thoughts in and out of season
Four religions:
Environmentalism has several aspects. The most justifiable is the view that the natural world is a complex evolved system that we depend on but can’t understand and control completely, so we should respect it the way a traveler respects local customs or someone sailing a small boat respects the sea. The point can be extended … More ...
Richard Epstein has an online piece entitled How Is Warren Buffett Like the Pope?
It seems that on the way to Spain for World Youth Day the Pope said that the economy “cannot be measured by the maximum profit but by the common good,” and that it “cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs … More ...
I’ve been reading the manuscript of Bruce Charlton’s forthcoming book on PC, Thought Prison, which grew out of posts and discussions at his weblog.
It’s a good book, I’m writing a blurb for it, and I hope it catches on.
As he notes on his website, his views are mostly consistent with mine. … More ...
Conservatively-minded people who favor the scientific outlook to the exclusion of other sources of knowledge point out that PC, the insistence that human differences don’t exist or don’t matter or shouldn’t be allowed to matter, is anti-scientific.
That’s true, of course. It’s also true though that scientism—the view that knowledge is not knowledge unless it’s … More ...
I mentioned marriage as an example of the antiliberal implications of the new science of complex order developed by writers on architecture such as Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.
There are of course many other examples, because the new science goes to basics. It helps make sense of living systems, explains how their specific qualities … More ...
I’ve been reading Nikos Salingaros’ Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design. It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented in his other books. … More ...
I’ve been reading The Problem of Democracy, a new translation of a short book by the French writer Alain de Benoist.
“Democracy,” even more than “inclusiveness” or “social justice,” is viewed as an incontestable fundamental good today. Everybody seems to agree it’s how things have to be. Nonetheless—or maybe therefore—most people don’t think about … More ...
A recent discussion with Bruce Charlton on knowledge, society, and the Eastern and Western Church provokes reflection.
It’s notorious that involvement in particular activities makes it hard to keep their connection to the whole in mind. Standard examples include making money, attention to the opposite sex, and attempts to control things generally. Hence the monastic … More ...
The mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros has written a useful account of “seven tactics for denying the truth”: Cognitive Dissonance and Non-adaptive Architecture. (PDF here.)
It’s a good summary of how people maintain their views when they don’t have an argument and don’t want to change what they think. In many cases—like … More ...