Category: The Dish

Gates and Buffett

Can we offer three cheers? Here we have two of the richest men in the world who are essentially channeling their vast resources to help others. I’m particularly impressed by their lack of interest in handing over their entire fortunes to their biological offspring. Money quote from the Washington Post:

"Neither [late wife] Susie nor I ever thought we should pass huge amounts of money along to our children," said Warren Buffett, who said he plans to give away his remaining stock holdings after his death but that he has "quite a bit of cash" he still plans to leave to those close to him. "Our children are great," he told Fortune. "But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home – I would say it’s neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money."

Nepotism is indeed a corrosive element in a democratic society; dynasticism is poison to democracy. I know it’s only natural to want to hand over all your wealth to your children, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it as such. But it is not the only moral claim; and those who elevate the biological family to supreme status in our society seem to me to be missing something important. Take care of them, of course. But keep them in their place. Along with the rather base impulse to benefit one’s own genetic material, there is also philia – the love based on choice and acceptance of another free human being – and agape – the love for all as one loves oneself. These two other forms of love and giving are clearly morally superior to "family values." They certainly were to Jesus, whose disdain for the biological, nuclear family is one of the great themes of the Gospels. He disowned his own parents as a teenager, abandoned them in adulthood, taking care of his mother only at the hour of his death and entrusting her to his closest friend, John. He never married, told his followers to abandon their spouses and children without even saying goodbye, and, if necessary to hate their mothers and fathers. Giving everything away to the poor was his injunction with respect to money. Buffett and Gates are closer to his message than the genetic dynasties others build and enrich and cherish.

Quote for the Day

Ganjilaughs_1 "I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act," – Akbar Ganji, Iranian dissident, in Paris. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Iran is a theocratic totalitarian state. Check out his comments on Iran’s nuclear program as well.

On Strauss

Ayounghare

I’m not the only one to be struck by the difference between what Leo Strauss actually wrote and what some have inferred from it – both on the paranoid left and the triumphalist right. Here’s a post written almost a year ago on the same theme:

The power of Leo Strauss’s students, and those who have in turn studied under them, upon the growth and direction of the Republican Party in Washington is a well-documented fact. His followers have been credited with providing American neoconservatism with its distinctive qualities: its emphasis upon crisis, its aversion to liberal tolerance, its rejection of pluralism, its insistence upon nationalistic superiority, its religiosity, and more.

However, far less is known about the degree to which these Straussian power brokers have misunderstood his teachings and distorted his legacy. Strauss actually had little to do with promoting a particular political party, nor any model of political ‘crusade.’

For Strauss, being conservative implied, more crucially, that optimal political actions depend upon proceeding with a kind of thoughtfulness characterized by careful introspection and depth, as well as being deliberative, cautious, attentive to detail and non-impulsive. He was not known to teach adherence to one American political party or another. Strauss was more interested in examining the great political writings of the past and teaching his students a ‘new’ way to read important texts. He was well known for repeatedly appearing in front of his classes and venturing to minister to his own as well as to his students’ ignorance by simply asking, ‘What does this mean?’

Dr. Strauss’s openness to the virtue of prudence was accompanied quite naturally by a sense of wariness: keenly cautious, attentive and watchfully prudent. A testimonial to this sense of wariness was the copy of Durer‚Äôs famous watercolor, ‘A Young Hare,’ that he had on his office wall. He particularly liked the picture, he said, ‘because the hare sleeps with its eyes open.’

It has been said that great minds are often, if not always, as great in their simplicities as in their complexities. Strauss greatly admired Winston Churchill’s historical work, ‘The Life and Times of the Duke of Marlborough.’ In line with this, Strauss revealed his capacity for simple directness perhaps more clearly than anywhere else in his eulogy of Churchill: ‘The tyrant stood at the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant – this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.’"

One way in which conservatism can be guided back toward sanity is perhaps by revisiting the great conservative minds of recent times. Oakeshott and Strauss are the two central figures in this endeavor – which is why they both feature in "The Conservative Soul".