Reading notes

Longing for antagonism

by kurto

In the 1980s, an art critic notes the establishment’s sharp turn to the left evidenced longing for the polarization of the 1930s:

For what we are now witnessing in this movement toward the politicization of art in this country is an attempt to turn back the cultural and political clock. And it is not to the radical counterculture of the Sixties that this movement looks back for its model and inspiration, despite the many resemblances it may bear to the outlook of the Sixties, but to the radicalism of the Thirties when so much of American cultural life was dominated by the hypocritical “social consciousness” of the Stalinist ethos. It is to a contemporary version of this old “social consciousness” that the protagnists [sic] of this political movement in the art world wish to confine the life of the artistic imagination. Hence the attacks on modernism and on such champions of the modernist aesthetic as Alfred Barr. For this new generation of radicals, it is the cultural life of the Forties and Fifties — when American art and literature finally vanquished the last respectable traces of the Stalinist ethos — that can never be forgiven. The Forties marked a great turning point not only in the history of American art but in the life of the American imagination, and any attempt to return American culture to the ideological straightjackets of the Thirties must inevitably attempt to discredit both the achievements and the values that belong to the post-World War ii period. Hence, too, the increasingly raucous attempts to dismiss the accomplishments of the Forties and Fifties as nothing more than the political products of the Cold War.

Kramer quotes Lionel Trilling: ‘…there was in the prevailing quality of the intellectual-political life a kind of self-deception: an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions which, while they seemed political, actually expressed a desire to transcend the political condition—which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny.’

Hilton Kramer, ‘Turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984’, New Criterion
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1984/4/turning-back-the-clock-art-and-politics-in-1984

Contemporary American oligarchy

by kurto

Oligarchy is the replacement of representative government by the melding of public and private power with the administrative state. Throughout history, most oligarchies have united around the stakeholders’ primary common interest in orderly rent-seeking. Typically, oligarchies have nothing to do with ideas of right and wrong, never mind with ideology. And if they form out of a political party, that party is all about oligarchy itself.

But ours is not a typical oligarchy. The sense of superiority to the rest of America had been the animating force behind the Progressive movement around the turn of the twentieth century. From their embryo, the disparate parts of the American administrative state/oligarchy shared this sense. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the will to hurt and to demean the rest of the population grew among these stakeholders, to the point that today, this vengeful approach overshadows and endangers their very power.

This happened because the tasks that these public/private institutions were empowered to fulfill always had something hostile, vindictive about them…

America’s oligarchy is made up of diverse elements that have little in common other than an indifference to or loathing of Western civilization in general and of the American republic in particular. Since members of the oligarchy support each other’s claims—over which they have no control—by the iron law of political necessity, there is no logical end to those claims. That is yet another reason why our oligarchy’s modus operandi relies so heavily on cutting off at the source any and all circulation of facts and arguments that would cause any set of stakeholders publicly to argue its case—an argument they might lose and that would surely upset other members of the coalition. This is why Google’s and Facebook’s censorship is essential to the oligarchy’s continued power…

Our ruling oligarchy has made it socially difficult even to think about the difference between what is right and wrong. This itself presents us with an important crossroads. Eliminating the intellectual and moral conversation that made the American republic unique has been the oligarchs’ effect if not also their objective. Their success in this enterprise haunts America’s future. China does not.

Angelo Codevilla, ‘The Specter of Chinese civilization’

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/11/the-specter-of-chinese-civilization

Locke and Strauss

by kurto

How do these passages reconcile? In the latter essay, there is no suggestion one of Jaffa broke with his teacher

While both schools of Strauss’s followers extol John Locke as America’s political-moral inspiration, Jaffa and his followers regard this English philosopher as a Christian thinker. Locke’s defense of individual rights is an integral part of Jaffa’s understanding of the Tradition and belongs to his picture of the founding.

Jaffa first published in 1952 a book that began as a dissertation under Strauss at the New School for Social Research, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics. It was, as philosopher Alasdair McIntyre observed, a luminous exercise in intellectual history. Much of his subsequent work seems driven by his commitment to his view of the American founding and Lincoln’s redemptive role in purifying this process.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-soul-of-the-claremont-school/

Strauss, famous for distinguishing between the explicit and supposedly hidden meaning of historical texts, persuaded a generation of political theorists that Locke was a closet Hobbesian who used biblical language to cloak a radically individualist, anti-religious agenda.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/10/the-appropriation-of-locke

Historiography of the English Civil War

by kurto

Why has the matter of liberty and the rule of law on one hand and lawless rule and despotism or tyranny on the other slipped out of focus in the cleverest writing of the past fifty years about the causes of the English Revolution?

Briefly, it slipped out of focus some time before the First World War when advanced historians as well as other advanced people assumed that all the political traits of a society, such as liberty and law, merely reflected its socioeconomic substructure; therefore to find the ‘real causes’ of any large upheaval in a society on must first look at the socioeconomic substructure. In the English-speaking world such people were so habituated to the rule of law that they had ceased to set a high value on its and had lost the capacity to imagine what a hell life would be without it. When it vanished elsewhere in the course of revolutions, they scarcely noticed the effects of its absence. After all, it had not actually vanished for them, and its absence elsewhere had no effect on them because they still enjoyed its presence.

There was no easy way before the First World War for historians to conceive that lawless rule was possible in a socially progressive society. Liberty and the rule of law, it seemed, would be natural concomitants of social progress, evolutionary or revolutionary. Only it would be in a fuller liberty and a truly just, nonexploitative law. In some lands, in order to deal with the enemies of progress, liberty and the rule of law might have to be suspended or delayed a while, soon to be restored or inaugurated, however, in their ultimate purity. For the men who saw the world this way it was unimaginable that any but the naïve could seriously imagine that an ultimate goal of political life or end of political action was or ever could be the achievement or maintenance of personal liberty and rule of law, those doubtless useful but somewhat old-fashioned items in the arsenal of the war against exploitation and alienation.

By the late 1930s the evidence had become overwhelming that the advanced views of the previous decades on liberty and the rule of law were nonsense. One had to be willfully blind in 1939 to believe that the political order merely reflected the socioeconomic base of a community. By then the evidence was in that, on the contrary, those who held unlimited control of the instruments of political violence and were ready to deploy them vigorously could within limits imprint on the socioeconomic base what structure they willed. The twin nightmare worlds of Stalin and Hitler had been built on the foundation of class relationships to the instruments of production profoundly divergent one from the other. By 1955 Khrushchev addressed the Twenty-second Congress, and by 1963 the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn had begun to appear in translation. By then to remain oblivious to the central importance of liberty and the rule of law in the ordering of human affairs ceased to be a mere intellectual defect and become a moral one. And finally, in 1974 the enormously rich people of the United States, and in 1976 the poor and backward people of Indian and Sri Lanka, showed beyond doubt that men of the most diverse cultures, of the utmost extremes of wealth and poverty, and of the most divergent relations to the instruments of production could be moved to decisive political action by the issue of liberty and the rule of law against arbitrary power and lawless rule.

And so the historiographic question is, how has it come about that in the midst of all this, in the midst of the hard evidence of their own experience, historians have wed themselves to views on the causes of the English Revolution that pay so little heed to the political concerns and motives for political action that conspicuously set men into motion then and now? It used to be said that historians reflect the views, biases, and preconceptions of their own day. Perhaps. If so, why the devil are present-day historians of England in the seventeenth century reflecting the views, biases, and preconceptions appropriate to the early 1900s, now obsolete for half a century? Why do they assume an intellectual stance suitable not to the political actuality of the past two decades hut more or less to the actualities from 1900 to 1925? That indeed is a problem of the English Revolution – a problem of his­ historiography, perhaps of the sociology or social psychology of knowl­edge, perhaps of the psychopathology of intellectuals. But in the mean­ time, let us historians drop this archaic nonsense. Enough already.

J.H. Hexter, ‘Power, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England’, Reappraisals in History (1979), pp. 216-217.

Gentlemanliness

by kurto

John Kekes on the ideal of a gentleman

Being a gentleman is not a matter of inheritance, wealth, or refinement. It needs to be earned by having a character with a sense of honor at its core. Character sets limits a gentleman will not cross and acknowledges responsibilities he will not shirk. It involves a commitment to a way of life that in some small or large way, by example or by action, contributes to making some lives better or protecting them from getting worse.

and

In The Idea of a University (1852), Cardinal John Henry Newman links gentlemen’s sense of honor to a university education. In our fraught times, education unfortunately often needs to be self-education, acquired by sitting quietly and alone in a room—digital technology silenced—slowly reading and reflecting on what some classic work of history, literature, or philosophy says about the possibilities and limits of life. And sometimes, not very often, it may happen that those who educate themselves discover not just how they might live, but how they must live if they want to be true to the ideal they have learned to admire from reading imaginatively reconstructed examples of others.

Marx on criticism

by kurto

Ken Minogue ‘s Pure Theory of Ideology includes this quote from Marx:

[Criticism] is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute to exterminates …. Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means. its essential sentiment is indignation, its essential activity is denunciation

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/ideologists-amok