| Wednesday,
January 6, 2010 I have successfully built Atomic,
Intel/Windows answer to the Mac Minnie. It took about an hour to assemble
and another hour to install Windows 7. Actually it took me longer than that
because I made several errors, but then I do lots of silly things so you
don't have to. It will all be in the column which ought to be up next Monday
or so since it's due in Tokyo Sunday evening Los Angeles time.
But once again I have a late start and since I am actually making
progress on Mamelukes I intend to go up there and work this afternoon.
Actually, I don't need to do an essay today if you have access to
National Review. The four articles on American Progressivism in the
December 31 issue are very much worth your time. Alas, apparently you have
to be a National Review subscriber to read them. I'd rather you subscribed
here, but once you've done that...
Anyway, I recommend the articles. American Progressivism -- which had
many similarities to Mussolini's Fascism (but not so much to the parody of
Fascism, Germany's National Socialist German Worker's Party after Hitler
was finished with it) -- has been very influential among American
intellectuals and remains so although many of those influenced by it do
not know they have been, and may know nothing of Progressivism. Hillary
Clinton calls herself a Progressive, but it's pretty clear she doesn't
know much about the Progressive movement.
I wish I had time to do this justice because it is important.
Progressivism like most Utopian schemes was a form of gnosticism, the sort
of thing that generated Eric Vogelin's phrase "immanentize the eschaton";
a phrase that so engaged William F. Buckley that he adopted it, and I can
recall one senior seminar in political theory in which every one of my
students appeared wearing an EVSS: an "Eric Vogelin Sweat Shirt" which
pictured the scowly Vogelin and the phrase "Don't let Them Immanentize the
Eschaton!". Gnosticism has been with us for millennia, and the fact that
most American intellectuals never heard of it is more a commentary on
modern education than anything else.
The dream of perfecting society, or of using the State to generate the
means by which those who desire perfection may obtain it, has many
variations. It has ever proven to be a nightmare, in many diverse places
and over centuries of time. The Pursuit of the Millennium is a highly
attractive temptation, and gnosticism has the added temptation of allowing
you to denigrate your intellectual opponents as uninformed or worse,
perverse and selfish dogs in a manger, preventing others from perfecting
themselves because of their base motives. Gnosticism is doing very well
and thriving in Washington. And, of course, as always there are those who
take on the color of the gnostic while remaining the selfish wolves the
Progressives so detest.
And, of course, the gnostic, who has such noble motives, may well
believe himself entitled to a few benefits. He is doing good; should he
not do well? Contemplate Bill Clinton as a candidate for that mantle.
I don't recommend that you read Vogelin, although it would do no harm;
but he is thorough and assumes a level of education that was higher than
much of his readership when he wrote. Western intellectuals used to share
far more common education -- novels, familiarity with myth and legend,
Iliad and Odyssey and Aeschylus and Sophocles and -- ah, well. There is a
great deal of more modern stuff that we must know now, and perhaps a
neglect of the classics was an inevitable result of all our modern
scientific discoveries. Jacques Barzun told a story of the days in the
19th Century when Harvard instituted the Bachelor of Science degree;
something new at the time. It did not guarantee that its recipient knew
any science, but it certainly guaranteed that he would know neither Greek
nor Latin... Today's graduate can add history and philosophy to
those guarantees; all of which makes communication more difficult. If I
say David and Goliath most readers will understand the reference and the
image of the underdog winning; but the days when there were thousands of
such colorful images for a writer to draw on in the sure knowledge that
the reader would understand are long gone. Alas. I am not sure we are the
better for it.
And that, certainly, is more of a ramble than I had intended. I have to
get to work.
========================
I just realized something. I think I actually paid for a
copy of Microsoft Security Essentials in a fit of absence of mind. I forget
which machine I did that on; I need to scan it.
If you Bing Microsoft Security Essentials the first listing
to download it is NOT Microsoft. It's an outfit that wants money. It's not a
lot, and I think I absent mindedly sent them a few bucks through Paypal. Now
I worry that what I got was corrupted, although as I recall the machine did
install the real thing. I wish I could remember which machine I put that on.
I recommend MSE but get it from Microsoft. It's free.
=============
I went looking for the four articles on the Progressives.
One has to be a subscriber to National Review, and then create an account,
all of which I did. And logged in, and went looking for the articles, found
them, and had to log in again on the account I had created. But they are
there. I suppose I have seen a picture of the future, and I can hardly
object.
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