Status Updates From Politics of Hope

Hope "implies a deep-seated trust in life that seems absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories... in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it."
-- Lasch

Religion is not he best way of understanding what is; its domain is in the realm of what ought to be. Nor is it an appropriate vehicle of power. Politics is the art of mediating between what is and what ought to be, and calls for compromises that faith cannot make.

Foreseeing the future, the prophets did not predict what would happen, but warned of what might happen in the hope that people would change.

As Harold Bloom has argued, those who find themselves late arrivals on a cultural scene create space for themselves by 'misreading' their predecessors: that is the oedipal way in which civilisations progress.

The most striking symbol of this is the role of memory in contemporary society, our ability to pass on to our children the knowledge of the great events, heroes and battles which brought us to where we are. Tradition societies lived with the past as an eternal present.

Dilemmas arise not because there are no moral absolutes, but precisely because there are, and because they can sometimes conflict... The conclusion we should draw is not that there are no objective duties, but that one of the great failings of the philosophical quest for a rational basis of morality has been its search for a single coherent set of principles that would unequivocally answer all moral questions.

These values will not speak to everyone. They never did. Nor will we live up to them all the time. We never do.

Adultery has no saving graces

For a government to identify one way of life as inherently preferable to another is the ultimate crime against the concept of the abstract individual and the procedural state, the self which is prior to its ends and the right which is prior to the good.

Dickens [saw] that a society that harms its children, whatever else it is, is not a place where one can live at ease.

Teachers are among a civilisation's most precious assets...a re-evaluation is called for, one that restores to education its true dignity as the citadel of cultural continuity and to teachers the honour due to those who are the trustees of society's bequest to its children.

Tradition can be revolutionary

"Tradition is to morality what memory is to personality, and when we lost it we become prey to a kind of collective Alzheimer's Disease."

Even to have a reason for acting, we need to have some sense of ourself as a character within a drama...

If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which equality of conditions is increased.

--Tocqueville

Needs are not facts but values, and they are written in the history of a particular culture.

Rights presuppose the responsibility to participate in and keep in good order the basic framework of society... If we want to pick the flowers we must help to tend the garden.

-- Taylor as summarized by Sacks.

Our pathos and our glory lie in the fact that we cannot live alone, but only with the greatest difficulty can we live together.

"The point--- and it is crucial--- is that we all have multiple allegiances, to family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, 'significant others,' to interests, vocations, institutions, groups and teams. These place an important, sometimes definitive, part in making us the person we are."

"In place of Adam and Eve, conscious and ashamed of their nakedness, the modern self glories in self-disclosure, for clothes, concealments, reticences--the multiple constraints of self within society--have come to stand for the unwarranted intrusion of public standards into private space."

"Relationship precedes identity. "

"If all values are relative, so too is liberty. "

"What we can talk about, we can cure. What we cannot talk about eventually takes a heavy toll. In an age where the most private emotions are paraded in public, and the most intimate confessions broadcast to millions, things that used to be public knowledge have become unsayable."

"...One of the Sunday papers... asked what might have happened had Moses descended from Mount Sinai only to be confronted by a hostile radio journalist."

The image and imagined ramifications were too good not to share. :D

"The very fact that violent crime is news tells us two things: that it remains exceptional, and that evil has not lost its power to shock. Our fascination with disorder testifies to the underlying strength of order."