Readers:
I speculated last Sunday that scholars of different disciplines are attracted to different kinds of humor. What about historians?
I am suspicious of most fashionable theories, but the narrative theory of the self has a certain merit if one doesn’t take the metaphor it is based on too literally. Maybe we could view things like this.
In a famous talk some years ago, the philosopher Mortimer Adler delivered a lovely refutation of the modern fallacy that we never perceive anything in itself, but only perceive our idea of the thing. As he explained, the only thing I ever perceive is the thing, but I perceive it by means of the perception in the intellect. The classical thinkers called this the “intelligible species.” I do not actually perceive the idea at all – in Adler's term, it is "invisible" to me, like a perfect window. If I try to perceive the perception, all I am really doing is constructing a
Conversation took an interesting turn with a few lively political philosophy undergrads who liked, or thought they liked, self-government and free markets.
I suggested that institutions such as the republic and the free market can’t function properly without virtue.
They enthusiastically agreed.
I suggested that these institutions cannot provide themselves with virtue – it has to come from somewhere else.
Like schools? they asked.
No, I suggested, schools can’t compensate for disordered families. At best they reinforce the lessons of sound ones.
Liberalism is an "upstairs" morality, much as “playing the game" and "good form" used to be in the English upper classes.
Its chief function is to enable our intellectual, professional, and business classes feel virtuous, while at the same time disguising the political mistreatment of the other classes.
More than once after giving a talk, I’ve been asked, “How did we get into this mess?” People pose this question in the hope of a simple answer. There isn’t one. No one thing got us into this mess; we were brought here by a great many seemingly independent but converging and reinforcing events, over a period of centuries.
Often, even if we cannot prevent something from happening, we can do something about how it will happen. I think Alexis de Tocqueville had the right idea about this.
I have a half-baked theory that people in different disciplines are attracted to different kinds of jokes. Physicists seem to be especially fond of limericks:
There was a young lady from Bright,
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She set out one day
First freedom meant our noble power of rational and moral self-direction.
Then it meant the mere absence of restraints on our will, so long as we were not violating moral law.
Then it meant the absence of any restraints whatsoever.
Finally it meant the sheer power to act immorally and irrationally, even if the power of rational and moral self-direction were taken from us.
Insofar as this is an illness of the mind, even to recognize its progress is to begin its cure. Insofar as it is an illness of the heart --
Here the manuscript breaks off.