thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The modern viewpoint tries to do away with obfuscation, so it tells us that reason has to do with things that are clear, distinct and verifiable. To know is to know such things, and everything else is fantasy that is not to be trusted. That view is often presented quite forcefully, and it’s led to … More ...
I can’t say these are good ideas:
The actions of the German nanny state can speak for … More ...
Turning to another side of Iranian life, I just watched a pleasant and rather well-made movie from over there, Children of Heaven. It’s about a young boy who loses his little sister’s shoes and their attempts to get them back or replace them, in the mean time keeping it a secret and getting by … More ...
A book by longtime Iranian leader Rafsanjani has apparently been suppressed, or at least withdrawn for fact-checking, because influential Iranians are outraged by its claim that Khomeini wanted at one point to drop “Death to America” as a slogan.
I can somewhat understand the “Marg bar Shah” slogan, ugly though it was, because there … More ...
To follow up my recent post on the topic, here are some things I’ve noticed in the past couple of days suggesting that the threat of fundamentalism is not quite as severe as advertised:
While composing my post on Ellul and rummaging around other things I had written, I ran into some comments I had made in in a discussion thread regarding a short essay of mine on liberalism and Christianity. The comments were extensive enough that I thought I’d edit them a bit and post them here, for … More ...
I’ve also been reading a bit of The Technological Society by Jaques Ellul. He’s good on presenting technology as an increasingly all-embracing system with its own demands. He tends though to view technological rationality as solely concerned with the ever-greater perfection of means. It seems to me that to explain what’s going on around … More ...
I just finished another of Belloc’s books, Characters of the Reformation. He published it in 1936, and his view of nationalism had shifted by that time from what it was when he wrote the two previous books I’ve read by him, Danton: A Study (1899) and The Jews (1922). In the earliest book he … More ...
I suppose people could claim things like these are signs of some such:
And so on. Still, there have always been a lot of local revivals and ups and downs, and I keep seeing overall … More ...
I’ve said that multicultural is really a-cultural, since culture that cannot be public and authoritative is not culture but private habit and taste. Naturally, that description simplifies things a bit. No human group can function without common habits and understandings that its members are entitled to rely on. Multicultural society therefore has its own culture, … More ...