As Donald Trump has put male behavior towards women front
and center for the moment, I thought I would share this from Ken Minogue’s
essay The Fate of Rationalism in Oakeshott’s Thought:
“I pluck from the
current headlines a proposal made in Britain by the current minister for
Schools and Children—a title that would’ve provoked notable derision from
Oakeshott. New guidelines for schools should require that boys from the age of
five onward must be taught respect for girls as one element in a curriculum at
something called ‘personal development.’ Oakeshott knew, as most of us do
unless we are ministers of the crown promoting a faith, that men refraining
from acting violently toward women is part of the absorption of manners they
acquire in the interstices of early life, partly by imitation of adults and
partly by absorbing elements of the chivalric convictions that have almost
perennially been a presence in European life. The notion that such subtle and
central modes of conduct can be disseminated propositionally by a taught course
of a didactic kind, is a piece of rationalism that no sophisticated person
would take seriously.”
The only thing I would add here is that Minogue is quite
wrong in his conclusion. A great number of ‘sophisticated people’ would take
the described proposition seriously.
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