{Today's excursion is to the land of Law & Liberty, a website of some distinction.}
Please allow the good folks at Law & Liberty to introduce themselves:
Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.
This magazine brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to examining the first principles of a free society as they appear in law, history, political thought, and other aspects of culture.
For those of you who do not yet have your ideology-decoder ring, “classical liberal” is code today for “conservative”. Law & Liberty features a conservative perspective on the topics it covers; but, of the many conservative sites onto which I venture from time to time, its writers are less hyperbolic and more rhetorically responsible than most.
That said, here are some recent articles from L&L.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
In “Better Things Than Happiness,” Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug learns, thanks to a wise remark from one of her college professors, that happiness is overrated. She then gets around to Aristotle and is introduced to eudaimonia, which, she explains, “refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection: perfect happiness. The lucky few who achieve eudaimonic happiness can do so only after living most of their lives. In fact, Aristotle questions whether any man can experience eudaimonia prior to the moment of death. This is because the perfect happiness of eudaimonia emerges from a life well lived.”
“Call no man happy until he is dead,” advised Aristotle. I am glad that Ms. Birkhaug has learned early that “The way to happiness is through more important things” and that “Happiness is not something totally within human control.” Now she can get on with her life.
Better Things Than Happiness – Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug (lawliberty.org)
(If you’re interested, see also Jennifer Hecht’s book, The Happiness Myth)
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Theodore Dalrymple’s “The Oikophobic Will to Power” picks up on “the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country.” According to Dalrymple (who is, I should point out, British), oikophobia “now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.”
Since Mr. Dalrymple never identifies the oikophobic individuals he has in mind, it is very hard to take his claims seriously, including his claim about the hidden agenda behind oikophobia:
“Interest in, admiration for, or love of alien cultures, or even a single alien culture, is rarely if ever the reason for oikophobia. The latter is not the belief that, as the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey puts it, “they order these things better” there, and therefore we must emulate or copy. The oikophobe does not want sharia or Aztec human sacrifice, or any other foreign custom, in his own country. What he wants is power within it, and oikophobia is an instrument to achieve it by delegitimizing those he thinks already have it. He wants to replace one ruling class, as he sees it, with another – his own.”
It is amazing how easily and how accurately people can discern the true motives of their opponents, and how often those motives turn out to be selfish and unprincipled. The lust for power, says Dalrymple, is what drives “the intellectual class,” which believes that the way to their countrymen’s hearts is by openly despising their country.
I’m no expert on oikophobia, but the logic seems a little shaky to me.
The Oikophobic Will to Power – Theodore Dalrymple (lawliberty.org)
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Spoiler: “Tocqueville’s Worst Fears” were that “the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a “tutelary” despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it “knew” was their good.”
Now you know the point of David Lewis Schaefer’s review of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality. Piketty, a French economist, wants more income redistribution and more economic leveling; Schaefer, a Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, does not.
More precisely, Schaefer fears, as did Tocqueville, that further equality will come at the price of liberty. As Schaefer puts it:
Piketty is less concerned with promoting either political or individual freedom than he is with building a “state” strong enough to push “to its logical conclusion” the movement towards “real equality” as he conceives it—based, it would appear, on nothing more than an ambitious intellectual’s attraction to abstract principles. This is reminiscent of the armchair, “literary politicians” to whom Tocqueville and Edmund Burke attributed the origins of the terroristic French Revolution. Both Piketty’s principles and his policies are a perfect recipe for achieving Tocqueville’s democratic despotism.
A “perfect recipe”! It would be a shame to let it go to waste, would it not?
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears – (lawliberty.org)
Posted by: |