The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press
has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware
of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of
reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.
-Mark Lilla, The New York Times, Nov. 20 2016
This op-ed piece by Lilla sent me to his recent book, The
Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction
(New York Review Books, 2016), a study of political reaction. The reactionaries all seem to have a time
when things were great, before they went bad:
in ancient Athens or before the Reformation or before the
Enlightenment. Lilla studies three
influential writer/philosophers: Franz
Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, all of whom were on a “tragicomic
quest, like Don Quixote, to revive the Golden Age,” an age that never quite
existed. “For the apocalyptic
imagination the present, not the past, is a foreign country.”
Popular myths can be quite powerful, including yearning for
the America of the fifties, when women and minorities knew their place and
children always did as they were told.
We need to understand these myths, and not just ignore them, in order to move ahead. Lilla has made a good start at this,
examining the thinkers who have been most influential on populist views..
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