I thought about shifting into pooling more New Age thought but the character of the movement kinda repulses me in some way. Perhaps that’s another reason to dig into it?

Any, an unexpected detour prompted by a new Daily Dish essay. Another quote-heavy post, I’m more interested in reading than writing right now.

 

A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what, indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so sweet?

I once read that in Europe a hundred miles is a great distance, and in America a hundred years is a long time. It’s a great aphorism about perspective, and it might also be a clever nod to the Turner thesis (though probably not).

Not long ago Andrew Sullivan wrote about Oakeshott again, (or rather a new essay on Oakeshott by Wilfred McClay), an essay that introduced some new Oakeshottian vocabulary and ideas to me, as someone who still hasn’t read any Oakeshott directly. From that essay:

It’s been said during these past two days, more than once, that Oakeshott’s work will always be a minority taste and enjoy a marginal influence. There is probably something to that assertion, but I would prefer to put it a little differently. I believe Oakeshott is best understood (at least within American conservatism) as acorrective thinker rather than a foundational one. If he were a boxer, he would be a counterpuncher. One evidence of that is the fact that one would have trouble giving an account of his thought without first explaining the rationalist teachings and institutions against which his writing has been deployed, not only presupposing their existence but granting their (unfortunate and often malign) influence. The corrective will always be needed.

This not a derogation of him, since it was never his intention to offer us a new and improved monism. On the contrary, there is instead in Oakeshott always a very powerful sense of the writer himself as but one voice in a world of various other voices, whose conformity with one another is neither possible nor desirable.

This is where the concept of conversation, so central to Oakeshott, comes into play, and is very illuminating and useful. The “conversation of mankind” is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily; it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is to be regarded as an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant accommodation to an imperfect world. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit,” but rather is “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.”

All that said, though, it would be a mistake to argue that we can or should expunge the teleocratic impulse altogether. That too is part of our striving human nature, and to strive too earnestly to eliminate striving would be very nearly a self-contradictory act, as absurd as it is impossible. It is one thing to warn against the dangers of high-order utopianism; it is another to become too programmatic, too—dare I say too rationalist—in rooting out rationalism in all its manifestations. This is to commit the kind of act that Oakeshott warns about, in his famous barb directed at Hayek, whose plan for an unplanned society he deemed to be itself guilty of embodying a kind of planning.

But the concept of “conversation” and its central place in the life of civilized human beings does suggest to me a practical consideration that can be drawn from Oakeshott for the betterment of American conservative, and for that matter liberal, thought. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. A fully reciprocal conversation implies a certain propinquity and stability, and it fits well with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local, and on those kinds of communities whose scale is one in which conversation is possible, and whose stability with reference to “place” makes those conversations distinctive. (The very etymology of the word, conversation, goes back to the Latin conversari, “to live with, and keep company with.”) In other words, the voice of Oakeshott ought to pull conservatism back toward a renewed emphasis upon Burkean themes of local patriotism, as opposed to national and universalistic sources of identity, and toward the preservation of smaller-scale and local forms of association.

So that is one possible gift of Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the centrality of conversation. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is I think absolutely central to Oakeshott. And that is a release from the burden of purposefulness, from “the rage to reform,” as Oakeshott calls it, the burden that the predominance of the rationalist disposition, and of the enterprise associations through which it is expressed, including the regulatory state, imposes upon us. This release would be akin to the idea of the “usefulness of uselessness” to which Kenneth McIntyre alluded yesterday, and to the interesting parallel that has been drawn between Oakeshott’s insights and Johan Huizinga’s portrait of homo ludens

 

Homo Ludens

I had no idea that Oakeshott was aware of (let alone sympathetic to) Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Because of my background that was a very welcome connection to make. From an introductory essay on Oakeshott by a Mr. O’sullivan:

If the idea of play seems to trivialise the subject of civilization, it may help to recall that Oakeshott was sympathetic to a book published in 1949 by the Dutch historian Huizinga. In it, Huizinga argued that the past periods of civility in western Europe were only possible because of the existence of an outlook which refused to treat everything in instrumental or manipulative terms. The ancient Greek world, for example, possessed the Olympic Games, and the medieval world possessed the ideal of chivalry. The unique feature of modern industrial civilization, however, is the triumph of the work mentality, which pays no attention to intrinsic values but is concerned only with instrumental ones. It is against this background that Oakeshott wrote, in an early essay on play, that the complete character of a human being does not come into view unless we add to Homo Sapiens (intelligent man) the characters of Homo Ludens, man the player, Homo Faber, man the maker of things, and Homo Laborans, man the worker.[..]. Oakeshott added that of these, it is not Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber or Homo Laborans, but Homo Ludens (man engaged in the activities of play) who is the civilized man. [..]

When Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the role of play in civilized life is remembered, it is easy to understand the sense of despair which characterizes his late essay on ‘The Tower of Babel’. As that essay indicates, he came to believe that everything he valued in education, social life and the politics of civil association was unlikely to endure for much longer in an age which has become almost completely devoid of any sense of play.