thoughts in and out of season
Here’s some more moaning about These Young People Today, where “today” means recent decades going back God knows how long: The Closing of the American Mind Revisited. The piece is prompted by the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s book.
Like most complaints about These Young People Today it’s really about the consequences of the … More ...
The 70s were called the “me” decade, but it appears that we’ve built on the foundation they laid. College students’ scores on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory have been rising steadily since testing began in 1982, with the proportion of high scorers rising from half to two-thirds. The study worries that narcissists “are … More ...
Several items that touch on the current effort to turn the whole world into a unitary rationalized industrial scheme:
More news from the Sex Front that for some reason I’ve been covering a lot lately:
It’s become routine to say that current Anglican disputes are really about scriptural authority or unity of doctrine within the Anglican communion rather than sex. To my mind that doesn’t wash. At bottom the basic issue is always truth, in this case the truth about sex. If the right answer is that its human meaning … More ...
Some may harbor half-articulate doubts, but Catholics who want to be relevant have jumped on the bandwagon like everybody else. “Human rights” are now the sole moral basis of public discussion in the Western world. Rights rule, at least in theory. The bumper sticker says “question authority,” but that doesn’t apply to … More ...
Steve Sailer has a good piece on how the college prestige racket works. Basically, he says, no one cares what kind of education top colleges offer. Whatever Dr. Faust may do, a Harvard degree will still prove that its holder was able to get into Harvard and that’s all that really matters.
That certainly fits … More ...
So far as I can tell, the “rising tide of religious fundamentalism,” at least in the West, is really the “rapid dissolution of religion as a social presence.” That dissolution leads to occasional complaints from people who aren’t totally on board with the new program, as well as horrified outbursts from radical secularists who are … More ...
Worth a look: