Moreover, I don't think our to and fro about these things does us or anyone else any good.
As to the past, I think the national consensus about Lincoln, that he was wise and great, is true.
Concerning current political matters, I suspect that we agree about much, and we should work for the good we can do in our own times.
Best to you and all,
Richard F.
I only ask that you explore it further. My own first experience with Locke was one embracing much of his theories, which I had continued to do until fairly recently. Aways back I studied David Hume in an overview and then thoroughly, reaching the problems he creates, how he creates them, and what havoc they have caused ever since.
Shortly thereafter I turned my attention to combatting Hume's arguments by attempting to poke holes in them - something I still work on. In a way, Hume is a sort of point in the history of thought upon which things turn, therefore overturning what has come of his system lies in deconstructing that system.
All the while it became increasingly prominent how significantly the works of Hume rested upon those of Locke, themselves sharing in the same disastrous results. This, along with the prodding of friends similarly versed in Locke, pushed inevitably to the question of his theory of government's relationship to the inescapable problems created by empiricism. I now conclude that his clear basis in empiricism renders it impossible to escape empiricism, and the problems it creates, when one latches onto Locke just as is the case with Hume.
An alternative, as I have noted, must be found in a refinement of the theories other than Locke.
Not that there isn't anything to be gained from reading Locke or Hume and quite to the contrary. This is especially so with Hume, who advocates little more than Locke's system realized to its logical ends. A philosophy professor I once studied under often remarked that he had turned more people to Christianity by making them read Sartre than any Christian philosopher, simply by exposing them to a straight forward expression of the bleak alternative. I believe the same is true with Hume, and therefore by him Locke. Locke, and even sometimes Hume, are used as shelters for conservatives, claimed as our own philosophical foundings much as the left picks its icons of Marx, Sartre, Nietzsche, and the feminist theorists. But in reality, they are merely predecessors. Locke leads to Hume. Hume leads to skeptical chaos. Kant attempts to recover chaos and ends up worstening the decline into chaos. Nietzsche collapses Kant, forwarding chaos. Chaos comes to reign, forwarding cultural relativism and economic Marxism. Then the thinly vieled left wing system pursued as a means of facilitating "anything goes" style leftism, itself maintained by nothing more than might makes right, emerges complete.
That's where "intellectual" leftism is today and that's what we're up against. Since it is what we're up against, we must beat it with the alternative. And that alternative cannot be found in Hume, and inescapably by him Locke, which is an integral part of the source of what we're up against in the first place. We will never beat the bilge that remains in the wake of post-modernism by latching onto that which brought about post-modernism in the first place, as it will always end up as exactly that which we are supposedly trying to combat.
And that is why I reject Locke and urge fellow conservatives who think they've found something in him to examine him more closely before concluding him to be the answer. He is not. And we are never going to advance over the left as a movement if we are all convinced that he is.