Originally posted by P. G. Tipps
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Queen's Birthday Honours
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Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostHe's been trying since the 1970s, with very little success as far as I can see, to establish a philosophical basis for conservatism. I call that a shabby political ambition to be honest, bearing in mind JK Galbraith's well known words: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
Recalling how much of the popular pre-rock'n'roll American culture of my childhood coloured my formative thinking on these matters, I suddenly realised this while watching the 1950s Western "Shane", about a man who comes unannounced and unexplained into a fearful community of rural homesteaders under constant threat from a gang of land-grabbers who own the local provisions store, and before riding off into the distance sorts them out in the only way American culture seems to know how, having introduced the one boy-child in the cast to how to draw a gun and shoot faster. The fact that, like in many of such movies of that time, it is the woman who stands for something other than the sufferings of violence and warfare, albeit meekly, and that those particular values she espouses have now, courtesy the gun lobby, gone by the wayside, indicates the basic unsustainability of the philosophy, which, as with capitalism, personifies the survival of the fittest. But it's still difficult to counter without the help of a counter-theory, since the argument that human nature's supposed untrustability is ultimately counterable by pointing out that what cannot be trusted is itself subject to the same charge of untrustworthyness can be challenged by the religious notion that God's grace saves us from the conundra of not having all the answers to life's imponderables. The fact that our supposed untrustability puts any unverifiable notion such as God in question, cannot occur to religious apologists, shielded as they are by this idea of grace and forgiveness emanating from a source which, as with all origins, precludes questioning; and in endowing this entity or whatever with ultimate arbitration over moral questions and the power to ensure everlasting happiness, by virtue of a certain circularity that makes ideal bedfellows of religion and conservatism so that they are able to have their cake and eat it.
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Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostHe's been trying since the 1970s, with very little success as far as I can see, to establish a philosophical basis for conservatism. I call that a shabby political ambition to be honest, bearing in mind JK Galbraith's well known words: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
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Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Posta lot easier to put across, based as it is on simplistic premises, than socialism
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Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostAnd
"Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world" strikes me as eminently deserving of the description "deep and meaningless." Doesn anyone here know what it is supposed to mean?
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Richard Tarleton
Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostAnd
"Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world" strikes me as eminently deserving of the description "deep and meaningless." Doesn anyone here know what it is supposed to mean?
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Originally posted by Richard Barrett View Post"Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world" strikes me as eminently deserving of the description "deep and meaningless." Doesn anyone here know what it is supposed to mean?
To begin with, I would question
a) where "the borders of the natural world" are,
b) who imposed them when, how and why (or how might they otherwsie have materialised) and
c) with what they border.
Next, I would ask what is meant by music "addressing us", on the grounds that, as it doesn't and indeed cannot just do that on its own without the intervention of its composers/improvisers/performers, it is those very composers/improvisers/performers who are "addressing us" with it.
All that I can deduce that Prof. Scruton is seeking to put across here is that he perceives something in music - at least in what he takes to be the best of it - that is somehow possessed some kind of "other-worldly" characteristics that identify it as being above and beyond the mundanities of day-to-day human life which, insofar as that might go, might seem not entirely unreasponable, but that does not obscure the fact that even the C# minor Quartet "addresses us" - via its performers - from the creative mind and imagination of Beethoven who, as best I recall, was inhabiting "the natural world" when he composed it.
"Deep" Prof. Scruton's statement might be; "meaningless" it might not be, but its intended meaning nevertheless does not seem to convey itself to me.
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Originally posted by Barbirollians View PostI assume no Dame Ida Haendel ?
And no Sir Richard Barrett or Sir David Matthews either, perhaps demonstrating (for what it may or may not be worth) that, if they have nothing else in common, they do at least appear to have that.
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Originally posted by ahinton View PostEvidently not.
And no Sir Richard Barrett or Sir David Matthews either, perhaps demonstrating (for what it may or may not be worth) that, if they have nothing else in common, they do at least appear to have that.
I'm sure Richard will be delighted to hear that!
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