Bobby Keys (1943-2014)
A Danse Macabre of Wants and Satisfactions: Hayek, Oakeshott, Liberty, and Cognition
Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making
Coming very soon and to be reviewed in JMB.
Nick Lowe on Christmas Musical “Naffness”
The profoundly underrated Nick Lowe — the Jesus of Cool! NL has writen great songs ranging from rockabilly through to power pop. And if you want to know what “Naffness” means . . .
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 80
“Good gracious,” Ignatius spluttered. “I can see that we’re going to have a great deal of trouble capturing the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote. We are going to have to rebuild our image along lines other than those I see here.”
Timmy, who was watching the black leather lout twist and dump eager partners sighed, “How fun.”
The room itself was what decorators would probably call severe. The walls and high ceilings were white, and the room itself was sparsely furnished with a few pieces of antique furniture. The only voluptuous element in the large room was the champagnecolored velvet drapes tied back with white ribbons. The two or three antique chairs had apparently been chosen for their bizarre design and not for their ability to seat anyone, for they were delicate suggestions, hints at furniture with cushions barely capable of accommodating a child. A human in such a room was expected not to rest or sit or even relax, but rather pose, thereby transforming himself into a human furnishing that would complement the decor as well as possible.
After Ignatius had studied the decor, he said to Dorian, “The only functional item in here is that phonograph, and that is obviously being misused. This is a room with no soul.” He snorted loudly, in part over the room and in part over the fact that no one in the room had even noticed him, even though he complemented the decor as well as a neon sign would have. The participants in the kickoff rally seemed much more concerned about their own private fates this evening than they were about the fate of the world. “I notice that no one in this whitened sepulcher of a room has so much as even looked at us. They haven’t even nodded to their host, whose liquor they are consuming and whose year-round air conditioning they are taxing with all of those overpowering colognes. I feel rather like an observer at a catfight.”
“Don’t worry about them. They’ve been simply dying for a good party for months. Come. You must see the decoration that I’ve made.” He took Ignatius over to the mantelpiece and showed him a bud vase containing one red, one white, and one blue rose. “Isn’t that wild? It’s better than all of that tacky crepe paper. I did buy some crepe paper, but nothing that I could do with it satisfied me.”
“This is a floral abortion,” Ignatius commented irritably and tapped the vase with his cutlass. “Dyed flowers are unnatural and perverse and, I suspect, obscene also. I can see that I am going to have my hands full with you people.”
In defence of spontaneous order: Hayek and libertarianism
Abstract
According to Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and everyone else who knows what he or she is talking about, well-functioning markets depend, inter alia, upon clear property rights and a judicial system that enforces agreements and resolve disputes.
It’s true that Friedrich Hayek, whom Mr Linker shamelessly abuses, is the most prominent 20th-century intellectual behind the concept of spontaneous order—the theory that systems, such as markets, naturally correct, and function best without human meddling. It’s true that Hayek is commonly lumped in with libertarians. It’s true that spontaneous order is an idea libertarians tend to promote. Yet spontaneous order is not a libertarian idea.
The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 10
“What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition. I picked up a German-language weekly in the library. In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun. Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father’s desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme. The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before. There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.”
“The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.”
Yukio Mishima
Oakeshott’s concept of ideology
A new paper from the very excellent David Corey.
Abstract
Michael Oakeshott’s critique of ‘political rationalism’ is often regarded as a unique contribution to the study of 20th-century ‘ideologies.’ But, in fact, Oakeshott understood rationalism and ideology as distinct phenomena. This article exposes the essence of each in Oakeshott’s writings, analyses their complex relationship and shows how far back in human history they reached. Neither was, for Oakeshott, distinctly modern. In fact, he traced ideology and rationalism alike to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, even while he acknowledged important differences in their ancient and modern manifestations. Oakeshott’s outlook with respect to these phenomena was significantly more pessimistic than that of other 20th-century analysts. He did not think our problems were easily curable. He did, however, harbour some hope (albeit dreamy) that in the domain of politics in particular, the metaphor of ‘conversation’ might somehow loosen the grip of ideological thought and action.
Though the word ideology has many meanings, some of them mutually exclusive, it continues to be an indispensable analytical concept in contemporary political theory. Far from disappearing from the scene as was once expected, ideologies of all sorts appear to be thriving today—some grand, some modest; some negative, some positive; some new, some old. The endeavour to understand ideologies (including the various ways the word itself can be used) is therefore an important aspect of our effort to understand politics in general. Michael Oakeshott’s use of the term, which forms the subject of the present study, proves especially illuminating in this regard. Oakeshott’s concept of ideology was more original than has been hitherto recognized because commentators have tended to conflate his critique of it with his broader and more familiar critique of ‘modern rationalism.’ But ideology and rationalism were for him distinct. Oakeshott understood modern rationalism in the standard way as an intellectual temperament that emerged from the exuberances of the Renaissance and the upheavals of the Reformation. Though his concept of rationalism was not unique, his spirited critique of it certainly was, at least in its breadth and sophistication. However, Oakeshott in fact never described rationalism as an ideology, despite his view that ideology and rationalism were closely linked.
Thus, we need to wrestle with the following questions: what exactly did Oakeshott mean by ‘ideology’? What is the precise relationship between ideology and rationalism? And finally, what is the philosophical significance of Oakeshott’s work in this area? As I argue later, Oakeshott’s concept of ideology was critical, but not as critical as his view of rationalism, and yet, insofar as ideologies were problematic for Oakeshott, they were vexingly so because they seemed to him to spring not from some ephemeral defect of modernity but rather from certain propensities of human experience itself. This helps to explain why ideologies (as Oakeshott used the term) constitute a permanent feature of political life.
manwithoutqualities 