The Origins and Philosophy of This Blog

Bruce (Cousin Brucie) L. R. Smith...Why you ask, would a grown and presumably sane man want to start a blog? Don’t we have enough nonsense in the blogosphere already? These perfectly reasonable deserve an answer. A proper respect for the opinions of mankind….as the framers of our constitution might (did) say. In the first place I’m probably not grown up in any sense other than chronologically. If you look at the splendid biography of Machiavelli Nicolo’s Smile by Maurizio Piroli, you will see on the cover an enigmatic, mischievous smile on Machiavelli’s face. This, as the author goes on to argue, tips us off to the impish personality of the man who certainly was a lot of fun. Now if you look closely at my picture on the blog you will notice that you have a wicked child here, a pixie like person full of mischief, probably a contrarian, someone you are not sure of but perhaps not altogether dumb. Now I do have certain knowledge on various subjects but no doubt I have more opinions than I have knowledge. I will leave it to you, Dear Reader, to determine whether I address something I know at any given point or am simply opining.


There is clearly much nonsense spoken and written these days, in the newspapers, on TV, and not least in blogs. At the obvious risk of adding to the confusion (if anyone reads this blog) I venture to declare that I am tired of the nonsense and plan to “set the record straight,” as the politicians say. What will I blog about? Well, mostly things I once studied –- politics, philosophy, history, economics, literature, and learning (its institutions, frames of reference, etc.). I’m not writing here for my academic colleagues or writing scholarship – that’s another domain where I will remain active (I hope). Here I will write quickly, without the help of an editor (except occasionally for the spell check) and in a more accessible vein.

Why the Cousin Brucie? Isn’t this rather silly? Yes, I suppose so, but they tell me you need a gimmick in this business, and I do remember Cousin Brucie (which I am confident not a single person who ever happens upon my blog will have heard of). Cousin Brucie, I learned about in a roundabout way. It happened that some 50 years ago I was a resident tutor in Harvard’s Leverett (no, I don’t remember the handshake so if we meet in a desert I won’t be able to identify myself). One student I was fond of who became a friend was a colorful figure and he kept calling me Cousin Brucie. He might say, “Well, Cousin Brucie, I enjoyed your analysis this morning of such and such.” It turned out that Brucie was a disc jockey on a New Jersey station and this young man was from New Jersey. Brucie was no shock jock in our contemporary sense, but he was direct, blunt, provocative, and had a habit of getting to the heart of an issue. I will aspire to such in this blog.

To add a touch of learning I will go farther and say that I will try to take after a more serious hero of mine – the great Samuel Johnson. Now Johnson will be known to many of you as a rather pompous figure given to putting people down with a rude remark, and generally acting as an old Tory bully. Of course you all miss remember the remark attributed to Johnson about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels. As my learned and clever neighbor Christopher Hitchens (now unfortunately ill but we hope he will recover) pointed out in a Atlantic Monthly review a while ago, this was an instance of a man going down in history as meaning just the opposite of what he intended. Just as King Canute didn’t really expect to stop the waves and only wanted to remind his advisers of his own limits, Johnson was referring to a certain rascally sect, named the patriotism movement, which advocated radical causes. Never mind, Samuel was not a nasty man, but was an exceptionally kind and sensitive man who loved learning and desperately wanted to be a teacher. But he never got an appointment because the administrators thought him a bit “odd.” This was because, as modern scholarship has surmised, of Johnson’s Toretz Syndrome or because, as Oliver Sacks speculates, of his being what we now call bi-polar. It was not that the bureaucrats who made the teaching appointments were bad people; they were just limited and were concerned with the more conventional virtues and were, like most people most of the time, unwilling to take a chance. Johnson, in any case, approached matters from a three-fold point of view: First, he looked at what we might term the big picture. He did not admire small insights on minor problems, which would encompass of what contemporary scholarship amounts to.

Second, Johnson was invariably concerned with the broad moral and value implications of intellectual positions or analyses. This seems to me eminently sound: one cannot and should not avoid the larger moral issues. And third, Johnson was very practical. He knew a lot about many things – printing, how the Parliament actually worked, etc., etc. – and was to boot a shrewd judge of people. All of this is well developed in Jack Bate’s wonderful biography of Johnson (W. Jackson Bae also wrote a classic biography of Keats and for Keat’s lovers I commend also Stanley Plumly’s recent literary biography). So I will aspire in any case to these Johnsonian virtues. Picture a bottle of champagne striking a very large ship, the elderly lady swinging the bottle not hard enough to shatter it and having to try again. The ship lumbers forward, the bottle finally shatters, the boat splashes into the water and sends spray in all directions. Will it actually float? Does anybody care? Ships, blogs, ventures are launched all the time, and most disappear without a trace or have a short life that matters perhaps to a small handful. We shall see. Here goes…my little blog, blowing in the hot breezes of the blogosphere. Take wing, take wing!