Posted on 12/24/2001 11:15:18 AM PST by cornelis
exactly.
the founding fathers of the american republic understood this well.
both parties are rotten, power corrupts, so alternate parties.
our problem today is that we've suffered thru' 70 years of fdr-lbj, democrat control of the congress, and suffered thru' two political parties that have grown more alike.
Perhaps power is not the only thing corrupting. Is the efficiency of egoism a dead-end?
As we see politics unfold nowdays, the "Old Prince" would be somewhat proud.
Those outside this template are called radicals. The pseudo-radicals, who work for agenda, are the trully useful idiots.
Where are the free-thinkers?
Do you mean, protect from, say, the evil, or corrupting power of politics? Or do you mean, protect from the good of politics?
What good of politics do you have in mind?
Regards,
LH
Economic freedom is neccesary for a materially productive society. However, it should also be realized that part of the real wealth in life is family relationships and other interpersonal relationships. For these to survive, there must be at least some personal virtue. The cult of selfishness has produced millions or abandoned and rootless children and rates of depression five to ten times that of 45 or 50 years ago within a glut of material abundance.
I might add in this context, the vampires do so quite self-righteously by quoting various economic laws.
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
-- James Madison
Unfortunately the founders were already modern. The idea of returning to the ancients is intriguing, but our traditions now have already long been transplanted to modern soil. Still, this article does look like it's worth reading at greater length when things ar less hectic.
and unphilosophical, if you mean to turn the clock back. But as Bloom notes, the philosophical question of what man is, doesn't just belong to the ancients. Here's an additional excerpt which promotes a respect for the ancients:
If we do not have completed final wisdom, then our most important task is the articulation of the fundamental alternatives. This can be achieved only by maintaining an authentic knowledge of the best earlier thought, understood in its own terms, divested of distortions imparted to it by the thought which superseded it. Descartes gave a full presentation not only of the prescientific world but also of the previous philosophic interpretations of it. Those who followed him accepted his rejection of earlier thought without themselves having gone through his analysis. What was still a serious alternative for Descartes no longer was one to his followers, and knowledge of it deayed. Thus knowledge of the tradition of philosophy is necessary to philosophy and required for philosophic freedom from tradition. Philosophy has, at its peaks, largerly been dialogue between the greats, no matter how far separated in time. Without the voices which come from outside the cave constituted by our narrow horizon, we are ever more bound to it.
But about your "return to the ancients," here's this from Voegelin:
The Age of Descartes and Newton appears as the great epoch: what lies before it is an intellectual prehistory, and what comes after is the truly modern age of mathematized science and critical method. If this pattern is accepted, the bearers of the great countermovement to Enlightenment must appear as thinkers who could not free themselves from the shackles of a past that had gone. They must appear as reactionaries, as pessimists, as men who struggled against the current of progress but who would be swept aside. If they are of sufficient stature, they will either be disregarded, as Schelling was, or wildly misunderstood, as Nietzsche. This consturction is inadmissable in a critical history of ideas because it endows the epoch of mathematized science and reason with a specific authority and interpets other periods and movements by orienting them toward the authoritative period.
Your quote is intriguing. I suspect a lot of people who would reject modernity as a whole aren't really sincere or don't know what it would entail. There is talk about such a return to the ancients among the Straussians. I haven't explored it further and don't know what to make of it. It's doubtful to me that Bill Kristol really does want in his heart of hearts to return to the ancients and reject what came after, but there may be some people who do.
We are all modern to some degree. Some may dislike and try to reject that modern part of themselves, but it isn't all bad, and it's something we'd discard at our peril.
Perhaps what's valuable is not the modern departure or the turn to the modern, but the turning to modernity -- not the break with the past and desire to begin anew on secular, scientific, and antimetaphysical foundations, but the turning on the spiral that brings older ideas into the scientific age and tries to build on both.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the dichotomies or categories, but it does seem as though the bad side of modernity is the all-or-nothing quality. Spirit or soul or value is rejected in favor of matter, etc. A better modernity would build on science and not reject it, but also not reject the non-quantifible and intangible.
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