Alan: Conservatism's enduring appeal lies in the mistaken belief that The Ruling Class is an admirable social sector and, to imitate its "success," strict stratification by money and ethnicity is not only good but necessary.
G.K. Chesterton, who is usually considered a conservative, excoriates his putative fellows:
Chesterton Viewed The Rich As "Oppressive" "Scum" And "Failures"
G.K. Chesterton: "The Anarchy of The Rich"
G.K. Chesterton and Warren Buffett's Class War
Chesterton Viewed The Rich As "Oppressive" "Scum" And "Failures"
G.K. Chesterton: "The Anarchy of The Rich"
G.K. Chesterton and Warren Buffett's Class War
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of G.K. Chesterton Posts
The Apocalypse (literally "the removal of the veil") which is currently re-making (or at least un-doing) traditional conservatism reveals that "nobility" is not noble except in one limited sense: At infrequent intervals The Wealthy embody a measure of noblesse oblige, a trait that recalls this keen insight: "A philanthropist is someone who gives away what he should give back."
Noblesse oblige is gone, replaced by brutal and brutalizing self-aggrandizement.
"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie. They're Taking It All"
http://paxonbothhouses.
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On "Too Pure Principles" And The Collapse Of Conservatism
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On "Too Pure Principles" And The Collapse Of Conservatism
The very ground of conservatism is littered with fundamentally fearful people, struggling to check the advancement of undeserving "others,"more often than not in attempts to exercise, maintain or restore white privilege.
In this effort, "conservatives" circle their wagons, dig trenches, make threats, wage needless war and praise racial purity, claiming these lofty endeavors are undertaken in The Name of God.
Despite professions of godliness, winner-take-all conservatives never confront their central selfishness, disdaining "alien others" by declaring them irresponsible, unwashed and unworthy.
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
"Do You Know What You're Doing To Me?"
Jesus of Nazareth
http://paxonbothhouses.
The story of Jonah And The Whale illustrates the ferocity with which "the self-enclosed" shun the unwelcome work of "reaching out" to "The Other."
"The Story Of Jonah And The Whale"
Brilliantly Retold By Anne Herbert
The pomp, circumstance and monarchical grandeur that once characterized conservatism has lost its glow, dimmed by conservatism's self-seeking "shadow" now apparent to anyone with a folded cortex and an internet connection.
Hard-core conservatives still gloss their essential selfishness by contemplating Golden Age Magnificence through the manipulable patina of yesteryear.
Last gasp conservatives conveniently ignore the underbelly of once-upon-a-time Grandeur, oblivious to the inordinate pain suffered in every pre-modern society.
Until 1750, half of humankind died by age 8.
Until 1850, humans lived half their lives with toothache.
Biologist/psychologist Gregory Bateson noted that "natural history is the antidote for piety" which is why "the pious" pay so little attention to natural history.
Conservatism's dwindling ranks still represent Nobility as noble.
It is not.
Contemporary conservatives who have inherited the mantle of "nobility" are, in the main, crass, uncaring capitalists who devise fabulous fortunes by promoting "The Seven Deadly Sins," then vacuuming the profit created by commercialization of lust, greed, envy and - by way of The Military-Industrial Complex - wrath.
Hard-core conservatives still gloss their essential selfishness by contemplating Golden Age Magnificence through the manipulable patina of yesteryear.
Last gasp conservatives conveniently ignore the underbelly of once-upon-a-time Grandeur, oblivious to the inordinate pain suffered in every pre-modern society.
Until 1750, half of humankind died by age 8.
Until 1850, humans lived half their lives with toothache.
Biologist/psychologist Gregory Bateson noted that "natural history is the antidote for piety" which is why "the pious" pay so little attention to natural history.
Colonial Dentistry And George Washington's Teeth
Conservatism's dwindling ranks still represent Nobility as noble.
It is not.
Contemporary conservatives who have inherited the mantle of "nobility" are, in the main, crass, uncaring capitalists who devise fabulous fortunes by promoting "The Seven Deadly Sins," then vacuuming the profit created by commercialization of lust, greed, envy and - by way of The Military-Industrial Complex - wrath.
Compendium Of Pax Posts: "The Seven Deadly Sins"
Against this backdrop, it must also be acknowledged that conservatism is an essential political philosophy.
Power eventually corrupts anyone who wields it and therefore both political poles are essential so that first one, then the other, can be called upon to impose intermittent purgation.
Keeping this polar alternation in mind, it is also true that "the long arc of justice" bends toward compassion, inclusivity and a "preferential option for the poor" (to borrow a somewhat cumbersome term from Catholic "Social Teaching").
Power eventually corrupts anyone who wields it and therefore both political poles are essential so that first one, then the other, can be called upon to impose intermittent purgation.
Keeping this polar alternation in mind, it is also true that "the long arc of justice" bends toward compassion, inclusivity and a "preferential option for the poor" (to borrow a somewhat cumbersome term from Catholic "Social Teaching").
Liberalism: "Satanic Rebellion Against God?" (The Thinking Housewife)
Garry Wills and the New Debate Over the Declaration of Independence
Ralph E. Luker
1980
But if Inventing America is a distributist’s reading of Thomas Jefferson, stressing the agrarian and communitarian character of his thought, the acute criticism it has received is just as largely shaped by the assumptions and values of each critic. Historian Kenneth Lynn’s brutal assault on the book comes as no particular surprise. His reviews for Commentary in the past year have been such that one would think that Norman Podhoretz sends only wretched books for Lynn to review. Yet his attack on Wills fits a pattern outlined in Nash’s work on post-World War II conservative thought. The Old Leftists who formed the anti-Communist block gathered around National Review have more recently been succeeded by a younger generation of former leftists become “neo-conservatives.” InCommentary and The Public Interest, the neoconservatives have sought to shift the weight of American thought to the Right, with attacks upon “presentism” in historical studies, “apocalypticism” in social analysis, and the New Left in general.
Lynn’s recent attack upon Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism exemplifies the case. He acknowledged that ours has become a self-indulgent culture. But finding several typographical errors in the book by “our apocalyptic author,” Lynn said that there were “examples of the stupefaction of the privileged classes which bother me even more, namely, the sloppy mistakes of the middle-aged professor who wrote the book.” Therein, said Lynn, lay “the inability of Christopher Lasch and other writers on the Left to recognize their own contribution to the destruction of cultural standards.”
The Johns Hopkins professor is not alone among Commentary’s neoconservatives to have attacked Carry Wills. Referring to Wills” introduction to Lillian Hellman’sScoundrel Time, Nathan Glazer wrote that Wills “tells us with no hint of embarrassment that he prefers Communist totalitarianism to democracy.” Peter Steinfels takes note of that remark in his recent study of The Neoconservatives. “Wills tells us nothing of the sort,” Steinfels points out.
He writes as though the United States initiated Cold War hostilities—and should not have. Take issue with that, if you please, or with Wills’s account of the connivance between liberalism and McCarthyism; but no degree of faultfinding with Wills’s facts or his historical sensitivity adds up to a preference for Communist totalitarianism. That Glazer “deduces” such a preference and writes that Wills “tells us” of it “with no hint of embarrassment” only suggests how easily neoconservatives abrogate to themselves the task of establishing other people’s loyalty, how naturally they conduct controversies in terms of who shall or shall not be considered, to cite Glazer again, among “the principal enemies of freedom.”Lynn’s charge that Inventing America is “the tendentious report of a highly political writer whose unannounced but nonetheless obvious aim is to supply the history of the Republic with as pink a dawn as possible” should be seen against that background of careless charges by neoconservative reviewers at Commentary.
Had Wills been successful, Lynn acknowledged, “a new nation, conceived in liberty, would have been transmogrified into a new nation, conceived in communality.” But the book is “careless about language, displays no feeling for historical circumstance, is badly organized, rebarbatively written and replete with factual errors.” Lynn points to significant parallels in language between the Declaration and Locke’s Second Treatise, for example. But Edmund Morgan, who had praised Inventing America, had already pointed out those parallels, and Wills has acknowledged them in a new edition of the book. The ultimate offense, for Lynn, is that “in the world of the 70’s the cult of egality and “human rights” is served by many priests.” Lumping Morgan and David Brion Davis with Wills, Lynn charges them with “shameless pandering to the Zeitgeist.”
Wills responded to Lynn’s review in his syndicated newspaper column with the suggestion that Lynn was a “commie hunter,” and Lynn replied in the Baltimore Sun with the suggestion that Wills was indulging in McCarthyite character assassination and innuendo. “It is not his leftist views per se that bother me,” Lynn reiterated, “but rather his imposition of those views upon the mind of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.” More to the point is that, in their charges and counter-charges, Wills and the neoconservatives are both willing to impose their views upon the past in hopes of shaping the Zeitgeist.
***
The Thinking Housewife and Closeted White Supremacy
Race And Reason: A Yankee View:
4 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Racist pamphlet, September 10, 2012
By
This review is from: Race and Reason: A Yankee View (Paperback)
Carleton Putnam, whose book can still be found in Nazi and racialist sites, defends racial segregation using biological premises. In short, blacks are intrinsecally inferior to whites, incapable of originating or even absorbing a "superior" culture. This book was trounced in 1961 by Garry Wills in National Review (which also favored some degree of segregation at the time, against Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education) and, if read today, sounds still more grotesque. Its value, if any, is as an example of a kind of racist literature still current even after World War II, and written by a very articulated man. It can be used as a historical source, but not much more. So, if you are interested in American racialist thought, this can be useful.
10 of 40 people found the following review helpful
A great insight into the lousy mind of the average racist, November 13, 2010
This review is from: Race and Reason (Paperback)
This book, written in 1961 as a response to the 1954 US Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, is a verbose insight into the typical racist mindset of his day (and, if the other reviews are to be believed, ours as well). For that reason, it's worth a read, to understand somewhat the opposition to the decision, to understand massive resistance, Little Rock, etc.
The book itself is horribly written. The author drips with self-importance and egotism even while pretending to a plainly-absent humility and modesty. The first two chapters are devoted to describing his own background and how he came to decide to write the book. The third (and longest) chapter is split into multiple sections, which in other books might be made into chapters of their own. Each section takes multiple questions supposedly culled or paraphrased from people who've written to him and objected to his view, and a following response from him. These responses lay out the case for segregating schools, and it's a poor, vapid one.
His statements--I hesitate to label them "arguments"--are filled with contradictions, hypocrisy, ad hominens, logical leaps, unwarranted conclusions and assumptions, and dozens of straw men. Every question he supposes to answer is a mere strawman of the actual integrationist position of the time. And as is typical of racist ramblings from this time period, there are a number of paranoid conspiracy theories throughout the text, with mention of college professors fretfully asking if Putnam had been followed when visiting them, and a leitmotif of a "liberal" stranglehold on academia, politics, the courts and the media that prevent people from learning, or even discussing, the "truth" about racial disparities. Despite setting himself up as boldly daring to challenge this stranglehold, Putnam himself does no better, as he fails to offer any real evidence of black inferiority, even though he bases his entire argument on its existence. Instead, he simply attacks his opponents as "equalitarians", Communists, and leftists, attacks their logic as flawed (while never explaining how it is flawed), and makes hypocritical values appeals.
But therein lies this book's value. It demonstrates the factual vacuity and hypocrisy of the racist and segregationist position. It also shows their real concerns: that race relations and equality are all dastardly plots by "outsiders"; that providing equal rights to blacks was somehow an assault on the freedoms and "lifestyle" of Southern whites; and particularly, that desegregation would lead to racial intermarriage, which would somehow lead to the downfall of civilization as he chose to define it. It is an interesting look into the mind of a racist, however incoherent that mindset is.
The book itself is horribly written. The author drips with self-importance and egotism even while pretending to a plainly-absent humility and modesty. The first two chapters are devoted to describing his own background and how he came to decide to write the book. The third (and longest) chapter is split into multiple sections, which in other books might be made into chapters of their own. Each section takes multiple questions supposedly culled or paraphrased from people who've written to him and objected to his view, and a following response from him. These responses lay out the case for segregating schools, and it's a poor, vapid one.
His statements--I hesitate to label them "arguments"--are filled with contradictions, hypocrisy, ad hominens, logical leaps, unwarranted conclusions and assumptions, and dozens of straw men. Every question he supposes to answer is a mere strawman of the actual integrationist position of the time. And as is typical of racist ramblings from this time period, there are a number of paranoid conspiracy theories throughout the text, with mention of college professors fretfully asking if Putnam had been followed when visiting them, and a leitmotif of a "liberal" stranglehold on academia, politics, the courts and the media that prevent people from learning, or even discussing, the "truth" about racial disparities. Despite setting himself up as boldly daring to challenge this stranglehold, Putnam himself does no better, as he fails to offer any real evidence of black inferiority, even though he bases his entire argument on its existence. Instead, he simply attacks his opponents as "equalitarians", Communists, and leftists, attacks their logic as flawed (while never explaining how it is flawed), and makes hypocritical values appeals.
But therein lies this book's value. It demonstrates the factual vacuity and hypocrisy of the racist and segregationist position. It also shows their real concerns: that race relations and equality are all dastardly plots by "outsiders"; that providing equal rights to blacks was somehow an assault on the freedoms and "lifestyle" of Southern whites; and particularly, that desegregation would lead to racial intermarriage, which would somehow lead to the downfall of civilization as he chose to define it. It is an interesting look into the mind of a racist, however incoherent that mindset is.
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