thoughts in and out of season
I’ve been talking a lot about contemplation—what it is, why it’s needed, and why it’s at odds with the modern spirit. I should note down a few thoughts on what happens if you don’t have it.
To get rid of contemplation is radically to subordinate truth to action, word to deed. That tendency has developed … More ...
Some time ago J. Bottum, now editor of First Things, published a sort of hit piece on T. S. Eliot, What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed, that I just ran into going through some old correspondence.
It’s not clear just what claim Bottum is making in the piece, for example when he says “I … More ...
Truth and beauty enable us to place and orient ourselves in a world that is larger and more full of things that are worthwhile and interesting than the closed system of resources, desires, technology and formal logic that modern thought presents. That’s why contemplation is basic to the good life.
That kind of statement sounds … More ...
This sounds like a techie’s fantasy: hundred dollar laptops for Hottentots. Someone wants every poor kid in the world to get his own laptop. Computers haven’t done much for education in America, though, and it’s not clear they’d do more in Waziristan. It’s not as if every third world schoolkid is a computer nerd who … More ...
America was once a Protestant country. However that may be today, polling results confirm that Catholicism has become an American religion—indeed, as a sociological matter, largely identical to an increasingly secular Americanism. Thus, one recent report finds that 69% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics (compared with 43% of Protestants and 28% of white evangelicals) think … More ...
The point of present-day political thought is to integrate everything into a single system of technological hedonism that managers and functionaries can dominate with the aid of their ideological champions. A better and more human way of thinking would recognize that we live in a larger and less controllable world, one in which things … More ...
So far I’ve proposed beauty and contemplation as pieces of a program for restoring the transcendent and therefore humanity. What else is needed?
One obvious point is tradition. I’ve gone on and on about what tradition is, how it comes about, why we need it and why it’s generally reliable. I don’t think I’ve … More ...
Mathematics and beauty seem to give us something to admire that is independent of us and somehow ideal or spiritual. People have therefore thought that they point the way to transcendent goods and suchlike. An objection to that way of thinking is that mathematics and beauty are purely matters of form and don’t tell us … More ...
Plato suggests mathematics and love of beauty as doors to the transcendent. Most mathematicians are Platonists, I think—they believe mathematical objects exist independently of human thought and action and even physical reality—but mathematics today is too closely connected to measurement, analysis and prediction of natural phenomena, and the tendency to resolve it into arbitrary axioms … More ...
Liberal society says it leaves the question of ultimate goods up to its members. That’s not possible, since every choice implicitly defines what is worth choosing and thus what is good. Every society, like every human being, thus accepts a definition of the good that is as specific and comprehensive as its system of habitual … More ...