I think that the most hurtful thing I have ever been accused of is being a shill for immoral people, which is the subtext of a number of comments recently posted here at Cobb. I do know how to respond, I'm just not sure that I'll do an adequate job. In the end, I'm sure that I can be seen as useless, which is probably the best outcome for all concerned.
I can recall when I became a national officer of a student organization in college. I had the thrill of being elected several times at the local, state and regional levels and finally at the national level. I was truly learning about leadership. I remember running for a second term at the national level and saying in one of my speeches that leadership was the best thing that ever happened to me as a person, and the worst thing that ever happened to me as an engineer. Today I talk politics, political philosophy and ideology. I find myself in the same ironic position. What I have learned about conservatism is the best philosophical thing I have learned and it is likely the worst thing that has happened to me as a black political partisan. It is ironic that in being a leader of engineers that I became a worse engineer and now that I have gained in philosophical wisdom it spells doom for me in politics.
It is clear to me that the practical things that many folks desire of this curiosity I have become, although not onerous, do not seem to grasp what I want to be all about. And I wonder if I'll ever have enough time or patience to explain how my study has changed me. That is because I am first and foremost a writer and my journey into the realms of how it is that people come to decide what they believe has taken me towards wisdom - a wisdom I often feel incapable of communicating, interactively at any rate. I have taken out my frustrations here noting as I have that half of the things that I find most interesting gain few remarks.
For example, I attempted to identify Barack Obama in his Leftist roots and I've asserted that I feel kinship with him as he has triangulated rightward over the course of his campaign. I recognize how it is that the majority of black political opinion has been shaped by the Left and that it is the failure of this that moves us Right. As I told the reporter from the BBC, I just started my journey sooner than Obama. But it is also the case that in this kinship I assume that Obama's intelligence would compel him not to think his own experience was sufficient to frame his desire to use politics for good and that he would seek the wisdom of the ages, and having done so and landing to the Left of most Democrats that he would be following Socialist ideas and those originating with Marx as have so many black intellectuals of note. But all this has been taken as nothing more than beating of the black man on behalf of the white man, or if anything more than that then something of little use to anyone.
I have asked myself today what of my legacy - what is it that I seek to accomplish when all this writing is said and done, and I think that I have reached the limit of what writing can communicate in this form. If I am such a poor writer as to give such false impressions then I fail to see the point of continuing. This record assists me in making sense of everything I have said and thought on the subjects - almost seven thousand essays, reflections and comic strips over the years.
It is drudgery and I do wonder why I bother.
In discovering Oakeshott just recently I find that I have wasted a great deal of time and breath in evolving my understandings interactively. It is with that in mind that I am pleased to have upped my reading quotas this year, not that having all of these books on my sidebar has generated any discussion about them.
So here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give up blogging until some distance after the election. Instead of writing new stuff, I'm only going to publish those partial thoughts which have backed up over the months. Maybe that will help. Other than that, the only idea that gives me comfort is the idea of turning off comments completely in the hope that writing without any expectation of interactivity might make me a better essayist in addition to the comfort of not having to attend to arguments which are really not what I want to talk about.
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