Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Muddling through

From Hope or Despair? Roger Kimball and the Future of Culture by Wilfred M. McClay.

I love the description (emphasis added):
As this discussion will suggest, and as his fine book makes clear, Kimball is a conservative in the Burkean mold and an exponent of the great Anglo-American tradition of concrete, anti-ideological, unsystematic, decentralized, and organic forms of organization—the technique of “muddling through,” as it is unglamorously but affectionately known to many of us. He is also clearly an advocate for the idea of the Anglosphere, the notion, popularized by James Bennett but implicit in the writings of Winston Churchill, among others, that the English-speaking peoples have been granted, through the incomparable tools of the English language and culture, a special gift for understanding and upholding “the commitment to individual freedom and local initiative against the meddlesome intrusion of any central authority.”

No comments:

Post a Comment