Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Activism and Quietism

  • The Unavoidability of the Political

     Skholiast at Speculum Criticum sends a friendly greeting that I have shortened a bit:  Like the recent correspondent you quote in your Christmas post, I've been reading you a long time — I guess ten years now — and I read you from across the political divide. Possibly I am further "left," or "radical," or…

  • What is to be Done?

    Here: So, again, the question remains what should conservatives do in the current situation, in the middle of an all-out attempt by powerful elements in the administrative state-cultural leviathan axis to nullify the 2016 Presidential election? Remain aloof, cultivate one’s own garden of the little platoons in quietist, and often, ironic fashion; talk mostly of…

  • A Blogger’s Lament

    This from a fellow blogger: My output is down lately. I'm finding it harder not to just look away from it all. There are good books to read, history to study, music and chess to play, hikes to take, questions to ponder, family to love, drinks to drink and food to eat, and so much…

  • A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist

    In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism: I have to confess that blogging is weird.  It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn.  Anti-natalism?  Seriously?  With all the challenges that face us, with the…

  • Of E-Mail, Doing Nothing, and a Life Worth Living

    I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying: Dolce Far Niente Sweet To…

  • Dolce far Niente

    It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies. At least this is true here below. Genesis 3:19 may be read as 'sentencing' us…

  • What Exactly is Trumpism?

    Another excellent column by VDH.  Excerpt: Trump admires people who make money. He doesn’t buy that those, to take one example, with Ph.D.s and academic titles could have made money if only they had wished—but for lots of reasons (most of them supposedly noble) chose not to. For Trump, credentialed academic expertise in anything is…

  • The Altar of Activism

    Don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism.  Although happiness involves activity as Aristotle observed, it also involves rest, appreciation, enjoyment, gratitude, contentment, and contemplation. These, especially the last five, are deeply conservative.  And they lie beyond the political. We conservatives should be politically active only to the extent that it is necessary to beat…

  • A Time to Act and Press Our Advantage

    Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa.   Conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits,  need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism.  And this with blood and iron if need…

  • Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

    Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable. Here is another formulation,…

  • I Pity the Poor Activist

    I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political.  But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public. We need to battle them in the very sphere they think exhausts the real.  But it is and must be a…

  • Apatheia and the News

    Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do nothing about them?  Apatheia and the news don't go well together.  Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider.  But on the other side of the question: The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. …

  • I Wish I Could Stick to Philosophy . . .

    . . . and avoid politics.  But philosophy needs a 'safe space' within which to flourish.  And that space needs to be defended against the two-fold totalitarian threat.  There is the threat from radical Islam and the threat from the leftist enablers of and apologists for radical Islam.  (If you insist that radical Islam =…

  • Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option

    Excerpt: You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula. I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality.…

  • A Case Against Withdrawal

    Here: This is the hopeful side of the culture wars—a call for engagement, not retreat. Religious believers weighing the option of withdrawing from a culture increasingly hostile to their values should redouble their efforts to cultivate their ideas within active subcultures that influence the nation and the next generation of Americans. Those who share a…