thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The following review of Christopher J. Insole, The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Telos.
What is liberalism and is it good or bad? Its pervasiveness makes it difficult to gain the perspective needed to … More ...
A friend wrote to ask what I thought of various academic attempts to try to avoid objections to liberalism that are based on the liberal tendency, now out of fashion, to claim that liberalism should rule because it’s based on universally valid rational principles of some sort. My response:
… More ...The attempts you mention basically claim
A correspondent asks what metaphysical liberalism, as “the denial of the Good as a self-sufficient entity which exists independent of any individual’s personal preferences,” has to do with “the modern Left’s hysterical denial of differences between (and in some cases among) different racial sexual and myriad other groups.”
My response:
… More ...To my mind, the craziness
The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what … More ...
What does it mean that something as idiotic as the Da Vinci Code has had a strong effect on how people answer pollsters’ questions about Christianity and Catholicism? (No, I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, and yes, I feel entitled to dismiss them as idiotic anyway.)
Some possibilities:
An old friend, who considers herself a liberal, asked why I classified W as one. It really seemed batty to her although she could see that the “big spender” label would apply. My reply (somewhat edited):
… More ...He’s a liberal because he thinks he’s called on to reconstruct things to bring about a universal order in
Last weekend I attended commencement exercises at a very prestigious Northeastern liberal arts college distinguished by its selectiveness, its commitment to social progress, and its extraordinarily beautiful and lavishly funded campus. I was struck by the unity of view of all the speakers. Here’s the gist of what I heard:
Here’s an image that appeared on a piece of junk mail I received from the U.S. Postal Service pushing their “premium forwarding service,” which lets your mail follow you when you go on vacation. Whatever happened to feminism?
I suppose it matters that other panels on the card make it clear that what’s being shown … More ...
The more organized knowledge becomes the less people know. Formal studies are good for some things. Even football coaches have chalk talks, which are a kind of formal instruction. There are limits though. You don’t become a good cook from food science or a good teacher by studying teaching.
When knowledge is over-organized what counts … More ...
The following is the third part of a three-part interview run at 2Blowhards.com on January 20-22, 2004. The 2Blowhards version includes extensive comments from readers with responses by me.
2Blowhards: I think that, while many people are sympathetic to the critique conservatives make of liberalism, many of them are also suspicious of what conservatives would … More ...