thoughts in and out of season
Here’s the text of my lecture at the 2024 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
We have been discussing responses to the inhuman global order now under construction. I will discuss the outlook for that order, and so the environment we will be operating in. I will concentrate on … More ...
My last two columns at Catholic World Report were about race and sex, so my new one is about class.
Ethnicity is a fraught topic, but I go into it and some related topics at Catholic World Report.
Racial differences and attachments are real, and they can’t be educated or administered away. Family, ancestry, and history are part of who we are, so they are part of identity. People take them to heart, and that’s not going to change.
So why do respectable people get so weird about them, and claim race doesn’t … More ...
Here’s a discussion of the future of race relations.
More of the Same
The state of American race relations in twenty years will depend on the status of a conflict among various immovable objects and irresistible but slow-acting forces. Such conflicts generally don’t go anywhere fast, so neither will race relations.
The most obvious immovable … More ...
I gave this lecture at the 2013 meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club.
The “Inclusion” Obsession
by James Kalb
We hear a lot about inclusiveness, and it’s apparently very important, but the topic is never discussed analytically. The idea seems to be that it’s warm and fuzzy and just obviously a good thing. The … More ...
I’ve got a new book out, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It develops some of the arguments from The Tyranny of Liberalism and applies them in a more focused way to debunk our supreme moral principle, or what now seems to … More ...
I have yet another piece at Catholic World Report, this one on equality and Catholicism. It points out that the progressive understanding of equality is at odds with Catholicism, good sense, good order, human well-being, and what not else, because it demands the abolition of all significant social institutions other than global markets … More ...
Here’s a study that may be more interesting than the author realizes: people in Ann Arbor, Michigan, presumably mostly quite liberal, literally don’t realize that people whose politics differ from their own react to cold the same way they do. Does that explain the Gulag, or am I wrong in my immediate reaction that (at … More ...