David Brooks: Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.
Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. The world is an intricate place, he believed, filled with dense patterns stretching back into time. We have to be aware of how little we know and how little we can know.
But the fog didn't make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. But we should always guard against the sin of intellectual pride, which leads to ideological thinking. Oakeshott's doctrine was that no doctrine could properly describe the world.
ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
Link Posted by Tim at December 27, 2003 04:34 PM | TrackBack