thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb We’ve seen that multicultural society is brutish and irrational because accepted concepts of what life is about don’t begin to do it justice. So how can reason, civilization, and other good things be restored?
To some extent we can try to be reasonable and civilized ourselves and hope it catches on. That’s hard, though—man is … More ...
Basically, it’s nonexistent. As suggested in my last post, in order to reason about things we need to be able to identify them. We need to sort out experience and apply concepts to it that tell us what things are and what they mean. The problem is that the ability to do so depends on … More ...
Reason, I suppose, is the ability to form reliable judgements about the world and what we should do. As such, it involves a great many things:
In the absence of an explicit common understanding of what a good life is, and in the face of a government that has taken on responsibility for the whole of human life, from the rearing of children to the relations between the sexes to the validity of communal loyalties, the people responsible for persuading us … More ...
Medieval history has its striking themes and incidents. Beyond that, it’s fascinating for us today, or at least for me today, because it’s the source of the modern Western world, so it’s infinitely close—our modern thoughts and institutions can all be traced back there—but it’s also infinitely far away.
Maybe something like that could be … More ...
I’ve been reading a book, The Suicide of Reason, about the tendency of multicultural consumerist liberalism to disarm itself in the face of Islam. The problem the author sees is quite simple: in the West we’re into what he calls reason—that is, we view orderly satisfaction of individual preferences as the highest goal. In … More ...
People are impressed by science, and rightly so. The problem is that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything, so much so that they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.
That’s evidently wrong. So far as I can tell, science—so far … More ...
Other people focus their thought by making predictions, so I will too: I predict Eliot Spitzer will hang in there and ride out the storm. Some considerations:
Enlightenment was supposed to make everything perfectly clear. It has done so by ignoring everything that can’t be made perfectly clear, acting as if such things don’t exist and can’t possibly exist. How though is that enlightenment?