Fencing Bear at Prayer

Over at the National Review Online , Jonah Goldberg was wondering of late why liberal viewers should be so engrossed by the BBC's Downton Abbey .  In his words: "The popular series...is shockingly conservative in many respects.  The aristocrats are decent, compassionate people, and the staff is, if anything, more happily class-conscious than the blue bloods. And yet, as far as I can tell, liberals love it." I'm not quite sure why he is so surprised.  Of course liberals (including most of my friends) love Downton.  Sure, it may seem from the current political conversation that the last thing liberals (a.k.a. progressives) would like is to see aristocrats (a.k.a. the hereditary rich--"You didn't earn that") compassionately portrayed, but this is to miss the point of what it means to be a hereditary lord.  Lords are not just the ones who collect rents from their tenants and live off the earnings.  Rather, they are precisely the ones upon whom the tenant...

You know what I enjoyed most about last night's presidential debate ?  How calm Governor Romney stayed throughout the whole thing.  I know, I know, that was his plan, but nevertheless, it was his plan, while President Obama's seems to have been to be as aggressive and sarcastic as possible so as to discredit his opponent.  In contrast, Mr. Romney didn't even bring up the whole thing about the video.* I wish that I could be more like Mr. Romney.  Let me tell you, if you haven't already guessed, it's been a hard past few months .  Some of my family members will barely talk to me.  I've been accused of being a racist; of "doing it on purpose" so as to hurt them; of being stupid, shallow, and selfish.  I've been laughed at, belittled, and patronized, all for trying to learn something about the history of liberalism and what, practically, it means.  And you know what I've learned?  Liberalism is evil. Okay, not quite, but it is the party of ev...

"One of the fertile sources of confusion in discussions of ideological issues is the dichotomy between the political left and the political right.  Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the left and the right is that only the former has even a rough definition.   What is called 'the right' are simply the various and disparate opponents of the left.  These opponents of the left may share no particular principle, much less a common agenda, and they can range from free-market libertarians to advocates of monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or innumerable other principles, systems, and agendas. "To people who take words literally, to speak of 'the left' is to assume implicitly that there is some other coherent group which constitutes 'the right.'  Perhaps it would be less confusing if what we call 'the left' would be designated by some other term, perhaps just as X .  But the designation as being on the left has at least some hi...

"The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink--and for those with one percent of knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.  The difference between special knowledge and mundane knowledge is not simply incidental or semantic.  Its social implications are very consequential.  For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.  That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters. "Where knowledge is conceived of as Hayek conceived of it, to include knowledge unarticulated even to ourselves, but expressed in our individual habits and social customs, then the transmission of such knowledge from millions of people to be concentrated in surrogate decision-makers becomes very problematic, if not impossible, since many of those operating with such...

You care . You mean well . You are passionate . You believe in taking action , particularly when it comes to children. You believe in community , particularly at the global level. You celebrate diversity , but abhor exclusionary categories . If something is wrong in the world, you expect the government to do something about it. You abhor war , but celebrate dissent , even if (or when) it is expressed through violence . You believe that education should be relevant to society and issue in action . Just trying to get a few things clear in my head...

"Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or 'natural' categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed.  Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code , 'So Dark, the Con of Man.' "The 'con' in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus' true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene.  The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide.  The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like.  But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought. "Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the 'mother' of New Age spirituality as well as a to...

I knew it was a mistake involving myself in political commentary*, but having taken the plunge, I guess I have to keep swimming, at least until the election. One of the things that has mystified me for years is how the label "liberal" came to be associated with support for government regulation of business, e.g. environmental and worker protection measures, or even (heaven forbid) financial transactions. I know that my colleagues in political science would have an answer to this, and I suspect it goes back to sometime in the 1980s, when Berke Breathed did all those comics about the General [my bad: the Major; it's been a long time] and Milo hunting liberals in the meadows of Bloom County. But knowing the little that I do about the history of the concept of liberalism as it developed in the 19th century, I must confess myself rather confused. This is the way John Stuart Mill (as Wikipedia puts it, "one of the first champions of modern 'liberalism'") s...