may not be necessary. We’ve not arrived at these particular problems of Continental Europe.
Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest.
Charles Fried and Randy Barnett among others, testify as to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Nearly 3 hrs, but likely worth your time. You can skip to the parts you’d like)
Let’s have a little fun at the Washington Post’s expense. Maybe that ISIS Caliphate coulda been a democracy, and now one of its leaders has died in darkness. It’s all relative.
Perhaps ISIS was attracting global refugees, interested in fighting for change in a harsh climate of oppressive Western violence.
“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.”
I’m still getting accustomed to the post 60’s political and cultural landscape in America, at least in response to the current round of progressivism; the idealism and utopianism of many collectivist platforms, and the election of Trump as some sort of response.
As someone of more conservative and religious temperment, but as someone who is not a believer and deeply committed to many projects of the Enlightenment, I’m just looking around for different types of liberalism. Does equality always run aground on human nature? Will pursuing broad definitions of the public good always lead to a corruption of the ideal of equality, and less freedom?
‘As a Truman-style Democrat left politically homeless, I am often asked about the future of the Republican Party.’
The Tea Party probably might not agree, nor maybe many social and religious conservatives. The party is deeply, deeply divided.
—————————-
Walter Russell Mead seems to be envisioning a reinvigorated liberalism 5.0, arguing that the current union fights, ecotopia, high-speed rail plans, and progressivism aren’t necessarily the best way forward given America’s challenges. There’s been a fundamental shift that we must adjust to, and it involves technology and globalization for starters. Repost-Via Youtube: Conversations With History – Walter Russell Mead…
‘It is important to note, however, that rampant government dependence and economic mismanagement are not exclusively blue-state pathologies. Corrupt and crony Republicans can be every bit as sleazy and dangerous as their Democratic counterparts. South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi are on this list for good reason.’
————————-
Perhaps conservative Briton Roger Scruton is just being nostalgic for what he describes as the old humanism, but there sure is a lot of Hegel informing his thought:
Hesitate!
“There is no need for God, they thought, in order to live with a vision of the higher life. All the values that had been appropriated by the Christian churches are available to the humanist too.”
And he laments the new humanism, which lacks the noblility of purpose of the old, and offers nothing positive:
“Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness”
In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist. It shows us how political authority can be justified but only by accepting that moral authority limits it. It pushes us to look towards the practical and reject the utopian while simultaneously maintaining that a truly free and equal social order is within our grasp. It rejects the aspiration of political liberalism to neutrality among conceptions of morality while simultaneously retaining its spirit by sectioning off social morality from other normative domains.
‘The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.’
As to these more radical groups splintering and applying pressure upwards upon institutions of learning (or at least remaining very vocal and demanding voices within them), I remain skeptical of merely relying upon an adaptable and healthy post-Enlightenment humanism to push back against them in the long-run.
It seems groups of post-Enlightenment individuals gathering to solve commonly defined problems is a risky business, indeed, or at least subject to the same old schisms and problems religious institutions underwent and continue to undergo regarding human nature. I think it’s fair to say people and institutions are often requiring of constraints, especially when it comes to political power and lawmaking; especially when it comes to the challenges our civilization faces from within and without in maintaining institutional authority.
I’d like to think that secularly liberal leadership, more broadly, including the people who want to be in charge of all of us (at their best operating from within moral communities of not too great a solipsism and self-regard) can resist such pressures. For there certainly are those who would fracture our institutions into rafts of post-Enlightenment ‘-isms’ and politicized movements often driven by illiberal ideologies; movements relying on the presumed self-sufficiency of reason while behaving quite irrationally.
I’m looking around and not seeing too much decency in American politics, lately.
Post-60’s, I’m seeing a lot of people sucked into radical discontent, righteous certitude and often religion-deep belief in secular ideals and ideologies, demanding immediate change often faster than institutional stability can keep up.
A.C. Grayling makes one of the better cases for morality without religious doctrine (in Britain), I’ve heard of late, but I’m not entirely sold these particular problems can be addressed sufficiently:
‘The Ahmari vs. French standoff is a version of what Patrick Deneen, in a 2014 TAC article, identified as “a Catholic showdown worth watching.” Deneen identifies the antagonists not as left vs. right, but a dispute between two kinds of conservatives within US Catholicism. On one side are classical liberals — the Neuhaus/Novak/Weigel folks — who believe that Christianity can be reconciled with liberalism, and enrich it. On the other are those — Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler — who believe that they are fundamentally incompatible.’
and
‘Where do I stand? Somewhere unsatisfying between Ahmari and French, for reasons I will explain. Essentially, I lack French’s faith in classical liberalism, and I lack Ahmari’s faith that this is a battle that can be won (also, I’m not quite sure what “winning” would look like, but I’ll get to that).’
You may have already heard this mystery photographer’s story, if not, take a look.
Just a link for all the unknown photographers out there, documenting the grit and stuff of life.
kitchenette building
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
Franklin Foer at The Atlantic seems quick to blame the shuttering of the CEU, the George Soros funded graduate university in Budapest, Hungary, on Trump’s ambassador (a business imperative at The Atlantic), and by appealing, perhaps, to the sentiments of his readership.
Hey, I’m generally for openness, but while this could be pretty important for some people, it’s also pretty maudlin:
I’d met the student earlier in the day; he had told me that he was gay, and that CEU was one of the few places in his native country where he could hold hands with a partner without fear of violent recrimination. He pointed in the direction of a nearby bathroom: “The only gender-neutral toilet facility in eastern Europe.”
What does seem clear is that Hungary’s president, Viktor Orban, achieved this move politically, tactically, legally, and by degrees. It’s not entirely clear that such a move will be wise, long-term. A reasonable conservative position might be having another center of learning to replace the departing CEU once such steps are taken, perhaps to try and bridge the gap of the Hungarian country farmer and the city cosmopolitan with greater openness. This, given the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the problems with the Nazis and then the Communists.
But, what the hell do I know? Please feel free to highlight my ignorance (it’s deep).
It’s this blog’s opinion that if you’ve taken up a more unthinking liberal American position, you’ll be more likely to agree with Foer’s framing of the issue. You’ll be more likely to see your political opposition as not only mistaken, but morally supect, and perhaps fascistic and evil. The-troops-are-gathering-upon-the-horizon kind of view rather than the-merry-go-round-making-another-turn kind of view.
Roger Scruton spent a lot of time in Poland and Czechslovakia helping the ‘catacomb culture’ of learning that had to operate in secret against Communist rule.
Now, it seems, some old fault-lines may be re-emerging. Let’s hope it’s balanced.
Foer again:
‘Michael Ignatieff had barely unpacked his books when he first heard rumors about CEU’s endangered future, surreptitiously passed to his staff by a sympathetic source in the government. The source whispered about the possibility of an imminent attack encapsulating everything that made Orbán such a vexing opponent. Having studied law at Bibó, Orbán implemented his agenda with legalistic aplomb. He constantly revised statutes to serve his own purposes.’
Here’s Michael Ignatieff introducing Roger Scruton at CEU a few years back, having to explain to many CEU campus radicals why they should even allow Scruton to speak.
The people who could really use some help must often choose: Hitch one’s cart to revolutionary ideologues who assist in liberation but don’t believe in liberty, or find some other political channel. Or maybe get serious about religion. Or maybe just hunker down.
Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad:
‘American Corbynism also takes after its British provenance with hostility toward Jews. Over the past few weeks, Rep. Omar has made a succession of crude anti-Semitic statements, intimating that U.S. support for Israel is due to the influence of Jewish money and that American Jews are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country.”
The intellectual debates often lead the cultural and political ones. The rise of Corbynism in Britain can partially be explained by the below debate if the debate is, in fact, a leading indicator (Terry Eagleton’s Literary Marxism vs Roger Scruton’s Hegelian-influenced Conservatism):
Moving along, Douglas Murray has been predicting that many current failures of Western intellectual and political leadership to properly account for much basic human nature is clearing the ground for more conflict within the West. We still have time to be more cold-eyed and realistic about mass migration, economic incentives, much of our own basic human nature and our own traditions, but the clock’s probably ticking.