thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb I had a talk yesterday with a friend about James Carroll’s book The Sword of Constantine. I hadn’t read it. The recent anti-Catholic books by Carroll, Cornwell, Goldhagen, Wills and so on strike me as mostly hate literature. They may be important in a sense, because they’re part of a movement, but individually they … More ...
Additional thoughts on “gay marriage” provoked by a discussion I started, in connection with the Rauch piece, in the Atlantic discussion forum on Politics and Society:
… More ...Comments about “Judeo-Christian morality” are silly in this connection. The limitation of marriage to male/female unions is hardly peculiar to Judaism and Christianity. It was also the uniform
Current wisdom suggests that if right-wingers like marriage so much it’s really stupid of them to object to “gay marriage.” After all, shouldn’t long-term commitments be encouraged by respect, ceremony, and the web of custom and observance that has gathered around marriage? Isn’t that sort of thing the essence of social conservatism?
No doubt it … More ...
Vatican II has certainly worked out badly, although the documents are much more limited than what they led to. What happened was natural. An ecumenical council is an extreme measure, so if there’s no fundamental dispute to resolve, why have one?
The wisdom of an assembly is always hard-won. So if a council is … More ...
The reason classical liberalism looks better than contemporary liberalism is that it existed within a system of unspoken presumptions that kept freedom, tolerance and so on from becoming the operative final standards for the political system. The liberal standard of justice, equal freedom, had not yet forbidden public recognition of substantive goods like virtue and … More ...
The Europeans are terribly upset that an “extreme rightist” got 17% of the vote. They’ve had a lot of upsets lately. A couple of days ago it was the massacres they claimed (on very little evidence) had taken place at Jenin.
Paranoids find the world alarming but so do people who try to maintain a … More ...
There’s something admirable in a liberal outlook that maintains interest in new ideas and sympathy with other ways of life. It shows an awareness that the world is bigger than what we think about the world, which is all to the good. It’s not an outlook that can be turned into a final standard, though, … More ...
I’ve been reading Plutarch lately, in the Dryden translation. 10 years ago he bored me, now I think he’s wonderful.
He’s a cultivated and broadminded moralist who knows men and affairs. Already that sounds dull, I’m afraid. I don’t think people read him much today although Harry Truman liked him.
Why care about copyright anyway? It’s a dry topic, but in a world of mass media and computers it’s an absolutely fundamental issue.
Should it exist at all? Is property theft in this case, because there’s something wrong with the notion that you can own an idea? Should it only last for 5 years? Would … More ...
There’s something odd about intellectual property. Rules are necessary to prevent conflict in the case of tangible property but not intellectual property. So unlike other kinds of property, which would be found in almost any society, patent and copyright are visibly things we made up. The phrasing of the U.S. Constitution reflects the situation: Congress … More ...