I mentioned this “political autobiography” project for class and a few people were interested. I am one of my favorite topics, so I’m happy to share it; find out All About Me after the jump. (I feel very silly about this.) This is more of an attempt to trace my development than the actual content of my thoughts — that’s a much more interesting story.
I. Dr. Seuss to Descartes.
I could start with where I was born, or what my childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of stuff, but it doesn’t really matter, if you want to know the truth. There were trees and books and I was happy, and I didn’t think too much about any of it at the time.
My parents are East Coast liberal types: die-hard Democrats, evangelical atheists. I did thirteen years at Quaker school, but that was okay because Quaker theology isn’t. (This is the sect that concluded a hundred-year schism over the divinity of Christ by saying it was nice but didn’t really matter. And they’re Christians.) I graduated with a lopsided education, very heavy on the humanities and light on everything else, and a half-baked faith in equality, social justice, and human rights. I believed with all my heart in Man’s to understand the world by reason alone. I was an Enlightenment fundamentalist, though I would never have put it in those terms: in short, I agreed with everyone I knew.
The first big shock of my life came when I fell, almost by chance, into the Yale Political Union. Suddenly, I was surrounded by smart people who liked to talk about ideas, people who valued philosophical consistency. They talked to me, and they asked me questions, and I realized that the things I believed didn’t make sense. Yes, I believed in human rights; yes, I thought they were an intrinsic property of every human being; no, I couldn’t explain where they came from, or why I thought they existed; yes, maybe that was a problem. Still, I wasn’t too worried: if I thought about it really hard, following each belief back to its premises, I was sure I’d find some principle to build on.
It didn’t work, of course: I was distracted by Directed Studies and friends and a nasty bout of mono, and I didn’t put much thought my own philosophy until I read Descartes. I loved him because he was a rationalist, a skeptic: Descartes stood on the Archimedean point of his cogito and moved the world.
II. Nietzsche.
But of course he didn’t. The tragedy of Descartes is that his one self-evident claim leads him nowhere. His philosophy moves in a perfect circle, but it is a very small circle. All he can know is that he is a thing that thinks: any other perception or knowledge might be delusion or trickery.
This was all very depressing, but I was stubborn: clearly Descartes had started in the wrong place, or ignored something important, and as soon as I found a better foundation I really could rationally prove everything. It was seemed harder and harder, but I couldn’t give up my faith in reason. When I read Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard seemed to be speaking to me: “…if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is significant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all - what then would life be but despair?”
There came a breaking point, as there always does: first in a passage from Nietzsche, and then in a six-word email.
In On the Use and Abuse of History, my favorite syphilitic German cautions philosophers against pure reason and other contradictory concepts, describing it as “an eye where the active and interpretive powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded.” He was right, I thought: you can’t turn off the human will, or consider things from a stance of pure objectivity. But where did Nietzsche’s perspectivism leave my beloved rationality? Could I ever really get to that pure, self-evident axiom? How did I find it, and how did I construct a philosophy atop it?
I poured my heart out into an email, and an hour later I got a response: “Have you ever heard of Gödel?”
In an age before Wikipedia, I don’t know what I would have done, but now it was easy. I still don’t know much about the philosophy of mathematics, but I could make out my correspondent’s point well enough. Gödel proved that, except for the most trivial, no system of axioms could be both consistent and complete. Descartes’s tiny circle - the emptiness of its lesson - wasn’t due to a bad foundation but to foundationalism per se. My quandary wasn’t a bug; it was a feature.
Reason couldn’t establish a purpose for my life, so I was afraid there wasn’t one. The only rational thing to do was to become a nihilist.
III. Eliot.
What followed was one of the strangest months of my life. I felt like Wile E. Coyote: while I wasn’t looking, the ground had dropped out from under me. I’d hung in the air. Now I noticed, and I was falling. Every morning I asked myself why I existed, since there was no rational purpose for it and the universe at large was utterly indifferent.
At one point I called my mother and told her I was having an existential crisis. “Oh no!” she cried. “What’s wrong?” I explained that I was stricken with doubt about the possibility of knowledge and whether my life had any meaning. “Oh,” she said, sounding a little relieved. “An actual existential crisis. I can’t help with that.”
I’ve never felt anything like it. When I ignored it, going on with my life, I was perfectly fine. When I stopped to think, though, I felt lost, confused, alone. I wanted to cry. I wanted someone to give me an answer - but of course no one could. They all seemed to find it a little amusing, as though existential crises went out of style along with smoking and Marxism.
And then everything changed. I remember the moment vividly: it was an April afternoon, and I was sitting in my DS literature section. We were reading T. S. Eliot. The professor was saying something about “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but I wasn’t listening; instead, I paged through the rest of the book. I had started reading my own copy of “The Waste-Land,” and I liked it. I was nearly at the end, where Eliot uses a Hindu fable from the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad: gods, men, and demons gather to hear the thunder speak only one syllable, “DA.” Each interprets it differently, as datta (give), dayadhvam (have compassion), and damyata (self-control). For Eliot, this comes at the end of a “heap of broken images,” a long and troubling poem that seemed - like the meaning I wanted - to dance forever outside my grasp. And then it reads:
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
I can only describe the moment as an epiphany, with all that that implies. “An age of prudence” was my own age of rationalism. There was no reason to exist. But I did: not because I could prove it, or because I knew, but because in that utterly human moment of terror and sacrifice that gave meaning, I recognized that it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a good reason to love. But I did.
IV. Arendt.
I have intentionally said very little so far about my politics. The entire edifice of my beliefs had rested on that rationalist Weltanschauung. I had been liberal in the classical sense: I had considered Man as an atomized, self-complete individual, engaged with the world through choice and rational thought. When the framework for that conceptual system fell apart, so too did its results.
By the time I came back to Yale for my sophomore year, I’d already had three of the most important parts of growing up: an existential crisis, a nervous breakdown, and a broken heart. Though my ideas have certainly been refined and developed, the raw material was all there by the fall of 2007. By then, I was a version of the person I am now, but a fundamentally different person than I had been.
No matter how I try, I can’t identify the precise moment I first called myself a conservative. I know that in my rejection of rationalism, I regarded duty and community as alternate sources of meaning; I know that I was powerfully moved by Burke’s paean to the “decent drapery of life,” his condemnations of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” and the “new conquering empire of light and reason.” If I’m honest with myself, though, it also had something to do with my friends. The most interesting, intense, and intellectual people I have ever encountered - then or since - are the men and women of the Party of the Right. Their style of Socratic dialogue, their conviction that ideas had consequences, their valorization of truth, all appealed to me: when I had nothing, I looked to them for hints.
My first real certainty, after Eliot, was that alienation had been implicit in my old world-picture. If we cannot understand ourselves as meaningful participants in something, we regard ourselves as fundamentally other; if all we can truly establish is our own existence as “things that think,” we have nothing to do with our fellows. Language and logic are not enough to bridge those gaps: it requires something more. In opposition to that liberal, rights-based worldview, I looked to love and to tradition.
I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man’s isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity. Those were the things I had hated in myself, and they were the conditions I saw described in Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.
The book terrified me not for its historical lessons, but because there but for the grace of God went I. Arendt describes the “uprootedness and superfluousness” that followed “the break-down of political institutions and social traditions,” and subsequent creation of pseudo-rationalist ideologies to provide some measure of meaning. Totalitarianism, she writes, “teach[es] and glorif[ies] the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started.” If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he’ll cling to ideology as though his life depends on it. (His ego does.) Wherever it takes him, he won’t dare to let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating in the abyss again.
I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself. It was only by luck, or by that awful daring of a moment’s surrender, that I’d sacrificed my logical consistency for the chance of truly human connection. I felt lucky, but I wanted everyone to have that: I wanted human connection to be easier, closer, more meaningful, so that rationalism wouldn’t seem such an appealing option in the future. I wanted to encourage compassion and community, but I didn’t know how.
V. Nisbet.
This is a story I’ve told, in bits and pieces, many times. Only now, in trying to lay it out neatly, do I realize how long it took me to reach any sort of practical claim about politics. Eventually, though, I realized that my two intellectual priorities led neatly into conservatism: first, I was concerned with creating meaning through community and human connection, as I saw in Eliot and Arendt; second, I felt strongly about human virtue.
From Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, from René Girard, from history, I had taken an important lesson about the darkness at the heart of Man. The human race is not, at its core, nice. For every worthy urge, there are a dozen unworthy ones: violence, lust, anger, greed, ressentiment… Society’s job is then to teach us to be better. Plato thought that once we knew the Good, we would have no choice but to follow it, but he was wrong.
We need a set of values that makes us feel guilty about wanting to do the things we should not do; we need a culture that sanctifies those urges and channels them into something beautiful. (There could be no glory without violence, no romance without lust, no justice without revenge.) For some time, I toyed with the idea of the state: couldn’t it be structured to encourage virtue? Could fascism, as a kind of community through the state, ever be divorced from its abhorrent results? What sorts of policies would foster communities?
Almost by accident, I ended up in a college seminar called “What is Conservatism?” (The question mark was part of the title.) On top of Burke and Justus Möser, Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, we read The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet. Like many conservatives - and by this point I included myself - he was troubled by the decay of the traditional institutions that gave us meaning. The results were just as Arendt had diagnosed: alienation, isolation, susceptibility to totalitarianism. “The historic emphasis on the individual,” Nisbet wrote, “has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual’s sense of integrity.”
Once, he argued, both our material and spiritual needs had been met by non-state institutions. The family was a locus of identity, as well as the vital economic base for food, housing, and education. Churches and guilds provided economic support as well as creating identity. Still, Maslow was right: when the expanding liberal nation-state began to usurp their economic functions, and to perform them more efficiently, people no longer turned to these intermediate institutions. Without the strong connection of physical need, bonds between individuals and institutions grew tenuous and no longer created meaning and community.
The fundamental political problem, I’ve concluded, is in how we think about the state. If we look to it as arbiter of legitimacy, safety, or morality, we have already neglected the sources of real meaning in our lives. State intervention is dangerous not because it’s “coercion” (I don’t mind coercion), but because of its inhumanity. The more we depend on government, the less connection we have with one another. My burning hatred for both major Presidential candidates is due entirely to their New Deal liberalism, their conviction that if something is wrong it must be the government’s job to fix it, their utter disregard for limited government.
More than anything else, I am concerned with how we think about things and what they mean to us in terms of living both virtuous and fulfilling lives. I’ve long since stopped caring about labels: call me a conservative, a libertarian, a reactionary - just don’t call me late for the counterrevolution.
Thank.
You.
You know Eliot translated the DAs completely wrong, right?
Also… I’m going to develop this into something at my own place, but for the life of me I cannot understand these conservatisms whose notions are predicated on “it is preferable that”s rather than “it is true that”s. There’s quite a vogue for them, I find, among a certain class of campus Republican. But I simply don’t believe in the efficacy or coherence of anti-foundationalist foundationalisms.
“There’s quite a vogue for them, I find, among a certain class of campus Republican.”
Them’s fightin’ words!
“But I simply don’t believe in the efficacy or coherence of anti-foundationalist foundationalisms.”
A firm believer in the Birthday Cake of Existence then?
I responded to most of this at greater length elsewhere, but the most important question:
How did Eliot mistranslate the DAs?
Subquestion: does anyone know where I can find a beautifully calligraphied version of the Sanskrit word DA? Not that I want to get a tattoo or anything.
Thanks! I thought it was well worth reading.
Although judging by all the other blogs, Nathan and I, by requesting this story, might have triggered the biggest non-election-related blogosphere showdown of the season… Good luck, everyone.
What I find a bit sad about this narrative is the tragic contingency of it all–if it hadn’t been the PoR, those same philosophical instincts could just as easily have led you towards “leftist” worldviews - anarcho-socialism and the like, or perhaps something like Russell Arben Fox’s Red Toryism.
You say, “looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself”–I wonder, are you so sure you didn’t? So long as you stay something of a Socratic gadfly, fine; but you need only look to Helen to see how smart, meaning-seeking folks can find themselves drawn into politics-as-tribalism. And while I know “murderous” is a bit of a fighting word–well, I’m not the one singing about bombing Iran.
Granted I probably wouldn’t have thought about conservatism if I hadn’t been hanging out with conservatives, but it was hardly a case of all my friend
jumping off a bridgebeing right-wing nutjobs.I thought about the things that were around me and came to conclusions about them within the context of my own understanding of the world (for instance, I’m still not a Christian). If I had been hanging around with Marxists, I would have started in a different place, but probably not have come to radically different conclusions. (This is all part of my theory that conservatives and leftists have way more in common than either do with liberals. Often we agree on the state of the world and mostly differ on what we ought to do about it.)
The other thing I’d point out is that the PoR isn’t about a worldview but a process. Taking the results of that process and turning them into an axiomatic system that should never be questioned isn’t part of it, even if some people do that.
To the extent that this is a love story in which the beloved(s) remain intentionally unnamed, I can understand your interlocutors’ frustration! WHOM one loves (whether a person, a Person, or a persona e.g. a tradition) makes an enormous difference….
I can guess at a few possible beloveds; and you say yourself that this is a story of the shape of your thoughts rather than their content, but obviously it’s really difficult to separate shape from content, and I wonder if your decision to attempt the separation wasn’t a mistake.
More tomorrow.
ps: On the provincial point, I think it’s a bit over-easy to reply to XT by saying the POR is solely a process. It’s also a community, fortunately. I completely disagree with him that the conservatism of its radicalism is an accident–or that any equivalent left-leaning “traditional-Socratic community” (oxymoron is intentional, as always with the POR!) could have been found at Yale or any other college I know of. But in defending yourself against the charge of smoking Nisbet because everybody’s doin’ it, you make it sound like the POR is or should be proportionally-representative of every inch of the political spectrum, which is not true; and some of the reasons that isn’t true _are_ fairly accidental.
Actually I think we should use that as a recruiting slogan: OUR OXYMORONS ARE ALWAYS INTENTIONAL.
pps: could someone remind me when is the orgy?
I think you’re completely wrong but reading your post was interesting and I’m excited to look through it to find the whys and the hows of my disagreement because you seem to be quite honest.
Though frankly, I’d be dead if it weren’t for government intervention so perhaps I am biased!
1) Have you ever read Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”? He discusses many of the problems you take on here about alienation in contemporary society, but comes to a different conclusion — he was the source for Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech, for example. But I think you’d find his argument congenial.
2) You toss off “real meaning” towards the end, being in churches rather than the state — why is this? Are you deeply religious? Or is religion vital for purely pragmatic reasons — pragmatism trumps truth? My feeling is that saying church is better than state is replacing one kind of institution with another, and that the difference isn’t so much of kind rather than scale — if government consisted of town hall meetings, mainly, would we not need churches to establish community?
3) I really enjoyed your essay; thanks for making it available.
“My burning hatred for both major Presidential candidates is due entirely to their New Deal liberalism, their conviction that if something is wrong it must be the government’s job to fix it, their utter disregard for limited government.”
I hope you live a long life. And in that long life, that you are at some point persecuted for your beliefs, or traumatized by a rogue hurricane, or otherwise cast adrift against the whims of emoiton or nature or God. Because in that moment, the only thing between you and death will be the government that you live under.
Grow up. Find a passion other than masturbating with your mind. Live.
I would point out that conservatives consistently try to use government as arbiters of morality.
Take the issues of abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. Conservatives try time and again to get moral codes written into law that prohibit people from choosing their own moral path in these concerns…doesn’t that concern you?
Also, when corporations cease to be held in the highest esteem by conservatives who are lobbied by them, and the middle class is instead honored as it should be…and the wealthiest people are not given tax breaks at the expense of people who cannot afford even basic health care…you may have a chance at your counterrevolution.
Thank you for a very thoughtful account of your journey to conservatism.
As more of a classic liberal (in most respects), I find myself unable to reconcile our current state with the one you describe. I do agree with the idea that the use of government as the primary solution to society’s problems results in a disconnection of individuals from each other. Unfortunately though, this is mirrored by corporatism (my summary of what your definition of conservatism has devolved to) that effectively achieves the same end. In the land of the mega corporation, a sense of identity and community is lost as well.
Ultimately I’m left with (for me) an extremely difficult question, how do we return to the time when community defined us, not nation or corporation?
The limitations of Western Philisophy “limit” your outlook.
Human connection, as well as isolation, comes with liabilities. Nevertheless, having achieved a sense of meaning through affirmation of love and tradition, as a non Christian how do you even account for these things? To what more ultimate purpose do things like love and tradition serve, and from where did that purpose originate? Has it emerged out of process, consensus, innateness, or what?
There’s a number of things you might not have considered here regarding foundationalist epsitemology, values, and liberalism.
1. John Rawls was clearly not a foundationalist, but finds a brilliant- and elegant- way of situating a very appealing, moderate liberalism in a non-foundationalist framework. (Take a look at “A Theory of Justice” or “Political Liberalism’ if you’re short on time.)
2. You seem to to think churches, communities, and families are the sole source of value and meaning in life and that without these institutions, we would all be nihilists. Of course, this idea is anathema to Nietzsche: finding value in what the herd values, etc.
3. Don’t you find your position, from an existentialist point of view, inauthentic? I mean, you didn’t resolve your existential crises by choosing to affirm something valuable in the way Kierkegaard and Heidegger recommend. Instead, you let these institutions- church, family, etc.- choose a way out for you. The thing about an existential crises is that reason can’t get you out of it, only an irrational choice can; i.e. only a kind of absurd faith (which you must recognize is absurd) can get you out of the crisis.
I mean ‘crisis’ not the plural ‘crises.’ sorry
You know, before you decide that Goedel put the kybosh on enlightenment rationalism, you might, like, study some mathematical logic?
If you did, you’d bump into Gödel’s Completeness theorem, which predates his more famous results, and actually testifies to the opposite of your rather callow conclusions. In 1929, Goedel established a correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in first-order logic. That is, he showed that everyday first order propositions about ‘the world’ can be reasoned about.
The ‘Incompleteness’ result is actually a rather narrow, technical result in mathematical logic. It does not apply to ordinary, everyday reasoning, and not even to all mathematics. It showed that you have to be careful as soon as you start dealing with numbers, but other kinds of mathematical reasoning (Geometry, Graph Theory, topology) are just fine, thank you very much.
If you want to find all kinds of emotional satisfaction in your subjective truths, that’s fine. If you want to believe that ‘The State’ is more coercive than ‘your Church’ or ‘your family’, that’s also fine (though I find it ridiculous as a matter of fact). But PLEASE - don’t come blathering that Goedel made you do it. The man himself, a rationalist, and ur-realist and Platonist for crying out loud.
I’d also point out to you the rather sadly narrow range of your reading. No Hume? No Bentham and Mills? No Berlin or Rawls?
This is pretty fancy pantsy but, you know, vapid and shallow:
“The family was a locus of identity, as well as the vital economic base for food, housing, and education. Churches and guilds provided economic support as well as creating identity.”
Uncontroversially family structures are highly conditioned by the artificial spheres surrounding them. For instance–do you live out West? Is you’re father employed in the defense sector. Do you drink water delivered to you via massive Was you’re land settled by surplus, industrially unsettled populations who traveled out west and received their initial sustenance via those massive state-capitalist enterprises known as railroads?
If organized social activity is “de-humanizing” and spiritually destructive of all it touches then your family–from which you’re “identity” blah blah blah stems–is just the debased empty epiphenomena of socio-government action. And if that’s the case, then, well, what are you?
This is fluff. I hate the government too, but for concrete reasons. For instance, it kills people.
“my theory that conservatives and leftists have way more in common than either do with liberals”
That’s actually a commonplace. But good luck in college.
Look under Consonants. The one you want is the Dental “Da”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devan%C4%81gar%C4%AB
” ? “
Yes, the ground has fallen out from under you. But look around, there’s other people falling along side you. Choosing to be duty-bound and tradition-bound to them is just your way of trying to get something back under your feet. That’s an existential choice, but one that’s in bad faith. Try to just enjoy being with those you’re falling along side of, and with them make sure the infinite sky remains a safe, mutually rewarding place to be.
Great, thought provoking essay. I’m reluctant to bring electoral politics into an otherwise tastefully-above-the-fray piece, but I’ve got to say something about, “My burning hatred for both major Presidential candidates is due entirely to their New Deal liberalism.” Really? I’m completely on board that this is a great reason to be unenthusiastic about both of them, but I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan that there are plenty of other reasons to be very fearful of a McCain presidency, not least of which is the chance that Palin might be in control of nuclear missiles. I also have a really strong sense that, while neither candidate is likely to completely roll back the dangerous expansions of executive power, Obama, who taught constitutional law at Chicago, would do more to restore some legitimacy to the constitution than would McCain. So while I also despise their “New Deal Liberalism,” I’m a little at a loss for words as to how that can really be the entirety of your hatred for them.
that is: “via massive private/public interstate aqueducts?”
I appreciate your sharing this introspection with us. You surely will not suffer the lament Emerson warned about - “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Try reading some Michael Oakeshott. I think you would like it. Also, you seem very driven to find “the answer”. There is no such.
Both political parties have worthwhile ideas and necessary points of view and there are nearly limitless good ideas and viewpoints not represented in our parties. Even when ideas are totally inappropriate for a given time and circumstance, they may become more valuable at other times.
Do not succumb to the hubris or take upon yourself the burden of thinking that you are always or need to always be “right”. Think that you are right, argue for what you think is right, take action for what you think is right. But, maintain your humility and your respect for those with whom you disagree.
Again, thank you for your essay. It was a joy to read.
Also a conservative.
Oh, I forgot to add. Even though I am conservative, I simply cannot vote for McCain, Palin, or the Republicans this year. The Republicans need some time to become a functioning political party again and the America needs some time to recover from the utter disaster that has been George W. Bush (and his accomplices in Congress).
Obama ‘08
What on Earth are you talking about?
But let me be clear: I understand what you wrote, and I understand your sense of intuition to what you have read and what you have lived - at Yale, at [insert American statistic in regards to income-level, city, state, race, gender, blah, blah, blah], as a person with access to a computer and to the Internet (compared to everyone else in the world who doesn’t), but how does this equate to 55-mile per hour speed limits and the legislation behind it?
How does this equate to government bailouts?
How does this equate to Nationalism and illegal immigration?
How does this equate to the body of law in regards to abortion rights and the so-called “War on Terror”?
How does this equate to undereducated Americans ever conceiving the notion that we are not Gods and we are not superior - but equal, just smarter - per nature or nurture, and yet hold the string that swings their pendulumistic lives? And who holds us?
It’s nice that you want to build a brain-fart of ideas and lofty notions. But after nihilism, Conservatism was your only answer?
Conservatism of what? Of life? Of death? Of Roe v. Wade? Of unadulterated Capitalism? Conservatism to or from technology?
Efficiency should be a political party, then.
But then again, I’m babbling. Like you.
Long story short, you had a nihilist breakdown and latched onto the first thing that came to mind, conservatism. Maybe you wanted to rebel against your liberal parents? Don’t know, don’t care.
Still, it’s sad. For all the fanciness of your speech, you merely ran away. As others pointed out, in another world it would’ve been Marxism or communist or socialism or you friendly local mystery cult. All you’re really doing is running away from the darkness and trying to keep the lights on for a little longer, instead of facing your existential fears.
It’s not like I don’t get it —I get the right’s utter moral certainty and the church’s deep held believe that they’re right and everyone else in wrong can be deeply attractive to someone that has lost her way. But in the end, they’re crutches —harmful crutches— that will only stand in your way to whatever it is you’re really looking for.
Don’t take the easy way out and just what other authorities tell you just because you’re tired of thinking for yourself and deadly afraid of the dark. That’s intellectual cowardice, and it’s shameful that a Yale graduate gives up inquisitive thinking and instead relies on what amounts to be cheat sheet.
I’m glad that you have thought about your thinking, but sad that the conclusion is a zero-sum answer.
Not all government intervention is bad and not all free markets are good. Government exists to define the size of the legal box that markets operate in. If you want a truly free market, go to the tribal areas of Afghanistan.
Hate is a waste of time, leave it behind.
This sounds as though you are hopelessly confused. But you are young yet. Good luck with all of this.
Some sentences that deserve further unpacking:
“Society’s job is then to teach us to be better.”
How so? Since when did society have a job? Society is not prescriptive no matter how much your little lonely heart might wish. That’s not unlike saying water is embrasive.
Another one:
“If we look to [the state] as arbiter of legitimacy, safety, or morality, we have already neglected the sources of real meaning in our lives. State intervention is dangerous not because it’s “coercion” (I don’t mind coercion), but because of its inhumanity.”
Very strange and seemingly not at all a conservative position. Why would anyone ascribe humanity or the lack thereof to the state? I have never met these people who say the state is the arbiter of morality. Perhaps they exist. Does anyone listen to them?
Your comments make it clear you either really do not understand Godel or you have not applied his learning to your formulations.
Be well.
I graduated with a lopsided education, very heavy on the humanities and light on everything else, and a half-baked faith in equality, social justice, and human rights. I believed with all my heart in Man’s to understand the world by reason alone.
I don’t see “science” anywhere in that list.
So you believed in Man’s power to understand the world by reason, but you never bothered to try to be a part of it? You believed in “rationalism”, but the only thing you ever studied was the world of emotional experience?
No, I don’t find it surprising you became a conservative. No sir. I mean, you had already embraced the first tenant - the complete rejection of physical reality.
My god are you young! I hope you don’t feel that you’ve found “the” answer and you continue to grow.
Thank you for that excellent essay.
Good on you for finding Godel: Establishing the limits of describing what we know goes hand-in-hand with some interesting bits about the limits of computation, and Turing’s halting problem neatly joins the two.
It seems like we went through nearly the same progression through the philosophical major-leagues. Eliot’s conclusion to the waste-land was an opening experience for me, as well. So I was reading along nodding and going “yeah! Exactly!” but when you’d conclude these paragraphs with variations on “naturally, I became a conservative”, it was like having ice water dumped on my head as i was drifting off into a reverie. I seem to have come out from a similar process into completely opposite conclusions.
When i was looking for community and connection, I found it prominently in the liberal communities of the town, the ones who were running community bicycle shops that taught kids how to fix their bikes, the small-town farmers market with its aging hippees now happily running farms and starting the sustainable agriculture movement. Love and tradition were there in spades in the old-timey music movement and the community dances which were, almost universally, liberal.
In comparison, the representatives of the conservative movement were either of the College Republican breed or of the religious fundamentalist variety. They pooh-pooh’d these communities with disdain and contempt, labelled them godless communists for not having (offensively) overt displays of faith or cheese-eating surrender-monkeys for not supporting the War-On-Terra, etc. When the response to questioning the war in Iraq — it was a secular government with no ties to 9-11, what’s the rationale? — was met without any rational discussion but just “You don’t support the troops!”, it was pretty easy to recognize authoritarianism.
These are just local examples I witnessed — perhaps you were lucky enough to have some conservative lights and welcoming, non-authoritarian communities. When I broadened my view to consider the national examples of conservative thought, or its applications in practice… well. That’s gone well. I can’t name one who i think is serious — the last serious conservative i can agree with is William F. Buckley, and the Right of today is almost unrecognizable in comparison.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing this essay. It’s really funny that we could come out so differently from a similar path.
“If we look to it [the state] as arbiter of legitimacy, safety, or morality, we have already neglected the sources of real meaning in our lives [churches, guilds, and other non-governmental institutions].”
I enjoyed reading your essay, although I found myself arguing with various points along the way. I’m curious that your path toward a libertarian (or rather corporatist) viewpoint is ultimately a rejection of the atomic view of man and the universe in favor of a rather collectivist view. One might question whether the state (particularly a democratic one) is not merely another institution, one that binds people together in “highly associative and symbolic relationships.”
In the fascist system (as it was practiced in Italy, Spain, and Chile) the absolutely powerful state organized society through institutions, like churchs, labor unions, and manufactuers’ unions. In the democratic state, society is fundamentally organized along the lines of the individual, from whom it derives its power. Likewise the individual joins (or does not join) a church of his choosing and other institutions as he likes. Largely, he eats only the fruits of his labor, typically produced in the context of a collective effort which he has volunteered to join, such as a business. Only when this particular collective effort fails and all other resources have been exhausted does he turn to the state for help to keep him and his family from starving. In the context of a democratic state of freely associated individuals, does this really count as inhumanity? A liberal might argue the opposite.
One might also argue that the decline of the institutions that formerly gave us meaning (family and church, for starters) are due to forces other than the very human decision we collectively (and democratically) made not to let our fellow man starve should the winds of fortune blow him into destitution. The family’s place as a central economic unit has been replaced by the corporation. In the past, the family produced its wealth as a collective unit — working its fields, sewing its clothes, building its home. The church has declined because we as a society have failed in the intellectual task of reconciling scientific discovery with the teachings of our faith. We have failed to recognize scientific discovery as a form of revelation (as Thomas Browne did in the 17th C). Rather we pushed ourselves into a false choice: either the universe was created and ordered by God as written in the Bible, or the universe is ordered in the way that scientific discovery has now shown. One might argue that science shows us how God ordered the universe and brings us closer to understanding Him.
Cheers!
I know it’s been a few days, but I wanted to correct your claim about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems refuting foundationalism. Godel proved that arithmetic (or similiarly robust formal systems) couldn’t be both consistent and complete. It does not follow from this that the more general epistemological commitments of foundationalism are incorrect. Godel himself was a Platonist rationalist about mathematics. While it is true, based on Godel, that the foundational beliefs cannot be formalized in a single self-evident logic, that is by no means a necessary assumption of foundationalism. In fact, there is no evidence that Descartes himself made this assumption.
I hate to sound dismissive, but reading this made me think of my “junior year abroad stream-of-cosciousness, personal development who am I” experience. What I mean is, I hear what you’re saying with your yearning to label/find/discover/create yourself as a unique person, but isn’t it possibly all a reaction to your “Evangelically Athiest” parents, not to mention the recent heart break? No offense, but as a former boarding school prodigy with close ties to New Haven, once you leave the protected Ivy Halls, conservatism, liberalism, or whaterver you want to call it, will yield to…..Pragmatism. You’ll be fine, just keep looking for, and paying attention to, moments of JOY.
i can follow the through line until the end. it seems like you’re tiptoeing the whole way, then take a leap to hating big government because it denies us community (which is the only thing that’s real, in your estimation) and creates alienation (which is highly dangerous, in your estimation).
your idea that human evil must be contained and redirected sounds pretty totalitarian to me. your choice of communities seems arbitrary, with a bias towards ‘traditional’ groups such as churches. is this because you have so indicted reason that a government founded on it cannot be sound? instead we should rely on institutions that defy reason?
let me propose this. these standards that you uphold, ‘humanity’, ‘connectedness’, they are just as self-justifying as your forgotten reason. and fundamentally, aren’t you just another culture warrior dressed in literature? ‘big government destroyed our culture and left me all alone, and we need to get back to the good old days where people met at churches and really related to each other!’ taking the label off doesn’t change that.
reality check. we’re here now. don’t affirm the consequent. our current cultural, economic and social situation has A LOT of causes. government expansion is one of them. and i’m for reducing the size of government. but not via reductio ad absurdum where it’s to blame for all our problems. your argument is that we NEED institutions, we just have the wrong ones? that doesn’t sound different from the liberalism you decry.
It’s great to see intellectual curiosity; whether other people agree with you or not, what matters is that you’re reading, thinking, and trying to figure out how to make sense of your life. Don’t let other people’s negativity keep you from continuing your studies and attempts to understand your life.
I find the most interesting point in your narrative to be when you wrote, “Every morning I asked myself why I existed, since there was no rational purpose for it and the universe at large was utterly indifferent.” From there you discovered Eliot, but I wonder what might have happened if instead you had read Camus’ ‘Myth of Sisyphus’. In it he explores the sense of the absurd that results when man’s desires for meaning conflict with the indifference as of the world, and how one can reside within that space, and embrace the absurdity of living. If you have the time, I suggest you take a look.
I thought in a democracy the state was not to be feared because WE are the state, WE are the government. In a democracy there is no STATE there is only us (unless of course you are not living in a democracy)
It’s an interesting just-so story, but I think I’ve expressed my doubts about it by applying that label. What I find missing in your account is the place of market economics. How, in a world featuring (some would say dominated by) globalized capitalism, can your aversion to government intervention possibly be adequate to restore and maintain the communal and sentimental bonds you cherish? Chase the state away and you still have the homogenizing, alienating effects of Walmart, McDonalds, Nike, Safeway, Microsoft, Apple, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, New York Life, Time/Warner, and all the rest.
Unless you’re sequestered in a cave or a religious enclave or occupying the last truly isolated self-sufficient farm valley in existence, which seems unlikely for a blogger, you don’t live “close to the land” or close to the sort of community you wish to idealize. The objects of your daily life are produced and aggressively peddled and propagandized by people remote from you. The same is true of the people themselves: good luck evading Paris Hilton et. al. The marketplace is pressing from all directions at all times, and it has a very strong interest in what you consider “yours, hearth, and kin.” Your community is only partly chosen.
I hate to be so blunt, but here goes: wish away the globalized marketplace and your scheme makes sense; add it to the picture and your scheme comes across as delusional.
Thanks.
I can understand the current distress with each candidates cruth-lean on giant bureaucratic fanes, but the reality is that if we tear down the modern liberal nation-state what is going to immediately take its place is the current surge of capitalist globalization currently reaking havoc of the underdeveloped world. This is why Marx and Chomsky cannot yet be abandoned…
Two things. First how was your heart broken? You gloss over this important fact, while explaining your existential crisis in detail. Second, you need to read some science books. Political science and philosophy can no longer remain in their heurmeunetic bubbles. I really don’t get this idea of life needing meaning. So your completely against the theory of evolution? Why is it a problem that things might have and do happen randomly? Can you just enjoy all the amazing accomplishments humans have done?
If you haven’t, try reading something meaningful on each of the following subjects:
- Evolution
- Social anthropology
- Human physiology
- Neurochemistry & Brain Science
- Cosmology
- Quantum physics
- Complexity
Nicola, I enjoyed the story you told. I may disagree with some of your points and agree with others, but that is the fun of life. We are individuals, we hear different things in the same clap of thunder.
To Larry and the others who were rude or cruel in expressing their disagreement with anything Nicola may have said, grow up. Better yet, burn a few calories and put down a few polite words that explain, with the same intelligence and detail that Nicola used here, a polite and honest and enjoyable counter arguement.
I doubt you are up to it, but I encourage you to try.
I’m always glad to hear of another young person who finds meaning in the ideas of great and famous writers. But I think you still have a ways to go before you should say you’ve learned anything.
Your description, and loathing, of politicians’ “conviction that if something is wrong it must be the government’s job to fix it, their utter disregard for limited government” is an example of one of the weakest kinds of arguments: exaggerate your opponent’s position to a ridiculous degree, then ridicule the exaggeration and act as though you’ve said something meaningful. Would it spoil your fun? to have it pointed out that liberalism is not the idea that the state should seek to improve all aspects of everyone’s lives and grow without limit; but the much more modest one that people acting through the state can, sometimes, improve the human condition in at least a few important areas — as opposed the conservative tenent that the state can basically never achieve positive change and should never try. The ravening dictatorial socialist you imagine when you hear or say the word “liberal” is a classic strawman(/person?): not anything real, just something you made up so that you could feel righteous by opposing it.
Since you’re still young and have time to experiment, I would suggest you leave aside foundational theory for a while and have a fling with empiricism. Ask yourself: on those occasions when our culture has positively advanced, who was the driving force? For example, the fact that it is now unacceptable to be openly racist in (most of) polite society in the US is an absolute positive change to our culture over the last 30/50/100 years. And who did more to bring this cultural change about? Was it your patron saints at the National Review writing about how Jim Crow was justified since whites were “the advanced race”? or was it liberals, working (largely, though not entirely) through the state?
Was it the party of the left or of the right that provided “a set of values that makes us feel guilty about wanting to do the things we should not do”?
You’ve written here about the profound dangers of alienation in modern life. But think: in modern times the alternative to the state is the corporate business world; and which of those is more likely to create alienation? As Noam Chomsky has said — and I don’t think you can really disagree with him here — from the point of view of the corporation selling to consumers the ideal society is to have each person alone with their television. In a peaceful society it’s the corporate stratum, and the rightist party that serves it, which has a direct interest in atomizing society. Take care in to whom you’re giving aid and comfort.
It’s good that you’re willing to think and read and learn — but don’t believe that you’ve reached any good stopping point just yet.
“The more we depend on government, the less connection we have with one another.”
Um, sorry. Good government, run by people who actually find value in honorable public service, would give me time to relate with others. I and at least 70% of Americans, not to mention Europe and the rest of the world, have given Conservatism its last chance. We are exhausted.
It is amazing that after having driven countless families into the ground, Conservatism says that it is the family that is the ideal model. Please, your timing is, to say the least, offensive.
Provocative post. I have penned a brief response at exitcaveright.blogspot.com. Let’s continue the discussion.
Nicola - you’re clearly a young person at an early stage of your intellectual life.
I am at least twice your age and underwent a very similar process in my twenties - teenage leftism, then Nietzsche, then Eliot and Nisbet (and Ortega and Santayana and Oakeshott and the rest).
However seductive though conservative ideas can be, the record of conservatism in power has been in its way almost as catastrophic as socialism - so these days I describe myself as conservative in everything but my politics.
Sorry to say that if you really want a strong, stable society then the free market is the very last thing that will provide it.
Old fashioned European social democracy and New Deal liberalism actually did a far better job until the middle class hippie fuckwits took it over.
Good stuff. Very engaging. I am very very sympathetic to your search for something besides a social fantasy of totally independent individuals whose every choice must be good because it came from within themselves.
But like so many of the previous posters, I too wonder why the state is unfailingly that which erodes communal connections while guilds and churches are that which encourage them. I am curious why the mass apparatus of the international corporation doesn’t come in for any such condemnation, although it is a structure that largely dictates the shape of our workday, the possibilities for our vocations, the way we are able to care for very young children, the means of our communication with one another, the expense of our housing, medicine, clothing and food. And by its multi-national nature, can do so far beyond one particular state.
I also am curious to hear your thoughts on the church’s and the guild’s impact on women’s lives, especially (but not exclusively) because you seem to be a woman. You are extraordinarily intelligent and have much of substance to say. Yet churches and guilds have always operated in the west to deny women access to the sort of education that has allowed you to use your intelligence. And they have done it in the name of keeping communal relations intact, especially in the name of protecting that very basic unit of connection, the family.
Finally — screw anyone who tells you “oh my, but you’re young.” What sort of response is that? You are supposed to be thinking. What good can come out of pretending you have no thoughts until you are 50? Keep speaking.
Well, I’m glad to find out that I’m not the only one who got to college, had the floor fall out from under their worldview, and wound up confessing to themselves that they’re a conservative. Really — it mirrors a lot of my own philosophical evolution over the last few years, especially the Eliot (though for me, it had a lot to do with reading “Tradition and the Individual Talent” about three times in a week, until he seemed to be talking about more than just art). Even wound up in a seminar on the meaning of “conservatism.”
Anyway — thanks. At the very least, reading whatever it is that you’ve started among all these blogs has given me a wonderful new way to procrastinate. I’m gonna go let this one marinate for a little bit, though.
This essay commits the first sin of pseudo-intellectualism: misuse of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Congratulations, you have joined Lacan and Deleuze in showing that pretentious, nonsensical blathering about the deep implications of technical discussions in mathematics has no unique political pedigree.
I didn’t read any of the other comments, so maybe other people already talked about these. I do not think your political views fall under the “conservative” label, certainly in regards to how others use it today. I think we share a lot of common thoughts (and experiences)- I’m in my third undergraduate year and I’ve been questioning my entire perspective of life, politics, etc. and still haven’t come to any satisfying conclusions. I’m still working on it all.
Anyways, you describe liberalism as a “rights-based worldview” and that love and tradition are in opposition to this. Also, you say that you “wanted human connection … so that rationalism wouldn’t seem such an appealing option in the future”. Do human interaction human connection and rationalism exclude each other? If they do, how do they?
I recently read On The Genealogy of Morals and Marx’s The German Ideology, and both books pretty caused me to begin questioning my values, though I have not done it nearly enough. I thought I valued community and love (and a bit of tradition, only insofar as it benefits community and love) amongst other things (such as freedom, independent thought, creativity, knowledge) only to be convinced by Marx that values, morality, law, the state, ideology in general, are all institutions constructed to serve the interests of a certain group of people, who I may or may not be a part of. Nietzsche comes to a similar conclusion when he explains the creation of the noble morality and the slave morality, and how both were propagated only for the interest of a specific group. Reflecting on this idea I realized that I have no idea why I have the values, morals, etc. that I do, other than that I’ve been socialized to have them in order to serve the interests of someone else. Long story short, I’ve had quite a mindfuck, and I’m wondering how comfortable you are with your values.
It seems you got rid of your old values and chose new ones: love, tradition, community. I’m really curious if these are your only values. Do you value anything else? Where do these values come from, why are they your values? And what do you mean by tradition?
I’m a professor of history, and one of my research specialties is Enlightenment critiques and, more generally, 19th-century anti-rationalist conservatism.
Believe me, I understand your dissatisfaction with Enlightenment liberalism and impatience with rationalism.
But may I politely suggest that you have a lot more reading to do?
Start with Dostoevsky (Enlightenment Critique 101), but also Vladimir Soloviev and the Russian Slavophile movement. Look up some of the several solid academic critiques of Arendt.
But, really, you should maybe set the lit and philosophy aside for a moment and get some history under your belt. Actually, a lot of history. You’re missing some important pieces. Big pieces. When I say learn some history, I’m not talking about the survey crap - read real, meaty historical monographs by professionals on the history of Western civilization, intellectual history, Enlightenment, and (Western European) Cultural Revolution.
It’s really great that you’re raising these questions and thinking so hard. Kudos for going to the primary sources! But, um, you’re not the first to ask these questions or to toy with these answers. Many, many thinkers before you have been there, done that, and moved on to far more interesting territory. There are many miles to go before you catch up.
Some random titles to start with, off the top of my head:
Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans
James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, C. 1760-1832.
Richard William Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna.
Jolanta T. Pekacz, Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women.
Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
David Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: The Practice of Inegalitarianism
Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution
Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, ed., The Age of Cultural Revolutions
James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
Harold James Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society
A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment
Q.R.D. Skinner, Meaning and Context and Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method
Dear Nicola,
I was fascinated by the depth of this post. Your philosophical acumen is astounding– I’ve found myself musing in the odd hours of the night on your masterful exegesis of Goedel’s incompleteness (also known as “On The Deconstruction of New Deal Liberalism”).
While the idea is not my own, I was curious if you had heard that the evils of dialectical materialism (nee historical materialism :)) are now being applied at the subatomic level by a cadre of Marxian physicists? We must, I repeat MUST, perform a Lewisian two-dimensional style analysis of such scientistic liberalism to eliminate such sophistries!
Keep well,
H.J. Blaume
You obviously don’t know what the term rationalist means when it’s used in philosophical discourse.
Re: H.J. Blaume
These are exactly the sort of vacuous, dialectical beef bowls we are trying to avoid here, sir. Take your bub-mub elsewhere, you schlub!
Wow …this is so, like, …. deep!
Wow. This shallow blather is the best advertisement for not doing Directed Studies that I’ve ever heard. Maybe try paying more attention in lecture instead of taking bong hits from your cosmic epiphanies? On the other hand, being full of sweet-smelling shit is what going to Yale is all about.
Re: Ceaser N. Pleaser
You foolish commentators should take your vapid banter elsewhere. This is not the place for petty disagreements. Ms. Nicola’s candid testament should garner nothing but respectful and serious commentary.
Her exegesis of Goedel’s famed theorems should make us all pause in wonder, awe, and deep, true, reasonable thought.
My cup runneth over.
dr yle mn,
tll m hw t hndl th rssns nd
tll m hw m ss tste
An excellent piece, very interesting…unfortunately it reminds me that despite all the reading I’ve done there’s so much I haven’t. However, I was thinking about this statement:
State intervention is dangerous not because it’s “coercion” (I don’t mind coercion), but because of its inhumanity. The more we depend on government, the less connection we have with one another.
Have you ever asked where the government comes from? It doesn’t just pop into existence out of nowhere. It isn’t imposed on us from DC, or Mars or from secret underground lair of secular humanists. It quite literally is us. How can government really intervene when government is part of our community? What does it really mean to depend on government then?
This, of course, doesn’t mean all gov’t policy is good or that you need to sign onto the Obama train full speed ahead….just addressing those questions might provide you with a more peaceful reconciliation to the conflict you see between community and government.
Don’t fear the Gödel police! Every time the man’s result(s) are mentioned, there are always a few derisive voices proclaiming your ignorance. The derision is uncalled for. Some of the comments that suggest that you familiarise yourself with the theorem are well worth consideration — though I will note that we must take Gödel’s Platonism with a pinch of salt: Martin Davis has documented his changing views over time as he evolved out of logical positivism, and further, the man believed in a lot of things, including that there were plans afoot to poison him. However, the commentor who suggests that you offers the Completeness Theorem as the more significant result, pointing to the Incompleteness Theorem(s) as “narrow” is best ignored.
The incompleteness result (in question) is indeed a “foundational” result (there is a reason it occupies those who study the foundations of mathematics). Can you carry out mathematics in spite of it? Indeed. But the incompleteness theorem answers a very important question, raised by Hilbert, on the foundational integrity of the strongest of techniques (the axiomatic method) offered to justify results, and it answers it in the negative.
But what is the recourse? Abandon the rigors of axiomatisation? In favour of what? Otto Neurath had some ideas but none of them is the equivalent of taking refuge (exclusively) in a church (of unreason). Personally, I think you should be reading more Heidegger and less Nietzsche! Or better, Paul Feyerabend, who will enlighten you on reason vs Reason. Aligning yourself with conservatism, after such existential philosophical questioning, betrays a precommitment and hence, shall we say, bad faith.
Kate and Boonton (especially Kate) gave great replies.
I would echo Boon and ask why you posit such a rigid dichotomy between state and society? Kate comes in here with adding Habermas to your reading list. This is not to say that you should become a Habermasian, but “The Structural Transformations” is a great way to think beyond pure society being tainted by imposing central gov’t.
I also think Arendt is a great thinker to read, but again, Kate’s suggestion to read some academic criticisms of her are key. Start with Hannah Pitkin’s “Attack of the Blob”…. maybe then you’ll start thinking more about the “social question”– and see it as an alternative to yr ideas on ‘tradition’ (which I still don’t understand when you confess that you’re not religious- especially since ‘tradition’ is a construct created by the very modernity you appear to loathe so much).
Wow, does this read as young and naive. Many commenters above have said it better than I could.
If you end up pulled down the rabbit hole of Movement Republican propaganda and defining yourself by the war against some fantasized liberalism, you’ll be a lost soul. If you end up trying to build real community between real people in a real locality, you’ll have a wonderful life — and your politics will get much richer, less abstract, and more complex.
How awesome that I was not the only one saved by The Waste Land!
In fact, I owe a lot (not that they’d welcome the attribution) to the organizers of the International Baccalaureate program in New York in the early 1970s. They gave us — all within the Higher Level English program, and all within junior year — a Russian lit course in the fall that included Crime and Punishment, and a poetry course in the spring that included Eliot.
I hadn’t thought of entitling my intellectual autobiography (if I ever write it) “Saved by the IB,” but I could.
Further comments, re Commenter Kate’s bibliography:
1. I happen to know Emmet Kennedy, and I regard him highly. More when next we meet.
2. The list includes Skinner and Pocock. They form one side of an historical debate in which the other side is manned by historians and political scientists influenced by Strauss, notably Paul Rahe, Cary Nederman, and Nathan Tarcov. It’s not a debate I have followed as closely as I should, but, to oversimplify, one of the issues at stake is “Machiavelli, benign bridge from the ancients to modern democracy” (Skinner, Pocock) v. “Machiavelli, malign bridge-dynamiter between ancient and modern” (Strauss, Rahe, Tarcov).
See e.g. Tarcov, “Quentin Skinner’ Method and Machiavelli’s PRINCE,” in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Princeton U.Press, 1988
It occurs to me that you might have missed the concept of “community” in the concept of “state.” A state isn’t a thing separate from its citizens; it is the expression of the collective will of its citizens. You argue that the state prevents community action. Yet your position assumes (a) that the government does not reflect the community will; and (b) that “the state” is some sort of Platonic idea, apart from the people who make it up and who set its policies. Both of these premises are highly questionable (at least on any long-term view), and obviously betray a social atomist viewpoint that simply isn’t sustainable in anything outside a thought experiment. But good luck arguing it.
I think it’s misguided to totally renounce rationalism just because there’s limits to it. Looking for a single system through which to validate your life’s meaning, and in the process totally writing off others, I think is a fundamentally unconservative disposition. To me, a conservative disposition leads one to find value in moderation and pragmatism. Which would entail remaining skeptical of new ideas and systems, even “conservative” ones, and letting experience and practical wisdom inform your ideas, and not obsessing over fine points of philosophic disputation. A conservative thinker I think can accept that rationalism can inform on certain questions.
Wow. After reading some of the arrogant, condescending, and just plain mean-spirited comments here, I am very glad I don’t hang out with “intellectuals.” You pour out your heart in good faith, and this is what you get? Geeze.
I loved the essay. Keep up the good work.
Hello there!
I’m sorry to disturb, but I’m worrried by the last comment. I fear that someone may take Margaret’s comment as a reason to put an end to the conversation, and that a hurried visitor who would be tempted to jump to conclusions, would leave the blogspot without having tried to really consider the underlying ones. The fact is I respect these conclusions, and I encourage constructive comments as well as I can understand that one can feel sorry about the way opposition to such an effort of reflection leading to them is expressed. But it must be known that serious couterargument has been crafted by Acarr (http://chasingthenorm.blogspot.com/2008/10/philosophical-journey.html) responding in part to the requirement of consistency that is cogent to moral responsability (virtue, according to some).
There is some evidence that a choice ought to be made between community and virtue according to him.
Altough he fails to justify this beleif, it seems to me to be a serious path to consider. In a way we could relate Nicola’s stance to Rousseau’s love for feeling towards others, joint to his impression that sharing rules of conduct is the only way towards security. But Hobbes objected that rules could be effective only if they are applied by absolute power, otherwise they will be distracted from their goal by irrational but natural preference for thyself.
Both are stucked in a tension between an aspiration to order and a desire for “reform”.
Altough I disagree about Hobbes motives and am ambivalent about Rousseau’s, I dont know if motives can be the only source of approbation or rejection of a political theory or doctrine. It seems to me that if we want protection for (the body of) the people (that we love) and encouragement to achieve great things as individuals and/or collectively, we must confer some power to delegates to organise these matters at the national level. “Incentives” is the word for the tools that help us manage our behviours in a righteous manner, though nothing in thaht strategy refrains us from doing more to promote betterment of the international situation on the global level. Many occasions exist for sharing views on what we expect of life and how we can achieve it together, without having to put down the government to do so. The state is a tool to redirect people’s energy towards greater ends than the domestic tasks.
So I would be curious to read Nicola’s reaction to Acarr’s objection and to my social-democratic stance.
And I thank Margaret for stimulating me to extend the life of this fascinating conversation, even though it may be in a way that could seem a regress (towards moderate liberalism, I hope).
I wish to say that I dont want Nicola to feel any obligation to take a different stance than the one he believes in (and seems to have changed slightly since). And I noticed that he (or she?, according to Acarr…) began by saying that this was not expressing his opinions but the evolution of his reflection on matters such as rationality, the vacuum of values, and the critique of totalitarianism as well as the admiration of what litterature and myhts may bring to the forth, like the spiritual importance of generosity (according to my interpretation of his writing). So I cannot deny the value of this “confession”. And I can accept that the author finishes in an ellusive manner, talking about disdain against the “counterrevolution”. According to Wkipedia (sorry for being naive)
“The word counterrevolutionary is often used interchangeably with reactionary; however, some people considered reactionary (like the CCP)[Communist Party of China] used the term counterrevolutionary to describe their opponents - even if those opponents were advocates of a Marxist revolution. In general, the word “reactionary” is used to describe those who oppose a more long-term trend of social change, while “counterrevolutionaries” are those who oppose a very recent and sudden change.”
I’m not sure about what (s)he refers to: is it only to say he is against the new “New Deal” coming up with the regulation of finance by the state, as well as massive intervention in the economy, or is it to say that he still claims the right… to distanciate himself from the consevatives (who tend to want to come back to a privileged prior state of civilisation)?
Thanks for shedding the light of your mindfull spirit on my bewildered eye.
A french canadian
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So, you also exist in the cyberspace…
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