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Guest blogger:  David Brooks

Many thanks to Michael for letting me join you all today.  I thought it would be fun to do a . . .

Friday random ten:  conservatives’ favorite philosophers

Which philosophers are on the average conservative pundit’s iPod?  Here are mine:

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France – Live at Leeds

Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, Book 3 Prosa 1 (“Iam cantum illa finiuerat, cum me audiendi auidum stupentemque arrectis adhuc auribus carminis mulcedo defixerat. . . .”)

Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics”

Donald Luskin, I Have Paul Krugman’s Home Address

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (Double Live Gonzo)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment § 9, purposive purposelessness remix

Anaximander, fragment DK 12B1

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Chicago edition, Supplement, Questions 67 and 68 (“Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?” and “Of Illegitimate Children”)

Friedrich August von Hayek, Totally Tubular Cash Flow (volume two of The Road to Surfdom, illustrated version, with an introduction by Jonah Goldberg)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, final sentence

Posted by on 04/08 at 06:48 AM

  1. I’ll just let that pass in silence.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  09:12 AM

  2. Golly, Mr. Brooks. It’s a real pleasure. I’m so glad you like Wittgenstein, because I know this will mean that we’ll be best buds 4-ever. My faves are 2.223, 5.47321, and 6.422. Just the numbers, not the sentences that follow them.

    You should also totally check out “A Critique of Pure Energy” by Information Society. Later, homeslice!

    Posted by norbizness  on  04/08  at  09:18 AM

  3. Yeah I like that final sentence. It’s a lot easier to read than the rest of the damn thing.

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  04/08  at  09:27 AM

  4. You’re right.  That was a lot more effective than just calling him a c***.

    Posted by Doghouse Riley  on  04/08  at  09:45 AM

  5. Good one, D’House.

    (It’s funny because it’s true!)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  04/08  at  09:59 AM

  6. The Road to Surfdom? What is this, a Beach Boys’ song? David, you’re the second blogger I’ve seen mis-spell “serfdom” in two days.

    Actually “surfdom” probably expresses the seriousness of conservative philosophical disputation.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  10:09 AM

  7. Don’t know about the rest of these chumps, but Friedrich’s daughter Salma is totally hot, even in Frida with the unibrow.  And Aquinas definitely rocked more once Peter Cetera left to do that soft-rock crap with Hans Kung and Matthew Fox.

    Posted by corndog  on  04/08  at  10:14 AM

  8. What is this, a Beach Boys’ song?

    Now that’s funny.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  04/08  at  10:23 AM

  9. Poor guest blogger David obviously didn’t get the memo on prudence.  Privately it’s Lucretius; publicly it’s Jesus.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  10:36 AM

  10. This is totally off topic. But did you hear that David Horowitz was pied on Wednesday. There is apparently a rash of attacks with food against conservatives happening on campuses across the Midwest. From the article in today’s Inside Higher Ed:

    “David Horowitz was hit in the face with a pie Wednesday during a speech at Butler University. The attack was the third incident in the last 10 days in which a conservative speaker has been doused with food while trying to speak on a Midwestern campus.

    William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, was hit in the face with a pie during a speech at Earlham College and Pat Buchanan, the former presidential candidate, had salad dressing thrown on him at Western Michigan University.”

    The link to the full article is here:

    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/08/speech

    Fess up, Michael. The salad dressing is a dead give away.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  11:07 AM

  11. Tom, some of us are actually from Indiana, where two of the three attacks occurred, and would appreciate having a little suspicion thrown our way, too.

    Posted by Doghouse Riley  on  04/08  at  11:20 AM

  12. Damn.  I knew I shouldn’t have used the French dressing on Buchanan—it was a dead giveaway.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/08  at  11:22 AM

  13. I thought Neo-Bolshevists used Russian dressing for their symbolic nefariousness.

    Posted by corndog  on  04/08  at  11:45 AM

  14. Double Live Gonzo really rocks but try telling my kids that. It’s always eminem this and Gwen Stefani that…

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  12:33 PM

  15. The Consolations of David Brooks, Unplugged (with commentary)

    When her song ended, my ears yearned for more. Ah! Celine!

    scholium:
    David Brooks, cruelly seated far down the line from the favorable view of baseball reserved for Washington Nationals season ticket holders who matter a great deal more than he does in Washington, who have by rough ranked order of prominence in that city been priveleged with seats behind the dugout and behind the screen which he would have preferred and, had there been enacted a more equable distribution of the valued seats than casually offering them first to the most eminent buyers in that city, would have had for himself one of those best seats instead in harmony with the orthodox desire for the best possible seating known to all communicants of baseball. Given the cash, anyone who cares in the standard American way for the game would have had those best seats. But even with cash in hand some finer discrimination sends Mr. Brooks far, far down the line, to the best seat still available when it finally comes his turn to buy. Miffed, he half–hears the imperfectly rendered National Anthem.

    Two kinds of people, he considers: ”PER/i/lous fight” people and ”PER/ahh/liss fight” people. Strictly speaking it’s perilous, but the singers of the Anthem keep singing it ”PER/ahh/liss” in public, getting it wrong in the same standard way every time. Curious.

    PER/ah/liss people shop at Wal-Mart, drive Yugos or whatever they have out there. PER/i/lous people work in information technology, cannot countenane Celine Dion ah, well… Tuesday column maybe.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  12:42 PM

  16. Eeeee-manuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable....

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  12:46 PM

  17. I hear you, MikeAdamson.  I tell these kids today that De Rerum Natura really rocks but with them it’s always Deleuze this and Agamben that. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  04/08  at  12:49 PM

  18. Mr. Brooks:

    I thought I’d read somewhere in the Leo Strauss Random Reader that Ayn Rand’s Boy Toy was your fav.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  04/08  at  01:00 PM

  19. Quite true, Rox!  But it didn’t come up among the first ten texts, for some reason.  Nor did Strauss’s Also Sprach Leo, which I often use to score my DVD copy of 2001:  A Neocon Odyssey.

    Posted by David B.  on  04/08  at  02:24 PM

  20. David,
    How could you forget Hobbes The Leviathan, Vol II: Against the Endangered Species Act?

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  03:14 PM

  21. I prefer Buddha:  Live at Budokan!

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  04:41 PM

  22. Yeah, Buddha rocks - especially “I Want You to Want Nothing.”

    Posted by corndog  on  04/08  at  04:46 PM

  23. Somehow I don’t think Buddha is a philosphizer David B. would look up to. You might try one the Shinto gods, tho.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  04/08  at  05:51 PM

  24. The early Adam Smith, before he went electric, has a certain poignant directness.  Look for the _History of Astronomy_ bootlegs.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  05:59 PM

  25. Y’all be good. I havent laughed so hard all week. And I got to learn the last line of Wiggi, too.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  07:12 PM

  26. This may be old news, but this is my favorite David Brooks parody:

    http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/9/20warner.html

    ‘Lucky Charmers and the Cheerioians.’ heh.

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  07:18 PM

  27. and if I had to add two tracks Mr. Brooks, I’d suggest:

    Boys II Men, feat. Francis Fukuyama - “(So We’ve Come to) The End of the Road”
    Milton Friedman - “Capitalism and Freedom (Cafeteria Lunch Table remix)”

    Posted by  on  04/08  at  07:32 PM

  28. I’m curious how you got involved in this racket.

    Prof. Berube, it was clear to you that, in this second round, you just had your final turn. We had ascertained that this would be your final opportunity to discuss each of the points that Mr. Horowitz would raise, and that Mr. Horowitz would then have a final reply. And yet, this is all you have to contibute to what was supposed to be an intellectual dialogue.

    Posted by Ezra  on  04/09  at  11:41 AM

  29. Thanks for the link, Ezra.  Right now, all I can say is holy fugging shit Almighty, as Leo Durocher puts it in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.  I took part in a “forum” over at FrontPage, and they cut about 80 percent of the exchange and then accused me of not replying to their increasingly lunatic charges.  How far they’ve fallen in only two years since the last time I debated Horowitz:  back then, they were honest enough to run the entire exchange.

    Don’t worry folks, I’ll take my turn on Monday.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/09  at  01:37 PM

  30. David Corn must be moving up the list as well in that he has “ear-ned” the support of David Horowitz and Robert Novak, whose own senility conveniently keeps him from remembering his own personal history--thus Corn must feel like a freak on the leash of Horo-vak.

    Posted by  on  04/09  at  04:36 PM

  31. Michael, I’m relieved you’lll finally turn your attention to Horowitz on this blog. All the cuddly dolphins and magical puppies were getting a trifle stale.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  04/09  at  04:47 PM

  32. Chris, I didn’t know puppies were magical!  I thought it was only those dolphin sex toys.

    And thanks for all your kind words about my in re Schiavo essays.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/09  at  06:12 PM

  33. I think that’s a typo, M. The thing at the top of the crucifix reads “IN RI,” not “IN RE.”

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  04/10  at  12:51 AM

  34. "Whenever I find myself facing a tough choice in life, I ask myself: WWWD (What Would Wittgenstein Do?)”
    - T. Dale DeLay

    Posted by weldon berger  on  04/10  at  03:47 AM

  35. You were certainly right—in her recent post (April 13) on her website, Ann Coulter actually made a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein.... we are in trouble. 

    What’s next? Bill O’Reilly employing Quine’s Two Dogmas to claim liberal arguments are meaningless?

    Dear Michael, please save us.  Please verbally murder Ann Coulter.

    Posted by Postmodernist  on  04/13  at  10:39 PM

  36. Boethius was the favorite of Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces.
    .

    Posted by  on  04/16  at  11:25 PM

  37. I think you got the wrong title. The right one is:

    Donald Luskin, “Face to Face with Evil”

    FACE TO FACE WITH EVIL I did something tonight I wish I hadn’t done. I met Paul Krugman.

    Posted by Oskar Shapley  on  04/22  at  10:59 AM

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