thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb 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 ...
My answer is no, at least if conservatism is to be more than the view of a few comfortable intellectuals. “Conservatism” can mean many things, but it always involves a sense that in the most basic ways life can’t be understood or controlled. At bottom, we have to accept and cooperate with things as they … More ...
At times the distinction between moderate and paleo conservatism seems too ill-defined and polemical to be useful for analysis. Still, there’s something important in it worth discussing. At bottom, it’s the distinction between conservatism as a pure principle of caution, so there’s no limit to what can be negotiated or naturalized as part of the … More ...
From a traditionalist conservative point of view, the modern world looks doomed. Its insistence on rooting out all social institutions not based on free-floating choice and formalized expertise—that’s what “inclusiveness,” its highest moral principle, is all about—leaves no place for the settled informal connections and understandings that make possible decent human relations or even ordinary … More ...