Comments on: Traveling

By: Dain

Dain — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:04:27 +0000

I’d love to read anything you come up with on Dwight MacDonald…

By: Caleb Stegall

Caleb Stegall — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:08:03 +0000

I have always assumed that Eliot held that view specifically as a result of his place-hopping experience. He was forever haunted by his rootlessness which is what made him such a profound prophet of the 20C.

By: Daniel McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:00:39 +0000

Along the lines of respecting the concrete being more than a slogan, I thought it was ironic that one speaker should cite T.S. Eliot’s remark that the world would be better if more people lived where they were born, considering that Eliot abandoned not only the place but the country where he was born and reinvented himself as an Englishman. (The English are less prone to idolizing Eliot than Americans are, interestingly enough.)

By: Jesse Walker

Jesse Walker — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:50:31 +0000

Funny to read Deneen’s comments on his blog. I found more to disagree with in his talk than any other that day, in part because he seemed to be deducing a general cultural decline from, as far as I could tell, his observations of pop-culture images, and not from any observation of how actual people actually behave (including how they interact with pop culture). There’s a thin line between sentimentalizing ‘the people’ and condemning them, because both require you to treat them as an abstraction. Respecting the concrete should be more than a Kirkian slogan.

By: Eunomia · What’s An Anarcho-Trad To Do?

Eunomia · What’s An Anarcho-Trad To Do? — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:17:51 +0000

[...] Thursday, March 29th, 2007 in politics by Daniel Larison What would I object to? Well, I thought there was an undertone of something in that talk, and this later post by Professor Deneen makes it explicit. He detects “gauzy sentimentality” in the libertarian and generally anti-statist bent of some of the participants, as well as an overvaulting optimism about human nature. To me, it looks like the statists are the optimists about human nature: they believe that some people, given lordship over others, will not abuse their powers. I would contend that that view holds up neither in theory nor experience: with a very few exceptions, growth of state power comes at the expense of community and civil society. ~Dan McCarthy [...]