Saturday, June 07, 2008
Couple of good reads
Linking, mainly for my own future reference, a couple of wonderful articles that make the same point.
Roger Scruton writes about the connection between modernist 'Bauhaus' architecture and Communism, and the failure of both... contrasted with plain old vernacular villages, which have always succeeded despite elite hatred. Provides a partial answer to a question that Polistra found puzzling.
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And David Warren writes about the abstract 'Bauhaus' mind of the leftist, which blindly follows authorities and theories untethered to common sense. Echoes and expands on several of Polistra's previous thoughts.
Roger Scruton writes about the connection between modernist 'Bauhaus' architecture and Communism, and the failure of both... contrasted with plain old vernacular villages, which have always succeeded despite elite hatred. Provides a partial answer to a question that Polistra found puzzling.
Krier has pursued a career in architecture, but he is also a philosopher and social thinker who believes that architectural modernism is not just ugly but also based in profound mistakes about the nature of human society. As he put it in a recent interview: “Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.”
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And David Warren writes about the abstract 'Bauhaus' mind of the leftist, which blindly follows authorities and theories untethered to common sense. Echoes and expands on several of Polistra's previous thoughts.
To put this plainly: as the evidence for continuous “man-made” global warming disappears, belief subsides among Republicans. But among Democrats it increases, radically. Democrats respond better to words, and the repetition of them. For the one thing that has increased hugely, in the last decade, is the propaganda for “global warming.”¶ 2:43 PM
I have myself observed this distinction between the Right and Left sides of mainstream electorates in most other Western countries: the Right tends to believe in facts, the Left to believe in “theories”; and as we advance through post-modern irrationalism, those theories become battier and battier.
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This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland.
