Book reviews: Curiosity, by F.H. Buckley

The great thing about Buckley books is that they're such a mix of wisdom and foolishness. The value of the wisdom is obvious: you learn stuff. The value of the foolishness is that it isn't your everyday foolishness of the fashionable woke or the old-fashioned just-plain-dumb variety: it's outrageous foolishness that has enough possibility of being right that you feel a need to argue with it.

That's why I feel like writing a book review even though I've only read to page 4 so far. I'm cheating a bit-- the preface is 20 pages long, and worth the price of admission by itself-- but I have to stop now and argue with Professor Buckley about his first rule: "Don't Make Rules."

I don't object to the contradiction. "The exception proves the rule," and this is an apt example. The meaning of that maxim is that when you come across an exception to a rule, the surprising validity of the exception in that particular special context makes us realize even more how valid the rule is almost everywhere else. When you understand how special the forces of an atomic explosion must be to violate the law of conservation of matter, you realize how reliable the law is in ordinary situations. When you understand how large the size of the income effect must be to violate the law of downward sloping demand curves and create a Giffen good, you realize how reliable is the law that people demand less when the price is higher. So we must not object to a rule saying "Don't Make Rules."