June 8, 2006
David Warren in the Spectator is always sane and diverting:
...she was a bundle of splendid contradictions.
My own original encounter with her had been over her book, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992). To my mind, it was an even more important contribution than The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) -- the book that made her famous.
The later book takes an idea out of Plato, that there are two apparently contradictory sets of moral and social values -- one based on honour, one based on enterprise -- which are in fact complementary and necessary to each other. And yet they should never be mixed, or slurred. Corruption comes from mixing and matching these two moral codes.
Mixing and matching incompatible moral codes -- the contradictions of what the West now faces:
Intrinsic to the threat against the West is not terrorism, alone, but terrorism in combination with legal efforts to use the more fatuous provisions of our “human rights” codes to subvert our defences.
And, on what we lose by a prissy professionalization of everything. Here
...the purport of a talk I gave, to a group of fellow-journalists in Toronto....
In a long, rambling, extemporaneous memoir, I emphasized the traditional hack virtues of smoking and drinking and general loucheness against the prim political correctness of the current media mainstream. The beauty of the old-time hacks, I averred, was that they did not seek fame, only adventure, in contact with life. They could be as anonymous as mediaeval artists. They did not consider themselves to be intellectuals, and so their heads were free of stinking pride. Yet they had pride in craft, which the current ones seldom have. All our little Woodwards and Bernsteins today want fame, instead. And they want it smoke-free and soberly, they are professional fame-seekers.
Take this, of course, with the charity I always intend.
A tagline to be archived at Chez D.
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