My friend and Libertarian Alliance colleague Sean Gabb is one of the best writers and talkers with whom I am personally acquainted. A month or two ago I tried to persuade him to take up blogging, but he ended the discussion by saying: "Blogging is not the solution to any problem that I have." Fair enough.
The basic reason Sean doesn't have a problem that blogging would solve is that he is an extraordinarily fluent producer of quite long essays. He is able to produce pieces in a few hours which are as long as stuff that takes me a week, minimum. The erudition just flows.
Sean became the editor of the Libertarian Alliance's would-be quarterly journal Free Life in 1991, issues of which have been appearing, with variable regularity, ever since. But out of Free Life has emerged Sean's own series of internet based writings, known as Free Life Commentary, written entirely by him, and a source of constant joy and enlightenment to his many thousands of fans and contacts the world over. Free Life, the journal, recycles some of these commentaries for a paper (as well as internet) readership, but nothing like all of them.
Sean's political stance is an interesting one, easily mistaken for modern-day orthodox conservatism, but in fact it is anything but that (as is the case with many who call themselves "conservative"). What Sean calls himself, and very accurately, is an "Old Whig". He is a liberal of the definitely pre-Victorian variety. He is a pessimist about everything now happening in the world except the Internet.
Issue Number 89 of Free Life Commentaries has already been circulating for a week or two, but I waited until it became available as an html file before featuring it on this blog. The subject of this Commentary is the claim now being pressed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. No prizes for guessing Sean's conclusion:
Anyone who looks for Greece in the modern inhabitants of that country will be disappointed. In almost every sense, the modern Greeks bear as little relationship to the builders of the Acropolis as we do to the builders of Stonehenge. But there is still a Greece - not a nation, perhaps, but a spirit. Wherever there is reason and light and beauty, there is Greece. Wherever people wonder what is truth and how we can perceive it, there is Greece. Without Greece, there would have been no Shakespeare or Milton, no Newton or Leibnitz, no Bach or Mozart, no Descartes or John Locke or David Hume, no Adam Smith. We, the civilised classes of Western Europe and the English-speaking world, are the true heirs of Greece; and, beyond all reasonable doubt, England has been the Athens of that New Greece. The Elgin Marbles are presently in London, and by all that we may regard as sacred, it is our duty to keep them there.
But don't be content to regard that as a summary, for it is not. He has much more to say, and I urge you to read it all. If you find yourself liking Sean's style as much as I do, you will find the effort almost effortless.
Practically everything that Sean writes seems to have a political dimension to it, and often almost nothing but that. "Cultural" issues of Free Life Commentary turned out to be much rarer than I had supposed, when I went through the list of them over the weekend. Culture-vultures who share Sean's interest in the past might care to sample numbers 27 (about the National Maritime Museum), 53 (about Macauley's History of England) and 55 (about the teaching of Latin). As to more modern matters, I could only find 12 (about a particularly horrible TV show that Sean and I both turned up to take part in, but then ran away from in disgust), and 9 (which is a review of the movie Starship Troopers – typically, Sean hadn't and presumably still hasn't read the Heinlein book).
As to Sean's fluency as a speaker, I can only say that the talks he has given at my last-Friday-of-the-month evenings are always treasurable and well attended.
I especially remember a truly wonderful Brian's Fridays talk he gave about the impact upon civilisation of the invention of the printing press. It was quite different from the usual talk that you hear about printing, in which the spread of the presses across the map of Europe is described, the books the pressed printed are reflected upon, and in which the disruptive impact of vernacular versions of the Bible being available to a new mass public is reflected upon especially. Reformation, counter-reformation, nationalism, and so forth. What Sean talked about instead was the way that knowledge was preserved before the printing press existed, i.e. the way that knowledge was only preserved with extreme difficulty and expense. The idea of a growing body of knowledge was pretty much impossible, because it was all they could do to keep the stock of knowledge that they already had. So far as I can tell, Sean did little by way of specific preparation for this talk. He just sat himself down and proceeded to tell us the story. Later he gave the orthodox impact-of-printing talk, and that too was very good.
He has yet to get around to writing out either of these talks or anything resembling them, so far as I am aware. Perhaps this posting will nudge him into doing this. I would certainly link to and quote from any such piece or pieces if he did.
I have also heard Sean give more public speeches many times over the years, and he does that with similar distinction. In a couple of days I am due to attend one of his academic lectures, and I hope to be reporting soon about that on my Education Blog. I'm sure I shall enjoy myself very much.
