Hildegarde

I’m continually amazed by how often this blog brings home to me the very different ways we all read things–so different that I wonder, really, if any two people are ever reading the “same thing.” 

Okay, that’s incoherent.

Let me tell you about yesterday, which actually hooks up to what it is I found “brilliant” about that essay I posted yesterday.

Yesterday, I got myself into trouble on Facebook.

Ack.  It was one of those things.

Somebody had posted a link to an article about how Facebook allows “hate speech” against fat people, with the comment that FB has a button up on every page that lets you declare the page “racist/hate speech” if you want.

People then responded to this by saying well, it’s amazing how much of that kind of thing goes on when it has nothing to do with free speech or the first amendment.

And, you know, I couldn’t help myself.  I posted responses–yes, this is free speech, freedom of speech is an individual right, it’s not just about the government, I don’t want corporations telling me what ideas I’m allowed to express any more than I want governments to, letting people decide who gets to say what endangers everybody and causes much more harm than “hate speech” ever could.

And, of course, I had nobody else defending my side of it.  I got snippy little comments about how the First Amendment only applies to the government so this isn’t a free speech thing, and what’s really immoral isn’t censorship or control of speech and ideas but “hate speech” itself, and then when I wouldn’t back down I got the message that “this is done now.”

In other words, agree with me or I stop talking.

And part of me is just annoyed at myself, because the idea of FB for me was just to have little light conversation, and that kind of thing.

But part of me went back to something I learned on the Internet–it’s not a matter of Left and Right, it’s not a matter of conservative and liberal, it’s a matter of libertarianism or the need for control.

And that division–libertarianism and the need for control–occurs inside the usual political divisions.

And that division seems to be visceral–it seems to be tendencies within personalities rather than a result of one kind of political thinking or another.

In other words, I know libertarian socialists as well as libertarian capitalists, and libertarian everything in between.  I know self proclaimed socialists who are just as much free speech absolutists as I am, and who are committed to Second Amendment rights to boot.

I know self-proclaimed conservatives who think it should be illegal to criticize people’s religion and who really want laws restricting all kinds of private behavior, from homosexuality to flag burning.

The real division is not what we think it is. 

Hayek, of course, is famous for saying that social welfare states will necessarily breed serfdom, in the sense of breeding need-for-control people dependent on their controllers. 

It seems to me that that is just sort-of true.  Lee’s “natural libertarians” seem to exist everywhere, and in some cases they actually develop out of the other thing.

The problem with arguing about things like “hate speech,” of course, is that people automatically assume that if you’re not for banning it, then you think it’s “all right” that some people should be insulting to other people.

But I don’t think it’s all right.  I think it’s inexcusable.

I just think it’s wrong to ban it, because banning it will, in the end, cause far more damage.

Part of the problem is that I’m not a feelings person.  I get mine hurt a lot–well, okay, less than I did when I was younger, but that’s mostly because I’ve developed a hide like a rhinocerso–but it seems to me that in issues of speech, feelings are irrelevant.

And that one drives people crazy.

As to John’s post:  Both Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand provided foundations for individual rights that do NOT rely on God and that do NOT rely on if it feels good or you like it.  That is, they both provided objective grounds for rights.

But Mill and Locke were relying less on God thanyou think–they were Deists, and the God of the Deists is more like what you and I would call “the laws of nature” than it is like the God of Christianity.

Mill and Locke assumed–correctly, I think–that just as you could establish the laws of physical motion, the way in which nature is constructed and how it works, you could do the same with human nature.

But more about that later.

It’s already getting too hot to sit in this office.

It was 102 by midafternoon here yesterday, so I’m in the office–which is a sunroom–early, because it’s either early or nothing until later this week.

But I really hate heat.  And I hate cold.  And I got up really early, so Gregor got done.

But, a couple of things.

First, one of the reasons for reading what Singer and this guy Unger write is to see how they defend their ideas.   That also tells me what I have to argue or explain to refute their ideas.

Some people construct closed systems, so that once you accept their definitions it’s impossible to seriously challenge anything they say.  Freud is like that.  The problem with Freud’s thought is far more fundamental than anything in any of his arguments.  If you accept his definitions, you’re stuck accepting everything that follows them.

Certainly part of the issue here is the definitions these people are using.  And yes, I do think they know that, at base, the ideas they say they are upholding began as religious ones.  I think they would answer that by saying that those ideas are not only religious ones, that they’re “commonly accept basic moral values.” 

I think that, in order to counter them, you would indeed have to attack what they define as the core values.  But I’ll know more when I’ve had a chance to read Unger’s book. 

With Singer, I’ve only been able to read essays. Singer tends to be highly controversial, so the best of the anthologies for composition courses–for me, that would be Current Issues and Enduring Questions, from Bedford/St. Martin’s, and not because that company also publishes me–tend to include his stuff to see if they can get students energized to write things.

Current Issues also includes an essay by Garrett Hardin called “The Case Against Helping The Poor,” which takes almost the opposite stance, so the book isn’t biased in the way so many of these books often are.

But Hardin’s essay is–as these things often are–a practical response to what is presented as a moral argument in Singer and Unger.  And, as I’ve said before, I don’t think that works.

You have to counter moral arguments with moral arguments.

But I’ll get to that later.

Right now, I want to suggest a truly brilliant essay, linked to a couple of days ago on Arts and Letters Daily, by Lee Harris.  I’ve got a book by Harris around the house somewhere.  I like it a lot.

Anyway, the link:

And now I’m going to go drink something with ice in it.

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I came downstairs this morning, at not quite four, and it was so hot I had to put on the air conditioner. I can usually get away with not doing that until at least ten, even if July and August.  Then I checked the weather, and the news was “temperatures near 100.”  It’s getting to the point where I hate both winter and summer.  I’m past the age where I can handle the -12 temperatures of February, and I’ve never liked the heat.

In the meantime, just as I’m finishing up the Ayn Rand, I’ve come across a little book my older son was assigned for a philosophy course this past term.  It’s called Living High and Letting Die:  Our Illusion of Innocence, by Peter Unger, and it literally came spilling out at me when I picked up a duffle bag.

From what I can see from looking at it, the book isn’t particularly original. Peter Singer says a lot of the same stuff, and his books are longer and more widely reviewed.

But what strikes me about it is that it (and Singer) represent yet another case in which I thought Rand was exaggerating, when it turned out she was only considerably ahead of her time.

Unger’s point–as is Singer’s in a lot of his work–is that we have no right to anything we (think we) own, not even the food we eat, if we haven’t given away every single thing to save every starving person anywhere on the globe.  If we have a nice house and a nice car and central heating, we are responsible for the death of any child in Africa, because we don’t “need” those things to survive and we therefore should have given them away.

I’m putting this badly.  But I was thinking I’d actuall read this thing next up, so maybe I’ll be able to put it better later.

It’s the fourth of July, and I should probably be off doing something about something.  I know I’m supposed to be making chicken salad.  There are things.

But it’s also just after five in the morning, and I’ve just put away another big hunk of Gregor novel, and I don’t really want to get up and move away from the computer for the moment.  Besides, I have tea, and I can put the music on in the background if I want to.

On the other hand, I’m not feeling too serious this morning,  or too coherent.

So, instead of writing something comprehensive, with a good persuasive arc–or even trying to–let me throw out two ideas.

The first is this:  people who talk about the public sector vs the private sector are misunderstanding the real nature of the problem. 

The big divide isn’t between public and private, between government and business.  The big divide is between bureaucracy and the lack of it.

An enormous private corporation–say, for instance, Toyota or BP–exhibits not only exactly the same amount of dysfunction as a large public agency, it exhibits exactly the same kind of dysfunction.

And the first symptom of this kind of dysfunction is the proliferation of completely unnecessary people–people who do absolutely nothing to further the goal of the business or the agency.  These people are hired and retained for a raft of reasons that sound plausible until you actually start looking into them. 

There are “diversity coordinators,” and people who do nothing but plan parties for all-department meetings.  There are people who put out the company newspaper, full time.  The list is different in each organization, but in every case it is a list of people whose jobs do not need to exist for the organization to fulfill its function.

There are also other people with jobs that do need to exist for the organization to fulfill its function, except that there really need to be only about half of the people the organization has.  It now has twice as many as it actually needs because it has complicated its paperwork to the point where documenting a function has become so complicated you need more people to do that than you need to fulfill the actual function. 

People always say that this is a disease of government, and that business, always needing to be mindful of the bottom line, is largely immune–but a short look at any multinational corporation will show that this isn’t true. 

Bureaucracies, once started, feed on themselves.  The purpose of any bureaucracy is not to get something done, but to preserve itself, and that’s true in the private as well as in the public sector.  What’s more, that causes exactly the same kinds of problems for those of us who have to deal with the bureaucracy in question. 

When self-protection is the only goal, almost everything (lying, cheating, falsifying documents, blaming the victims of your incompetence for your mistakes) is acceptable.

My second point is this:  bureaucracies happen so often and so spectacularly in modern industrial societies because, in modern industrial societies, the vast majority of working aged people are not needed to do any necessary work.

I put that into italics for a reason.

At the base of every society, there are jobs that have to be done for that society to survive and prosper.  And as a society becomes more sophisticated and technologically advanced, there are more kinds of jobs that are needed to make that possible.

But at the same time there are more kinds of jobs necessary to make the society survive and prosper, the percentage of the population required to be in such jobs gets smaller.

Five hundred years ago, a majority of your population had to be engaged in agriculture just for your society to eat.  These days, that percentage is down to single digits. 

Of course, we need other people that that old agricultural society did not–engineers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, computer hardware and software designers.

The problem is, we don’t need enough of these people to engage a majority of our citizens in what is actually, at base, useful work.

And I’m using an expansive definition of “useful work.”  I don’t think, for instance, that entertainment is negligible. 

But even with that expansive definition, we have an awful lot of people with nothing significant to do.  

And to deal with them, we invent “professions” that are often fun, but also sort of silly–think of “fashion.”  The making of clothing is certainly useful work, necessary for any society to survive.  Fashion magazine production, runway modeling, and designing “couture” originals made of clear plastic and strategically placed conch shells are not.

The problem is this:  people who do actually useful work have a different experience of themselves and their society, and a different perspective on both, thanpopel who do things that are not actually useful work. 

For one thing, if nothing else is different, there’s the fact that there’s a lot more give in the non-useful professions than in the useful ones, because the society-wide consequences of failure are so much smaller, if not nonexistent.

And that leads me to this: the political and philosophical and moral ideas of people who do useful work are likely to be different from those of people who do work that is not useful, and to be so because their experiences will have taught them almost contradictory things about the way the world works.

I’ve gotten to that place where I’m beginning to think I’m blithering unbelievably.

So I’ll go off and listen to music, among other things. 

And I’ll just leave this here as it is.

Last year at this time, I was in the middle of trying to find a way to get to my 40th high school reunion.  That only partially worked out, but it put me in touch with people I hadn’t seen in forty years, and that seems to have cut loose some kind of nostalgia trip.  Or something.

I don’t want to say nostalgia.  I’m not really a nostalgic person, in the way that word is commonly and properly used.  I do have times in my life that I miss–any time with Bill in it, for instance–but for whatever reason, I don’t long to live there instead of here.  And I don’t sugarcoat, or at least not much.  That was then.  This is now.  I’ve always liked living in the now.

All that being said, I’ve found myself, over the past year, sort of stumbling over things I haven’t seen or read or heard of since high school, and sticking with them for a while just to see what they were like.  Or are like. I’m not sure you can recreate a reaction.

A couple of days ago, what I ran across was, of all things, Atlas Shrugged. 

For those of you who don’t know, Atlas Shrugged is the most famous novel by a woman who immigrated to the US from Russia between the World Wars and renamed herself Ayn Rand.  Rand was enormously popular as a novelist in her time, and still is–Atlas Shrugged alone still sells in the tens of thousands of copies a year. 

She is best known, however, not for being a novelist but for being an ideologue, the most libertarian of all the libertarians, a woman who wants to privatize the roads and do away with all social welfare programs.

And as an ideologue, Rand has been enormously influential.   Alan Greenspan, the man who served four terms as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was a Rand disciple, and the libertarian movement that gave rise to things like the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute has been fueled by people who came to libertarianism first through Rands novels.

Rand herself started a foundation, now called The Ayn Rand Institute, specifically to popularize her ideas, and you can find it here:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_intro

But the ideas were popular enough already, and have become increasingly so in the US.

They were not, however, popular with conservatives.  She was roundly ridiculed, and worse, not only by the left by by the right, especially by Bill Buckley and The National Review, with one conservative writer dismissing the popularity of her work as being due to the “dirty bits”–the sex scenes.

These days, Rand’s “dirty bits” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on prime time network TV, and she’s still popular.  My guess is that whatever’s going on, it isn’t about the weird boddice-ripper-romance-novel-not-really-rape scenes she was so fond of giving her favorite heroes and heroines.

That said, I have a relationship to this book that I have to no other.  Sometime between junior high school and the start of college, I read it over twenty times.  I read a couple of paperback copies absolutely to pieces.  And I did it even though, even at the time, I knew for a fact that it was, on any technical level a very bad book.

Well, no.  Let me take that back. Rand was a meticulous plotter.  She could keep three dozen balls in the air at once and make sure the pieces all fit together perfectly in the end.  The idea for Atlas Shrugged is original, which is hard to do at this stage in the history of the novel.  So there’s that.

There’s also her one great virtue, which is that she wrote completely plausible, completely true-to-life villains–true enough so that, forty years on, I run into these people all the time and go, “Oh, wait, I know how that mind works,” because of her.

And she got those villains right, too.  She got them perfectly.  She understood–in a way no writer has before or since, including writers with far more talent for fiction than she had–a certain kind of mind.  Or maybe I should say a certain kind of disease of the mind in the modern world.

The drawbacks of the fiction as fiction are threefold:

First, English was not her native language, and it shows.  The writing is often stiff, and overly “proper.”

Second, the woman was a Romantic, in the sense that her sense of a human life propery lived had more in common with Byron and Shelley than with real life as we know it.  She liked significance, and striking poses, and the Great Man tortured by the stupidity and venality around him.  It was just that her Great Men were industrialists and commercial inventors instead of artists.

The result of this is that she got her heroes wrong to almost the exact extent she got her villains right.  And she got them wrong internally even when she got them right externally.  Some of her heroes hang out in old blue jeans and flannel shirts, but as soon as you get into their heads they’re thinking in terms of “bearing anything he needed to bear just to keep on going” and “glimpsing the greatness that should be possible but that the world around him would not let him reach.”

My guess is that the only Great Man Rand ever knew was herself, and that she grafted her way of thinking onto other people almost as a matter of course.  That certainly seems to be what happened in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Rand’s friend and her inspiration for the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. 

Rand managed to get it all exactly backwards–she portrays Roark as failing all his architectural school design classes and excelling at engineering, while Wright himself was a great designer and a terrible engineer.  Still, he appreciated the appreciation, and designed a house for her.  I don’t know how it’s holding up.

The third problem with Atlas Shrugged as fiction is that too much of it isn’t fiction.  Periodically, one of the heroes will deliver the kind of monologue that really should have been an essay in a magazine or a collection than a characcter speech in a work of fiction. 

And those monologues are not minor.  There is an entire chaper in Atlas Shrugged, called “This Is John Galt Speaking,” in which Rand outlines her entire philosophy–morally, aesthetically and politically.  In the hardcover, this chapter takes up 70 pages.

Of course, in a book that’s 1168 pages long, that’s a drop in the bucket.

I don’t really want to bitch about the monologues. They taught me some things that I didn’t know and that have been very useful to me, not least of which is the necessity of understanding how people are defining the words they use.

And I always read every word of those monologues, because the ideas were (and are) interesting.  It’s just a terrible way to write a novel. 

You can get the monologues separately, by the way–they’ve been reprinted in collections of her work, along with the many nonfiction essays she wrote at the end of her career.

It’s odd, though, to read it again after all this time.  It still comes closest to what I believe both politically and philosophically, even though I’m now sure that she got her heroes not just wrong but perversely wrong–and that getting the heroes right is important.

Of course, getting the villains right is also important, so there’s that.

This

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/66894/sec_id/66894

was linked to on Arts and Letters Daily this morning.

It’s by Theodore Dalrymple, and it’s got some interesting things to say about meritocracies and equality.

And, you know, like that, to go along with today’s actual post, below.

Well, we’re now on the third day of the new computer, and things are definitely better.  I actually got a big whacking hunk of work done this morning without yelling at the keyboard even once.  And nobody on earth sympathizes with the fact that I really did love WordPerfect, even if nobody else on the planet did.  So I’ve got WORD now. I seem to be getting used to it.

Um…guys?

I mean, gee.

I got this new computer, which is great, and a lot faster than my computer.  I can actually write this blog on the blog site, which I couldn’t do on my home computer before.  I’m in love with the thing.

But I’m also me.  I react to change in minor routines with a kind of belligerent panic.  So I’m doing a little of that.  What the hell.

Right now, I’ve got to major problems, which are connected–the space bar tends to stick, which I’m not used to, so I’m not correcting for it yet.   But I will get used to it. 

And the related thing is that the back space key on this keyboard is the size of an ordinary letter key, instead of being really long like it was on my old keyboard.

And I touch type.

So, I write merrily along, realize the space hasn’t happened, blindly put my pink up to hit the back space and get slash marks more often than not.

I’ll work it out.  I had keys on my old keyboard where the letters had worn right off, making them blank.  Which was fine for me, because I do touch type, but it drove the boys nuts because they hunt and peck.

I’m keeping the keyboard.  I’ll learn to remember to really smash the hell out of the space bar eventually.

As for anything else that might be going on:

Sitting around yesterday, waiting for the computer to go in and to leave for a really ridiculous, unnecessary meeting that I had in the evening, I realized something about myself.  It’s one of those things that surprise me, but that I don’t know what to do with.

When it comes to “entertainment,” both the fictional kind and the reality-TV kind, what I’m most drawn to is one of two things:  the extremely competent, or the extremely screwed up.

Take,  for instance, Apollo 13.  I don’t think I ever remember to put it down when somebody asks me for my favorite movie, but I’ll watch it whenever it comes on television, I own it, and there’s never a time when I don’t want to see it.

What is that, really, but a movie about a world of extremely competent people handling a very big problem?  I think I like the idea of it, a world full of people who honestly bone-deep know how to do very hard things, and do them every day, without–I don’t know what I want here.  “Prancing around about it” are the words that come to mind, but that’s not quite it.   Maybe “making a big deal about how important they are” comes closer to it.

It occurs to me that this is why I like the Ocean movies, too, even though I’m not usually a good audience for caper stories.  There’s always something in the back of mymind going, “they’re stealing stuff.  They’re stealing stuff, for God’s sake.”

I think with the Ocean movies, the focus is not on the stealing but on the skill, planning and intelligence of the operation, so that the nature of the operation sort of drifts into the background.

On the other end is the extremely screwed up, which includes things like Intervention and a fair number of the various Lockup and Women Behind Bars sorts of things.  It also includes all those movies about alocholics (Days of Wine and Roses, 28 Days, Clean and Sober) that I sometimes wonder might have been made by people as part of a sentence after a drug or alcohol charge.

Part of what fascinates me with these is the money.  There you’ll have Our Guy, hasn’t had a job in ten years, starts shooting up at eight in the morning…and then the information that, last year, he spent $30,000 on drugs.

I mean–what?  Getting that much out of mugging people would make mugging a full time job that would leave him practically no time to get high.  Where is all this money coming from?  And there’s tons of it.  It’s everywhere.

And although there are certainly plenty of bums on the street because of alcohol and drugs, it’s astounding how many people with full-blown addictions manage to have really nice places to live. 

I know that the reality shows are skewed to middle class anomalies, but still–there do seem to be an awful lot of them. 

Part of what fascinates me about all this is that I can’t really imagine it.  I seem to have some kind of internal program that makes me run around doing stuff, teaching, writing, whatever.  I don’t even need a boss or a supervisor to do it.  I just do it. 

Obviously, some people don’t.  I always wonder why they don’t, what it is in them that makes it possible to just let themselves go.

Eck.

This keyboard is getting easier to use, and I found my copy of Edmund Burke, which I’d been looking for.

And, just a note, the new copy of  Free Inquiry has yet another column by Shadia Drury full of howlers, and this time without even the excuse that it’s all from the Middle Ages and she doesn’t read Latin anyway.

My favorite was her definition of “oligarchy” as “rule by the rich.”  It means “rule by a small group,” which is hardly the same thing. 

Ah, well.  She was doing her usual thing of dumping a bunch of cliches about the US as if she’d thought of them herself and they were brand new, coupled with indulging her nostalgia for a “conservatism” that, if she actually knew anything about it, would make her run like hell in the opposite direction.

I’m going to go do something practical.  Maybe I can get back to the two Enlightenments tomorrow.

So, whatI havehere, at the moment,isanewcomputer. That I don’t really know how to work yet.  I especially don’t seem to know how to work the space bar yet.

The computer arrived courtesy of my friends Carol and Richard, who understand this kind of thing.   

It’s very nice, and faster than my old one–well, snails are faster than my old one–but I’ve threatened to kill the keyboard twice in the last five minutes.

It does work a lot better on Hildegarde, though, and that’s a plus.

Okay, let me work this out a little–let me go back to where I started thinking about it, instead of where I started writing about it.

In the beginning, not of Western Civilization itself, but of Western Civilization as you and I have lived it–because we are products of the twentieth century, and not the fourth–the Aristotelian and the Platonic.

Yeah, I know.  I always get back to this.

But I think that it does always get back to this. 

Aristotle and Plato provided two different and essentially contradictory ways of looking at the world.

Plato proposed a system of pure intellection–we would learn about the world by thinking about the world, by making connections and finding patterns.  And, in doiing so, we would discover the ideal and the perfect, and be able to aim for it.

If you think about Plato long enough, what you get is a kind of early version of Intelligent Design–that is, the conviction that the universe not only makes sense (Aristotle thought that, too), but that it makes a certain kind of sense, a narrative sense.

It was in this sense that the Middle Ages (and Augustine before them) adopted Plato–not for his political writings (which they knew little about and ignored when they did know them), but in his concept of a “real” world beyond this one, the world of perfection and ideals.

Since the world of perfection and ideals was, in fact, perfect, it could be understood by thinking about it as long as we kept our thought ruthlessly logical.

If you want to see how this works out, consider the Medieval defense of the Immaculate Conception.

For those of you who haven’t already heard me rant about this obsessively, the Immaculate Conception is NOT the Virgin Birth–it is NOT Jesus Christ who was immaculately conceived.

The Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that says that MARY was conceived in HER MOTHER’S WOMB without the stain of original sin.

The pregnancy was otherwise completely usual.  Mary’s parents had sex, and Anna gave birth to Mary in the ordinary way. 

“Immaculate'” refers to MARY’S lack of original sin at birth. 

A lot of people these days try to say that the Immaculate Conception wasn’t part of Catholic Doctrine until the 19th century, which is when the Vatican defined it officially as a dogma, but the idea goes back as far as the early Fathers of the Church and was a popular subject for art in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

It was defended in two ways:

First, as a matter of the morally proper.  It would not be proper for God himself to be lodged in a body stained with sin.

Second, as the logical inference of the narrative–Mary was a “second Eve.”  The first Eve was asked for her obedience, to do what God willed for her, and she said no, and ate the fruit.  Mary was asked for her obedience, to do what God willed for her, and she said yes.

In order for the parallels to be exact, Mary had to be free of original sin–because Eve had been free of original sin.

I remember, the first time I heard this, thinking that it was so much like analyzing a novel or a poem–it’s that same kind of thinking, the same kind of assumptions about what you’re expecting to find, and what would establish the rightness of your interpretation.

That is how Platonists view the world–by starting with what they already know to be Right and Proper, and then working out the ways in which the world must be if that is so.  And since what is Right and Proper is not just unquestioned but unquestionable, anything found in the world that seems to contradict it is inherently evil, and must be resisted or rooted out.

I’d like to point out that this is a closed system.  There is no way to successfully argue with a Platonist except by attacking his definition of the Right and the Proper.  Once you’ve accepted those definitions–remember my think about equality the last couple of days–any attempt you make to argue with him will not only fail.  You’ll decisively lose.

Aristotle was less interested in ideals and perfection than he was in the everyday reality of the everyday world.

His approach was not to ask what was Supposed to Be, but to try to find out what was.  He may be the first person in history to try to make a systematic study of animals by collecting specimens of them and reports from people who had travelled and seen species not immediately available to him.

For Aristotle, it was important to uphold the Right and Proper, but the definition of the Right and Proper had to be derived from the real experience of real life.  How men Ought to Behave mattered, but when you were setting up a legal system or a political system, it mattered as much how they actually did behave. 

The differences between how men ought to behave and how they did behave marked the limits on the possibility of earthly perfection in any society.   We could try our best to efect the Perfect State, but we would fail, and if we tried to hard we might actually get something less good than if we’d agreed to compromise earlier. 

At any rate, what we needed to decide what kind of society we should have was just what we needed to figure out what kind of solar system we had–a thorough investigation of what actually exists.  Our standard should be the Real, not the Ideal.

By now, all of this ought to sound at least vaguely familiar.  The fact is that this argument has not really changed since fourth-century-BC Athens. 

It is the argument that created Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the classic conservative (in the traditional sense) response to the rise of modern political radicalism. 

It is also the argument that created both classical liberalism (what we’d call libertarianism, these days) and eventually the American Republic.

But the first thing it did was to create two Enlightenments, not one–the French (which is the one we all think of when we think of the “Enlightenment”) and the English.

And it is the tension between those two things–and especially the tension that exists in the constitution and founding documents and ideas of this country in particular–that we end up talking about affirmative action, national health insurance, immigration illegal and otherwise, and all the rest.

Which is the reason I started this series of posts, and what I’ll get to.

But I want to point out one thing.

In terms of PRACTICAL consequences, Aristotle has it over Plato hands down, at least if you look at the overall picture. 

And yet Aristotle loses time after time, and he’s been in retreat now for decades, first on the cultural level, and then on the level of laws and of nations.

And there’s a reason for that, that is not just “those guys are evil.”

If that’s all it was, we would all be doomed.