NP - Isaiah Berlin still speaks to us

[matthew cissell]

Dear all,

I hope you are well and making the best of this less than ideal summer (at
least for those of us not flying off to the stars with some billionaire).

Recently I've been going back over Berlin's essays and have found that his
words may be more applicable now than when he wrote them. This especially
hit home when I was reading from "The Bent Twig", at the beginning of the
fifth section.

"What we are seeing, it seems to me, is a world reaction against the
central doctrines of nineteenth-century liberal rationalism [...] The lines
of battle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more or less
clearly drawn. On one side stood the supporters of tradition, of political
and social hierarchies,, whether 'natural' or hallowed by history, or
belief in, and  obedience to , to divine, or at any rate transcendent,
authority. [...] On the other side stood the unswerving champions of
reason, who rejected faith in tradition, intuition, transcendent sources of
authority as mere smoke-screens to justify irrationality[...]."

Those forces of reason come in for some serious review by way of his work
on Joseph De Maistre and others, but the point is that Nationalism is a
force which many refused to recognize or dismissed. Now that we see Tucker
Carlson going to Hungary to fawn over Orban's fascism (lite?) it is clear
that the most noxious form of nationalism has got to be called out for what
it is. But of course to call soem one a fascisit is to fall into the
mudslinging that reigns in the internet. Their words and behaviour must be
documented and categorized to show that they indeed walk like ducks because
they are very sincere in their Goose-stepping.

Go grab some Isaiah Berlin and feel the crooked timber of humanity creek
and groan in our time.

Best Regards
Matt Cissell

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