Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In the comments on this post , Keshav worries that anti-utopianism may lead to complacency: isn't it a good thing, he wonders, to strive for an ideal, even if one knows one will never achieve it? Good question. I will try to indicate when I think striving toward an ideal is fine and when it is dangerous. Let us move away from politics, to take the emotional charge off of the topic, and consider basketball (which appears to be coming another major theme of this blog). A basketball shooter should clearly have the goal of making every single shot, even though he knows he will inevitably sometimes miss. But the player slips over into utopianism if he takes this not as an unachievable ideal by which to orient his practice, but as a realistic goal which implies that he should "never rest" until he achieves it. In the latter case, he may decide to increase his time practicing shooting continually so long as he is not hitting 100% of his shots. That approach will prove destructiv...

Previously I sought a label for my political views: people seem to like labels. Perhaps a good one would be that I am a "classical republican": I think the best constitution is a mixed one, that balances the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and checks the parochial tendency of localism while also checking the totalitarian tendencies of centralization. Often, it is perfectionism, or "politics as the crow flies," as Michael Oakeshott liked to put it, that is the greatest enemy of republicanism. It is often apparent that some immediate good can be achieved by disrupting the republican balance. Perhaps if only the president could simply unilaterally impose some virtuous policy, or the federal government ignore state's rights, we can achieve some true political good faster than otherwise imaginable. The Gracchi brothers threw Roman republican institutions into turmoil by trying to short-circuit them to achieve admirable policy aims in terms of l...