The Althouse Amazon portal: a penny (or 2) for your imperious thoughts.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you commit a colossal gaffe will we know it's you.

"Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" [Paperback]
Niall Ferguson (Author)

and

"Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World" [Paperback]
Niall Ferguson (Author)

John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

Here's something worth reading in light of Niall Ferguson's remark about Keynes (something about his being gay and therefore childless and unconcerned about the future). Keynes was writing in 1930:

My purpose in this essay... is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?...


When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease....

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Hag-ridden. The (unlinkable) OED defines "hag-ridden" to mean: "1. Ridden by a hag; esp. afflicted by nightmare... 2. Oppressed in mind; harassed." Examples:

1684   T. Otway Atheist ii. 18   He's married; plagu'd, troubled, and Hag-ridden....
1702   C. Mather Magnalia Christi iii. ii. xxviii. 159/1   He did not allow himself to be Hag-ridden with the Enchantments thereof.
1886   T. Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge I. xx. 246   When she had not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been ‘hagrid’.
1891   Spectator 4 Apr. 471/1   Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by the physical fatalities of modern science.

A hag is "A woman supposed to have dealings with Satan and the infernal world; a witch; sometimes, an infernally wicked woman" or "An ugly, repulsive old woman: often with implication of viciousness or maliciousness."

1590   Spenser Faerie Queene i. viii. sig. H4,   A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old....
1712   R. Steele Spectator No. 266. ⁋2   One of those Hags of Hell whom we call Bawds.

Interesting that Keynes pictured "pseudo-moral principles" as female demons.

(Thanks to Meade for turning up that old article. )

"What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past."

Writes Jonah Goldberg:

Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

Perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago.

If that's what intellectuals were doing — kicking members of an out group when they were on the outside — before the outsiders were on the inside and it became awkward to disrespect them to their face, then why should I be impressed by this history of intellectual discourse?

Maybe times change and it's hard to keep up, but let's not cry over a Harvard professor's difficulty keeping up.

What Niall Ferguson said about John Maynard Keynes being gay and therefore not caring about the future.

I feel compelled to do a post about this story:

Perhaps in an effort to save his job at Harvard, or his gig with the Daily Beast, or just his professional dignity, Ferguson apologized Saturday for his "tactless" and "off the cuff" remarks. "I should not have suggested... that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay," Ferguson wrote on his website. He called his assertion "doubly stupid" because of course people without children care about future generations and "I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried." Right, yes. That's why his remarks were dumb. Because Keynes tried to have a baby and failed....