Political theory

If our built environment is an image of what we believe about the world generally, then the ways the modernist ideology is imposed and maintained in architecture must be part of a more general process. With that in mind, this short essay by a Norwegian urbanist with a legal background takes on considerable interest even apart from its particular concern: why architectural modernism is so dominant when everybody hates it.

Some data points:

• Anthony Esolen notices that at places like Netflix users make normal critical comments on films based on natural distinctions like good, better and best, while in formal literary studies such concerns have been edged out by clunky political posturing.

One issue raised by Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians, his new hip yuppie ruling class) is how long they’ll last in power. They do have some advantages:

When people complain about stupidity they mean that someone is willfully ignoring—or mindlessly oblivious to—the obvious. Whether something is obvious depends on your general understanding of things. So to say something is stupid, when it’s something other people insist on, is to say that (1) it’s based on an understanding you reject, and (2) there’s something immediately untenable about the understanding, so much so that someone who claims to hold it is either lying, or refusing to think, or has something seriously wrong with him.

I’ve been reading Paul Gottfried’s recent book, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right.

Peter Brimelow begins his book Alien Nation by calling current immigration policy “Hitler’s posthumous revenge” on America.

Here’s an interesting graph showing how liberals (blue), conservatives (red), and one self-described libertarian (green) test on a survey of “moral foundations”:

Basically, liberals emphasize “harm” and “fairness” and don’t care so much about “loyalty,” “authority” or “purity,” while conservatives give more equal weight to all five dimensions. (The libertarian can speak for himself.)

Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi (whatever that is), has come out with a book saying that multiculturalism threatens democracy.

Alexander’s outlook has definite implications when applied to society. It rejects the idea of imposing concept and image on reality, and so is anti-constructivist. It favors particularity of position and so is anti-egalitarian and anti-inclusivist. It accepts that patterns that reappear in a variety of traditions very likely have something to them that rationalism should not be allowed to trump. And it treats both subsidiarity and hierarchy as necessary features of any acceptable system.

I’ve been talking a lot about contemplation—what it is, why it’s needed, and why it’s at odds with the modern spirit. I should note down a few thoughts on what happens if you don’t have it.

To get rid of contemplation is radically to subordinate truth to action, word to deed. That tendency has developed in a variety of ways:

The modern viewpoint tries to do away with obfuscation, so it tells us that reason has to do with things that are clear, distinct and verifiable. To know is to know such things, and everything else is fantasy that is not to be trusted. That view is often presented quite forcefully, and it’s led to great advances in the physical sciences, so it must be taken seriously and dealt with.

While composing my post on Ellul and rummaging around other things I had written, I ran into some comments I had made in in a discussion thread regarding a short essay of mine on liberalism and Christianity. The comments were extensive enough that I thought I’d edit them a bit and post them here, for preservation if nothing else.

I’ve also been reading a bit of The Technological Society by Jaques Ellul. He’s good on presenting technology as an increasingly all-embracing system with its own demands. He tends though to view technological rationality as solely concerned with the ever-greater perfection of means.

Another example of how people act when their metaphysics are challenged: Status of Catholic Church in Spain Threatened. The Catholic Church in Spain has protested a citizenship education program that promotes full normalization of homosexuality.

People say religion is irrational and religious people are crazy. Sometimes that’s so, of course, but the same could be said of secular people and their views. The truth of the matter is that everyone has metaphysical principles that determine how he understands the world, and when someone insists on something without evidence, or even in the face of obvious crushing objections, there’s usually some such principle behind it. The result is that there can be a huge amount of craziness and stupidity even though there aren’t that many crazy or stupid people.