Friday, February 11, 2011

Happy Birthday Guido

3 comments:

Can't remember my moniker said...

Glad you have burst into life again, AC1.

I spoke to an Italian policeman on the flight to Trieste a month or so ago. He was a Berlusconi supporter but his boss was from the south of Italy. It is well known that Italy is a north and south nation where the stereotypes hold up reasonably well to support some levels of argument. The north are the industrious type, the doers, my co-passenger saw himself as one of those, notwithstanding his employment by the state. Nearly all the production of goods in Italy is in the north. The south is, apart from agriculture, largely unproductive. It appears to produce all the lawmakers and often the leaders of state-run and even some private organisations because Italian law has been so bureaucratic in the past. Those who produce do not have the time or patience to look at all the rules and, more particularly, how to get round them.

Having travelled, over the decades, to almost every corner of Italy, mostly to look at Greek and Roman remains, I found a intriguing empathy with his encapsulation of the country which chimed with my many experiences there. Naturally there are exceptions, but one can begin to see how the opportunities affect people's thinking. I say all this because I worked with so many solicitors and barristers in the UK and have always been curious as to why such a large proportion of them lean politically to the left when their clients, in the main, come from the right. I realise that the ground has changed since the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998, and the state became the paymaster, but my exposure to this came from the '80s and early '90s.

So my anecdotal Italian experience suggests that those who only think, and cannot do, are going to admire theoretical conclusions rather than practical ones and they rarely get to the sharp end to witness the pragmatical consequences of their incomplete planning. That goes for the guy in the picture.

AntiCitizenOne said...

I saw this on Instapundit and thought you might like it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/why-intellectuals-are-not-conservatives/71079/

Can't remember my moniker said...

"... unrecognized superiority ..." - Absolutely! Although I do know a number of intellectuals from the right.

Going back to the earlier part of last century, R G Collingwood's hostility to psychologists is legendary in academia.