Reviews and News:
The procrastinating king: “Contrary to what hostile contemporaries, echoed by many historians, claimed, Louis was very far from stupid or lazy. He was gifted at mathematics and geography, and fascinated by the sea – his reign saw a remarkable rebuilding of the French navy. He also spoke Latin, Italian and, surprisingly, English, the language of France’s hereditary enemy. Throughout his life he was alternately fascinated and repelled by Britain’s political system and commercial power. He is probably the only French ruler to have had a subscription to The Spectator. Louis’s flaw was not stupidity but sometimes paralysing indecision, a product of heredity, early bereavements and the stultifying ritual of Versailles. Its effects were memorably summarised by his younger brother, the future Louis XVIII: ‘Imagine a set of oiled billiard-balls that you vainly try to hold together.'”
* *
Dante’s marriage: “Dante’s wife Gemma was not the shrew of legend, and may even have been the recipient of one of his most moving Canzone, according to Marco Santagata’s indispensible biography of the poet.”
* *
Edward Docx goes to the 2016 British Esperanto Conference: “There’s a phrase in Esperanto ‘ne krokodilo’ meaning ‘no crocodiling.’ To crocodile is when two people, who have learnt Esperanto, speak to one another in another language. This was an offence punishable by banishment—a kind of community-enforced personal Brexit.”
* *
Boris Johnson wins The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition. (The story behind the poem.) In Germany, Jan Boehmermann’s original Erdogan poem has been banned.
* *
A 1500-year-old underground Byzantine church discovered in Turkey. (HT: Thomas Kidd)
* *
The meaning of food: “Who would have thought a few years ago that anyone would have wanted to use social media to photograph and share their daily meals, or indeed that anyone would have wanted to look at other people’s photos of their dinner? Or that “clean” eating would become a fad? That quinoa would be considered at all edible, drenched and dressed up with anything? Or that seven out of ten of last year’s most watched television programmes in the UK would be episodes of a show about baking, filmed in a tent, hosted by comedians? In the West, at a time when food is available to many of us at an astonishingly low cost, requiring minimum effort and exertion to gather and prepare, and often consumed with little fuss or ceremony, we seem to be spending more and more time thinking, looking, reading and writing about it. In this sense, food is like religion, or indigestion: it has come back to haunt us.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, Peter Lawler and Richard Reinsch argue that conservatives should avoid espousing a Lockean understanding of natural rights and instead look to Orestes Brownson, who argued that those rights are founded on (and constrained by) a specific tradition:
“Contrary to the concerns of many Tea Party types, we think the reality confronting the United States isn’t the continual growth of progressivism understood as progress toward bigger and better government, but rather progressivism’s coming demise, one that we should speed up. The good news is that the road to serfdom, apparently, never gets to serfdom. The demographic situation—too many old people and not enough young and productive ones—will only get worse from the view of sustaining our entitlements. And the various other safety nets that have been integral parts of our welfare state—such as pensions and unions—are also falling victim to the dynamic realities of the twenty-first-century global competitive marketplace. Persuasive evidence, notes John McGinnis, professor of constitutional law, can also be seen in the fragile legislative coalition of contemporary progressivism that can only dream of the congressional power it held under FDR and LBJ.
“But if progressivism is receding, what is the alternative? The most commonly stated alternative to big-government progressivism is a Lockean natural rights constitutionalism, a doctrine that many of our Founders deployed in their own battle to secure American liberties. Now more than ever we have to ask whether a purely individualistic understanding of who each of us is by nature is really stable enough to sustain limited and representative (or generally democratic) government. That question, of course, has been a perennial conservative concern in our country.
“America is becoming more ‘Lockean,’ not less. As evidenced by Justice Kennedy’s evolutionary understanding of the Constitution’s view of liberty in Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges, America is now more attuned than ever to the individualistic philosophical principles that guided some of the leading Founders. And by reconfiguring, against even the intention of Locke himself, every feature of human life, our individualism may be pushing us in the direction of a postpolitical, postfamilial, and postreligious fantasy that would make our free republic unsustainable.
“The common sense of our country for most of our history has been to take the course defended most ably by our great (and very unjustly neglected) nineteenth-century political thinker Orestes Brownson. We Americans have embraced the self-evident truths of our Declaration, which proclaims that each of us has been created equal with inalienable natural rights, but we have slighted Locke’s nominalist method of establishing those truths. Instead of the written Constitution, being grounded merely by abstract natural rights and autonomous individuals, we have looked to a prior, unwritten, ‘providential’ constitution. Providential here, to be clear, has nothing to do with some intervention of Divine Providence into history. It has to do with the fact that no written constitution could emerge from nothing, but is necessarily dependent on the various ‘givens’ that limit and direct what is possible for statesmen at any particular time. The ‘givens’ from this view aren’t oppressive constraints but civilizational accomplishments that make the written Constitution and constitutional order possible. ‘Providential,’ in this sense, means to be guided by what one is given by custom, tradition, philosophy, theology, and prior political experience.”
* *
Image of the Day: Patagonia
* *
Poem: Alexander Pushkin, “The Critic”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
