"Principlesofgovernaaance"Gene Wolfe's Politics

Jerry Friedman · 02 Apr 2009, 23:27 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 16:27:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) "Principlesofgovernaaance"Gene Wolfe's Politics
In-Reply-To: <e815e3c90904021520q6509e581w6091c5d7f0a7eff4 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <704224.72362.qm at web50709.mail.re2.yahoo.com>


--- On Thu, 4/2/09, Matthew Weber <palaeologos at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Jerry Friedman
> <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>wrote:
> > I think we're supposed to take the classification
> > Severian learned as naive and Master Malrubius as
> showing
> > what's wrong with it.  At the least, we and
> Severian are
> > supposed to consider that there's as much to be
> said for
> > monarchy as against it, as in the quotations from
> Aquinas
> > and the ancients that Stanislaus kindly posted (so I
> could
> > pretend I knew all along about those opinions).
> >
> 
> I'm not sure that's at all the case.  I think here
> Wolfe is making a point
> about how he believes God established governance in the
> human sphere, and
> how far human beings have departed from it.  It would
> certainly be consistent with Wolfe's Thomism.

That is, God established monarchy, and we (but not the
Commonwealth) have departed from it?  But which do you
think Wolfe means is "higher", monarchy or our kind of
democracy?

A question that just occurred to me: Which of the
principles applies the best to the Ascians?  To
Communist and Fascist dictatorships?

Jerry Friedman

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net