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That's apparently the advice in a new book, "The Reactionary Mind," by Michael Warren Davis.
It seems to me that Foucault's "counter-conduct" is becoming the number one obsession today, at least among people who think about . . . or at least feel . . . the left-hemisphere's overwhelming of the Tao (my diagnosis). The pioneers in this area were probably the Southern Agrarians, but the revolt goes back even earlier: to Pascal (the earliest, I think) and comes forward in various forms of revolt (Tao rescue missions), like Romanticism and Henry Adams. It's in Flannery's fiction. Today, it has practically become a cottage industry: Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, Paul Kingsnorth's suggestion that we become barbarians, a renewed interest in Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and the effects of modern technology, hatred of the cell phone. And now, a suggestion that we live like hobbits.
It occurred to me this morning that TDE has been pushing counter-conduct for 20 years. The "eudemon" implicitly means "seeking light and happiness by pushing aside Modernity."
Modernity is the Left Hemisphere Era of Empire.
A Prediction
Watch for a revival of interest in poetry. Poetry appeals to intuitive knowledge, which is a right hemispheric way of knowing (the left hemisphere only values explicit knowledge). By reading poetry, a person exercises the right hemisphere. In an age when the right hemisphere is relentlessly assaulted by the left and is atrophied, reading and writing poetry becomes the mental equivalent of lifting weights.
