Conservative To Neo-Conservative To Liberal-A Few Thoughts & Links
February 19, 2022 February 20, 2022 / chr1
Maybe I'm off?: As much as there are truth and knowledge claims, about ourselves and the world, embedded within our ideas about ourselves and the world, it seems we're often arguing over who should be in charge. Agree on some 'is' questions, surround yourself with like minds, and then pursue the 'oughts' through education, politics and law.
Oh, there will be authority.
Something like the conservative position-One Nation Under God. Defend home and hearth, and the Constitution. The country was born of revolution, yet not the French, nor the Russian revolutions. The country wasn't built upon the utopias proffered by Marxist radicals, nor anarchists, nor even the anarcho-capitalist libertarian types (perhaps something more like the Euro-project, built on economic allegiances).
Something like the neo-conservative position-At some point, get mugged by reality, and start questioning many truth and knowledge claims of the liberal idealist and secular humanist project. Defend homes within communities, and use the American military to advance secular humanism and humanistic ideals around the globe. Use law and policy, and the American military, to spread many elements of the Western project in which you pursue your highest goods (Many in China and Russia, and many Muslims and Islamists disagree).
Something like the current Liberal position-Defend houses within the community and 'societal' interests in our 'modern' world, but America itself may not be worth defending as it is and has been. Many activists and radicals in the party do seem to be co-opting many academic, institutional and bureaucratic positions. Become somewhat invested in the 'Hitler-Year-Zero' Marxist conception of conservatives, traditionalists, and religious believers as potentially 'evil.' Standing against progress is certainly morally questionable, and clearly against (H)istory.
The positive visions (environmental/globalist/Health & Safetyism) lead us all into a Statism and authoritarianism present all along.
In the meantime, Johnny, get your gun and fight for Ukraine.
—On that note:
What about a good 'ol Humanities education?
Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).
According to Kiss, Oakeshott's non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.
Friedrich Hayek's profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.
Martha Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us 'Aristotelian citizens of the world', or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.
Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian neo-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.
Via A Reader-Isaiah Berlin's Lectures On The Roots Of Romanticism. Romanticism–>Modernism–>Postmodernism–>Wherever We're Heading Now
Maybe it all started with Beethoven: Everyone's a (S)elf.
Isaiah Berlin pretty much blackballed Roger Scruton, so it's not all roses.
Scruton had some keen insights:
"The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart"
"…in the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women's studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they."
Quite importantly:
"And since there is no cogent justification for women's studies that does not dwell upon the subject's ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms."
Terry Eagleton, British Marxist and professor in the humanities, debates Scruton below.
Will Marxism & continental philosophy become further guiding lights for the humanities here in America as we find much more so in Britain?
See Protein Wisdom for a discussion about language and intentionalism, and how it gets deployed.
-Daniel Dennett: 'Postmodernism And Truth'
The nihilist claims are deeper than you may think, and the Nietzschean, and Will–>Will to Power German influence is also deeper than most people think; offering profound criticisms of the scientific project, liberalism, liberal institutions, and a secular humanism which is the air many folks breathe these days.
Here's a somewhat similar vein of thought. From friesian.com:
Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself — this despite the leftist program to use "climate science" to impose a Sovietized command economy on energy and the tactic to smear climate skeptics, i.e. "Deniers," through associaton with Creationism or Neo-Nazi Holocaust denial. None of that has stopped the "post-modern" move…'
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