thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb I had sensed something like this, so it’s interesting to see such decisive confirmation: New Survey Shows Religious Americans More Inclined to Stand Their Ground. It seems that people today are more likely to say politicians should stand by their principles on “cultural” issues. The change among church-goers since 2000 has been quite substantial, … More ...
Rocco Buttiglione acted in a more principled way than Larry Summers when he said the wrong thing, but was he principled enough? I don’t think Summers would have knuckled under to any pressure group whatever that threatened to make things difficult for him. At Stalin’s show trials the Old Bolsheviks didn’t confess simply because … More ...
How long has it been since being a college president was a respectable job? Every time one gets appointed it seems it’s because of his passionate personal embrace of “diversity.” It’s not so important what happens, as long as people from officially protected groups get as big a piece of the action as possible. Leading … More ...
There is a strain of right-wing thought, especially in Europe, that holds Christianity responsible for the collapse of the West into rationalized egalitarian mass society. Christian monotheism and emphasis on the equality of souls before God, it is said, undercuts particularity, diversity, and hierarchy. And in the absence of some admixture of those things all … More ...
Who says we live in a secularizing age? I say it’s an age of conquering faith. You may think the faiths are stupid, but if “secular” has to do with observable reality they’re not secular, and if strength has something to do with the will to tranform all things then they’re not weak:
Communication is usually so fragmentary that people who write things are mostly convinced that no one really reads them. Maybe a better explanation is that you can’t understand anything without prior understandings, but prior understandings also make it all but impossible to see what people are getting at who see things differently. So if you … More ...
So what does it mean that actual conservatism—conservatism that accepts the natural, historical and transcendent as substantive realities and so is distinguishable from the attempt to convert the whole world into a sort of rationalized industrial process—doesn’t exist in American public discussion? (I take it that paleo or traditionalist conservatism is not really part of … More ...
The question presented by current public standards regarding racial discrimination is whether it’s OK to prefer to form connections with people to whom one has an ethnic or cultural connection, on the grounds that things tend to work better that way, or whether it’s so wrong to do so that extirpating such conduct is an … More ...
Things run into here and there:
No conservatism worth having can accept the ’60s revolution regarding sex and sex roles. The revolution wasn’t just another set of modifications to practices and secondary principles that are always changing anyway. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it was a genuine modernist revolution that has created an unprecedented situation at odds with any normal way for … More ...