…reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.
From David Brooks in the New York Times. Here’s another Burke quote that makes the point. (Brooks also provides some data.)
Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
These debates are old and Brooks is right: we have much to learn from the great writers. Irvin Ehrenpreis believed that Jonathan Swift made so many exaggerated mathematical calculations in Gulliver’s Travels and the Drapier’s Letters, in part, to mock the newly mathematical method of philosophy introduced by Hobbes and Descartes. You cannot find the truth about society with an finer and finer chopping of your reasoning alone! As Louis MacNiece said,
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
If you want to see how crazy the world is, and how much more of it there is, you need to read the great books.
You can read more about Edmund Burke here.
Culture and politics are best thought of as intersecting Venn circles where the overlapping center is more spacious than the solitary spaces on either side. Are laws only political? Is C&W music only cultural? Of course not. Trump’s fly swats at national arts organizations while rebranding the Kennedy center in his political image are only the most recent, and blatant, examples of the two-sided coin of culture and politics. Mozart’s great divertissements reflected the political reality of classical musicianship. Perhaps spotting the wealthy patron in the corner of a great medieval painting demonstrates the inseparability of the arts and culture best of all.
a culture that values books will encourage advanced reading, but incentives like banning school uniforms if the all the students ace their tests will work better