Nancy Rosenblum has my back when it comes to seeing a link between partisanship and humility:I advocate for the moral distinctiveness of partisanship and propose reasons to elevate partisanship over its nemesis, the much vaunted pose of "Independence." Partisanship is the only...
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Citizenship is a Kind of Romance (But Your Crush on Obama is Still Lame)
For having compared politics and family, I stand in danger of being called lovey-dovey (i.e. comment #6), a paternalist (i.e. "Daddy State, save me from myself!"), an absolutist (i.e. "Spare the rod, spoil the citizen"), or else a credulous hero-worshipper (i.e. "President Bush...
Monday, January 26, 2009
Bookbag: A Modern Maistre
Owen Bradley (as seen on this blog):It is necessary to remark, however, a certain pride in failure on the part of the counterrevolution: not simply a disdain verging on disgust toward events in Paris, but a pride in not being understood as the trait of a superior sensibility.However,...
The Dogmatism that Can Be Spoken is Not the True Dogmatism
E. D. Kain is talking trash about my kind of conservatism:An important thing to note when discussing various forms of conservatism is the difference, often-overlooked, between social and cultural conservatism; or perhaps better phrased, religious or fundamentalist conservatism...
Brief Encounter and Adultery's Failure to Make Sense
Eve Tushnet has this to say about David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945):The lead actress, Celia Johnson, is pretty excellent, although to be honest all she's asked to do is stare at the camera with a look of repressed misery. But I loved her huge-eyed, oddly lumpy and jawy face....
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Compare and Contrast: Oscar Wilde and Michael Oakeshott
Renato Poggioli's theory of "decadence"—in the 19th-century literary sense—is the compare (translated from the Italian, so forgive anything that hits your ear at a funny angle):The very notion of decadence, at least its modern version, is practically inconceivable without the...
Monday, January 19, 2009
I Wanna Live Like Common Law People, I Wanna Do Whatever Common Law People Do
Nick writes:MAYBE 1000 YEARS AGO. NOW, NOT SO MUCH. Helen, quoting:Once a practice was established it could be considered a custom, and a custom, steadily exercised, was nearly as good as a right in law. The process was, however, nearly imperceptible under ordinary circumstances...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!
Ages ago, I wrote that "subversion is better than revolution, always." There are plenty of good reasons to qualify that claim: Nimble-minded tricksters are certainly more appealing than grabby protesters, many of whom are hippies, but it's hard to imagine how an oppressed group...
"How to Serve Man" isn't a cookbook when you're a trained monkey butler!
Remember the nightmare in which our transhumanist overlords get gene-happy and engineer a slave race of idiot-men to do our master-racy bidding? Well, we can all set those anxieties aside, assuming universal assent to this basic intuition: Trained monkey butlers are better than...
Friday, January 16, 2009
Bookbag: British Factory, Japanese Factory by Ronald Dore
A Richard Sennett favorite, as the footnotes to Authority reveal.The importance attached to educational qualifications in recruitment has for a long time been greater at Japanese factories than at English ones. However, English Electric is becoming more like Hitachi in this...
Lawrence Lessig, James Agee, and Obsolete Telegraph Operators
I was one of the poor souls at the Lolita Bar Debate on "Is Intellectual Property Theft?" who sided with the vote-losing open-source pro-piracy types (no surprise to CSB regulars), which makes me all the more disappointed that Lawrence Lessig has joined the devil's party in...
"Conservatism for Punks" for Punks
Todd Seavey has pointed out that he and I like punk rock for entirely opposite reasons—Todd because it's individualistic, me because it's "rule-bound and tribalistic." In other words, it's fifteen rounds of punk libertarianism vs. punk traditionalism. To understand why I am...
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Wilde Defamed Yet Again
Oscar Wilde's sex life is up for public debate again, this time over the question of whether it is appropriate to call him a child molester. The relevant question is the age of Alfonso Conway, which sounds as if it should be eminently verifiable, and, indeed, it seems that British...
Beyond the Mob Aesthetic: The Practical Virtues of Machine Politics
Reform in New York, like reform before it, has favored greater mass participation, but in terms of many unconnected individuals, each having no power of any importance. "Participation," either as taking part in insurgency or having an institutionalized share of authoritative...
The Finest Neuhaus Tribute I've Read
From the Fallen Sparrow:As I was leaving the church, I stopped to greet the numerous members of the Sisters of Life, who have been good friends of the Notre Dame Choir over the years, and whose infectious cheer never fails to brighten my spirits even on an occasion such as this....
Bookbag: Moynihan on the Virtue of Political Loyalty
Daniel Patrick Moynihan discusses behind-the-scenes wrangling over LBJ's Economic Opportunity Act in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty:In a meeting in the Speaker's Office on August 8th, 1964, members of the North Carolina delegation demanded...
Monday, January 12, 2009
Hazlitt Postscript
Buried in the footnotes of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic:Among the notes which Hazlitt never saw fit to publish is perhaps the most vehement dismissal of general nature in all of romantic criticism. To Reynolds's "perfect beauty in any species must combine all the characters...
William Hazlitt and Aristocratic Distance
Even if we can forgive Michael Dirda for comparing Hazlitt to "the snarkiest of modern-day bloggers," and again for calling his abruptness "Asperger's-like," we are still left wanting to read less Dirda and more Hazlitt. In that sense the review is a success.Further to that...
"What's My Name? Is It Marriage? What's My Name, Fool?""
The New York Sun critic who reviewed The Children's Hour in 1934 was right in his commonsense response to Martha's lament that, because she and Karen had been accused of lesbianism, "There is not anywhere we can go!""You immediately think of half a dozen places," he said, "including...
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Honor among Taxidermists
The facts of this story aren't all in, but, at the moment, it seems possible that Lawton McKenzie's arrest for animal cruelty may rest on nothing more than the ordinary "mutilation" involved in being an amateur taxidermist who also butchers one's own goats for food:A man accused...
Bookbag: A Sydney Smith Grab-Bag
The eighteeth century parson beginning a literary review:We take it for granted that Mr. Ritson supposes Providence to have had some share in producing him, though for what inscrutable purposes we profess ourselves unable to conjecture.On the Scottish temper:They are so imbued...
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Capitalism for Preschoolers
Heard at work today: "We don't have 'sharing' in this classroom. We have negotiatio...
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Provocative Urbanism
If they seek long-term success, American city advocates can’t simply shoe-horn people in more urban environments with technology (light rail) or policies (smart growth), but must cultivate an urban sensibility that demands such policies and tools because they demand a certain...
Can arbitrary loyalties be morally defensible?
As a way of responding to Will's provocation on truth and particularity, I'll throw up bits from this paper I wrote for a Yale seminar on Edmund Burke. Excerpts chosen for relevance and readibility:. . . The sketch of the accusation against Burke and his own defense against...
Monday, January 5, 2009
More Quentin Crisp
If you look into your soul and find that you’re ordinary, then ordinary you must be, but, if possible, you must be so ordinary that you can imagine someone saying, "Come to my party and bring your humdrum friend," and everyone knowing that he means y...
Superlatively Queer Comedians Against Gay Marriage: Two Case Studies
Over at Ladyblog, I've thrown up a refutation of one fallacy underlying same-sex marriage (short version: gay marriage makes it harder to acknowledge gender differences, and talking about gender in our post-feminist climate is already hard enough), but there's another battle...
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Bookbag: Urban Politics and Ethnic Differences
From Michael Novak's Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics:Mayor Lindsey found it difficult to attract Italian community leaders to his staff, Nicholas Pileggi reported in New York Magazine, because they did not like the hectic, family-less lives that Americanized staffers cheerfully...
Friday, January 2, 2009
Truth is Bad and There Should Be Less of It
In Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty, Daniel Patrick Moynihan points out the inevitable connection between the collection of sociological statistics and the unfortunate liberal intuition that government must therefore do something about...
Conservative Obsessed with Purity. And?
I can't help but feel gratified when Zoroastrianism receives public notice, but Time's latest (The Last of the Zoroastrians) is disappointing. Yes, Zoroastrianism is ancient, and, yes, Zoroastrians are everywhere a marginal minority. They would be interesting even if they were...
Sister, He's a Poet
From Morrissey: In His Own Words:I was such an intellectual idiot, people were convinced that if they talked to me I'd quote Genesis and bolts of lightning would descend from the sky. So I was never kissed behind the bicycle sheds.Oscar Wilde was a hideously fat person, so I'm...
What Can Alasdair MacIntyre Do For Your Sex Life?
Neither of these speakers is identified, but it should not surprise you to learn that one of them is me. I refuse to say which:"Everyone thinks of tradition as an expression of togetherness and unity, but it's actually just the opposite: embodied conflict.""That's what she said!"Almost...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)