thoughts in and out of season
There’s a tendency today to criticize “essentialism,” the idea that something like Islam has an enduring character such that (for example) you aren’t going to see a moderate liberal Islam become the predominant form of the religion.
I’m inclined toward a moderate essentialism. It seems to me that at bottom the opposing nominalist view is … More ...
“Nostalgia” is frequently associated today with “racism”, “sexism”, and “homophobia”. Among our betters, it has become a sort of general put-down for popular attachments. As in the case of “tolerance,” “openness,” and “acceptance of change,” the point of the expression at bottom is “do what you’re told and like it.”
Such expressions … More ...
The modern technological outlook can’t deal with issues of identity, because it abolishes essences—understandings of what things “really are”—in favor of measurable properties that fit the thing for particular chosen ends. That’s why it’s thought ignorant, irrational and abusive to treat someone differently because he’s a man or a gypsy, but not because he … More ...
Will it ever be possible to force gays back into the closet? That rhetorical question is considered a crushing rejoinder when someone objects to the attempt to normalize homosexuality. Whoever is making the objection, it implies, is a typical reactionary—either he hasn’t thought things through, and is living in the past, or else he’s planning … More ...
Another part of the appeal of Catholicism today (apart from its truth) is a sort of this-wordly extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church there’s no satisfaction now and no hope for the future.
The problem can be stated briefly: the West now stands publicly for secular liberalism. The latter has reached a philosophical, … More ...
Because conservatism as normally understood is not possible in America today. Conservatism stands for loyalty to what is settled. It presumes that one belongs to a culture and civilization that is basically well-founded and coherent, so that it will return to type if a few errors are debunked and excesses suppressed.
None of that makes … More ...
Paul Gottfried makes some interesting points in a thinkpiece on white nationalists over at Takimag. His basic argument:
… More ...The rising generation cares even less than its parents about holding on to an inherited civilization. Most of my students in Western civ courses have only the vaguest idea of the figures in the Bible (including Jesus)
If our built environment is an image of what we believe about the world generally, then the ways the modernist ideology is imposed and maintained in architecture must be part of a more general process. With that in mind, this short essay by a Norwegian urbanist with a legal background takes on considerable interest even … More ...
Some data points:
In my last entry I moaned and groaned a bit about how the kind of reason that enables us to live reasonably has become an archaic concept, since the principles of scientism, commercialism and bureaucracy can’t make sense of it, and in comments to an earlier entry I touched on one aspect of its … More ...