Starting From Scratch, Again and Again

Bruce Charlton makes a good point:

One of the strangest traits on the Left is the one when people behave as if pacifism, secularism, egalitarianism, feminism, racism, the sexual revolution etc. are new ideas - fresh, exciting, untried, untested - give them a shot why not? Don't write-off idealism! They might work!
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The point is that we actually know, in so far as anything can be known, how these ideas turn out - and they they turn out very differently from how idealism paints them.

In the Brian Eno article I quoted yesterday, he also said this:

So, just as we might come to accept that "coriander" is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands. 

And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience - the possibility of better guesses - without certainty.

 The thing is, I agree with Eno that so many of the things we argue about are "fuzzy, not very clearly defined spaces." Where we differ is that I don't think we started feeling out their borders in 1965.

Civilization has been a millennium-long project of pushing and pulling against the concepts and mores of human life in order to provide more order, more stability and more happiness to the individual.

Tradition provided that, creating the best possible outcome for the largest number of people--restraining their worst impulses and, at its best, coaxing out the saint within. "Progress!" is the cry of the person desperate to indulge their vices but too cowardly to defy society. When vice fails as it always does, the progressive never blames vice itself.

Wealthy and lauded people like Eno think that being "uncentered" and "unmoored" is a great freedom. Perhaps for them it is, but their pronouncements ignore the addict, the narcissist and the child of divorce and all the people who crash on the rocks for lack of guidance.