thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Will there always be an England? Maybe not, says Peter Hitchens; indeed, the end may be upon us. In this book he presents a long-meditated account of the cultural revolution that has done away with much of what made Britain British … More ...
The attempt to base social order on human will dominates public life today to the point that objective moral order has become unthinkable. Technological hedonism, the rational organization of all things to give each man what he wants, is universally accepted as the guiding ideal.
The current situation has grown up in stages. The First … More ...
The goals and ultimate destiny of the European Union have been variously explained. The uncertainty is not altogether accidental, since the plan of the EU Founding Fathers was to bring about European unity by indirection. The strategy is a good one; it is hard to criticize what has no accepted description. Those who favor the … More ...
Thomas Chittum, a former rifleman in Vietnam, the Rhodesian Territorials, and the Croatian Army, has written something of an underground classic that predicts the devolution of an increasingly multicultural America into racial partition and bloody civil war.
The analysis is … More ...
My Liberal Lawyer correspondent has provoked me to the following reflections on the relationship between liberalism and totalitarianism:
… More ...How you use political words depends on the features of political life you think deserve to be played up. People view these things differently so maybe the best I can do is explain what I have in
We’ve talked a bit recently about implications of the New Urbanism, and a few years ago I wrote a book review touching on connections between tradition and fashionable scientific theories having to do with “complexity” and “emergence.” Now there’s a book that works organizational science and complex systems theory into the pattern: Confederates in … More ...
How rational is morality? Are fact and value separate affairs, with modern natural science final authority for one and personal choice for the other? Or are they inseparable aspects of a single complex world that must be understood as such?
Modern understandings of man, the world, politics and morality tend to separate fact and … More ...
The relation of religion and politics has long been a contentious issue in the West. Particularly in America, the dominant view has come to be that religion has no place in public life and should be kept strictly private. That view is extremely unusual historically, far from unanimously held in the world at large, … More ...
This page presents materials I accumulated that are related in one way or another to traditionalist conservatism, an outlook described in my Conservatism FAQ and developed in the materials on this site. If you want, there is a spoken introduction to the issues (requiring RealPlayer).
The collection … More ...
Sex is a more contentious topic than ever. The view easiest to articulate in the language of public discussion today is that the only appropriate public standards are that it should be consensual and precautions should be taken to avoid disease and unwanted pregnancy; everything else is a matter of individual choice that others should … More ...