BTW, i agree that it's a cop out to tell someone they are taking the wrong side and to go read the book. the person saying it doesn't have time or doesn't want to have time to be bothered to even defend the author. On my view, it's rude and disrespectful to everyone involved.
The problem with discussing a book you haven't read, especially if you attribute ideas to an author based on misreadings by others or misreadings of the others writing about a book they've read is that, because people like to follow others they respect, as Carrol well knows, and believe their renditions based on reputation, the misreadings and in accurate characterizations stick. This is unfair to the author. You see this happen all the time with bad reviews in the NYRB and people who read the reviews trot out claims about books based on skimming a review.
It's like where all this money is being exchanged on a stock market many degrees of separation from the companies to which those exchanges point.
> > what's inadequate about white supremacy as an explanation. (i'm not
> even sure what it means, actually)
> >
>
>
>Robin writes this right after the section I quoted:
>
> > Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
> >
> > With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor,
> but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich,
> belong to the upper class.
>
>Hence my reference.
yeah. So what's wrong with it as explanation? Why doesn't it satisfy you?
<snip happens :) >
>The above are not my ideas for explaining the "conservative mind" of the
>"lower orders". They are other explanations I have heard, which even
>though wrong (IMO), I find have more content than the speculation about
>psychological motivational states.
>
>Perhaps I should mention that there is lot in what Robin writes — again,
>to be clear, in the NYRB, not in the book -- that I myself find
>uncontroversial, e.g:
>
> > Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon
> hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show,
> shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von
> Mises.
speaking of which, joanna wrote:
:One might add, it makes for the only possible experience of selfhood in a
society that is gradually emptied of meaningful human relations and
meaningful work. A society in which we see one another either as burdens
(dependents) or competitors. "
The problem I have with such claims is that there are no illustrative examples. And, to avoid methodological dualism, it only seem fair that Joanna show how this operates in her own life. If this is a general operation in society, then everyone is affected - and that includes the author. after all, how do you come up with such an insightful account, without experiencing this.
now, i don't see people as competitors on this list for instance. don't see them this way at work. definitely don't see them that way as my neighbors. heck, even when competing at the gym or on a bike ride or playing tennis, it is always *fun* even if i lose, which i often do!
i certainly don't see people as dependents.
speaking of methodological dualism, i doubt woj is reading but if so, the md was in the discussion of lefty assholes.