thoughts in and out of season
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 ...
I just watched the Ozu film Early Summer and thought it was really quite wonderful. Basically it’s about a 3-generation family trying to find their 28-year old daughter a husband, and her refusal of what seems an advantageous match in favor of an old family friend whom the others find unsuitable but she thinks she … More ...
Love of country can mean a lot of things. Many of them don’t seem to apply from my standpoint. It can mean:
The satanic is rebellion against God. In more abstract and secular terms, it is rebellion against all order that is not a matter of unconstrained human choice. Either way, contemporary intellectual culture often tends toward the satanic. Extreme idealization of human autonomy makes willfulness, transgression, and subversion seem like virtues. They destroy traditional standards, which … More ...
A bothersome feature of the Salingaros book I just commented on briefly is that it’s necessary. Basically, he’s saying that buildings should look normal to normal people, and fit in with the way normal people normally act and feel. Nobody’s ever had to say that before. Up to 80-100 years ago such things could not … More ...
A UK cabinet minister says that Britain is on the verge of a “new Renaissance,” at least if plans go forward to shift arts funding from pork barrel to pursuit of excellence. According to the Culture Secretary, and a report prepared for him, “the society we now live in is arguably the most … More ...
Why do we have horrible inhuman architecture? I’ve claimed that the issues are basically religious: “we want the world we build around us to look like the world we believe in. Otherwise it seems stupid, distracting, phony and aside the point.” So if you’re a modernist technocrat who makes a religion of the laws of … More ...
Christopher Alexander puzzles over the difference between a Catholic vestment, which is likely to have a symmetrical design centered on the Cross, and a Japanese kimono, which is likely to have an intentionally asymmetrical design, although one composed perhaps of symmetrical and even identical elements like stylized blossoms. (The Nature of Order, vol. … More ...
R. R. Reno, at the First Things weblog, flags the final report of the Harvard task force on general education. From Reno’s discussion it appears that “liberal education” is now understood as the training of technocrats to man the global machinery that is to govern 21st century society. In particular, Harvard students are … More ...
Peter Brimelow begins his book Alien Nation by calling current immigration policy “Hitler’s posthumous revenge” on America. The war against the Nazis, he says, left the U.S. political elite “passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia.” Now it appears, from a new book called Camelot and the … More ...