New at Reason

In a review from reason's March issue, Daniel McCarthy contemplates the life of Russell Kirk, and asks whether we should call him a postmodernist.

Comments

sixstring | February 29, 2008, 11:06am | #

Am I the only one who saw the title as the Porno mind?

Jonathan Hohensee | February 29, 2008, 11:38am | #

Could someone explain to me post-modernism in a nut-shell for me? It's a concept that I can't really wrap my mind around...all I can figure out is that it has something to do with how reality is a social construct.

And it's concepts makes great tv-shows.
And shitty everything else.

DON | February 29, 2008, 12:20pm | #

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Russello relates the dubious idea that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which Russello says “struck a terminal blow to the idea of scientific objectivity,” tells us something about historical knowledge. What does our inability to observe simultaneously the velocity and position of a subatomic particle have to do with our ability—or lack thereof—to understand what happened at, say, the Battle of Hastings? Even if there is uncertainty about both kinds of events, we are not talking about the same kind of uncertainty. We may not know whether King Harold was really killed by an arrow to the eye, but if he was, we can say with certainty that both the position and velocity of the arrow could have been observed simultaneously, if anyone had been in a position to do so.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle proves that it is impossible to say with certainty the position and velocity of anything--an arrow, a planet or a galaxy. For a large object, like an arrow, the uncertainty is trivial, but exists nonetheless.

The related dichotomy as to whether a photon or electron is a particle or a wave is trivial when applied to an arrow, but it still exists--even the arrow is both a solid and a wave.

Alan Vanneman | February 29, 2008, 1:46pm | #

It says a lot about the conservative "mind" that a wet fart like Kirk is considered any kind of thinker at all. As for "pomo," I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it.

economist | February 29, 2008, 9:08pm | #

Yeah, Kirk was kind of a douche.

Ana Luisa Stella | March 1, 2008, 7:04am | #

High Respectable! http://www.spymac.com/details/?2348684

Someone Who Doesn't Want to Lose His Job | March 1, 2008, 11:18am | #

Ana Luisa Stella,
That doll singing video "INTERESTING DUCKLING SONG 2008" was terrifying.

Andrew Murphy | March 2, 2008, 9:23pm | #

Russell Kirk was really a British Tory in America. He did a great job as a scholar of Burke and the 19th century British poets and writers but he over played his abuse of Liberalism. He thought all Liberals and libertarians were Benthemites when in fact Gladstone and Lord Acton were not only anti-Bentham but devout Christians. Likwise, Austrian economist libertarians like Ropke and Rustow were devout Catholics and had nothing to do with the utilitarianism.

ChiTown | March 9, 2008, 4:25am | #

Mr. McCarthy, You may already be familiar with it, but I might suggest considering Clinton Brand's essay in the Modern Age "50th Anniversary of the Conservative Mind" where he specifically encounters Kirk's thinking with an eye toward Gadamer. I'll have to pick up Russello's book, but it seems like you're correct that a wider discussion of Kirk vis-a-vis the libertarians needs to be written, though perhaps it already has. Quarrels with Frank Meyer, no?