Yuval Levin
Born
in Israel
April 06, 1977
More books by Yuval Levin…
“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.
You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.”
―
You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.”
―
“Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.”
― The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
― The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
Topics Mentioning This Author
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Challenge: 50 Books: JB's Challenge List for 2016 | 115 | 144 | Dec 31, 2016 08:59PM | |
Non Fiction Book ...:
![]() |
442 | 140 | Feb 18, 2017 01:07PM | |
Challenge: 50 Books: JB's Challenge List for 2017 | 151 | 100 | Dec 22, 2017 07:48AM | |
Non Fiction Book ...: * Non-Fiction Book You Are Currently Reading or Just Finished ~ 2017 | 537 | 304 | Feb 01, 2018 11:50AM | |
Challenge: 50 Books: Jonathan Brown's 90-Book Challenge for 2020 | 64 | 65 | Dec 26, 2020 05:43PM |
Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Yuval to Goodreads.