Still on the topic of the remarkable “Edmund Burke,” my conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe continues this week. O’Keeffe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.” (Part I is “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara.”)

Ilana Mercer: Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, wrote this about Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”: It “burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes.” You express these exact sentiments, as eloquently, in your gem of a book, “Edmund Burke.” Explain this passion of yours.

Professor O’Keeffe: Burke knew that occasionally there are to be found individuals of profound wickedness, in families, schools, workplaces. Their cause is often fed by wise fools, like Rousseau, and blind haters of reality, like Marx. Burke hated the murderous impulses of revolutionary France, which had trampled on the hard-won sanity of experience. Like most of us, I have known men and women of transparently despotic tendencies, kept in place only by the decency of most arrangements in the English-speaking world. In “Reflections” Burke is arguing that theories of governance which have overridden all the civilizing constraints built up over centuries are an appalling threat to decency and sanity. It is not clear which is worse in its effects: the substitution of a vile hierarchy for a fairly decent one, which happened in Germany after 1933; or the fantasy which holds that all hierarchy can be transcended, which was the one inspiring the revolutions of 1917 type. It is a sobering thought that many of the leaders of the political correctness persuasion, now, thank heavens, waning both in America and Britain, would surely have murdered their opponents if they could.

Ilana Mercer: “Burke opposed all schemes of fundamentalist reconstruction and the formulation of policy on the basis of purely abstract reasoning” and “loose speculation.” For that reason, Burke opposed the French Revolution. Indeed, I deduced from this premise you’ve enunciated that Burke would have denounced America’s contemporary Jacobins, the neoconservatives, in their efforts to transform the world, based on ignorant abstractions. In other words, a modern-day extrapolation of this would be the exportation of democracy (via Daisy Cutters) to Planets Iraq and Afghanistan. Where am I wrong?

Professor O’Keeffe: You are quite right that Burke would not have approved of the neocons. Had he been born in the mid-nineteenth century or later, he might well have concluded that private enterprise plus a liberal politics is the best arrangement to which human beings can aspire. This does not constitute the capitalist economy and the universal franchise as a terminus for human affairs. If history has a terminus, we do not know what it is. Nor should we think we have the right to impose our markets plus franchise version on others, by any means, of war or otherwise. On the other hand it is not at all obvious how the West should proceed in relation to the undeniable Islamist threat.

Ilana Mercer: In “Edmund Burke” (p. 134), incidentally, you suggest that India will overtake China, based on the strength of its democracy. Of that I am unsure. For one, democracy is not to be conflated with freedom, much less with economic freedom. I would not be surprised if China has much more of the latter than does India. Have you any second thoughts about this?

Professor O’Keeffe: In my book I make more of India’s being a free society than of the argument that it is a democracy. If I had taken Paul Johnson’s case any further, I would also have stressed India’s evolutionary caution in her governance. India has been trying to transcend the horrors of the caste-system; most educated Indians now seem to repudiate this dreadful source of division. We can compare this with China’s blanket refusal even to look at the horrors of the long Maoist years. I take it that India is at least trying to bequeath her grandchildren a morally improved society; China, Russia and Japan seem to have no interest in this kind of political hygiene. India is clearly more “Burkean” than China. Its capitalism is less state-managed too. 4.

Ilana Mercer: “The French Revolution did not generate only a new politics … Along with the new politics there came a new concept of personhood, a self-caressing egotism … a moral and aesthetic theory based upon sentiment” (p. 122). And relativism too (p. 146). In my experience, this malady affects conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Hierarchy, so essential to ordered liberty, is no longer. Lost is the distinction between men and women of character, and those without it; between adults and youth (the latter are usually elevated and worshiped by ever-errant adults); between experience and a lack of it; between quality in intellectual and cultural products, and its absence. Faction has replaced the fellow-feeling that ought to accompany a shared purpose. Talk to me about what you’ve dubbed the Zeitgeist’s “moronizing dialectic.”

Professor O’Keeffe: You are entirely right to emphasize the cult of self-love as one of the worst flaws of modernity in the free societies. You are right that experience, character and the imperative of hierarchy are denigrated or neglected. Modernity has spawned a cult of the self, of which Rousseau, especially, was a founding club-member. The cult is also strangely intertwined with intellectual and moral relativism, which serves to cover up the empty education most people receive. Burke would have identified the schooling our young people get, the moral relativism which they are taught, as our central problem. The relativism of school and college involves a moronizing dialectic between soulless instruction and the grubby people making vast fortunes from popular culture. The idea has taken hold that everything is a swindle, that all hierarchies are based on power and only power and that there is no such thing as excellence.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
October 29

The post The “Moronizing” Of Modern Culture appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

There is absolutely no philosophical link between early America and latter-day Iraq ~ilana

Singer Sheryl Crow has been applying her cerebral sinew to solving global warming, that manufactured monomania. Crow’s planet-saving plans are asinine, and worse: they give a glimpse of a remarkably indelicate, ill-bred creature. She delights on several levels. Here’s the first of her brainstorms, reported by BBC News. Be warned: it is merely compost for Crow’s later flowering:

I have designed a clothing line that has what’s called a ‘dining sleeve’…The sleeve is detachable and can be replaced with another ‘dining sleeve,’ after usage. The design will offer the ‘diner’ the convenience of wiping his mouth on his sleeve rather than throwing out yet another barely used paper product. I think this idea could also translate quite well to those suffering with an annoying head cold.

“Diner” is not quite the right word for Crow’s slobbering, sniffing target market; “dog” comes to mind. But if you think table manners (to say nothing of musical aptitude) are not Crow’s strong suit, wait for this:

Now, I don’t want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.

I am not sure what is more offensive, Crow’s ideas as to what constitute natural rights and human industry, or her unfeminine, personal-hygiene habits. Either way, the damage has been done. Having unleashed “E-Crowli” into the ether, Sheryl should zip those lips over that overbite. The only thing that might lift the malodorous aura that has clung to Crow since she came out of the toilet with these schemes is the knowledge that her well-appointed bathroom sports a bidet. Or, conversely, that she practices “Islamic toilet etiquette.” The latter, at least, involves water!  But don’t hold your breath. (Or maybe you should!)

Speaking of a pain in the posterior, or is it a “Paine,” Trotskyite-turned-neoconservative Christopher Hitchens has a new book out: Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” Hitchens has dedicated it, “by permission,” to Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, whom he clearly considers the Paine of Mesopotamia.

Trotskyites and neoconservatives share an ahistoric approach, to say nothing of philosophical Alzheimer’s. These tendencies explain why the ideologues within and around the administration see nothing wrong in comparing America’s constitutional cramps with the carnage they’ve helped create in Iraq. As I’ve pointed out before, there is absolutely no philosophical link between early America and latter-day Iraq.

While Paine wrote some fine tracts in defense of a “government that governed least,” he was too much of a follower of the French Revolution for my tastes, at one stage snuggling up to the Jacobins. They almost guillotined him for his troubles. The Rights of Man, in particular, is intended as a refutation of Edmund Burke’s brilliant critique of that blood-drenched revolution. “Everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,” is how the English statesman, supporter of the American colonists, described the French’s illiberal, irreligious, intolerant uprising.

Contra Hitchens, there is no philosophical affinity between the feuding Mohammedans and the American founders, acolytes of John Locke. Equally, no such bonds bind the French to the American Revolution, despite Condoleezza Rice’s assertions to the contrary during a visit to France. One can understand, however, why Rice mistakenly drew parallels between—horrors!—French and American founding ideas.

The Jacobins and their terrifying leader Robespierre believed in ramming Rousseauist virtues down every European gullet, by guillotine, if necessary. Rousseau, their muse, thought it necessary at times to force people to be “free.” Rice’s neoconservative administration and its terrifying leader have said repeatedly that American power must be used to mount a “global democratic revolution,” in the words of The Leader. What’s more, this administration has acted on its beliefs. The idea that neoconservatives are no more than warmed-over Jacobins is not that far-fetched after all.

Citizen Paine’s emphasis on the universality of political rights is also in the tradition of the French, not the American, Revolution. The idea of America, as I see it, is that all men are imbued with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. The contemporary American Welfare State, where someone who consumes more taxes than he contributes—all government workers—can also vote to raise them, would have appalled the American Founders. Hitchens wants to convince his readers that Paine’s proto-socialism—he advocated welfare financed by taxes—is quintessentially American. I disagree, but understand where this ex-Trotskyite transplant is coming from.

Still, leery as I am of Thomas Paine’s philosophical provenance, it seems egregious, even comical, for Hitchens to have paired Paine with Talabani.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer
   WorldNetDaily.com
   April 27

The post The Toilet Taliban And Other ‘Paines’ In The Posterior appeared first on ILANA MERCER.