ps...I don't think one can get a grip on why it is that the ID movement is an American movement (let's differentiate here between notions such as george forwards re difficulties we humans might have in imagining 'first cause' scenarios vs the movement as it actually exists in the US - a deeply ideological and anti-intellectual push to christianize america/world) unless one understands the unique history of the US...and I know of no better book to address this question than Hofstadter's.
Thanks Bernie-
I'm afraid I am not more enthused than I was though.I did buy the anti-intellectualism book a few years ago and have read it.Unfortunately it is in my office which is a few miles away.
I,like you,have a curiosity,some say morbid,with the dynamics of social groups particularly those I am immersed in.My curiosity is just that.You give me the impression of being interested in them for a reason.I simply find them extraordinarily interesting but I'll admit to not really understanding why.If I was pushed I might confess that a study of them gives one some advantages in the pursuit of females and of money,which I think amount to the same thing.
My interest in Potter,for example,stems from his having the money and power and also a skin disease which would naturally repel women.I often wondered how this combination would affect a man's thinking.
I have always been interested in anti-intellectualism.I was in hot water at 10 for telling a kid there was no Father Christmas.On my reading of Hoftstadter,which was obviously not as careful as yours,I had a feeling he was shouting into the wind.They simply were not going to listen whereas one cannot not listen to Veblen.One might read all about conspicuous consumption and such like and then carry on indulging in it.After Veblen that is not an option so ridiculous does he make it seem.Veblen changed my life.Maybe Hofstadter does that but not for those who have Veblen.
But I'll look at it again tomorrow and let you know if a closer scrutiny changes my view.
The locked thread is on the General News forum.I am interested in your thoughts.
I'm inclined to think that ID is an emotional matter and,as such,I respect it.It is actually interesting as a fact of social dynamics.As is the other side.It seems to me to have similarities to football with rhetoric as the game plan in the service of business principles.Whether the stakes are higher or not will have some light cast upon it in next year's World Cup Finals.And I'm not being flippant.
In the last WCF the hysteria was fantastic and things get better all the time-don't they?
I just heard on Fox,which I've watched continuously since Katrina was four hours offshore,that your Chief Justice smoked all his life.
I also noticed that CNN and Fox and Euro News had their commercial breaks synchronised like the 5 Sky Sports channels and Sky News do.
I'll not make it conditional on your stopping smoking that I read the book again.
spendius wrote: ...I'll not make it conditional on your stopping smoking that I read the book again.
What a swell guy ! My offer, however, remains entirely conditional.
I recently read the memoirs of George Kennan - an exercise that renewed my distaste for that class of humans who style themselves as "intellectuals".
Gee George-that's a shame.Maybe Kennan had the wrong group in mind.
spendius wrote:Gee George-that's a shame.Maybe Kennan had the wrong group in mind.
Well, I was thinking of Kennan himself - an Ivy League intellectual of the worst sort. Very capable and often correct in his analyses of national strategy , but in the grip of first principles that I find repugnant, and wrong in many of his long-range forecasts..
George-
Maybe he wasn't an actual intellectual.He might only have been led to believe himself to be one by those who led him to believe it.That would explain his,and your, distaste.
But I don't really know.I haven't come across him as the duchess said to her confessor.
One can by dint of careful thought define the word.
Not that I'm going to mind you.
spendius wrote:George-
Maybe he wasn't an actual intellectual.He might only have been led to believe himself to be one by those who led him to believe it.That would explain his,and your, distaste.
But I don't really know.I haven't come across him as the duchess said to her confessor.
He was a State Department dissident princeling, a favorite of the political intellectual class, the author of the so called containment strategy vis a vis the Soviet Union, and a long-time member of the Princeton Univerrsity Institute of Advanced Studies. Very bright, self-absorbed, and socialist authoritarian to the core.
George-
If he was self absorbed,as you suggest,not me,he was nothing but an Aberdeen fish gutter who could talk posh and had refined a skill with longish words which bamboozled the chattering classes.No doubt after an extended period of infant dependence which is well known to create superior beings.
I prefer Frank Harris myself who flew by the seat of his pants from a very early age.
spendius wrote:George-.
I prefer Frank Harris myself who flew by the seat of his pants from a very early age.
Agreed - include Richard Burton as well.
Do you mean the actore who Ms Taylor couldn't,much to her surprise,get a grip of.
spendius wrote:Do you mean the actore who Ms Taylor couldn't,much to her surprise,get a grip of.
No, the 19th century bad boy of English letters, explorer, and translator of the Arabian nights.
That's what I thought.
Proust loved the Arabian Nights.A touch too romantic for me though.
Was Darwin not a badder boy?
Don't know about Darwin the bad boy.
Did you know that Richard's wife, Isabel Burton was the original translator into English of Jose de Alencar's allegoric epic poem "Iracems" - a Brazilian version of the encounter between the Portuguese and the Native Indians - and that this became the inspiration for a somewhat sticky & melodramatic, but very popular, novel of the time called "Green Mansions". Can't recall the author's name, but it was all about an Indian warrior virgin in love with and betrayed by a European explorer. All a rather inimaginative rehash of the Aneid. However Alencar's version was quite beautiful.
When one wishes to distinguish between the explorer, adventurer and oriental scholar and the hack actor, one usually refers to Richard Francis Burton. His wife was a prude who burned thousands of pages of manuscript upon his death, destroying an uncalculable amout of scholarship. Good little Victorian girl . . .
Setanta wrote: Good little Victorian girl . . .
Not all that good. She did work hard to restore Richard's reputation after his death. She was also Alencar's mistress when Richard was reduced to a position as English Council in Santos.
Her notion of "restoring his reputation" was based upon an hypocritical subscription to a moral convention which she tradduced herself. Had she the honesty of conviction, the world would not have lost so much.
George,
I know very little about Burton.He must have been interesting though if his wife thought fit to destroy some of his papers which,of course,she had every right to do.Even modern writers have censored some aspects of his correspondence so it is a reasonable assumption that there was stuff in there that is not suitable for the general public even today.It may be that in certain areas of human life we would be just as shocked as the Victorians.I think it fair to assume that Lady Isabel would have had a practical grounding in such matters besides a theoretical understanding.
I have met many people who believed themselves broad minded and on hearing just a few hints of possibilities they had not previously encountered have charged out of the room in high dudgeon and confusion.It happened only last week;the prominently up-front lady in question was only asked to pass an ice cube under her armpit before dropping it in my drink and she hasn't spoken to me since.If more extreme practices were dotted here and there in the thousands of pages one can easily sympathise with Lady Isabel faced with reading the lot to find them.The dear Lady may well have been concerned for her own reputation as it stood with her peers.One of the difficulties with an abstract,stereotypical view of events is that it often fails to take account of the actual human beings involved which often results in those taking such a view missing the salient points.
But thanks for the tip.I will re-read The Arabian Nights but it may take me a fair while to find it as I haven't seen it for years.I think my copy has an orange cover.Plus I have to read Hofstadter which I thought was in my office but isn't.Damn and blast!
And to cube those my Isis Unveiled has no index but it does give me an idea of what Lady Isabel faced looking for a few needles in a giant haystack.
An hour in this and I came to wonder whether scientific design is a natural extension of Christian thought and ID a fear of such a development, and possibly justified in some settings.
What is your view of such an idea.
I apologise for stating the obvious but I think it worthwhile to point out that I don't necessarily accept that Lady Isabel did burn those letters and manuscripts.It is a little convenient to think so.There are other possible fates.
spendie
Rising temperatures and manners violations over on that other thread. Yourself, myself, setanta (and a few others) are about equal in snot-quotient and clearly less constrained by popular notions of appropriate social protocol, so now and again the locals bring out the tar and feathers.
Pity the Hofstadter is not to hand. Pity too that I have no Veblen here. No great pity that we value differently though.
