Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.

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In our real world of corrupted, minimalist democracy, we privilege individual, special-interest thinking and ask citizens to do no more than express their private preferences. We confound opinion and knowledge and sometimes even seem to think that by denying expert science we honor “democratic” thinking (as if shared ignorance and democracy were the same thing). In this corrupted version of democracy, “now” trumps “later,” today takes precedence over tomorrow, and no one takes responsibility for that greater democracy about which Edmund Burke spoke—the democracy that encompasses not only the interests of the living, but the interests of those who are gone and those as yet unborn. Generational thinking can only be cultivated in a setting of prudent deliberation; contrarily, our short-term present-mindedness shrinks the temporal zone.

Amherst College library described in Colin B. Burke's Information and Intrigue, organized books and cards based on author name. In both cases, the range of books on a shelf was random.

experimental intonation

wonderful and sublime

ausal relationship

Kenneth Burke

identification

Edmund Burke

networkculture.Everythingusesandisused,andthereisnoclearboundarybetweentheoneandtheother.

a network [une grille]

In brief, we have to guess them and we guess much better when we realize we are guess-ing, and watch out for indications, than when we think we know.7

Good use is the general, present-day practice of the best writers." One bone we could pick would be with that "best." How are they the best writers except by using the words in the best ways? We settle that they are the best writers because we find them using their words successfully. We do not settle that theirs is the right, the "good usage" of the words because they use them so.

mbiguity,

The orator has little use for an imaginative world three inches in diameter. His world must be twenty feet in diameter and must include every atom of his own

The conservative influence of property does not, however, depend on primogeniture or even inheritance -- features that gave property a valuable role in Burke's political system as well as in the political theories advanced by Hegel and Plato. n11 Within a single lifetime, property tends to make the property owner more risk-averse. This aversion applies both to public decisions [*291] affecting property, such as taxes, and to personal decisions that might diminish one's property, such as investment strategies and career choices. Inheritance and capital appreciation are only additional characteristics of traditional notions of property that tend to stabilize social stratification.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke argued that property stabilized society and prevented political and social turmoil that, he believed, would result from a purely meritocratic order. n8 Property served as a counterweight protecting the class of persons who possessed it against competition from nonpropertied people of natural ability and talent. To Burke, the French National Assembly -- dominated by upstart lawyers from the provinces -- exemplified the risk of disorder and inexperience of an unpropertied leadership. n9 In contrast, the British parliament, a proper mix of talented commoners and propertied Lords, ruled successfully.

Intellectual property is far more egalitarian. Of limited duration and obtainable by anyone, intellectual property can be seen as a reward, an empowering instrument, for the talented upstarts Burke sought to restrain. Intellectual property is often the propertization of what we call "talent." It tends to shift the balance toward the talented newcomers whom Burke mistrusted