Posted on 09/20/2009 9:11:10 PM PDT by Senator Goldwater
According to his obituary in the NY Times, Irving Kristol once felt intimidated among NY intellectuals when he found himself seated with Mary McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other, and Diana Trilling across from him.
This standard—of intellect, to say nothing of other allures—was very much relaxed by the time he found himself placed next to me at a dinner at the Lehrman Institute in Manhattan in the mid-1980s.
Determined to upset his likely expectation of me—I having hung onto a version of Trotskyism many years after he had discarded it—I inquired politely about his time in London as an editor of Encounter.
Nursing at the CIA's teat as it had done, the magazine was nonetheless a haven for some real writerly talent, and its offices were a place where one might meet the most interesting and unorthodox people. "You want to know what really struck me about the London 'scene'?" he replied shortly. "How many homosexuals there were." I knew what he meant, all right, and his reputation for brusqueness had preceded him, but this seemed designed to forestall further literary chit-chat.
We were soon enough onto politics, and once again he more or less shut me up by saying that he didn't believe that Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine Jewish editor imprisoned without trial and tortured by the dictatorship, had actually undergone the experiences described in his book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.
I don't recollect quite how the evening ended, but if we had parted with mutual expressions of esteem, I am sure I would have remembered it.
Kristol's great charm, in other words, was that he didn't care overmuch for the charm business.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Hitchen’s has been hitting the sauce a lot lately?
Sounds like there will be more of those in the future.
“Here again, Kristol appears to have been contradictory as between an abstruse elite intellectual and the popular will: If I understood him correctly, he believed that religion was a useful tool for making people behave well, quite independent of whether it was true or not.”
A related idea within the Strauss community appears to be that there are two levels of knowledge, one for the initiates within the Strauss mysteries, and another for the rest of us rabble. It would seem that it’s wise not to take the words of Straussians at face value.
Good piece.
“Hitchen’s has been hitting the sauce a lot lately?”
Yeah, I sort of thought that too. I think one had to be alive and very politically aware during the 50s & 60s to really understand this (rather nice, I think) obit. Or at least the 60s & 70s.
I, myself, was a mere child at that time!
Actually he looks like he's cleaned up his act a lot since the early Bush era. Denouncing most of the left singlehandedly baised on their own hypocrisy was a big job for one man. At times he looked almost like he'd been in a fight before going on air. Unkempt.
None the less, I think he he carried it off very very well. Few people have ever lost so many allies and friends for taking a principled position. He was fired by several magazines that he had written for for decades.
I also think this is a nice column about a man he clearly admires, as a thinker.
What are your finding that makes you think he's drinking. Or are you just noting that he's a famous bon-vivant?
Good Lord, that's a beautiful sentence.
If I understood him correctly, he believed that religion was a useful tool for making people behave well, quite independent of whether it was true or not.
That's the topic for an entire debate, but the root of the matter is the authority under which any ethics are possible. I was reminded that today by an off-campus billboard simpering "Millions Are Good Without God," which evaded the question of why they should be so. It's a rather more difficult argument than it might appear to base an ethical system on a secular authority - "behave this way because it's good for society" is a question-begging avoidance of "who says so, and why?"
I should love to hear a still-firm atheist such as Hitchens address the topic. Most latter-day atheists seem to do their best to avoid it; most latter-day religionists seem, naturally enough, more taken up by the consideration of whether religion is true than whether it is useful. My apologies for the digression.
Thanks.
I should love to hear a still-firm atheist such as Hitchens address the topic. Most latter-day atheists seem to do their best to avoid it; most latter-day religionists seem, naturally enough, more taken up by the consideration of whether religion is true than whether it is useful. My apologies for the digression. Not at all. Its a very good question, and one Hitchens has probably addressed to his liking. I haven't read his two books on the subject of atheism (God is not Great; the Portable Atheist) but presumably its of the "opiate of the masses" variety. At least from the reviews that I have seen.
I generally don't like to pan a book I haven't actually read, but I suspect Hitchens can deliver his position forcefully and elegantly, irrespective of my misgivings about his militant atheism.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.