thoughts in and out of season
Razib Khan, a.k.a. “David Hume,” responds to my comments on the mission statement of the weblog Secular Right. His basic rejoinder is that a “morality grounded in the reality of God” may indeed have more consistency and power than one based wholly on this-worldly human inclinations, but only if it’s already admitted that … More ...
What we see around us, and my last entry points to, is a perfect storm of compulsory unreason:
A blogger offers comments on my talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism, concluding that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.
I don’t think that’s quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they’re different but they can’t get on without each other. … More ...
In my last entry I moaned and groaned a bit about how the kind of reason that enables us to live reasonably has become an archaic concept, since the principles of scientism, commercialism and bureaucracy can’t make sense of it, and in comments to an earlier entry I touched on one aspect of its … More ...
Mark Richardson makes an interesting point in his discussion of the British writer Rebecca West: she may have been a feminist socialist, but she had a much more civilized mind than you’re likely to find today. In particular, she was able to enter into, and take seriously on their own terms, the several types … More ...
Here’s another reason for the docility of the post-60s generations: they’ve had more schooling, and a study of people who quit smoking shows that educated people are more easily influenced by others.
That makes sense. The point of schooling is to hook people into the system of official attitude and belief rather than leaving … More ...
We’ve seen that multicultural society is brutish and irrational because accepted concepts of what life is about don’t begin to do it justice. So how can reason, civilization, and other good things be restored?
To some extent we can try to be reasonable and civilized ourselves and hope it catches on. That’s hard, though—man is … More ...
Basically, it’s nonexistent. As suggested in my last post, in order to reason about things we need to be able to identify them. We need to sort out experience and apply concepts to it that tell us what things are and what they mean. The problem is that the ability to do so depends on … More ...
Reason, I suppose, is the ability to form reliable judgements about the world and what we should do. As such, it involves a great many things:
In the absence of an explicit common understanding of what a good life is, and in the face of a government that has taken on responsibility for the whole of human life, from the rearing of children to the relations between the sexes to the validity of communal loyalties, the people responsible for persuading us … More ...