Apr 09, · The basic laws of human stupidity are ancient. The definitive essay on the subject is younger. Called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, it was published in by an Italian economist Apr 17, · In a Boston Review essay, I had occasion to explore the early writings of William F. Buckley, Jr., on racial segregation. I argued then that Buckley’s famous apology for having once held racially regressive positions — an apology cited by his fans both conservative and liberal, part and parcel of a contention that, despite a perhaps unfortunate history Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins Oct 08, · One of Pollock’s canvasses or Macdonald’s collection of essays, Against the American Grain (), might stand equally as evidence for what Buckley called, in an essay on Friedrich Hayek, the “elasticity of standards” 4 necessary to sustain the illogical but rigid farrago of left-wing blogger.comted Reading Time: 11 mins
Improbable Research: the laws of human stupidity | Research | The Guardian
There was a time when the refusal of any form of an essay on american stupidity buckley carried with it the inevitable assumption that one was a conservative…. It is becoming obvious that this is not so, because people an essay on american stupidity buckley seen that extremism may be either radical or reactionary. My own refusal of extremism was due not to the fact that I am a conservative, which I am not; but to the fact that An essay on american stupidity buckley discovered in it a vital and substantive fraud.
Like Ortega y Gasset, William F. Buckley Jr. Yet Buckley never adopted the methods of a doomsayer or an alarmist; he never himself, by any stretch of the imagination, agitated for anything. A dull collective mentality compensates for its low-grade spiritual metabolism with passing fits of meaningless frenzy, faddism, and hysteria; it experiences difficulties in concentrating its psychic energy but, on slight provocation, can also fly into inchoate rage.
Whereas the threatening ideology conforms to a model of stiffened coherence and implacable determination, the free communities which ideology threatens conform philosophically less to a model of anything than to a shapeless lack of one. Indeed, the free society that Buckley sought to defend is entirely capable of resenting and rejecting its champions as mere irritants, an essay on american stupidity buckley, while failing to resist its actual enemy.
Only a genuinely intellectual reaction could stave off a pseudo-intellectual, ideologically motivated assault. But in postwar America, there were few who could distinguish between wisdom and fraud, or between argument and demagoguery. Up from Liberalism summarized these dilemmas and explored the frustrations of the keen-sighted in relation to them. The frustrations ran deep. And the man could certainly land a punch, an essay on american stupidity buckley.
The comedic parodies of him—one, by David Frye, is accessible on the Internet—always mocked him for his philosophically precise vocabulary and recognizable vocal hesitations before alighting on le mot juste.
In Up from Liberalism, fifteen years before the Hayek essay, Buckley had examined the perverse relation of the flaccidly free society to its radical detractors with their ceaseless rhetoric of oppression and rectification, an essay on american stupidity buckley.
Words must find their anchorage in reality, or else their users must elide their relation an essay on american stupidity buckley reality so as conveniently to circumvent inconvenient logic, an essay on american stupidity buckley.
One cannot escape the implication of the Logos —of intellectual order—in the contest between the curators of truth and the purveyors of false but alluring visions. And liberals have always had their parallel Logose. Buckley never doubted that liberalism took its quasi-religious life from the twin goals of earthly redemption and human divinization—or that it played shenanigans with language.
That is how he defined people of liberal conviction in the opening chapter of Up from Liberalism:. They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.
An assumption about the demonic status of dissenters thus is at the heart of liberal folklore, a Gnostic sub-religiosity with its own an essay on american stupidity buckley of creeds and dogmas. One need only think of the latest version of this-worldly redemption, the project of salvaging the planet from the sinful taint of humanity itself under the guise of forestalling global warming, to test the rightness of the interpretation.
The teleological image of a pristine earth projected by the devotees of carbon-purity, as Buckley would doubtless have told us, conforms to a Rousseauvian fantasy, and that fantasy would remain incomplete without the gallery of industrialist-trespassers who have profaned the ecological sanctum sanctorum.
In the global warming an essay on american stupidity buckley, one witnesses the fierceness and intransigency of the True Believer, whose cause has become a crusade of the illuminated against the unwashed, who themselves register only the mildest dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy. Buckley noticed that, in addition to responding to dissenters by labeling them with stock pejoratives nowadays the inevitable fascist, fundamentalist, or racistliberalism exhibits an allergic reaction to facts and their incorporation in arguments.
The liberal rhetorical style, Buckley duly recorded, reflexively substitutes abstractions for concretions and speculative desiderata for items in the catalogue of the actually existing situation. The liberal rhetorical style presumably correlates with a parallel and equally defective epistemology. Buckley gave the example, poignant and rankling in and a topic to this day, of court-ordered desegregation in Southern public educational institutions.
What the liberal ideologist in debate generally refuses to reckon with is the political and social problems. In his eyes the problems dissipate at the mere statement of the truism that all men, regardless of color an essay on american stupidity buckley creed, should be dealt with equally. That abstraction, fiercely loyal though one should be to it, is not, as an abstraction, easily imposed on an unwilling community, any more than an ordinance to keep holy the Sabbath is easily imposed on a secular and raucous community.
When Buckley criticized judicial intervention in regional institutions as an authoritarian, if not indeed a totalitarian, imposition of the abstract on the actual, he was observing a larger aggressive and disintegrative trend identified by Spengler twenty-five years before, in The Hour of Decision.
Tradition would find precious few champions. Liberal sentiment had subdued conservative judgment in the dominant language so that no one any longer appreciated that liberals, not conservatives, were the true reactionaries. For Spengler to praise his heroes in this way was for him also to divulge implicitly what he took to be their ultimate ineffectiveness. Ortega, like Spengler, saw in modernity a sustained crisis of massive spiritual exhaustion. Hence there are periods in which it is enough only to give a shout…for everyone to surrender themselves to it.
Universal absolute equality offers a case in point, but any other liberal eschatology will serve. Voegelin judged that the majority of modern men and women had contracted the infection of unreal expectations, and he too foresaw a prolonged deepening of the crisis and its many attendant crises.
But stultified education appeared to the founding genius of National Review to be more a reflection of the modulated age than the driving force in the evacuation of steadfastness and belief from American society.
As long as life went smoothly and appliances and groceries sold cheaply, who wanted to trouble himself with disquieting moral analyses or the ensuing prescriptive conclusions that beckon men to unpleasant resolution or action? From this philosophical inadequacy, a political sequel swiftly follows. Up from Liberalism is a surprising book. Essentially it was an attitude, which went by the name of a program, an essay on american stupidity buckley, undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society, uncommitted to any sustained estimate of the nature or potential of the enemy.
Yet because of the sincerity of its leader and the ingenuity and devotion of its publicists, it was a Program, which, whatever it was up to at any given moment, took on the air of moral justification and intellectual tightness. The institution of free speech functions only in correlation with the courage that prompts a conscience to speak. Buckley differed from Ortega and Spengler in that, in at any rate, he held out considerable hope for a revival of domestic moral resilience.
To gloss it, one must link it with the not so obviously related statement about the significance of etiquette in a social context where unchecked radicalism has dissolved the old meanings. Social rules, like those of decorum, place a limit on behavior, but the rules themselves have limits in their application.
Broadmindedness refers, then, an essay on american stupidity buckley, to knowing when politesse has become otiose, and a measure of pugilism is necessary. Callosity is a corollary of broadmindedness so defined. Just as there is a moment when one must come out swinging in defense of a principle, so also is there a moment when one must let the social chain of cause and effect take its course without interference.
Buckley wrote, for example, of unemployment in Harlan County, Kentucky, where the coal seams had lately and predictably given out. Chomsky had just published American Power and the New Mandarins and made himself an intellectual spokesman for the Left and for the anti-war movement. Buckley remains courteous, although one can detect his growing conviction, as the interview unfolds, that his interlocutor is perfectly willing to use terms with self-serving ambiguity and to reject any facts that contravene his position.
Or rather, Buckley keeps his cool—except for a passing yet telling instant. Has the gentleman betrayed himself? His audience is William F. Buckley, a man neither bland nor obliging where the point at issue concerns an ongoing conflict of existential urgency to millions of people.
Buckley does not find any equivalency that would assimilate morally fallible and incompetent but non-homicidal governments with ideological and inhuman ones that perpetrate mass murder for the realization of abstract and impossible goals. As in the Cold-War missile standoff, one preserves the peace by responding to the threat clearly and vigorously with the appropriate counter-gesture. It is a rambling three minutes in which, as the MIT linguist avoids talking about the one and only time he came face to face with Buckley, it becomes clear that the rebuke still stings.
In History as a System, Ortega defines a gentleman as a fellow who determines, above all, to play by the rules, to avoid anything that is not cricket. As Buckley said in Up from Liberalism, the conservative position distinguishes itself from the left-wing agenda precisely by not being a schedule of fiats for ordering people around against their consciences.
Liberalism puts its faith in a hypostatic Reason, while the conservative trusts in the multiplicity of freely negotiating individuals in the market.
This does not mean that the conservative stands for nothing; rather, he stands for cricket. Buckley modeled, for those who might imitate him, the baptized figure of the upright man. Your time at college is too important to get a shallow education in which viewpoints are shut out and rigorous discussion is shut down. Explore intellectual conservatism Join a vibrant community of students and scholars Defend your principles.
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Skip to content. The Obliging Order: William F. II In Up from Liberalism, fifteen years before the Hayek essay, Buckley had examined the perverse relation of the flaccidly free society to its radical detractors with their ceaseless rhetoric of oppression and rectification.
That is how he defined people of liberal conviction in the opening chapter of Up from Liberalism: They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.
IV Buckley differed from Ortega and Spengler in that, in at any rate, he held out considerable hope for a revival of domestic moral resilience. Notes José Ortega y Gasset, Man and CrisisM. Adams, trans. New York: W, an essay on american stupidity buckley.
William F. Buckley, Up from Liberalism New Rochelle: Arlington House, Fritz Machlup editorEssays on Hayek New York: New York University Press, an essay on american stupidity buckley, Up from Liberalism Oswald Spengler, The Hour of DecisionC.
Atkinson, trans. New York: Alfred Knopf,92— Man and Crisis— View PDF. Get the Collegiate Experience You Hunger For Your time at college is too important to get a shallow education in which viewpoints are shut out and rigorous discussion is shut down. Explore intellectual conservatism Join a vibrant community of students and scholars Defend your principles Join the ISI community.
Membership is free. You might also like. In Memoriam: Angelo Codevilla — Remembering a prominent ISI alumnus.
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