Sublime

This is more or less the argument of Roger Scruton in positioning environmentalism as a deservedly (politically) conservative cause. He writes in Green Philosophy, For the conservative, politics concerns the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems — systems that correct themselves in response to destabilizing change. Markets are homeostatic s

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Optimistic attempts to promote what is Clearly Right will be presented as a pursuit of the common good, but Scruton believes that the attitude underlying them is always “I”-based: it’s for the good of me and people whose views are generally indistinguishable from mine. To this “I” attitude Scruton contrasts the “we” attitude—not the most felicitous

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to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

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The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.