Farewell, Sabbatical

It has been a good six months since my last post, and now that the summer is nearing an end, it seems about time to shuck off my isolationist robes, and come out to see the sun. It was Allan Bloom who said that there are two harsh disciplines which make a man serious: community and solitude. I have gone a far longer way toward mastering the latter up to this point, and perhaps it is now the right time to engage the former. And so, I have returned to the blogosphere as one step in that direction.

As described in an earlier post about the intentions behind this blog, there are, I think, three of them: to describe and share thoughts about my readings in Western civilization and, even broader, the full history of ideas, whether from the "West" or "East"; to discuss other philosophical questions that arise from my general reading of the news, academic journals, and cultural criticism; and, given that the United States will choose its forty-fourth president in two months, to discourse on the issues involved in this election. Full disclosure: I am supporting John McCain for President.

So to start things off, I will share two recent thoughts:

1. In a conversation last night about U.S. foreign policy in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, I described the strange bedfellows that the past several years have produced. This is not a very unique observation, but it is an intriguing one. The post-9/11 debates about the use of U.S. military force and the propriety of humanitarian intervention have built metaphorical bridges between the traditional left and the traditional right--two of them, in fact. The first is the alliance between left-leaning liberal hawks and right-wing neoconservatives, who both advocate for the use of force against our illiberal enemies, though I suppose for slightly different reasons. Nevertheless, this alliance is frequently blamed for paving a smoother road for the Bush administration's adventure into Baghdad. I believe that this topic is the focus of a recent book called A Pact With the Devil, by Tony Smith, one of my former professors.

The other alliance, before more uncomfortable than the first, is between left-wing pacifists and conservative isolationists, who saw Iraq as an unnecessary expenditure of blood and treasure, though, again, for slightly different reasons. This topic deserves further reflection in a future post, I think.

2. I frequently use Arts & Letters Daily to find new and interesting essays on the web--it is an excellent resource. The other day, it pointed me to an article in The American Conservative about how libertarians have begun to adopt (or adapt) the philosophy of John Rawls to their cause. Without going into detail on the article, I will relay something that Michael Ignatieff said in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, one of my favorite thinkers of the 20th century. Toward the end of his book, Ignatieff remarked that American liberalism in the latter half of the 20th century went in an undoubtedly Rawlsian direction, rather than a Berlinian one. This is telling, and also troubling. Rawls postulated a philosophical system for the organization of society, the very thing that Berlin argued against as he gazed out at the landscape of destruction that was wrought by the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, all of which were themselves based on rigid political-philosophic "systems." Rawls of course had no intention of setting forth the seeds of a new totalitarian movement when he published A Theory Of Justice in 1971, but as Berlin might have said, any attempt to mold a perfect society out of the crooked timber of humanity is bound, sooner or later, to end in disaster.