There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. (Hugh MacLennan, The Watch Ends the Night (1958)). Some personal history When I was in high school, I found my place in the band room. I took up the French horn (never very well) and played in the concert band. I learned guitar and bass and played the latter … [Read more...]

(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949). In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.” His piece concludes: Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, … [Read more...]

On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title is clearly meant to evoke the former. I won’t try to summarize Ganz - I recommend you read him yourself (not just this one … [Read more...]

We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed, they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bringing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly … [Read more...]

I read a story yesterday about the attempts to make a local arts tax in Portland, Oregon slightly less bad, and since I used to teach about this sort of thing I thought it might be worth giving my personal quick-and-dirty checklist on local earmarked taxes for the arts. Here are questions anyone wanting to propose such a tax ought to ask themselves: What are we trying to achieve? The answer cannot just be “yay arts!” because you are going to be asking locals to pay more in taxes and they rightly will want to know what it is for, … [Read more...]

Yes, Minister ran on BBC television in the early 1980s, the early Thatcher years (I’ll come back to the importance of this). I enjoyed it at the time (I was pretty young), and recalled it when I went to work in government myself in the 1990s. Canada has a UK-style Westminster parliamentary system, with more of a permanent staff of senior bureaucrats than in the US where political appointments play a much larger role (If you are following the debacle in the UK parliament right now, note that Olly Robbins, the very high-ranking official at the … [Read more...]

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that simply engaging with a lot of narrative fiction will make people more ethical, or more generally empathetic (which is not the same thing), or will increase the depth of their political understanding. There isn’t any evidence for it, and too many counter-examples of well-read jerks and political cranks. But don’t the stories told in novels, films, plays and operas have moral and political content? Yes, the author will bring some sort of moral framework to what they compose, and assume that … [Read more...]

(Kudos to the art director who chose that American flag done with handprints - it’s perfect). I enjoyed reading Becca Rothfield’s “Listless Liberalism” in The Point, in which she reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, and Cass Sunstein’s Liberalism, and also asks the question of why the aesthetics of a liberal society, barely addressed in either of these books’ defenses of liberalism, seems such weak tea: There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there … [Read more...]