thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb My last entry, on Melanie Phillips and her comments on the compulsory radical egalitarianism that has become so firmly established in the UK (and the West generally), brought to mind the general question of how to explain major social trends, especially major social trends like PC that seem sort of weird.
It seems to me … More ...
Historical and Practical Considerations
I have argued that rationalism does not work, that life in accordance with reason must rely on particular tradition and revelation, and that Catholicism has a good claim to be the most reasonable of revelations. Many people, of course, deny all those things.
The most forceful objection to my claims is … More ...
In the forum, a reader draws attention to a recent piece by Melanie Phillips on “The coercive culture of human rights”. The piece was prompted by the release of a UK government White Paper (*.pdf format) about proposed comprehensive administrative arrangements for enforcing equality, rooting out discrimination, and generally doing what has to … More ...
Informants with no personal reason for a “sour grapes” attitude tell me that students who get into the top-ranked colleges, at least from competitive NY high schools, tend to be integrity-challenged. A recent Gallup poll supports their reports. It makes some sense: in a rationalized society what you are is how you are graded and … More ...
It’s wordy, and not nearly as reflective as the author thinks, but there’s some interesting material there: Across the Great Divide, a piece from Columbia Journalism Review on journalists and religion. The basic point seems to be that journalists are unable to deal with religion intelligently because they are looking for observable events … More ...
How things work: the well-known group that calls itself Human Rights Watch doesn’t like conservative sexual attitudes. One result of those attitudes in the Philippines is a low HIV rate (in a nation of 80,000,000 people, a total of 2,000 known and an additional 4,000 estimated infections). Another is that the Filipino government accommodates cultural … More ...
Here are some worthwhile if rambly reflections on the implications of the recent passage of Bill C-250 in Canada, which would add sexual orientation to the list of things with respect to which you’re not allowed to stir up “hatred.” In principle, the legislation makes any general expression of traditional sexual morality a crime in … More ...
Theodore Dalrymple has a rather slight but nonetheless helpful piece on what’s wrong with rights. His basic point seems to be that when something becomes a “right” there’s no further need for civility, reasonableness or mutual accommodation, so the more rights the more brutish social life becomes.
The exhilarating marketplace of ideas and free thought, Anno Domini 2004:
So why are the Americans more religious than the Europeans? There have been a variety of explanations: