No doubt, I think this kind of thought is all part of a weird cult, but it is a cult that appeals to the most blase of pot smoking, dip shit, ordinary of American citizens. And as California makes pot smoking legal, then get used to this conspiratorial, paranoid mode of thinking as being the norm. I don’t smoke pot for a number of reasons, but one of the most paramount reasons is that it make me paranoid! Get used to this paranoia as being the norm with legalized pot.

I will not deny my enthusiasm for Sartre in his phenomenology of everyday life. Nausea is a great book as well as some of the descriptions of looking in keyhole found in Being and Nothingness. However, I will not defend Sartre’s bad attitudinizing on every issue from Algiers to Iran to Cuba to Hungary that appeared during his day. Why did a great mind have to do this? To speak on every “global” or “international” issue. I suspect it has to do with Frenchness that goes back to that citizen of Geneva Rousseau. Though I suspect it exists at the heart of Lockean liberalism, whereby the lay of nature tells us that when our own self preservation comes not into conflict we are bound to help the preservation of MANKIND. Locke was the the precursor of Bono–i.e., indifferent to his neighbor but loving mankind.

I admire Raymond Aron greatly. Aron always kept his head and remained sensible despite Lacoue-Labarthe’s derision (which means the derision of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Badiou, Zizek, etc., etc., etc. of the literati–Lacan is a special case but he too had nothing but derision for those who would not follow his “return to Freud” (which is bullshit)).

So I agree with Carl’s criticism of what I have to say regarding my defense of Sartre. However, this requires a real recognition of what is at stake, and I am not sure I know what that is. I’ve been watching the film “Carlos”–about Carlos the terrorist from the ’70s and ’80s. It is a great movie, and like the Baader-Meinhof Complex, it shows who the enemy is in a camera obscura. Who is the enemy? In this way, these films seem to be sympathetic with these terrorists–like they’ve been reading too much Sartre of Fanon.

So let me suggest (with no controversy in circles like these) a writer like Pierre Manent who offers a defense of a reasonable nationalism understood according to liberal principles, but which knows the complicated history of European history. Without smart minds like Manent, I fear that folk enamoured with the universal and homogeneous state will only spawn folk like “Carlos” who wish to make their mark by tearing down whatever is made.

John Presnall, a useful and rich comment in many ways. Your intellectual graciousness towards Sartre and others of the muy screwed-up French left intelligensia circa 1944-1974 is, I would guess, more defensible than not. Let’ s just take (I don’t know Cocteau outside of his B&B film, and Marcuse really is pretty thoroughly sick-making…no, he was not nuts, but niether was Lenin) Sartre: I know that those with good instincts will not think that a guy like Sartre should be cut any slack whatsover, but I’ve been teaching and thus reading a lot of Raymond Aron recently, and he speaks of Sartre much as Presnall does here. As genuinely philosophic, brilliant, worthy of reading. Of course, he also diagnoses, in his brief essay (contained in Defense of Political Reason) on why Solzhenitsyn refused to meet with the Sartre in Moscow, a good deal of why he was such a feeble and harmful thinker with respect to politics. And yes, it does stir the anger when you contrast the celebrity-philosopher Sartre semi-or-demi-justifying the camps and such, with the moral facts about them that Solzhenitsyn brings to life. Vengeance is the Lord’s, but one cannot but sometimes wish horrible experiences of real-life-socialism upon Jean-Paul Sartre. See…I’m getting carried away about his arrogant and unrepented-of errors even as I write this. But again, John, fine comment.

“The best advice to the law reformer, therefore, is to go carefully, to make only incontestable assumptions, and to endeavour to set out the human problem in its full complexity before attempting a legislative answer to it. This advice is not often followed, for the simple reason that people are always impatient for reform whenever they find their ambitions impeded by the law, and are always reluctant to accept–what may be glaringly obvious to others–that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions.”

It is all well and good to mock Sartre’s love of fame and his quixotic attempt to mix Marx and Heidegger in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. If only he had read Kojeve–or been present during the lectures with Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Fessard, etc. But Sartre is brilliant, and an Eliotic sense of the “uses of tradition” for moderns with a “dissociated sensibility” is no ordinary Burkean conservatism. Eliot like Sartre is trying to square a circle–the utter nihilism of modern society of the “Waste Land” allows for the reconciliation of opposites in the simple language of the “four Quartets.”

Scruton has a point if he wants to make the comparison of Sartre to the most ridiculous statements of those who in the name of Herbert Marcuse say that we should speak refusal as silence (or doing otherwise) in the name of revolution. But even Herbert Marcuse is not as nuts as many make him to be.

It is true that Eliot was no revolutionary, and it is true that his poetry and criticism makes for a facing up to the abyss in the name of the traditional order of Christian culture. Given the Waste land and the Love Song of J Afred Prufrock, it still seems like a leap to me, a la Kierkegaard. You can measure your life in coffee sppons or in terms of the calendar of the Anglo-Catholic church. Nothing in the middle–or better nothing for an attempt to persuasion.

In this way C.S. Lewis is far superior to Eliot (in my huble opinion).

Cocteau is not as bad as Scruton makes it. The enfants terribles can be read against what the ignorant say. The enfant terribles are simply an honest account of the world as it appear. Its ironic presentation allows for an analysis which looks for what is unsaid. The unsaid is incredibly important here.

Just as Hobbes wanted to eradicate Aristotelianism because speaking of essences led the unlearned to think that Aristotle spoke of invisible powers governing the universe, Scruton wants to tell us not to read the Holy Terrors (in translation) because it teaches the unlearned all sorts of bad ideas that lead to May ’68.

I say let there be reading of good books (like Cocteau)–even they are provocative with regard to convention. How do we avoid May ’68, er 2010? I don’t know. I just don’t think ridicule is always the best way.

Espinoza, as my espanol friends call him, likewise chose ridicule in his criticism of the holding sway of Biblical authority. I think Scruton is advocating a method of ridicule with regard to Cocteau, Sartre, et al.–it is a way of out-Machiavelli-ing Machiavelli here. I don’t want to see where such a contest ends. But if I must–so be it.

This contest is surely what Eliot is up to–the contest regarding who has the most probity? He writes a poem with footnotes for Christ’s sake! If this is what conservatism becomes, then I’ll bet on someone other than Scruton’s true sensibleness, let alone Eliot’s traditionalism.