Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Where Are We Headed?
Conservatives thought that when the nation elected Barack Obama it was the final surrender to the New Left ethos that emerged during the 1960s. But what if we are seeing the re-institutionalization of liberalism instead? What if--because of a decline in religious practice--people instead begin to adopt the Kantian ideology of duty-for-duty's sake? What if we are seeing a retread of Victorianism (though it be altered by history)?
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2 comments:
I felt this was a very sophomoric post, for the reason that there is more to Victorianism than Kant (there was also much cant) and presumably, more to Kant than Victorianism, else we would have dismissed him with the bad wallpaper.
Rewrite this- about two thousand words should do, and at that point I will offer further criticisms.
best regards,
Thom.
Check out Gertrude Himmelfarb's "The Demoralization of Society" and you will see where I am coming from. With the "changed by history comment", I suppose I should have been more clear: what I meant was that the moralizers of our particular era may very well end up enforcing their Grundy-ism with the same crusader spirit as the utilitarians and evangelicals of the 19th century, only the difference will be that the Grundys of today will enforce a different type of institutional morality with different ethical prescriptions than any of the Victorians did. Best wishes.
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