A mini-manifesto from my Anarchist Notebook:
I am temperamentally and morally a conservative, which is to say: I believe that I am charged with preserving my inheritance, nurturing it, and passing it along to the next generation. That inheritance is spiritual, cultural, natural, and political. (It may or may not be financial; that matters little.) Our largest social problems stem from the fact that our political economy promotes the concentration of power and money, and the concentration of power and money militates against the preservation of any spiritual, cultural, and natural inheritance. That is how we get an unprecedentedly rich and theoretically free society that also features corrupt religious institutions, insipid art, and dying rivers. I will continue to do my best to conserve and promote my Christian faith, my convictions about art, and my natural environment, but I must do so in unpropitious conditions. We need an alternative political economy that encourages rather than inhibits the work of conservation, and I think anarchism, properly understand, is that alternative.
My new post at the Dispatch moves along these lines.
Ordinary photos of ordinary things on an ordinary Sunday morning.
Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that “the game belongs to the people.” So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The “greatest good of the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life, and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
All genuine conservatism is based on an awareness of the debts the generations owe to one another: compare Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead,” articulated a decade before Teddy wrote his version of the idea.
You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests $100 million in your company.
Via kfitz. One mild improvement in the recent discourse: the widespread scoffing at the “going rogue” explanation. The bots are behaving as designed and instructed.
Think of this not as a political post but a sociological one. What follows is anecdotal but noteworthy.
- Here in Waco, I have seen hundreds of Talarico signs in people’s front yards, but not one Paxton sign. And for the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking hard!
- Every day I get texts and mail flyers denouncing Talarico — and none of them, again not one, has used Paxton’s name. The flyers are pieces of thick glossy stock, full of images of Talarico and denunciations of him, and no mention of Paxton even in tiny print.
This situation gives a new meaning to “negative campaigning.” Clearly Texas Republicans realize that their candidate is radioactive, so radioactive that his name cannot even be mentioned — but they hope to make voters hate the other guy intensely enough that the radioactive guy will win. And — such is America in 2026 — it might work.
Re: the passing of Da Coach, I’m reminded of a story I heard, long ago, from Joseph Epstein. When Epstein taught at Northwestern University, he was colleagues and friends with the great Czech/Jewish emigré scholar Erich Heller, and after Heller moved into a retirement home in Evanston, where he lived among retired electricians and plumbers and CPAs, Epstein would regularly take him out to lunch. During one of those lunches, Heller leaned over to Epstein and in his deep voice quietly asked a question: “Tell me zomezink, Joe. Who is zis … Ditka?”
Austin Kleon wants to know. I know which one I feel like today.
I’m shocked and delighted that Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Back in 2003 I wrote about her translation of Sappho — in the context of her whole remarkable career to that point. And I compared the love poetry of Sappho and Carson alike to the Song of Songs.
As Graham Greene reported in his review of [Make Way for Tomorrow] in Night and Day in the summer of 1937, “a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves.” The film is a withering criticism of a terrible wrong — and an eloquent vindication of the justice of the New Deal that had recently been devised by liberal gerontocrats in Washington. (The first Social Security payments were sent out only a few months before the movie’s premiere.) The film is also a devastating repudiation of the spirit of [Samuel] Moyn’s book and its insolent generational partisanship. Watch Make Way for Tomorrow and you will throw the book across the room, and not only for sentimental reasons. The film represents an entirely different and more sympathetic approach to the problem that the French call un pere qui vit trop, the father who lives too long. I have always detected a tincture of sublimity in filial devotion. Indeed, filial devotion should be enlarged and elevated into a standard for humaneness and a basis for social policy. We would inhabit a less indecent society if somehow we could find in ourselves a measure of filial devotion for other people’s fathers and mothers, too. Biology is only biology. We will be known by our choices.
I wonder if Wieseltier happens to have read my commendation of Make Way for Tomorrow in the first issue of Portico.
I finally heard from OUP, so I have posted an update to the update. Again: I cannot wait until all this is over.