thoughts in and out of season
I find atheism extremely puzzling, like persistent attempts to square the circle or construct a perpetual motion machine.
To me it seems that our way of understanding the world will be usable—will actually function as an understanding—only if it is coherent, hierarchical and ethically directed. “Coherent” seems self-explanatory. “Hierarchical” means we must be able to … More ...
Here are a couple of quotations from Louis de Bonald, taken from Critics of the Enlightenment, a recent compilation of writings by French counterrevolutionaries:
… More ...“When nations have been unable to retain their habits, they replace them by styles, ceaselessly changing them as they seek for what they have lost.” (52)
“The immense quantity of
Mr. Kalb referred, in his post on Weaver, to nominalism and its impact on Western intellectual history and the Western worldview. In this connection, I ran across the transcription of a lecture by Tillich—in a series of lectures on the history of Christian thought—that included a layman’s introduction to nominalism and its historic impact. Because … More ...
Although I sometimes disagree with Weaver and Guardini about the weight given this factor or that, the books I’ve been discussing are outstanding works and should be read.
Like other people, right-wingers put too much effort into trying to find particular causes for general conditions like multiculturalism or PC. It’s all a plot by Marxist … More ...
A really striking feature of the Guardini book discussed in my last entry is how extremist it is by current standards. It’s not a call for dialog and a place at the table. Instead, he calls for the “absolute experiencing of dogma,” for “a pure obedience. Christianity will arm itself for an illiberal stand directed … More ...
Romano Guardini’s book The End of the Modern World provides an interesting comparison with Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Both were written in the immediate post-war period, and first presented to the public in 1947-1948. Both considered, in the setting of recent horrors, the tendency of technological mass society to reduce all things to function … More ...
Weaver’s views in Ideas Have Consequences suffer from a standard problem with conservative views: they attempt to secure the benefits of recognizing transcendent authority without actually recognizing it, at least not in any form definite enough to be useable. They thus attempt to substitute “piety”—generalized respect toward man, nature and history—for religion.
He insists that … More ...
I’ve been rereading Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, a basic text in traditionalist conservatism.
Weaver’s basic thought is that the world is intelligible, man is free, we must understand the world intelligently to choose correctly, and we’ve been growing progressively less intelligent on basic issues for the past few hundred years. Most of … More ...
The bizarre argument that getting rid of the specificity and implicit function of marriage would strengthen it has been refuted by experience: How Holland Destroyed Marriage. The piece (by Charles Colson) cites a series of pieces by Stanley Kurtz showing how the move toward “gay marriage” in northern Europe has gone with abandonment of … More ...
On the face of it, the expected decision of the New York City Board of Health to let people decide what sex they are and to have the decision reflected on their birth certificates seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “gender perspective,” in effect the view that sexual distinctions should be treated … More ...