Really Aristotle is a Platonist, he criticises Plato and has different emphasises but there really is no Aristotlian system with the Platonic doctrines stripped from it as the Platonic Lloyd Gerson put it. As brilliant as Aristotle is Plato and the Platonists are even more brilliant and capture an even greater part of reality, particularly of the transcendent levels of reality as Aristotle is somewhat more focused on the immanent and sensory. Aristotle is sufficient for some and more Peripatetics in the modern West would be a good thing but more Platonists would be even better.

Ted has wonderfully described Bohemian Conservatism in passages likes this:

At the risk of approaching a definition, a bohemian conservative believes humans ought to appreciate, live amidst, and even love the eccentric particularity of physical nature, of distinctive persons, of local culture, of odd traditions that reach back before memory, and more generally of the person rooted in time and place–a historical expression as unique as the proverbial snowflake. The bohemian conservative appreciates less the abstract beauty of the woman on the billboard and more the peculiar beauty of the woman who works at the diner. The bohemian conservative does not love the individualist as much as the eccentric person who is rooted in cultural soil unprocessed by sanitizing consumerism. The bohemian conservative admires the unique and peculiar over the abstracted perfection of a universal form.

And I don’t think such a position is necessarily at odds with a Platonic position, after all Platonism not only affirms universals but all the potentials or possibilities within the universals and the limitless nature of the One. You need to remember the Platonic and Aristotlian ideas of the universal, essence and unity of course but that does not remove the truth of the diversity we are talking of either, it doesn’t even remove its goodness as long as it is seen within the full framework which also remembers the place of universals etc. Historically Platonism has not been opposed to all diversity or distinction, far from it; distinction has been seen as a key part of Platonism. Of course there will be tensions in this philosophy and it must be remembered that for Plato the prime place does not go to deductive reason or language, which are though still important but to the Intellect or Spiritual intuition when it comes to understanding and reconciling the true nature of reality and overcoming any lingering tension or ambiguity at the level of discursive thought.

If by Kirk’s “uneven” political judgments you mean that his were often at variance with yours, then I agree. I’ll push our agreement even further. If one were to list the reasons for reading Kirk, his reflections on contemporary politics would be near the bottom–this is particularly true by the time he got involved in the election of 1992. But I’m not sure exactly what a normal job would be. It sounds very much like those folk who use the hideous phrase “real world” to make reference to some privileged sphere of commercial activity. It is safe to say that Kirk would not have been good at many professions, which is to say something obvious about almost all humans.

The fact of the matter, however, is that despite our very different ways of saying things, we agree much more than is seemly.

All of these are oversimplifications and there is a poor (and in fact often misleading) parallel between any set of these pairs. For some reason, I’ve never been able to fully unlearn that framework. I get stuck back in my freshman year over and over.

Thus why I reverted. Apologies.

Modern life does set up an interesting paradox, once your tradition is no tradition (or at least the apprehension of none) you can’t really fix it by trying to artificially “reviving” tradition of some other time and place. Is this what you mean when you say we can’t go back to the farm?

More importantly, we cannot find answers to our deracinated condition by going back to the farm. THe Lippmann quotation that I offer in my essay is, I think, true. We cannot go back and nostalgia is a perverse answer to our needs. Yet, better relationships with nature, with land, with our labor, with the commercial world are possible and products of our choices. For some a life that is closer to nature and that incorporates farming, for instance, is more authentic and affirming than the disconnected existence in which many people feel trapped. In the long run, there is no going home, however, because we can never make a home.

Finally, the Maynard G. Krebs reference is too dated for me, except that I might note that Krebs the proto-hippie turned into Gilligan, the focus of a socialist paradise.

This brings in the mystery of the Incarnation where I experience God in Christ existentially, particularly, but who is sent as an image of the Father therefore is “begotten” of the Father who is the source of the Godhead. Christ seems to be both universal and particular. “Before Abraham was, I am” or the lamb slain “before the foundation of the world.” Or St John insisting that Jesus was in the beginning creating all things. Somehow the Incarnation exists outside of time and purpose or at least it’s my feeble comprehension of the paradoxical theandrical statements of faith that are inadequate.

Anyway, that’s more rambling than is good for me.