Awakening from reason’s sleep
Here is the text (plus or minus a few ad libs) of a lecture delivered at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy, on July 3, 2008.
Political theory
The building of tyranny
If our built environment is an image of what we believe about the world generally, then the ways the modernist ideology is imposed and maintained in architecture must be part of a more general process. With that in mind, this short essay by a Norwegian urbanist with a legal background takes on considerable interest even … More ...
A headless world
Some data points:
- Anthony Esolen notices that at places like Netflix users make normal critical comments on films based on natural distinctions like good, better and best, while in formal literary studies such concerns have been edged out by clunky political posturing.
- On a local studio tour I’m struck by the number of good artists
Reason gone mad
I gave a talk about reason, scientism and liberalism at a recent conference put on by the Roman Forum. Here’s a *.pdf of the talk’s written form.
The outlook for the bobo ascendency
One issue raised by Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians, his new hip yuppie ruling class) is how long they’ll last in power. They do have some advantages:
- They control the commanding institutions, and since the most influential of those institutions depend on skill at manipulating symbols, it seems likely that will last.
- Mass education,
On stupid ideas
When people complain about stupidity they mean that someone is willfully ignoring—or mindlessly oblivious to—the obvious. Whether something is obvious depends on your general understanding of things. So to say something is stupid, when it’s something other people insist on, is to say that (1) it’s based on an understanding you reject, and (2) there’s … More ...
The headless Right
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 ...
The historical dice are loaded
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 ...
Moral points of view
Here’s an interesting graph showing how liberals (blue), conservatives (red), and one self-described libertarian (green) test on a survey of “moral foundations”:
Basically, liberals emphasize “harm” and “fairness” and don’t care so much about “loyalty,” “authority” or “purity,” while conservatives give more equal weight to all five dimensions. (The libertarian can speak for himself.)… More ...
Can Sacks sack multiculturalism?
Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi (whatever that is), has come out with a book saying that multiculturalism threatens democracy. According to the article he defines multiculturalism as “an attempt to affirm … diverse communities and make ethnic and religious minorities more appreciated and respected.” If that’s the goal, it seems, then communities reap … More ...