[MD] Intellectual activity

[aesuszynski]

Alice replies to David's 5/13/2006 1:33PM post

Thanks David for your thoughtful reply.

Just a bit of business first. Since you are writing long quotes from 
Lila...is it online somewhere? I looked, but couldn't find it. You may think 
it's strange, but I read ZMM online and have yet to get a copy to read on 
the couch, but it's on my list of things to do.

I see that I may have tapped into a very lively train of thought because 
from the number of replies, I can see there is vital interest in this 
subject.

As Ian would say this thing is spooky,  in that the connections between 
these people are everywhere. I was commenting to Ian about Allan Bloom and 
then I went to the article by Woods and found Bloom mentioned in that. In a 
nutshell, I guess I would say Bloom's book "the Closing of the American 
Mind" is a critique of the university system

This is from the last chapter:
"the real community of man...is the community of those who seek the truth, 
of the potential knowers, that is....of all men to the extent they desire to 
know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was 
to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of 
good. Their common concern for the good linked them; their disagreement 
proved they needed one another to understand it. They were one soul as they 
looked at the problem.

An intellectual elite?

As Woods points out in his book review, neo-conservatism is anything but 
conservative in the traditional sense. Rather than acting with the restraint 
as descibed by people like Thomas Sowell, they are quite happy to make 
quantum leaps and fiddle around in other peoples' lives, justified by the 
belief that they are the "good guys" and know best. This would seem to align 
itself more closely with liberal thinking (as descibed by Sowell in "the 
Vision of the Annointed).

It does seem like quite a maze, which makes it quite human in my estimation. 
Hard to get anything "right" because "right" keeps changing.