Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is in fine form this week. Yesterday he published an excellent meditation on free will, and today he’s breathing fire upon the political Left:
It is hopelessly naive to think that we can have comity without commonality… we have reached the point where we agree on almost nothing and that the way forward will be more like war than like civil debate on a common ground of shared principles.
Quite so. More and more people are starting to understand that the nation has become, to the point of irreconcilability, a “house divided against itself”. What we have seen so far this year is, I think, just the beginning.
13 Comments
I had worried that I might have sounded a bit too angry yesterday under the “Right -Left-Chaos-Order thread. If so, I am in excellent company. At the moment it is “Cold Civil War”. For the Left, there must be friction for them to thrive. Either the non Left answers with enough heat to end them or we submit to them. No decent livable middle ground.
Carthage must be destroyed.
pangur,
One more, and you should write yourself a macro.
Malcolm,
Cato didn’t need one, why should I?
Robert,
There is a third possibility. Because the Left stands in opposition to organic order, it must apply ever-increasing power to impose its doctrine — and because it denies the architectural realities of sustainable social structures, it can build nothing that lasts. All of these things mean that it must collapse — though of course when it does so, it will often take the societies it has infected down with it. This is happening now.
So the third way is study, and patience, and preparation, and the careful storage and protection of the things we must preserve: the building of an ark.
pangur,
I was only trying to help.
Malcolm, I appreciate that image of an “ark”. An excellent symbol as a way forward. An ark of wisdom, values and traditions.
Malcolm,
You must disagree with this guy about a lot of things but you’re on the same wavelength here:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2015/12/leftism-is-universal-acid.html
“Leftism really is like acid – it destroys the functionality of all social systems, reduces them to a confluent lagoon of Leftism – but does not thereby unify them. Religions may dominate social systems, and make them cohere into the shape imposed by the religion; but Leftism subverts social systems so that they blend without coherence; they join up to make a chaos, a Brownian motion of randomly jiggling radical notions.”
Jacques,
Yup. If you search “universal acid” on this site you’ll get quite a few hits.
Robert,
That’s it exactly. No mean feat, though.
I just had a happy thought — in the next general election, I am going to completely nullify the OEM’s vote on all national and state-wide issues.
You’re welcome.
Many thanks, Malcolm.
Seen in a Derbyshire column about two weeks ago describing the “Democratic” party… “the Coalition of the Fringes is looking pretty solid.” What a totalitarian mess. Amusing in a way.