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Skip to comments.Why I Became a Conservative: A British liberal discovers England's greatest philosopher.
Posted on 02/04/2003 10:13:26 PM PST by JohnHuang2
I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term conservative as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the structures against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.
In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.
The vanknown then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windowscame cautiously round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van, and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian cobbles as they went.
That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theaterthe artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy.
The Old Fascist was de Gaulle, whose Mémoires de guerre I had been reading that day. The Mémoires begin with a striking sentenceToute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la Francea sentence so alike in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that equally striking sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. How amazing it had been, to discover a politician who begins his self-vindication by suggesting somethingand something so deeply hidden behind the bold mask of his words! I had been equally struck by the description of the state funeral for Valéryde Gaulles first public gesture on liberating Parissince it too suggested priorities unimaginable in an English politician. The image of the cortège, as it took its way to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the proud general first among the mourners, and here and there a German sniper still looking down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression on me. I irresistibly compared the two birds-eye views of Paris, that of the sniper, and my own on to the riots in the quartier latin. They were related as yes and no, the affirmation and denial of a national idea. According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture; in times of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed. The funeral for Valéry followed naturally from this way of seeing things. And I associated the France of de Gaulle with Valérys Cimetière marinthat haunting invocation of the dead which conveyed to me, much more profoundly than any politicians words or gestures, the true meaning of a national idea.
Of course I was naïveas naïve as my friend. But the ensuing argument is one to which I have often returned in my thoughts. What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this bourgeoisie whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucaults Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the discourses of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argueby the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Liesthat truth requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
My friend is now a good bourgeoise like the rest of them. Armand Gatti is forgotten; and the works of Antonin Artaud have a quaint and dépassé air. The French intellectuals have turned their backs on 68, and the late Louis Pauwels, the greatest of their post-war novelists, has, in Les Orphelins, written the damning obituary of their adolescent rage. And Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the result of sprees in the bath-houses of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an intellectual celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all over Europe and America. His vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud.
By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was NunziaMaria Annunziatathe Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.
One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longerthe Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blairs behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestowthat of Companion of Honour. This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britains first woman Prime Minister. We should ponder some of the other recipients of honorary degrees from British academic institutionsRobert Mugabe, for example, or the late Mrs. Ceausescuor count (on the fingers of one hand) the number of conservatives who are elected to the British Academy.
Suffice it to say that I found myself, on arrival in Birkbeck College, at the heart of the left establishment which governed British scholarship. Birkbeck College had grown from the Mechanics Institution founded by George Birkbeck in 1823 and was devoted to the education of people in full-time employment. It was connected to the socialist idealists of the Workers Education Association, and had links of a tenacious but undiscoverable kind to the Labour Party. My failure to conceal my conservative beliefs was both noticed and disapproved of, and I began to think that I should look for another career.
Because of Birkbecks mission as a center of adult education, lectures began at 6 P.M. and the days were nominally free. I used my mornings to study for the Bar: my intention was to embark on a career which gave no advantage to utopians and malcontents. In fact I never practiced at the Bar and received from my studies only an intellectual benefitthough a benefit for which I have always been profoundly grateful. Law is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.
Inspired by my new studies I began to search for a conservative philosophy. In America this search could be conducted in a university. American departments of political science encourage their students to read Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and others have grafted the metaphysical conservatism of Central Europe on to American roots, forming effective and durable schools of political thought. American intellectual life benefits from American patriotism, which has made it possible to defend American customs and institutions without fear of being laughed to scorn. It has benefited too from the Cold War, which sharpened native wits against the Marxist enemy, in a way that they were never sharpened in Europe: the conversion of important parts of the social democratic Jewish intelligentsia of New York to the cause of neo-conservatism is a case in point. In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses. Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being conservative.
The view has for a long time prevailed in England that conservatism is simply no longer availableeven if it ever has been really available to an intelligent personas a social and political creed. Maybe, if you are an aristocrat or a child of wealthy and settled parents, you might inherit conservative beliefs, in the way that you might inherit a speech impediment or a Habsburg jaw. But you couldnt possibly acquire themcertainly not by any process of rational enquiry or serious thought. And yet there I was, in the early 1970s, fresh from the shock of 1968, and from the countervailing shock of legal studies, with a fully articulate set of conservative beliefs. Where could I look for the people who shared them, for the thinkers who had spelled them out at proper length, for the social, economic, and political theory that would give them force and authority sufficient to argue them in the forum of academic opinion?
To my rescue came Burke. Although not widely read at the time in our universities, he had not been dismissed as stupid, reactionary, or absurd. He was simply irrelevant, of interest largely because he got everything wrong about the French Revolution and therefore could be studied as illustrating an episode in intellectual pathology. Students were still permitted to read him, usually in conjunction with the immeasurably less interesting Tom Paine, and from time to time you heard tell of a Burkean philosophy, which was one strand within nineteenth-century British conservatism.
Burke was of additional interest to me on account of the intellectual path that he had trod. His first work, like mine, was in aesthetics. And although I didnt find much of philosophical significance in his Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful, I could see that, in the right cultural climate, it would convey a powerful sense of the meaning of aesthetic judgment and of its indispensable place in our lives. I suppose that, in so far as I had received any intimations of my future career as an intellectual pariah, it was through my early reactions to modern architecture, and to the desecration of my childhood landscape by the faceless boxes of suburbia. I learned as a teenager that aesthetic judgment matters, that it is not merely a subjective opinion, unargued because unarguable, and of no significance to anyone besides oneself. I sawthough I did not have the philosophy to justify thisthat aesthetic judgment lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep social imperative, and that it matters to us in just the way that other people matter to us, when we strive to live with them in a community. And, so it seemed to me, the aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement. Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.
Like Burke, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost experience of home. And I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recapturednot necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression. That belief is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find itvery differently expressedin Burke and Hegel, and also in T. S. Eliot, whose poetry was the greatest influence on me during my teenage years.
When I first read Burkes account of the French Revolution I was inclined to accept, since I knew no other, the liberal humanist view of the Revolution as a triumph of freedom over oppression, a liberation of a people from the yoke of absolute power. Although there were excessesand no honest historian had ever denied thisthe official humanist view was that they should be seen in retrospect as the birth-pangs of a new order, which would offer a model of popular sovereignty to the world. I therefore assumed that Burkes early doubtsexpressed, remember, when the Revolution was in its very first infancy, and the King had not yet been executed nor the Terror begunwere simply alarmist reactions to an ill-understood event. What interested me in the Reflections was the positive political philosophy, distinguished from all the leftist literature that was currently à la mode, by its absolute concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary and unexalted forms. Burke was not writing about socialism, but about revolution. Nevertheless he persuaded me that the utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human minda geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings live. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress.
Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue liberty, equality, and fraternity, not only because those things are lamentably underdescribed and merely abstractly defined, but also because collective reason doesnt work that way. People reason collectively towards a common goal only in times of emergencywhen there is a threat to be vanquished, or a conquest to be achieved. Even then, they need organization, hierarchy, and a structure of command if they are to pursue their goal effectively. Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war.
Moreoverand here is the corollary that came home to me with a shock of recognitionany attempt to organize society according to this kind of rationality would involve exactly the same conditions: the declaration of war against some real or imagined enemy. Hence the strident and militant language of the socialist literaturethe hate-filled, purpose-filled, bourgeois-baiting prose, one example of which had been offered to me in 1968, as the final vindication of the violence beneath my attic window, but other examples of which, starting with the Communist Manifesto, were the basic diet of political studies in my university. The literature of left-wing political science is a literature of conflict, in which the main variables are those identified by Lenin: Kto? Kogo?Who? Whom? The opening sentence of de Gaulles memoirs is framed in the language of love, about an object of loveand I had spontaneously resonated to this in the years of the student struggle. De Gaulles allusion to Proust is to a masterly evocation of maternal love, and to a dim premonition of its loss.
Three other arguments of Burkes made a comparable impression. The first was the defense of authority and obedience. Far from being the evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authorityby which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. And obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into the dust and powder of individuality. Those thoughts seemed as obvious to me as they were shocking to my contemporaries. In effect Burke was upholding the old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state. And what struck me vividly was that, in defending this old view, Burke demonstrated that it was a far more effective guarantee of the liberties of the individual than the new idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined. Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. Those ideas exhilarated me, since they made sense of what I had seen in 1968. But when I expressed them, in a book published in 1979 as The Meaning of Conservatism, I blighted what remained of my academic career.
The second argument of Burkes that impressed me was the subtle defense of tradition, prejudice, and custom, against the enlightened plans of the reformers. This defense engaged, once again, with my study of aesthetics. Already as a schoolboy I had encountered the elaborate defense of artistic and literary tradition given by Eliot and F. R. Leavis. I had been struck by Eliots essay entitled Tradition and the Individual Talent, in which tradition is represented as a constantly evolving, yet continuous thing, which is remade with every addition to it, and which adapts the past to the present and the present to the past. This conception, which seemed to make sense of Eliots kind of modernism (a modernism that is the polar opposite of that which has prevailed in architecture), also rescued the study of the past, and made my own love of the classics in art, literature, and music into a valid part of my psyche as a modern human being.
Burkes defense of tradition seemed to translate this very concept into the world of politics, and to make respect for custom, establishment, and settled communal ways, into a political virtue, rather than a sign, as my contemporaries mostly believed, of complacency. And Burkes provocative defense, in this connection, of prejudice by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social lifewas a revelation of something that until then I had entirely overlooked. Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves. The real justification for a prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument. In other words it is a justification that cannot be conducted from our own perspective, but only from outside, as it were, as an anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals of an alien tribe.
An example will illustrate the point: the prejudices surrounding sexual relations. These vary from society to society; but until recently they have had a common feature, which is that people distinguish seemly from unseemly conduct, abhor explicit sexual display, and require modesty in women and chivalry in men in the negotiations that precede sexual union. There are very good anthropological reasons for this, in terms of the long-term stability of sexual relations, and the commitment that is necessary if children are to be inducted into society. But these are not the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men and women. This conduct is guided by deep and immovable prejudice, in which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds. The sexual liberator has no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational, in the sense of being founded on no reasoned justification available to the person whose motives they are. And he may propose sexual liberation as a rational alternative, a code of conduct that is rational from the first-person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of practice from a transparently reasonable aim, which is sexual pleasure.
This substitution of reason for prejudice has indeed occurred. And the result is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not merely a breakdown in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the reproductive processa failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other, but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of date-rape take the place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as sexual harrassment. This is an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill. And indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of sexual liberation, and the joyless world that it has produced around us, that I came to see the truth of Burkes otherwise somewhat paradoxical defense of prejudice.
The final argument that impressed me was Burkes response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burkes eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the hereditary principle, according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burkes view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else in Burke, since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions that I had had in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window and thought of Valérys Cimetière marin. In those deft, cool thoughts, Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and perverted modern politics. In effect, Burke was joining in the old Platonic cry, for a form of politics that would also be a form of carecare of the soul, as Plato put it, which would also be a care for absent generations. The graffiti paradoxes of the soixante-huitards were the very opposite of this: a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.
It was not until much later, after my first visit to communist Europe, that I came to understand and sympathize with the negative energy in Burke. I had grasped the positive thesisthe defense of prejudice, tradition, and heredity, and of a politics of trusteeship in which the past and the future had equal weight to the presentbut I had not grasped the deep negative thesis, the glimpse into Hell, contained in his vision of the Revolution. As I said, I shared the liberal humanist view of the French Revolution, and knew nothing of the facts that decisively refuted that view and which vindicated the argument of Burkes astonishingly prescient essay. My encounter with Communism entirely rectified this.
Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism was its ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole populations to live within the lie, as President Havel put it. George Orwell wrote a prophetic and penetrating novel about this; but few Western readers of that novel knew the extent to which its prophecies had come true in Central Europe. To me it was the greatest revelation, when first I travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1979, to come face to face with a situation in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the book of history, in which truth could not be uttered, and in which the Party could decide from day to day not only what would happen tomorrow, but also what had happened today, what had happened yesterday, and what had happened before its leaders had been born. This, I realized, was the situation that Burke was describing, to a largely incredulous readership, in 1790. And two hundred years later the situation still existed, and the incredulity along with it.
Until 1979 my knowledge of Communism had been entirely theoretical. I did not like what I had read, of course, and was hostile in any case to the socialist ideas of equality and state control, of which I had already seen enough in France and Britain. But I knew nothing of what it is like to live under Communismnothing of the day-to-day humiliation of being a non-person, to whom all avenues of self-expression are closed. As for Czechoslovakia, as it then was, I knew only what I had gleaned from its musicthe music of Smetana, ~DVORAK, and ~jan in particular, to all three of whom I owe the greatest of debts for the happiness they have brought me. Of course, I had read Kafka and Ha~s\ekbut they belonged to another world, the world of a dying empire, and it was only subsequently that I was able to see that they too were prophets, and that they were describing not the present but the future of their city.
I had been asked to give a talk to a private seminar in Prague. This seminar was organized by Julius Tomin, a Prague philosopher, who had taken advantage of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which supposedly obliged the Czechoslovak government to uphold freedom of information and the basic rights defined by the U.N. Charter. The Helsinki Accords were a farce, used by the Communists to identify potential trouble-makers, while presenting a face of civilized government to gullible intellectuals in the West. Nevertheless, I was told that Dr. Tomins seminar met on a regular basis, that I would be welcome to attend it, and that they were indeed expecting me.
I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied by some dark official business, and in which Party slogans and symbols disfigured every building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted. Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air-raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction. Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Dr. Tomin came out, and an altercation ensued, during which I was thrown down the stairs. But the argument continued and I was able to push my way past the guard and enter the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the same expectant silence. I realized that there really was going to be an air-raid, and that the air-raid was me.
In that room was a battered remnant of Pragues intelligentsiaold professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets; fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents political crimes; priests and religious in plain clothes; novelists and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst. And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope; and the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession: that of the stoker. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment blocks; one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Some stoked where there were no boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me, a fitting symbol of the communist economy.
This was my first encounter with dissidents: the people who, to my astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders of post-war Czechoslovakia. And I felt towards these people an immediate affinity. Nothing was of such importance for them as the survival of their national culture. Deprived of material and professional advancement, their days were filled with a forced meditation on their country and its past, and on the great Question of Czech History which has preoccupied the Czechs since Palack~y\s day. They were forbidden to publish; the authorities had concealed their existence from the world and had resolved to remove their traces from the book of history. Hence the dissidents were acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise in what Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things. Something in me responded to this poignant ambition, and I was at once eager to join with them and make their situation known to the world.
Briefly, I spent the next ten years in daily meditation on Communism, on the myths of equality and fraternity that underlay its oppressive routines, just as they had underlain the routines of the French Revolution. And I came to see that Burkes account of the Revolution was not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was like Miltons account of Paradise Lostan exploration of a region of the human psyche: a region that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by way of a miracle, to a world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the memories of Hell. To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of Satan and his workthe very same vision that had shaken Burke to the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burkes philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.
Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite them only in the short-term.
As to the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern politics, the philosophy that Burke made plain to the world, this is perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do not despair of it; but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires not a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.
I should have said "primo" bookcase, which sits in my living room. (The major part of my library is located in another part of the house.) It's the one that I use for my most cherished books. It's a sort of "grab bag," the sort of thing you'd expect of a generalist of conservative tendencies. Your asking me what's on it gives me a welcome chance to "flog" my favorite books! :^)
There's lots of Eric Voegelin (I'm collecting all his titles over time) and Plato. There's a rather large "Americana" section: works of the Framers (e.g., collected letters of T. Jefferson, Federalist); plus the new John Adams biography; a few years back I was collecting sources of the Framers' thought (e.g., Locke, Hume, Burke, Milton's Areopagitica, Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters). They're all there still. Also critical studies of the founding period by Bernard Baylin (e.g., The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Ideological Origins of American Politics). I have the Autobiography of U.S. Grant (a first edition!), the collected writings of John Calhoun, including his masterful Disquisition on Government.
Then there are writers on American and Western culture, such as Russell Kirk (The Roots of American Order), Richard Weaver (The Southern Tradition at Bay), the Vanderbilt Agrarians (I'll Take My Stand), A. J. Nock (Our Enemy, the State), Frank Chodorov (Fugitive Essays) Jacques Barzun, James Burnham (esp. Suicide of the West); lots of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I only have two works on economics on these shelves: Ludwig von Mises (Human Action) and Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy).
Other than Voegelin, Plato, Aristotle, and the Framers' sources, the only other philosophers there: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. Theology: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, Francis Schaffer (Trilogy), Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and books by or about Pope John Paul II (including the fine Carl Bernstein biography). Of course, the King James Bible is there.
My science section is a-building: Wolfram, Gleick, Heisenberg, Sir James Jeans, Einstein, and (new accessions!!!) Roger Penrose, Evan Harris Walker, Christopher Wills....
I have Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Also Vilfredo Pareto's Mind and Society.
This bookshelf is relatively poetry and plays "lite": But T.S. Eliot and John Donne are there; also a collection of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Also Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. The plays: T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Aeschylus' Orestiea, and a collection of Moliere (he just cracks me up!).
I have most of the C.S. Lewis (my favorites: The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce) and G. E. K. Chesterton titles (I love his biographies of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi).
It's "fiction-lite", too. Only truly beloved titles are there, including Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, The Idiot); the collected works of Jane Austin; Boccaccio's Decameron; Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur; also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Also one of the greatest autobiographies ever written (IMHO) is there: Whittaker Chambers' Witness, as well as Sam Tannenbaum's excellent critical biography of Chambers.
I think that's about it. Pretty eclectic, no?!
Thanks for asking, A-G. Hugs!
Excellent analysis, Alamo-Girl. But how does one communicate, however, with the neshamah -- in sound bites? I just don't know how it is to be done!
But how does one communicate, however, with the neshamah -- in sound bites?
Actually it is being done, but it requires funding and needs to be directed to non-believers also. An example is the white letter on black billboards you see now and again in Texas. One of them said: "Don't make me come down there!" - God.
Metaphysical naturalists could be targeted with a billboard showing a child helping an elderly person: "Mercy is not an accident of genes."
I'm not creative - but that's the general idea. Tug at the neshama.
John Donne, 1620
I am in at least some meaningful sense reluctant to agree. This love of truth is a very deep, passionate, moving thing, it is not cold and austere. An example. PBS did a segment on a British mathematician (wish I could remember his name) who struggled for years in search of a mathematical proof that had eluded all to that time. Incredible effort, countless hours, were spent over months and years in passionate, passionate, pursuit of that elusive proof. He succeeded. And he had to hold back tears when recalling the moment of truimph for the camera. Does passion always disorder?
Good point, Phaedrus! Perhaps we could bring Alamo-Girl's distinction between nephesh and neshama into play here, so to try an answer to this question. I'd say the passion of nephesh -- that of the lower "animal" nature -- certainly does disorder. But this British mathematician you were speaking of, my guess is that his passion was of the neshama type -- expressing a passion for beauty and truth, and the delight of achieving something lovely, something sublime, that had long been elusive.
What do you think, my friend?
Passion of the nephesh demands gratification. Rape, theft, murder, intoxication, gluttony fall into this category. It is self serving, the politics are Marxist, the worldview is materialistic, the end justifies the means:
Yes, I agree. The longer I live and the more I think about these "things", the more I come to believe that life itself and the manner in which we exercise our Free Will is the lesson, and the first step, if you will, seems to me to be "overcoming the fear" and that requires understanding. A mouthful but FWIW, bb, as always.
A body-soul dichotomy, as with any dualism, is a setup for the tyranny of one over the other. And a prior synthesis or a fundamental arche to the body-soul or form-matter antithesis (I use Kant's word on purpose) is not to be found in Greek or Enlightenment thought (and the Hebrews weren't even Greek!)
cornelis, thank you for your cautionary statements with respect to dualism. Yet I don't see how the body-soul distinction necessarily must be thought of as constituting polar opposites. I imagine there must be a fundamental arche that unites the two at some level, for these two "aspects" need each other to express a human life; i.e., they constitute a unity. Yet given the limitations of language, to speak of either of the aspects requires us to "intend" one or the other; and intentionality implies a kind of artificial uprooting out of the fuller context in which each of the aspects appears and mutually participates in the other. In this sense, it distorts to some degree the thing we're thinking and speaking about. In this sense, "we murder to dissect." So we have to remember that the separation was an artificial one all along.
Does this make any sense?
cornelis: The first step toward a revision is to abandon the notion that these two actions are in some way a polar opposites. Otherwise we will land ourselves in a horrible dualism--something already intimated in suspicion of passion.
The dualism already exists, the conflict has always been there. It was recognized thousands of years ago by the Hebrew word usage in the Bible. It is at the root of Theology - from Judeo/Christian to Eastern Religions. Freud confirmed at least in part the Id and Superego. Both sides practice tyranny within us as we exercise our free will do I watch the soap opera or play with the kid?
IMHO, if we truly wish to communicate - we must tailor the message to the recipient. If its an English audience, we dont speak Spanish. We dont sell ice to Eskimos. And if the audience is particularly sensitive to an issue, thats the one you raise - play the race card to win an acquittal for O.J.
Likewise here conservatism doesnt appeal to the carnal man, the nephesh - so I suggest we speak to the neshama. In other words, why not exploit the difference which already exists to further conservatism?
I do not, and cannot, address the philosophical issues you raise. I only speak to the practical ones how to get the conservative message a fair hearing.
Neither do I, but that is only because of others have made the mistakes before me. The body-soul distinction was just an example. But with respect to the Hebrew, I am afraid we run the risk of building our edifice on the analysis, rather than on what the analysis is contingent on.
I don't blame Alamo-Girl for sticking to her guns here, but as I understand it, we need to make doubly sure whether this dualism which has always been there is fundamental. If you build your epistemology on it, you'll be more Greek than Hebrew.
I acknowledge the danger, cornelis. On the other hand, I don't think that Alamo-Girl means to construct a system, to "build an edifice" here. Personally, I doubt the dualism is fundamental. Yet to speak the language of nephesh and neshama really is to speak the language, not of ontology or epistemology, but rather of metaphor (perhaps even myth). It does allow us a way to account for observable differences between the behavior of the Parisian mob, and what Phaedrus' British mathematician was doing. To that extent, I think it has real value. Plus Alamo-Girl has developed this metaphoric language to account for specific, observable differences between socialist totalitarianism and the conservative position. This seems useful -- just so long as we remember we're dealing with metaphors.
Thanks again!
Treating it as a metaphor is fine with me. My concern (and the reason I dared to contribute) is to suggest a way to "get through" to this spectator society (LOL!)
It is a tour de force.
I think it could work just that way, Alamo-Girl. Most of those spectators wouldn't understand cornelis' (valid!) objection anyway. They just want somebody to "paint them a picture."
Funny, I had the same reaction to Burke's Reflections, which anticipates the methods of our modern totalitarians in great detail -- from 1790!!!
Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences sounds like a great book, KC! I'll get me a copy.
But, like the man said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Talk about timing ... LOL! Anyway, you have my caution about spectators and my suggestion of targeted sound bites. I leave the intellectual heavy lifting to you.
You are exercising your cordial virtues in more ways than one and so I should naturally hesitate to defend anything such as myself to note that the failure of discourse cuts right through "us" and "them."
Yes, that was pretty arrogant of me, wasn't it? Normally I try to be inclusive. In my own defense, I've been seeing quite a few "mobs" lately. It's got me a little unhinged....
People who would run run from a "Savior" cling to Truth.
When one conducts any inquiry into the motives, beliefs, and aspirations of people, especially the habitually rich and powerful, one is inescapably led to the grand sweep of history stretching back 6-10,000 years. It really isnt such a terribly long time. It is a history of the propagation of ideas, far more efficient and with a great deal more continuity than is commonly understood. It is a humbling thing that forces one to confront some undeniable choices.
I would be thus remiss not to say that this process of inquiry led me to the importance of a renewed relationship with God Jesus Christ. Its that thing about morality. It is a logical consequence to the study of such a history. It may not be a logical requirement for ecosystem management, but it is seems to be so when considering the transaction overhead among humans, so capable of untrustworthy and self-destructive behavior. It was certainly a requirement for the faith and stamina that it took me to crank out such a beast of a book, particularly in the all too frequent moments of despair at my own inadequacies as a writer. If you got this far, thank you for your forbearance. There was a cause.
I had been self-abused for over ten years of intensive and expensive humanist training that had rendered many pleasurable gestalts invited through deep regression. They were an opening for interests outside that which I was given. I was being taught to think I had all the answers while simultaneously opening myself to those suggested. I thought I knew everything, just as I had been told to think. Unfortunately for the humanists, the integrity in conduct and the search for truth they emphasized led me to seek essential Truth.
Truth was the undoing of their philosophy.
The sensual enlightenment that came with such realizations of suggested abstraction became a crowd of competing perspectives that were destructive to clarity. Unfortunately, they werent my realizations and they werent my thoughts. I have since bid them back to their own lives and, subsequent to having begged for His forgiveness, I have thanked God for the rediscovery of my own. Life is simpler, now.
Conceptual dualism is the beginning of differentiation and analysis and so, I would suggest, it is essential, though we would (all?) agree, I presume, that overconcentration on these mental constructs can, and has in the past, obscured an (the?) underlying unity. This reflects only our limitations and weaknesses, I would suggest.
But I am an optimist. Each human being is unique and that is amazing considering our numbers. Yet we are all human. Physics explored the nature of materiality and found first energy, then immateriality, to be at its core. Physics is pressing ever closer toward the unification of all (Walker comes clearly to mind here, bb).
This has also happened to me a great deal in recent years. I found my college education to be highly deficient and it was upsetting. The "good news", I suppose, is that the internet has allowed the interchange of ideas without mediation by the academic (or any other) "elite". Very valuable. And Thank You -- I will be joining bb in buying Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences.
Well said, Phaedrus!
Having lived in Poland (1981-3) during Martial Law and the crackdown on Solidarnosc, I can identify with the author's perceptions on "real-life" Communism, especially the observation that Communist governments "banish truth from human affairs" and force people to "live within a lie." Revisionist history is a tool of oppression. It relegates the individual to a meaningless speck of matter whose very proof of existence can be removed by the State.
As a free people, it is our obligation to attack the untruths, past and present, that come not only from government, but also, from our educational institutions and societal leaders. The history of the United States is being bombarded by revisionists in the name of political correctness ignoring the context of the times. I find the ignorance of young Americans about our history the stuff that will rend the fabric of our culture and leave us without a national character and identity.
Was there another thread where this point was raised. I recall this was discussed somewhere else--the Hayek thread? Do you know? Where else does Scruton raise the problem of communication? Does he get it from Voegelin?
All I could find on that was: Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living.
Our discussion about passion was hurled onto the metaphors of nephesh and neshamah. Nephesh, according to A-G, is the thought-mechanism of the animal soul and the source for Marxist thought, and neshamah, the as the source from which conservatism derives power from Truth revealed to the spirit. The one source leads to relativity, the other submits to higher purposes and yielding moral absolutes.
This last metaphor, I suppose, could be in some way analogous to Scruton's tradition.
I cautioned against the usefulness of this ordering and I will tell you why. The placement of these two sources, in a sort of opposition between an "us" and "them", does not answer whether these two sources belong to the same orders, as if they belong to the same genus. Sure, they are here conveniently found together, even beginning with the letter n.
The metaphor of these two sources was furthermore complicated with the body soul dichotomy, the supremacy of common (or public) reason, as distinct from the private I presume. All of this then is found to come together in a master receptacle called the consciousness, some central nexus that lies passive to a monolithic and ubiquitous nature, or reality, which is something I don't believe.
I do believe right understanding here makes all the difference in our attempts to communicate. The unique understanding of Plato led him to record the Gorgias and suggest ways of realizing dialogue after failure. It provides a unique answer that has not yet been discussed.
Of course this is only FR, but I suspect all of you consider yourselves as a cadre of significant members, always devoted to aletheia with every sincere motive.
Through all this confusion, I extent my mortal hope that the best and brightest could slug it out and leave "them" alone to their happily chosen perdition. : )
The Chapter in my Conservative Debate Handbook, just published two days ago, The Persuasive Use Of Images, illustrates the method by which the Left has been undermining American values--and promoting racial antagonism, at the same time--by substituting fantasy images for the actual historic experiences of the American people. It is more and more obvious, that the way to counter the left, is to return to an understanding of the actual dynamics of genuine positive human progress--as opposed to change and destruction in pursuit of fantasy.
The writer in the essay, you have posted, found in Burke an understanding of the rational and actual continuum which is a healthy society. We need to apply the lesson of his lifetime to our approach to the youth. We need to cut to the chase, and demonstrate the obvious. There is too much wasted effort, trying to argue with the Left in terms of their own fantasies. That accomplishes nothing. The obvious reality is that people progress via a many generational quest; that developing a clear perception of the building process that one's ancestors embarked on, and why, is the foundation for anything worthwhile to follow.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
The placement of these two sources, in a sort of opposition between an "us" and "them", does not answer whether these two sources belong to the same orders, as if they belong to the same genus.
I really did not mean to cause such a ruckus, I was just offering a suggestion on how to communicate or promote conservatism to the general public.
Every human has his own nephesh and neshamah tugging at him in opposite directions. His free will determines which way he will turn - one moment he can be liberal, the next conservative. But, IMHO, he will trend in one direction or the other depending on whether he seeks gratification or completeness. In other words, it's not "us" and "them." The battle is within each of us.
This is moot to the debate of political philosophy. But perhaps you will find the distinction useful when attempting to promote conservatism to the inattentive and disinterested public.
On the point of communication, which interested all of us, I really think that confusion about the orders of monism, dualism, as well as kinds and genus is the one of the greatest cause for disrupted dialogue (the other is egoism, willfulness, or other such hubris--an ordering all the same).
Yes, confusion reigns but as noted earlier, most are not interested and so we must "count them out". To characterize this (and find an excuse for borrowing from one of my all-time favorite movies, Bull Durham), it's like a Martian talking to a Fungo.
Our discussion about passion was hurled onto the metaphors of nephesh and neshamah. Nephesh, according to A-G, is the thought-mechanism of the animal soul and the source for Marxist thought, and neshamah, the as the source from which conservatism derives power from Truth revealed to the spirit. The one source leads to relativity, the other submits to higher purposes and yielding moral absolutes.
This last metaphor, I suppose, could be in some way analogous to Scruton's tradition.
I cautioned against the usefulness of this ordering and I will tell you why. The placement of these two sources, in a sort of opposition between an "us" and "them", does not answer whether these two sources belong to the same orders, as if they belong to the same genus. Sure, they are here conveniently found together, even beginning with the letter n.
Here I would agree and disagree. I find the contrast useful and meaningful beyond the surface level in terms of its correspondence to reality because Man does have an animal, material aspect (which to me is not a negative, but more on this at some other time, perhaps) and a spiritual one (not obvious only because of pervasive popular cultural propaganda). My criticism would be that the characterization of Man cannot and should not be forced into such small and limited and thus inappropriate boxes. What we are is much more, qualitatively. The dichotomy is too pat and the words are woefully insufficient. But then, any either/or set of alternatives is too pat.
The metaphor of these two sources was furthermore complicated with the body soul dichotomy, the supremacy of common (or public) reason, as distinct from the private I presume. All of this then is found to come together in a master receptacle called the consciousness, some central nexus that lies passive to a monolithic and ubiquitous nature, or reality, which is something I don't believe.
I don't understand the underlined portion. What is it you don't believe? That consciousness is real? Or that it is central? Or what? And why?
I do believe right understanding here makes all the difference in our attempts to communicate. The unique understanding of Plato led him to record the Gorgias and suggest ways of realizing dialogue after failure. It provides a unique answer that has not yet been discussed.
I would like to hear it discussed. The implications of this statement, though (and I do not intend to put words in your mouth), seem to be that it is possible to communicate in all instances with all people and that perfect communication would lead to right action. I believe that both assumptions, if they are being made, are absolutely and demonstrably false.
Of course this is only FR, but I suspect all of you consider yourselves as a cadre of significant members, always devoted to aletheia with every sincere motive.
This raises my hackles. Should it? You are here, voluntarily, discoursing. And presumably learning. I sincerely doubt you will learn more or better in "the university". You find yourself here among some exceedingly sensitive, deep, accomplished and open-minded thinkers (betty boop comes readily to mind). In the university you will find the first 3 but not often the 4th, and that is a critical difference.
Through all this confusion, I exten[d] my mortal hope that the best and brightest could slug it out and leave "them" alone to their happily chosen perdition. : )
I suppose I would say that the brightest is not necessarily or always the best (by any stretch) and that I, for one, would not admit to much, if any, confusion.
You wrote, confusion about the orders of monism, dualism, as well as kinds and genus is the one of the greatest cause for disrupted dialogue (the other is egoism, willfulness, or other such hubris--an ordering all the same). You worried that use of the Kabbalist (sp?) metaphors of nephesh and neshamah might muddy up the waters of discourse: The placement of these two sources, in a sort of opposition between an us and them, does not answer whether these two sources belong to the same orders, as if they belong to the same genus.
Plato draws dualistic distinctions; he speaks of body and soul. But he also had a myth that accommodates the view of one common humanity, a vision of unity. That was the myth of the divine puppeteer, and the golden and base cords that animated the actions of the human puppets where the golden cords could draw the individual human soul into a divine life in the fullest measure that human nature can admit. The way I look at it, the terms nephesh and neshamah refer to propensities in an individual human soul to respond to either the pull of the golden, or the pull of the base. And I think this is within Alamo-Girls description of those terms. (I hope she will let me know if thats not the case.)
You later wrote: The metaphor of these two sources was furthermore complicated with the body soul dichotomy, the supremacy of common (or public) reason, as distinct from the private I presume.
I dont presume that. Ill take the body-soul duality the way Plato saw it. More on that in a minute.
All of this then is found to come together in a master receptacle called the consciousness, some central nexus that lies passive to a monolithic and ubiquitous nature, or reality, which is something I dont believe.
Well, I dont believe it either, cornelis. Consciousness is not some kind of passive nexus mediating a monolithic and ubiquitous nature. That was Callicles entire argument, in a nutshell wouldnt you agree?
The unique understanding of Plato led him to record the Gorgias and suggest ways of realizing dialogue after failure. It provides a unique answer that has not yet been discussed.
Lets take a look at this gorgeous work. The mise en scene: Callicles invites Socrates to his house, where the eminent guest of his hospitality, the great rhetorician Gorgias, has been holding forth all afternoon to a very large company of other invited guests. Socrates particularly wants to meet Gorgias, because he has a few questions he wants to ask of this famous and highly esteemed figure. We soon learn that what Socrates had in mind is the test of the statement or postulate: It is better to suffer evil than to perpetrate it.
Fast forward. (Lurkers, please go read the dialog. I promise to put up the link presently.) Socrates is able to maneuver Gorgias into total silence, on the basis of the logical inconsistencies of Gorgias argument. The only way that Gorgias had left to him to assert his position would have required him to say out loud the most despicable and base things about human nature and the general constitution of reality. So he presently clammed up.
Then stepped into the breach one Polus, a disciple, I gather, of Gorgias. In due course, Socrates made short order of him, on identical grounds. Polus presently clammed up as well, and for identical reasons.
Which left the field to Callicles. One gathers he was also a pupil of Gorgias. But he was not as scrupulous in his discernment of moral truth as either of his predecessors in the dispute with Socrates had been.
Of Callicles, what can one say? To my mind, a description of his character is best summed up in these lines from Heraclitus (Platos long shadow, on Voegelins view):
Eyes and ears are bad witnesses/For men whose souls are barbarous.
In Callicles we have a human creature of the 4th century B.C. maintaining with perfect equanimity that all human laws are but conventions, in effect fabricated out of the perceived need by whatever ruling class might hold the reins of power at any given point in time, to support whatever happens to pass for the cultural, political, and economic status quo. To this concept he opposes the idea of natural law which is decidedly not the idea of natural law that Christian theology has advanced. The natural law of which Callicles spoke was, in fact, the law of the jungle. The law of brute power: the law of human advancement at the expense of ones fellow human creatures. Arguably, it is a kind of law of which both Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin would have approved. [And then would presumably have had to devise ways -- instantly -- to constrain precisely this behavior, so deleterious in practice to the welfare of human societies down the ages.]
Throughout this dialog, Callicles sneers at, and makes veiled threats against Socrates. And Socrates recognizes the bad faith, the animus towards himself; yet he bears it all in good grace and good humor despite being well aware of the personal danger he faces in confronting this character. In particular, Callicles was quite prescient in this regard, for he informed Socrates that Socrates might himself be brought up on public charges sooner or later, and have to answer for his crimes in due course.
But Socrates is not to be daunted by these veiled threats. Well he understands that, in the end, the final judgment is not mans to make. And its here we have to remember the dualism of Socrates/Plato which prefaces, IMHO, the idea of a Unity that can contain the two:
Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul and body; nothing else....
Socrates further maintains in what follows that, in an improvement by Zeus over the former order of Chronos, human souls are judged naked, by naked judges.
Which is the very approach or posture taken by Socrates toward Callicles all along. For all of Callistes barely contained spite, Socrates was generous towards him in all respects. The suggestion is that Callistes, when he must confront the final judgment, naked spirit to (fearsome!) naked Spirit as inevitably he must, on Platos view -- would probably not fare so well, or be so generously treated .
And from the merely human point of view, why should he be, since Callicles thought fit to espouse the following:
how can a man be happy who is the servant of anything? On the contrary, I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this however the many cannot attain; and they blame the stong man because they are ashamed of their own weakness, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base .they enslave the nobler natures, and being unable to satisfy their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice out of their own cowardice.
Unfortunately, this voice seems to sound a great resonating chord in our own time -- echoing down the course of a couple millennia by now, and yet so timely to the modern ear.
In the discourse of Callicles, you are hearing a case mounted in favor of unaccountable power, of the invasion and usurpation of the sphere of the individual human being, of totalitarian thought and behavior.
Of contempt for all life, human or otherwise. And a rebuke to God Himself into the bargain.
Who needs this sh*t??? What kind of civilized polity can be constructed on Callicles stated grounds?
Of course, the folks who give you this (i.e, Callicles') explanation tend to hold human history in contempt as a source of knowledge or wisdom....
Chilling. Callicles, thy name is Clinton.
Yes, Callicles is the very model for a Bill and Hill....
Ping for more thought.
He felt that the Founders took the idea of continence to its logical end, we were from England and those laws and customs that we inherited and were compatible with a Republic should hold force.
Hey there Little Bill! Long time no see!
How can one dislike a book that dislikes what one dislikes?
By all means, Little Bill, do read Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France yourself. As Scruton points out, the book is about conservatism vs. progressivism (revolution):
To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the structures against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again?The French revolution was about "rubbing society out" and starting over, from scratch. In the process, human beings devolved into animals: There was nothing left after France was laid waste that could serve as a support to human beings. Everybody was free to "do his own thing" (even quite monstrous things); but then it turned out that only "bestial things" could then be done. (Which is an insult to animals really -- I'm sorry for that; but these humans were "worse" than animals. Animals are incapable of bad will or evil motives....)
The horrors that Burke depicts are monstrous, chilling. Plus Reflections is one of the most eloquent defenses ever written about the millennia-old conservative political (and social) philosophy.
I couldn't recommend the book more highly. And Roger Scruton is a wonderful read in his own right!
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text:
|Instrument: 2DC : 2D Cloud Probe
Instrument Category:
In Situ/Laboratory Instruments
Instrument Class: Probes
Instrument Type: 2DC
Instrument Subtype:
Related Data Sets
View all records related to this instrument
1. Introduction
The Two dimensional optical array probes (2D-OAP), models 2D-C
and 2D-P, are instruments developed by Particle Measuring
Systems (PMS Inc., Boulder, Co) for the measurement of cloud and
precipitation drop size distributions. These sensors are used
primarily for the study of cloud microphysical processes,
particularly the growth of cloud drops and ice crystals through
aggregation, riming and coalescence into drizzle, rain drops,
graupel or other forms of precipitation.
2. Operating Principles
The 2Ds record the two dimensional shadows of hydrometeors as
they pass through a focussed He-Ne laser beam (Fig. 1). The
shadow is cast onto a linear diode array and the on/off state of
these diodes is stored during the particle's passage through the
laser beam. This informatio, along with the time that has passed
since the previous particle, is sent to the data system and
recorded for post-flight analysis.
Information about a particle's shape and size is deduced from
analysis of the recorded shadow with a variety of pattern
recognition algorithms. Figure 2 illustrates some measurements
by the 2D probe in several different types of clouds, ranging
from rain drops to pristine ice crystals to more complex heavily
rimed ice particles. Figure 3 is a photograph of the 2D-C in the
canister that is normally mounted on an aircraft pylon. A
complement of 2Ds is normally flown during a project to cover
the size range of interest. The 2D cloud probe (2D-C) measures
in the range from 25 mm to 800 mm and the 2D precipitation probe
(2D-P) measures in the large size range from 200 mm to 6400 mm.
Additional information available at
[Summary provided by UCAR]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Congratulations on your acceptance to Buena Vista University!
Our faculty, staff and students look forward to meeting you and having you be a part our community. The Orientation program is designed to assist you as you prepare to start your university experience in August. Incoming students and family members will have an opportunity to meet our outstanding faculty and staff and learn more about the academic and co-curricular programs you will be participating in when you start in August.
An important part of the orientation experience will be for you to meet your classmates and begin to form those supportive relationships that will help you to be successful here at BVU. The "O" team has planned a variety of interactive events that will help you feel welcome, informed and ready to start.
We hope that you will enjoy this time together and we look forward to meeting you!


text:
Fabricator helps entrepreneurs grow
Tight-knit customers and self-scrutiny keep Accufab humming
As part of its unofficial business plan, Cumming, Ga.-based Accufab gets in on the ground floor and helps entrepreneurs to get off the ground. As a result, the company is able to grow with its customers.
The entrepreneur started in one of the oldest of business incubators: his basement, just with an idea and room to tinker. He wanted to design a monitor to withstand harsh environments, like food processing plants.
Tyrous Ward was there nearly from the beginning, discussing with the new entrepreneur why a certain sheet metal form would work here, why this bezel would work there. Today that entrepreneur sends Ward's job shop, Cumming, Ga.-based Accufab, thousands of dollars' worth of business a month.
"Those customers tend to stick with you," he said.
Ward operates the fabrication business with his two sons, Kerry and Mark. Tyrous has a relaxed manner, a subtle grin, and the easy cadence of a Southern storyteller (see Figure 1). He has plenty of stories to share, and most of them involve small companies. Accufab has more than 120 active customers.
"You probably wouldn't recognize most of their names," said Kerry.
If you visit home improvement stores in the Southeast, you'll probably see point-of-purchase displays made at Accufab. The shop makes backing components for digital billboards along highways, sheet metal components for the radar signs that show how fast (usually too fast) you are driving. The shop also makes sheet metal enclosures for what may be the last lucrative public phones in America: phones in prisons, where inmates have no choice but to call collect.
This business strategy has helped Accufab hum along quietly since its launch in 1991. It has had its share of changes, like when the company did miscellaneous metal and ironwork jobs, such as gates. An utterly different process, such fabrication was separated out to another division called Iron Ideas, which eventually had its own building. But the business has waned, and today miscellaneous metal fabrication business isn't Accufab's primary focus.
("Iron Ideas is a business in name only," Tyrous explained. The company still uses the URL www.ironideas.com, but plans to change it in the coming year. "It's in a transition state," he said.)
Accufab endured the dot-com bust and even the Great Recession without much disruption. Tyrous recalled how several machine tool representatives visited his shop in the dot-com bust years and were dumbfounded. With so many other shops slowing to a crawl, how did Accufab keep work flowing in the door?
The Wards have a two-part strategy. The first part involves process improvement, and a quick glance on the shop floor plainly shows their efforts. The second harks back to the monitor designer that today represents one of Accufab's largest clients. For many of its customers, Accufab gets in on the ground floor (or even basement), helps an entrepreneur get off the ground, and sticks with them for the duration.
About Relationships
Managers don't have any illusions as to why many stray from job shop work and attempt to play their hand in the contract fabrication arena. Long-term contracts can add much-needed stability to a business.
But Accufab stays happily in the job shop sandbox. Most jobs come from work orders demanding a four-week (or shorter) turnaround. They're for a dozen of this, several hundred of that, several thousand of this. Work ranges from piece parts to complete subassemblies—again, mostly for smaller companies.
The Wards estimated that for about 75 percent of the customer base, Accufab's designers work with customers to design components for sheet metal fabrication. They come to the fabricator with an idea. They sometimes have a drawing, sometimes not, but whatever they've got, Accufab helps them through the process.
"That's how most of our customer relationships start," Kerry said. "They have an idea, and they come to us to find out how to make it. That's our sweet spot, and nobody wants to do that work."
Many stay away from such work because of the inherent risks. An entrepreneur may have a great idea, but it takes a combination of hard work, good timing, and luck to make that idea a success. But for Accufab, the strategy has paid off.
In any given year, the largest client may make up (at most) 15 percent of company revenue. "The next highest comes in at less than 10 percent," Kerry said. "And then we have a slew of customers that make up 1 to 2 percent of our revenue, everything from security equipment to point-of-purchase displays, the recreation industry, and medical equipment. It's all over the board."
"You see the effect of a downturn really quick with the big companies," said Tyrous. "But with the mom-and-pop operation, they have a family to feed, and they've got to keep going. They tend to be more stable for us."
"We have close relationships with almost every one of our customers," Mark said. "We know their businesses, and we're true partners with every one of them. Our customers are our friends. Kerry and I grew up in this area, and we've known many of them for years."
The shop serves as a reminder that, alongside the effects of globalization, local business relationships remain a steady, healthy, and often unnoticed undercurrent of the economy. It isn't about multi-million-dollar deals or flashy product launches. Instead, it's about a quiet cycle of brainstorming, handshakes, and work orders.
Assisting entrepreneurs with design efforts not only helps build good relationships. As the Wards explained, they work with customers to lower manufacturing costs in their shop—with their machines, of course.
This includes a Salvagnini panel bender and two new Bystronic press brakes with dynamic crowning and pressure reference technology for bend accuracy. Lights above the tool clamps and 3-D animations on the control show operators where to insert tools. This, combined with offline programming, allows the shop to set up extremely complex bends quickly. What was once a multipart assembly may now be unitized into fewer pieces. This may eliminate or reduce subsequent welding or fastening, and the shop's design consultants take this into account.
This provides a clear competitive advantage. The Wards serve the customers by offering ideas that can save them money. And thanks to the mix of technology on the floor, they often can produce those designs for less money than the competition can.
Every Process Under Scrutiny
This strategy wouldn't work if the shop's combination of technology, part flow, and talent weren't scrutinized. The shop always had an informal improvement effort, but several years ago the Wards began a formal "scrutinizing" strategy that continues to this day. They scrutinize every process on their 30,000-square-foot floor and run the numbers. They don't consider the age of a machine or established practices; everything is on the table. If the numbers prove that a new investment will pay off, the Wards move forward with that investment.
This effort becomes evident right as you walk out onto the floor and look at its raw stock inventory. A few hours after lunch, that inventory looks as if the shop is about to run out of material. The shop takes advantage of next-day delivery from nearby service centers and carries only what it needs for the next day or so. The Wards can call for material as late as 4 p.m. and receive sheet the next day.
About a third of Accufab's work is in stainless steel, another third in aluminum, and the remaining third is carbon steel. This is a significant shift from just several years ago, when most of the shop's work orders called for plain carbon steel.
The shop's cutting technology has followed this evolution and, most significant, shows the shop's equipment investment strategy. Several years ago the company purchased a 4-kW CO2 laser, when fiber lasers were just starting to enter the market. "We didn't think fiber lasers were quite there yet," Kerry recalled. "They were still very new."
About a year and a half later, though, the Wards couldn't ignore the numbers. "We started running the numbers, and we saw that on [on 18-gauge stainless] we could be going from 300 inches a minute to 1,800 inches a minute," Kerry said, "and our cost for electricity, gas, and consumables would drop. With that productivity, we could cut our second shift and still maintain our throughput."
So in October 2012 the shop invested in a Han-Kwang fiber laser cutting system, which complements the Danobat punch press acquired a little more than a decade ago. Still, the Wards didn't look at cutting efficiency in isolation. What good is such extreme cutting efficiency if it simply shoves a bottleneck downstream? A laser beam may cut fast, but it can't make a difference to the bottom line if overall throughput doesn't improve.
This included the shop's flat-part graining and deburring. The previous system left secondary burrs that workers often had to grind down manually. So the shop replaced the machine (which, like the laser, wasn't old) with a multihead system from Steelmaster, which includes an initial drum head to deburr the leading edge; oscillating brushes (see Figure 2) to grain the surface and deburr hole inside diameters and similar geometries; and a final drum head to eliminate the secondary burrs. This eliminated the need for manual removal of those secondary burrs.
Still, this improvement wouldn't have had such an effect if it pushed the bottleneck downstream. And before 2010, parts had a better chance of sitting for days as work-in-process, because of some prolonged setup times at the press brakes. A portion of Accufab's work was (and is) new or not ordered regularly, which meant that press brake programs had to be written and tried out. Setups sometimes took hours.
Even if a job wasn't new, a specific batch may have formed a certain way because of the metal's characteristics. For certain precision forming jobs, grain direction as well as metal thickness variation meant programs had to be tweaked every time the job arrived at the machine. As the Wards explained, steel emerging from the mill can be slightly thicker on the edges than in the center. When multiple forms are bent into one part, the angle may be ever-so-slightly off (but still within spec) for the first bend, but those tolerances stack up to the point where the operator has no choice but to scrap the part.
Over the past few years, the shop has revamped its bending operations to overcome this age-old problem. The first initiative came in 2010 when Accufab purchased its panel bender. The system's tooling holds down the workpiece, and its bending blades move up and down to fold the flanges. The area of bend remains stationary, while the flange is folded up or down. The system can handle up to 10-gauge mild steel, slightly thicker aluminum, and slightly thinner stainless.
Programmed offline, the system can handle the work of three or more press brakes. The panel bender effectively freed the bending bottleneck for a good portion of Accufab's work. Parts with suitable flange heights and sufficient surface area for the hold-down tooling are routed to the panel bender (see Figure 3).
Of course, not every part can be put on a panel bender, so the company routes its remaining parts to other brakes. Small parts go to some of the company's older, lighter-tonnage brakes, while those with complex geometries are sent to one of the company's two new Bystronic press brakes (see Figure 4). For some complex parts, programming and setup time that used to take hours now takes less than 20 minutes.
From bending, the parts flow to hardware insertion, welding, grinding, and powder coating. Here again, the Wards looked at ways to streamline flow. About three years ago they knew they had a problem in the stud welding area.
Several parts needed a number of stud welds, some of which required varying types of stud hardware. At the time a person needed to laboriously insert each stud weld the typical way, positioning a hand-held gun vertically above the hole, being careful not to angle it slightly before depressing the trigger—a difficult feat for anyone to perform consistently over an entire shift.
So the Wards began searching for a machine that could ease the proc-ess. They looked at some automated systems, but many of them were just overkill—designed for production environments, not a job shop. So ultimately they created their own system. They purchased a simple XY positioning table, then a stud welding feeder and power supply. They also integrated a welding head that could accept different types of studs. If the operator needs to change studs, he need only change the head's tip (see Figure 5).
"It operates differently from a hand welder," Tyrous explained. "In hand stud welding, you hold the gun against the material, you pull the trigger, and the stud embeds into the material. This system actually holds [the stud] above the part, and fires before it starts moving toward the surface." As the system energizes to perform the stud weld, the head descends quickly to the surface. "This helps blow clean and prepare your surface, to ensure it's free of any debris that would make it difficult to weld."
More Relaxed Now
Accufab installed its first press brake with angle correction in October of last year, and then installed its second one the first quarter of 2013. When working their shop schedule, the Wards noticed something.
"We're more relaxed now," Mark said.
That's because the schedule has gotten far more predictable because of fewer variables on the floor. It used to be that the shop would route work based on what the Wards call "our wizards." Certain jobs needed to go to these individuals who—especially in the press brake area—had the experience with the machine to process a job effectively. They knew where to shim and how to tweak a brake program, perhaps even calculate and lay out a staged bending setup.
Today more preparation and programming take place off the shop floor. The result is minimal WIP and scrap. For sure, this has changed day-to-day job duties for many of the shop's 43 workers (many of whom have been with Accufab for a decade or more), but it also has broadened their perspective. In recent years the focus has shifted from "How are we going to set up this part?" to "What can we do to shorten overall manufacturing time and reduce costs?" The latter, of course, is what the customer really cares about.ceholder
Tim Heston
FMA Communications Inc.
Elgin, IL 60123
Published In...
The FABRICATOR
The FABRICATOR is North America's leading magazine for the metal forming and fabricating industry. The magazine delivers the news, technical articles, and case histories that enable fabricators to do their jobs more efficiently. The FABRICATOR has served the industry since 1971.


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L'affaiblissement progressif des ressources. (a.k.a. The progressive weakening of the resources) – Trailer 2013.
3D computer graphics video. 6 min.
Actor : Bruno Boulzaguet.
Created with the support of Mocaplab.
Video in situ. "Fantômes numériques" 2016
The video, with a very horizontal format is presented on 3 screens.
Thanks to the movement we distinguish a hollow character caught in a stylised snow storm. He walk and slowly exhausts himself.
The goal of the film is very simple and at the same time ambitious : make us feel an emotion, an empathy with just white dots on black. A eulogy of movement.
Making of directed by Mathilde Marc of the motion capture shooting done at Mocaplab.
Exhibitions :
"Territoires Incertains", Plateforme (Paris, France), 2014
"Nostalgie du réel", Le Cube (Grand Paris, France), 2014
Fantômes numériques
Interactive installation.
Interactive sculpture
Video installation
"11 EXECUTIONS" confronts armed violence and modern terrorism to video games artificial intelligence (AI).
"Camgirl odalisque" aims to establish a connection between classical nude artworks and a more contemporary vision.
This is an homage to the famous show opener of Tracks (Arte channel).
The hallucination is in fact a set of memories, where the colors of a real nature mingle with the folds of a pop-up book nature.
…The result of this is a distraught vision of a destructured nature, an artefact formed with multiple shreds, that Arman would have designate as « archaeology of the future ». A puzzle for future generations, for the day nature will have disappeared.
The digital material in this film is a repository and only exists thanks to the creations of Len Lye; but also, as in a painting by Soulages, it forms, transforms and emits in its turn.
Thanks to the movement we distinguish a hollow character caught in a stylised snow storm. He walk and slowly exhausts himself…
Nostalgia For Nature is a full 3D computer graphics film.
These white lines on black reveals the raw beauty of 3D.
This installation is the litteral representation of the link (fight?) between the real and the virtual.
This full 3D computer graphics film draws from the events that struck Japan in March 2011, and more specifically, the way the events were covered in the media.
This series follows "Fiction 1" a work inspired by the events that took place in Japan, March 2011. We are in this series after the tsunami.
"A beautiful ode to E99500 hexadecimal color."
The aim of the Artefact series is to highlight those 'material accidents' in 3D computer graphics, and by doing so, to showcase the way in which the artist takes a 'trial and error' approach.
Sometimes a bug in a video game can be magic. It gives the keys to a normally unexplored area, beyond, in the limbo of the game.
A 8 minutes hypnotic and optical travelling (sequence shot) into a computer graphics forest.
(Français) Mutation #1 est une sculpture issue d'un procédé de création et de fabrication numériques, obtenue par impression 3D.
"All my 3D objects are afflicted with a degenerative disease.
Gradually they disintegrate, face after face they lose their appearance, with a fatal outcome."
By a strange mitosis phenomenon, the objects proliferate infinitely, at the expense of all that is natural and human.
Experiment with video compression.
A dogma of constraints, in a purified freedom, in order to broaden the emotional scope of the viewer.
Decomposition of the body/decomposition of the image.
Unable to exist anywhere else than in the hollow of the pages of a wrinkled book, they collapse after a long fall, until they lose themselves, and disappear in the plump and passive bounce of their papier-mâché flesh…
black car, video game, speed, video game, speed, video game…
In this series I use a face reduction algorithm. A percentage defines the strength of reduction. 0 %, no reduction. 100 %, total reduction. Each stage is created mathematically.
This series consists of four images, each depicting a woman held in an identical position with a reflective plane symbolizing water. The series plays on the inferences one naturally makes from images.
(Français) Une sculpture vient compléter l'image en représentant la partie manquante.
La somme de l'image et de la sculpture forme le paysage dans son entièreté.
Flesh separated from its meaning and function thus becomes an unknown territory, a limitless area. A substance that can be moulded at will.
Virtual flesh become abstract.
A mental trip in the mind of a hypnotized woman.
A day in Russia, for morning to the night. 454km (282 miles).
The real world that surrounds us doesn't appear to provide an ideal background for dreams, but it only needs a different way of looking to become malleable and porous.
Shape, movement, transparency: a strange, organized dynamic is set up in which the bottles become a simple optical pretext, a bewitching kinetic motif.


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text:
Emergency downgraded at Wanapum Dam
(AP) -- That crack in a spillway pier at the Wanapum Dam has been downgraded to a "non-failure emergency."
The Grant County Public Utility District lowered the classification Tuesday night.
The downgrade is the result of engineering surveys conducted Monday and Tuesday that show continued stabilization of the 65-foot long crack found last week on one of the dam's spillways.
As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, surveys show that the impacted area is stable.
The PUD says the fracture has closed and the damaged section of the spillway monolith has moved back upstream by nearly 1.75 inches. That's the result of the utility's actions to lower water above Wanapum Dam and reduce pressure on the damaged spillway.
The dam is located a few miles south of Vantage on the Columbia River.


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It's Friday already! (Or…finally!!) Today we're giving away this Sew-On Soft Touches embellishment from Dritz. Stitch ribbons on each end and make a statement necklace, or stitch to a neckline to spice up a shirt!
To win this fun prize, post your answer to the following question in the comments section below:
Do you make fabric jewelry?
The winner will be announced on Monday! Good luck and Happy Friday!


text:
LA brethren it's almost Thursday again, which means it's nearly time for the dirtiest party of the week. This week, Versus is going to be extra special as Metamimetic takes over GDD™ and Danceism's infamous weekly. All the way from London, underground sensation Fazhands will be gracing us with his presence and unparalleled action on the 1s and 2s. Joining him are Los Angeles based Metamimetic artists Tre and Avedon. Finally, don't miss San Francisco's own Sososoon who'll be getting the party started. This is truly a unique show, boasting transatlantic talent from the London label, who've also brought over their resident MC: Sinna G of Mortal Methods to host the night.
This is a FREE one for you folks with the infamous $5 Red Bull + Vodkas, so get out here and get on a heater. RSVP names and pluses at DANCEiSM.com for guestlist.
Set Times
9:30-10:30: SoSoSoon
10:30-11:30: Avedon
11:30-12:45: Fazhands
12:45-Close: Tre
Oh and of course here are some tracks for your listening pleasure : )
Boy Mandeville – Killing The Work (Fazhands 'Lost In Space' Remix) by fazhands
Amnesia (Out on beatport in May!) by Tre
Bad Boyz Preview Coming Soon On Metamimetic Records!!! by djavedon
SOSOSOON – F.Y.P.M. by SOSOSOON
Always with love,


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What is the education discount policy?
For more than 15 years, Bio-Rad has made science education a major priority. To support this effort, the company has implemented a discount policy that allows high school and college teaching laboratories to purchase kits, instruments, reagents, and other equipment at preferred prices.
How do I apply for the education discount?
If you are an educator at the high school or college level, visit our Education Discount Policy page to establish an education account number.
100 g, styrene divinylbenzene beads for size exclusion chromatography, 1% crosslinkage, 40–80 µm bead size, 600–14,000 MW exclusion range
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text:
August 17, 2012 - 11:12am
Darksiders II (+22 Trainer) [FLiNG]
Add new comment
unlimted helth
I want this trainer
thank you.
How to Skip Level
I can't come Lvl up -.-
help meee
it means ACTION in russian.
darksiders 2 trainer
m not using fling's trainers anymore.
fling's trainer once screwed my amalur game a by spwanning nearly like 9999999999 objects in my inventory and now it screwed my darksiders 2 play(it messed up the gears now there are 2 death grip icons and a voidwalker which i didn't recieve yet O_o,without activating the trainer i cannot go to reaper form now,)..just gr8
is your game updated? bec.
Hey Guy this trainer working
Hey Guy this trainer working fine.. the thing that bug is the game itself you can't exeed level 22 on your first playthrought.. after new game+ max level cap is 30 then you can complete the crucible and buy the max level possed weapon with infinite boat coin at vulgrim... hell this trainer is uselless after you get max level possed weapon with 30% life steal and aftermath weapon LoL
how to rach at level 23
hello again
i tried again INFINITE EXPERIENCE, its working, max level is 22, just use the infinite exp cheat, if you become level 22, then it is good. if not 22.. DO NOT SAVE , LOAD AGAIn, THEN USE INFINTE EXP UNTIL U GET LEVEL 22. (be sure to backup your save files, so that if your account got bugged, you can use the backup files, this is what i did, did many trial and error, now im lvl 22 and max money.)