thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb [The fourth in a series on inclusiveness.]
The demand for inclusiveness is often attributed to emotion, but something so systematic and persistent can only be based on principle.
No one explains very clearly what the principle is, so it’s evidently something taken for granted. The peremptory nature of antidiscrimination, together with the irrelevance of … More ...
They’re just side comments, but if you haven’t bought your copy yet you should consider what people are saying at Chronicles (“Mr. Kalb[‘s] … wonderful book”) and The Thinking Housewife (“thoughtful and absorbing … absolutely engrossing … long shelf life”). So everybody’s talking about it! Do you want to be the only one left out?… More ...
[The third in a series on inclusiveness.]
As I showed in my last piece in this series, prejudice and discrimination are natural, normal, and beneficial in the same way other basic principles that order human life—like private property and government—are natural, normal, and beneficial.
Here are some examples of prejudice and discrimination:
I’m usually too unsocial to participate in blogging memes, but the idea of listing the ten books I’ve been most influenced by caught my attention. In a carping world we should express gratitude now and then, and if you want people to read your stuff it seems civil to offer a little background on where … More ...
The Easter offensive against the Church has been unusually aggressive this year, and it’s lasting longer than usual. A sober response is naturally in order, and there are those who are providing it, but at bottom the attacks don’t bother me that much. Some reasons:
[The second in a series on inclusiveness.]
Liberals claim to oppose discrimination, but feel free to make the distinctions they think make sense. Financial, bureaucratic, and institutional criteria are OK, or so they believe, but natural and traditional criteria are not. You can choose a Yale man over a Harvard man—the schools are a … More ...
Deogolwulf has a post and comments that are worth reading for the account they give of the essential unity of classical and contemporary liberalism.
I just finished an advanced review copy of The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist, by Robert R. Reilly. It’s a clear and informative book that quotes lots of primary sources and deals with basic issues in an intelligent way.
Like any book it has certain limitations. … More ...
A blast from the past: a group of working-class Catholic mothers, protesting against an obvious gross violation of Catholic social teaching regarding subsidiarity and the primary authority and responsibility of parents for the education of their children, pray the rosary on their knees. Then the cops go after them. The local bishop must have … More ...
[The following is the first of what will likely be a sporadic series of longish entries.]
Liberals believe that the benefits of society should be equally available to all. They have recently come to hold that it is a basic responsibility of government and indeed all institutions to make them so. Failure to do … More ...