For the thoughts of random taxi drivers there’s Thomas Friedman, but
otherwise the best columnist going is Jonah Goldberg. If you don’t get his NR
after dark G-File, sign up here http://www.nationalreview.com/newsletters
. His new foreword to the re-released What Is Conservatism is typically
interesting. However, I think he slightly misses the mark in his conclusion
when he writes “Fusionism is a failure if one looks to it as a source for
what to think. But it is a shining success if one sees it as a guide for how to
think.”
Now in what follows there lurks a rather glaring contradiction. In arguing
that a book of this kind which doesn’t tell you what to think is not really a
failure I am inevitably telling you what to think. And since I have no idea how
to resolve this contradiction, I’m just going to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
But in what I take to be a work of political philosophy I’d argue that how
to think is the correct criteria. One thing I’ve taken from reading Oakeshott
is that the conclusions of a philosopher are less important and of less
interest than how the philosopher arrives at those conclusions. Like math
lessons, there’s no credit if you don’t show your work. And I am reminded of
the many Firing Line answers given by William F. Buckley in the form of “for
the conservative there is a presumption in favor of…………”
To be sure, we don’t start from zero, and it is safe to say we can
eliminate communism, fascism and their like from consideration. But for 99% of
our political discussions it strikes me that truth statements are of the
asymptotic [still borrowing from WFB here] variety. In that range, how to think
is more conservative, as I understand it, than what to think.
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