thoughts in and out of season
Medieval history has its striking themes and incidents. Beyond that, it’s fascinating for us today, or at least for me today, because it’s the source of the modern Western world, so it’s infinitely close—our modern thoughts and institutions can all be traced back there—but it’s also infinitely far away.
Maybe something like that could be … More ...
I’ve been reading a book, The Suicide of Reason, about the tendency of multicultural consumerist liberalism to disarm itself in the face of Islam. The problem the author sees is quite simple: in the West we’re into what he calls reason—that is, we view orderly satisfaction of individual preferences as the highest goal. In … More ...
People are impressed by science, and rightly so. The problem is that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything, so much so that they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.
That’s evidently wrong. So far as I can tell, science—so far … More ...
Other people focus their thought by making predictions, so I will too: I predict Eliot Spitzer will hang in there and ride out the storm. Some considerations:
Enlightenment was supposed to make everything perfectly clear. It has done so by ignoring everything that can’t be made perfectly clear, acting as if such things don’t exist and can’t possibly exist. How though is that enlightenment?
I noticed a camera lying around the house, and I wanted to try out the imaging features of my blogging software, so I decided to memorialize a walk down Flatbush Avenue over the bridge to Manhattan. It’s about an hour walk, and there’s lots of stuff on the way, so why not give it a … More ...
The paradigmatic traditionalist American Catholic Bill Buckley has died. There is a good obituary in the New York Times:
http://tinyurl.com/ysr942
I commented very briefly on Kay Hymowitz’s not-so-pleasing account of the “new girl order“—the Way Young Women Are Now. Now she’s come out with an even less flattering account of today’s single young men. Guys will be guyz it seems. The positive part of the KH essay is that “How to make your … More ...
I’ve been reading Paul Gottfried’s recent book, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. The book presents two of Gottfried’s tendencies as a thinker: his tendency to treat expressions like “liberalism” and “conservatism” as names for particular historical constellations of principles, institutions and interests rather than long-term tendencies that show up differently … More ...