Author: kurto

On pursuing the low but solid

by kurto

Larry Arnn on Churchill’s conclusions of the Anglo-Sudanese River War, and foreseeable consequences beyond:

In reaction to this gruesome spectacle, Churchill understood something that he remembered and developed the rest of his life. War, he saw, was becoming a “matter of machinery.” Soon he speculated on the disaster of two such armies meeting. Soon he predicted the cataclysms of any general war in Europe of this new and mechanized type. Soon he expanded this thesis to explain the movements of domestic politics that marked the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. Tyranny has given way to totalitarianism, more comprehensive, cruel, and sustained. Politics has given way to the administrative state. War has given way to total war. As men make things bigger, they become themselves smaller, dominated by the science they have discovered and the machines they have made.

Take Me to the River

5. Sandoz (ed.), Roots of Liberty (26 March 2022)

by kurto

A series of essays exploring shifting interpretation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and Magna Carta, sweeping from Fortescue to Augustan England and colonial America, addressing the charter as emblematic of Saxon culture, original intent, rule of law and government by consent, and the source of executive power. Effectively premised on JGA Pocock’s

    Ancient Constitution and Feudal Laws

, the contributors agree one’s views on such topics as the rights of subjects (e.g., trial by jury of peers) and limits of authority are relevant not only to jurisprudence but also the political conditions of liberty. Pocock had observed (among other things) that it was judicial process, rather than black-letter law, which was immemorial. Sandoz writes Fortescue and the common law grounded Coke’s opposition to the monarch. Holt observes Magna Charta was both a grant of liberties and a legislative act. Brooks writes, somewhat against the grain, that 16th-century lawyers were little concerned with constitutional theory and more interested in humanist (neoclassical) law. Christianson, sketching the skirmishing between early Stuarts (i.e., James I’s absolutism) and the Parliamentary opposition (Selden’s mixed monarchy, Hedley’s constitutional monarchy grounded in common law) which came to blows in the Five Knights case and provision of supply, essentially pitted rival views of the ancient constitution rather than absolutism vs constitutional government. Reid: 17th- and 18th-century lawyers thought the ancient constitution gave Parliament and common-law courts standing against arbitrary monarchy (which resonated with American revolutionaries). The common laws which had survived were the best evidence of English liberty. (Later, Burke held prescription the most solid of the titles to property, custom being the proof point of time time.) The merit of ancient constitution was security against government caprice – in an unwritten charter, no element was more essential to thwarting slavery to government. Reid adds: in this era, forensic historical work deployed the ancient constitution for proof of authority, establishment of consent, and bulwark against new government claims; in the latter century, the British chose government by consent (i.e., king in parliament) whereas the Americans settled on rule by law (following Coke, not a sovereign granting rights but a people delimiting executive power). The Saxon constitution represented liberty; the Norman charter arbitrary power; the Americans converted the dynamic to the notion of original intent. He asks why English lawyers, alone in Europe, sought to formalize understanding of rule of law – a matter now relevant to American originalists (vs progressivism) and Brexiteers (vs European Unionism).

Faulty postmodern pillars

by kurto

Two of postmodernism’s original contributions, the unreliability of Cartesian science and the instability of language, are premised on sophomoric understandings. So writes John Ellis in ‘What Does Postmodernism Really Amount To?’.

Postmodernism’s components include skepticism, cultural relativism, the shortcomings of rationality, and neo-Marxism, all of which are unoriginal. Its attack on science and language are new.

…General skepticism about scientific knowledge [is postulated], for example, by the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard, who advocated incredulity toward all such ‘meta narratives’. [In the 1860s Charles Sanders] Peirce put paid to that attitude in a devastating riposte. He argued that generalized doubt was impossible, because when we doubt something our doubt is grounded in specific knowledge. If you doubt a theory, it will be because you know something that causes your doubt. If you are skeptical of Darwinism and people ask you why, they’ll expect a specific reason for your doubt, and they won’t be satisfied with a theoretical rejection of all scientific narratives. Indiscriminate doubt is nothing but empty posturing.

Regarding the instability of meaning in language, French critic Jacques Derrida misread of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said the assignment of words to meaning was ‘arbitrary’ but that the meaning made sense in its context (e.g., 20C or 70F are both accurate measurements).

Because he misunderstood what Saussure meant by this second sense of ‘arbitrary’ Derrida jumped to the conclusion that meaning becomes unreliable and indefinite. This mistake was amplified by Derrida’s stylistic habit of dramatic verbal exaggeration. And so, for him, the absence of a reference that exists independent of language (what he called the ‘transcendental signified’) extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. Meaning becomes indefinite, limitless, indeterminate. The play of signifiers is endless. But of course Saussure’s point was exactly the opposite — that the meaning of a term is created by its place within a system of terms and is specified within that system.

Appraising Isaiah Berlin

by kurto

Berlin deserves a place among the second rank of philosophic greats for his defense of liberalism against the tyranny of communism as well as his definition of ‘negative liberty’.

We should surely forgive him his posture in the face of the Left establishment: what appears now as pusillanimity was probably, at the time, the only effective anti-Communist tactic, even if it did serve to entrench the left-liberal attitudes which have since dominated British intellectual life. His defense of negative liberty (liberty as personal sovereignty) is of enduring value, as is his critique of the ‘positive’ alternative — the idea of liberty as ’empowerment’ — which comes to the fore whenever egalitarians seek to ‘liberate’ us from our traditional freedoms.

Many praise Berlin, too, for his defense of ‘pluralism’, attributing to him the view that human beings have different and incommensurable values, for which no ultimate or shared foundation can be provided. This idea does indeed play a large part in Berlin’s later and more long-winded writings…

Roger Scruton, ‘Back to Berlin‘,

    New Criterion

, September 2009

Crisis sharpening statesmanship

by kurto

‘Perhaps statesmanship of the noblest and truest kind has always been associated with crises of one sort or another’, Daniel Mahoney writes in ‘Ballast on the Ship of State: Statesmanship as Human Excellence‘.

In this framework, DeGaulle finds his place among Cicero, Burke, Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill. Bonaparte, to the contrary, exemplifies ‘greatness without moderation’.

Also:

One cannot promote justice on the ‘willful’ premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) modernity. If one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man. A barely concealed nihilism cannot provide a foundation for common humanity, the civic common good, or mutual respect and accountability. In the end, it can only negate our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.

On Stalin’s evil genius

by kurto

Sean McMeekin’s

    Stalin’s War

asserts the Soviet leader manipulated interwar Europe in his interests, in ways that have been obscured by the West’s focus on Hitler’s Germany. ‘At its core is the claim that Stalin saw an advantage in the renewal of global hostilities, so he helped facilitate them’, writes Yale’s Ian Johnson.

Stalin had his war — and won it…. A looming question throughout the book is the counterfactual. Was there an alternative to partnering with Stalin against Hitler? That question has rarely been raised in serious scholarship but merits the consideration McMeekin gives it. The historical evidence in Stalin’s War shows how badly senior statesmen, particularly in the U.S., misunderstood Stalin, the Soviet system, and the price of their alliance with the USSR.

In the contemporary era, there are three implications. First, the extent to which ‘reductio ab Hitlerum’ has ruled scholarship and indeed social understanding. Nazi Germany was not sui generis but a form of tyranny matched by Soviet Russia. Second, FDR’s foreign policy was equally as inept as economic policy (e.g., 1937’s double-dip recession). Third, progressives seem little better judges of telos than of merit. It is little wonder the academy is sinking.

4. Kramnick (ed.), Edmund Burke (17 Mar 2016)

by kurto

Presents leading segments of Burke’s most notable works in conjunction with contemporary critiques, and reprints three essays seeking to characterize the whole of his thinking. Kramnick succeeds in simultaneously portraying the genius of Burke’s rhetoric (if not the volume of his erudition) and its more heated qualities, which sometimes took him beyond the pale. The triumvirate of essays – 1 right, 1 Marxist, and 1 centrist — demonstrate Burke’s empirical skepticism toward rationalism.

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.

6. Knightley, Australia (20 Apr 2016)

by kurto

A long cultural essay of 20th-century Australian society, helpful for understanding changing attitudes but lacking the dispassion of the historian. The author recurs to descriptions of the government and the working class, changing views of Aboriginals, and the cultural relationship with England. Knightley seems a reliable weather vale for left-liberal politics: he doesn’t acknowledge predecessors thought they were doing the right thing.

7. Kelly and Bramston, The Dismissal (24 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam violated multiple standards of propriety, including Kerr’s obligation to inform Whitlam of the seriousness of the budget crisis (i.e., blockage of supply), Kerr’s keeping counsel with High Court judges, his discussions with the opposition, and the use of ‘reserve powers’. The authors generally located the shortcomings in the personalities of the vainglorious yet timid Kerr and to a lesser degree the ambitious Malcom Fraser and the bombastic Whitlam. Constructed as a journalist’s tick-tock account with the newest information presented first, the book seems unlikely to be the last word because of its focus on personalities to the near-exclusion of contemporary society, economy, and politics; it reads like a polemic, defending contemporaneous conclusions, although this could be a byproduct of Aussie vernacular.