Recommended by EBD, which is good enough for me: The Great Republican Revolt and ‘These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life’;
So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
That ought to keep you busy for a while.
Nobody has the backbone to make clear that the left at its very core is about totalitarian
elitism utilizing all available grudges and emotions on hand while seeking absolute power
for the construction of a nightmarish tomorrow.
Progressive as rust.
Scared, spineless creatures, who project their own inadequacies onto the face of society.
They must rule and regulate everyone and everything, to prevent anyone else acting as they would.
There is a reason no one in their right mind, willingly runs for public office.
As Mark Steyn says the left tries to make more and more things political and to encroach more and more into our time. In communist countries you have to go to endless meetings, parades and watch propaganda on t.v. and movies. Try to leave space for family and activities you love. And with that enough politics for me and on with the good company and good eats!
The destruction of the intellectual life began in earnest when Immanuel Kant divorced reason from reality. That allowed G. W. F. Hegel to concoct his sub-Scientology drivel and have it passed off as philosophy. Karl Marx and others just picked up the ball and ran with it.
Scruton says that obedience, “properly understood”, might be the highest human virtue, and is “what freedom consists in, as Kant wisely saw”. This screams out to me that at base he’s on the same side as the extreme left, because what do they believe that’s different?
The antidote begins here:
“… there are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a ‘basic minimum’, as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. One principle is epistemological, the other is moral; they are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.”
— Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual
Frum is such a downer. Apparently, the only way for the Republicans to succeed is to become Democrats? Mr. Frum, we already have Democrats for that.
Admired Scruton for a while now.
While at the local bookseller getting some Christmas prezzies I wandered by the Philosophy section to see if they had anything by him. Lots of Deleuze, Derrida (gag), and of course, Zizek, And not one title by Scruton !
It would be like going to the Science section and having no E.O. Wilson. Keep in mind, Scruton has published some thirty plus books. THe lesson is that there is active censorship of Conservative thought.
Yours truly,
Niall Mackintosh
Philosophy 2015
These were two good recommendations. I had some free time today as the rug rats are not coming for a few days and my wife did not need my help baking Christmas cookies. So thank you for these readings.
Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised reading Frum’s piece, as I had expected a partisan elite Republican, something like a Laurentian Elite tirade. He actually had a decent piece.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Hume’s article about Scruton. I am going to have to get Scruton’s book, “Fool, Frauds, and Firebrands”. Scruton is right about the left standing for nothing but destroying society as it has evolved over centuries, and replacing it with a humanity destructive nihilism. I know a little of this as our family experienced first hand this destructive ideology of the left.