I need to spend less time online so I’m sacrificing Tumblr. Cheers, guys, it’s been fun.
So, Tumblr is the place for spontaneous and perhaps unreasonable thoughts. Why have renowned modern poets often been on the right and renowned modern playwrights often been on the left? (I count Eliot, Frost, Larkin, Stevens, Pound and Yeats among the former, and Wilde, Shaw, Pinter, Miller, Brecht and Fo among the latter; without, of course, denying contradictory names like Ginsberg and Stoppard.)
Imagine this show but with effective altruists…
untiltheseashallfreethem said: I don’t know if it’s contradictory, but I definitely have those same two desires. (Is there a problem with being contradictory?)
Yes and no…
In The Weekly Standard Joseph Epstein reflects on Michael Oakeshott and compares the “contemplative” philosopher with the neoconservative firebrand Irving Kristol…
Kristol’s thinking had a religious bent; Oakeshott’s seemed ineluctably secular. Kristol was future-minded; Oakeshott locked firmly into the present. Finally and decisively, Oakeshott’s conservatism, in Kristol’s reading, offered no “guidance in coping with all those necessary evils, which can . . . destroy whatever philosophical equanimity we have achieved as a result of reading the writers of philosophy.”
Part of Irving Kristol’s disagreement with Michael Oakeshott had to do with the radical differences between English and American conservatism. England is (or at least was) a society aristocratic in spirit and based heavily on tradition. America is based on revolution. Americans, even ultra-conservative ones, have not given up on the idea of progress; English conservatives wish (or used to wish) to retard, even stop, progress. Evelyn Waugh once remarked that he would never again vote for the Tories: They had been in power for more than eight years and hadn’t turned back the clock one minute. American conservatism, Kristol recognizes, is “a populist conservatism,” which “dismays the conservative elites of Britain and Western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism—which in actuality, always turns out to be a defensive and therefore enfeebled conservatism.
There are broad differences between English and American conservatism, yes, rooted in the latter nation’s idealistic beginnings, but Kristol rewrote history to legitimise the dominance of his clique. From Randolph to Buchanan, from Eliot to Berry and from Babbitt to Kirk, American conservatives, while often more religious than their English equivalents, opposed what they saw as rash reformative instincts in the US. The tradition of Burke crossed the Atlantic and in attempting to mould “conservatism” anew Kristol and his associated proved that they were no friends of it.
I have been wondering if it is contradictory to both like that which is mysterious and to desire the truth. But I love walking yet would often remain unsatisfied if I failed to reach my destination.
A few pictures from Krakow, Poland’s first city of culture…
untiltheseashallfreethem said:
I’m 25 right now. At 30, my fertility will start decreasing, so it’s imperative that I start having kids around then. Once I have kids, I’ll want to be a stay-at-home mom. It may be possible to continue my intellectual pursuits while stay-at-home-mom-ing, but if I want to contribute to academia, I’ll need a foot in the door (i.e. a PhD) by the time I have kids. And even then, I won’t be able to devote myself to research the way I can now.
Perhaps, but Elizabeth Anscombe had seven kids.