Quotes: 24 June 2015
The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth, or perhaps a noble lie.
Sad, but true.
This latent conflict between trained officials and autocratic rule was to be found everywhere.
Look no further than the current administration.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
[I]f man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man. It regulates the relations between individual and society, and all other ambitions as well, for riches, knowledge, and honor follow from it.
And politics is screwed.
As Aquinas recognizes, this is a substantial qualification of the Aristotelian thesis that “there is no science of the contingent”: “There can be no science of future contingents considered per se. But there can be science of them considered in their causes, in that some sciences can know there are certain inclinations to such and such effects.”
If you believe this is just so much airy, philosophical mumbo jumbo, then you haven’t spent time in a courtroom or read many legal opinions.
At this point, we are close to Wittgenstein’s description of our predicament in modern philosophy. “A picture held us captive.” I think something like this is true of the tradition of modern epistemology since Descartes, which has enslaved not only Cartesian dualists, but also all those mechanistic reductivists who claim to have repudiated totally Cartesian dualism, including those who believe in objectivist semantics, and who sideline metaphor!
One heck of a book!
Both [Jim] Hougan and [Tom] Wolfe inadvertently provide evidence, however, that undermines a religious interpretation of the [1960s & 70s] “consciousness movement.” Hougan notes that survival has become the “catchword of the seventies” and “collective narcissism” the dominant disposition. Since “the society” has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own “private performance,” to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a “transcendental self-attention.” These are not the attitudes historically associated with millenarian outbreaks.
Lasch’s book was published in 1979. So what’s different now?
Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce proclaimed “the American century,” American confidence has fallen to a low ebb. Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders.
And where are we now? We’re “led” by a moral cretan and intellectual runt with the appearance of a giant balloon caricature from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Our faith in our leadership class became so utterly lost that we ended up with a president who’s the very antithesis of a leader, a purebred demagogue.
Northern [nation-]states must learn how to create and sustain larger political unions that will over time extend themselves southward toward those [nation-]states most vulnerable to climate change’s ravages. We either spread Middle Earth’s rising risk across a wider subscriber pool—just like in health insurance—or we are looking at widespread state failure there, resulting in all manner of “emergency room” treatments (i.e., US military crisis responses) that end up being a day late and many dollars long.
They [William F. Buckley & his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell] were attracted to what is referred to by conservative Catholics as integralism, the union of the church and state—and a doctrine that is being revived today by a faction on the Right. In 1966, Bozell openly advocated theocracy, establishing a Catholic magazine called Triumph that would deliver the truths that even The National Review shrank from airing. There was no waning of the Middle Ages for Bozell. He complained that his brother-in-law was supplying anodyne “political prescriptions when only a spiritual rebirth can save the West.” For Bozell, it was apocalypse now.
This refers to the 1960s, but this movement, small as it is, remains active with new players. They’re trying to place a fig leaf of intellectual over the MAGA organ of pure id. As the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, I’m down with pluralism as a principle, and trying to provide intellectual cover for Trump & MAGA is like teaching a pig to sing. And you know who that went.