> 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.
>
Yes, all true. Just to clarify though, if at all I have taken sides, it is that of Robin’s i.e., I have no question that he and I are [for the most part] politically aligned; and against Lilla. Terrible hatchet jobs have been carried out by reviewers leading recently to a spate of lawsuits in the UK (and elsewhere?). My comments are not about the book, but about the NYRB threads (and the one reference I made to quoted sections in Gourevitch’s essay). And I do think it is possible to analyse the arguments in a meaningful way (take for instance Colin McGinn’s excellent rejoinder in the NYRB or LRB to V.S. Ramachandran’s response to the former’s review of VSR’s book; there is a lot to learn in the exchange and concrete statements that one can analyse; in this case, Lilla’s section on historical liberalism vs conservatism, which runs contrary to public perception today, was a useful read, independent of Robin’s book, and one I recommended to friends).
>> 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?
>
Because I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think race turns all whites into a ruling class and I don’t think all whites rejoice in this virtual inclusion in the upper classes. Perhaps Robin does not think so either, hence he says “lower orders” “often” “join”. My disbelief is stronger than that of course. I do not think it is any more useful politically to say lower orders get a lordly thrill, hence their conservatism, than it is to say “people are altruistic because it lights up the same regions in an fMRI scan as when their testicles are scratched”. How moments of lordly pleasure is a “good reason” is an even trickier problem. I could be completely wrong. Hence my question to Shane.
—ravi