thoughts in and out of season
I just finished reading Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. It’s an interesting display, by the French Traditionalist metaphysician (and mathematician), of what can be done through systematic application of simple concepts.
In Guenon’s system, which is heavily influenced by Hindu speculations and traditional metaphysics generally, the concepts … More ...
More signs of the times:
Here’s a claim that 99.8 percent of FCC indecency complaints were filed by a single activist group. The facts seem a little confused, but the evident general inactivity on the conservative side of the issue is the sort of thing the “conservative trend” in American life amounts to. The truth is that there isn’t … More ...
The ’60s, bracketed as they were by the school prayer and abortion decisions, stand for definitive public rejection of the transcendent in favor of a wholly this-worldly understanding of reality. In the absence of a superior point of reference, the social order became the ultimate moral reality and human choice the ultimate authority. For … More ...
Can the internet and traditionalism get along? On the face of it, the net sums up the most extreme features of the modern world. It destroys particular connections by making everything equally present to everything else. With all things in the same setting and position, the meaning and significance of things has nowhere to establish … More ...
Here’s the latest on mutual respect and public neutrality, as filtered through what now passes for American public thought: a U.S. appeals court says that law schools, which have never seen a federal antidiscrimination rule on faculty hiring they don’t like, can ignore a federal law that says they can’t discriminate against military recruiters and … More ...
Is there such a thing as “natural society”? The difference between the traditional and modernist outlook is that the former believes in it and the latter does not, at least if “nature” is taken to refer to anything substantial and not simply to content-free abstractions like freedom and equality. The traditional standpoint is that basic … More ...
A point raised in my last entry, that the realization that social engineering isn’t possible makes nonsense of a lot of current political, social and religious thought, is worth expanding. One implication is that a “top down” understanding of subsidiarity, in which government watches to see if families or whatever are doing what they should, … More ...
A few odds and ends run into on the web: