thoughts in and out of season
Environmentalism has several aspects. The most justifiable is the view that the natural world is a complex evolved system that we depend on but can’t understand and control completely, so we should respect it the way a traveler respects local customs or someone sailing a small boat respects the sea. The point can be extended … More ...
I interview the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros at the Philadelphia Society website. He goes into a variety of topics relating to his recent writings, including the evolution of living form, the cluelessness of modern man, the perfidies of the evil oligarchs. and what it all means for politics and religion.
Richard Epstein has an online piece entitled How Is Warren Buffett Like the Pope?
It seems that on the way to Spain for World Youth Day the Pope said that the economy “cannot be measured by the maximum profit but by the common good,” and that it “cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs … More ...
Here’s the text of a lecture I presented at the 2011 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
James Kalb
Presented at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone Riviera, Italy,
July 6, 2011
This conference raises a variety of questions. What is the present situation? How should we deal with … More ...
[Originally published in the Spring 2005 issue of The New Pantagruel]
Liberalism has enormous power as a social reality. When liberals call themselves “progressive” they make it stick. Their views dominate all reputable intellectual and cultural institutions. Judges feel free to read liberalism into fundamental law, even without historical or textual support, because it … More ...
I’ve been reading the manuscript of Bruce Charlton’s forthcoming book on PC, Thought Prison, which grew out of posts and discussions at his weblog.
It’s a good book, I’m writing a blurb for it, and I hope it catches on.
As he notes on his website, his views are mostly consistent with mine. … More ...
Conservatively-minded people who favor the scientific outlook to the exclusion of other sources of knowledge point out that PC, the insistence that human differences don’t exist or don’t matter or shouldn’t be allowed to matter, is anti-scientific.
That’s true, of course. It’s also true though that scientism—the view that knowledge is not knowledge unless it’s … More ...
I mentioned marriage as an example of the antiliberal implications of the new science of complex order developed by writers on architecture such as Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.
There are of course many other examples, because the new science goes to basics. It helps make sense of living systems, explains how their specific qualities … More ...
I’ve been reading Nikos Salingaros’ Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design. It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented in his other books. … More ...