Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
For a collection of writings from various reactionary blogs.
I'll start with a new article from Ortosphere:
“Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about”
Robert Conquest quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
“Reflecting on what has been said, we see how quickly men’s eyes may be opened, if knowing that they deceive themselves in generalities, we can find a way to make them pass to particulars . . .”
Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (1531)
My first epigraph is the first of Conquest’s three laws of conservatism, now perhaps better known in John Derbyshire’s paraphrase: “everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” What this means is that it requires ignorance to believe that ameliorative social “progress” is easy, efficacious, or even possibility. Making the world a better place appears simple only so long as one has very little idea how the world works. The more one knows about some thing, the more one understands why it is done the way it is, why alternative ways of doing it are not done, and why optimistic reformers do not, “generally speaking,” have any idea what they are talking about.
Kingsley Amis became a friend of Robert Conquest in the early 1950s, when Amis was still one of the “angry young men” of British letters and Conquest was a young historian beginning to buck the leftist tide with honest histories of the horrors of Soviet Russia. In addition to being an angry young man of letters (Lucky Jim was published in 1954), Amis paid his bills by teaching English at a redbrick university like the one he described in Lucky Jim. Of his friendship with Conquest Amis writes,
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I'll start with a new article from Ortosphere:
Why all Wise Men are Sad: The Roots of Reactionary Pessimism
“Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about” Robert Conquest quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991) “Reflecting on what has been said, we see how quickly men’s …
orthosphere.wordpress.com
“Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about”
Robert Conquest quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
“Reflecting on what has been said, we see how quickly men’s eyes may be opened, if knowing that they deceive themselves in generalities, we can find a way to make them pass to particulars . . .”
Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (1531)
My first epigraph is the first of Conquest’s three laws of conservatism, now perhaps better known in John Derbyshire’s paraphrase: “everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” What this means is that it requires ignorance to believe that ameliorative social “progress” is easy, efficacious, or even possibility. Making the world a better place appears simple only so long as one has very little idea how the world works. The more one knows about some thing, the more one understands why it is done the way it is, why alternative ways of doing it are not done, and why optimistic reformers do not, “generally speaking,” have any idea what they are talking about.
Kingsley Amis became a friend of Robert Conquest in the early 1950s, when Amis was still one of the “angry young men” of British letters and Conquest was a young historian beginning to buck the leftist tide with honest histories of the horrors of Soviet Russia. In addition to being an angry young man of letters (Lucky Jim was published in 1954), Amis paid his bills by teaching English at a redbrick university like the one he described in Lucky Jim. Of his friendship with Conquest Amis writes,
On the connection between experience and reactionary pessimism, Paul Fussell has this to say about his friend Amis.“In those days I was some sort of a man of the Left, and this brought us into mild conflict. Some time later he [Conquest] was to point out that, while very ‘progressive’ on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience.”*
I realize that disillusion is not the only consequence of learning “how things work” and “why things are done the way they are,” and I am the first to insist that a reactionary is not simply a sour old grumbler who denounces everything as a swindle and a sham. But everybody is, generally speaking, reactionary on subjects he knows about because he knows they can seldom be improved. If they presently work well, “reform” and “improvement” will almost certainly make them worse; if they are swindles and shams, “reform” and “improvement” is very unlikely to make them better.“Amis has taught at four universities, and his experience at each seems to have augmented his disillusion with that scene.”**
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