thoughts in and out of season
There’s definitely been a bump up in aggressively anti-religious agitation in the years since September 11. If you look back though there’s been no real change in the beliefs of those who consider themselves entitled to determine the order of our public life. Here, for example, is the terminally prominent and mainstream Arthur M. Schlesinger, … More ...
An article at LewRockwell.com today provides, with libertarian clarity, an example of a basic vice of liberal and libertarian thought. One of their writers complains about opposition to a local measure to extend the hours of liquor sales. For him, opposing such a measure is the same as “telling the voters … to their faces, … More ...
The freeing of the Old Mass seems to be drawing closer. There have been assurances to that effect from a leading cardinal, as well as petitions from various French and Italian intellectuals that may help counteract interventions from French hierarchs worried that Charles Maurras is going to rise from his crypt or some such.… More ...
Disputes are always with us, so it is not surprising that John Rawls says that a society with liberal democratic institutions always has a plurality of views on fundamental issues. According to Rawls, the consequence is that we have to accept his principles of government, because the alternative is oppression and violence, and because (apparently) … More ...
In my last post I suggested that liberalism intrinsically causes crime, because the strong impulses, weak intelligence and spotty human attachments that make a man criminal are supported by basic liberal principles (making preference the standard of the good, reducing reason to the service of desire, turning autonomy into an ultimate standard). I then suggested … More ...
The dictionary definition of theocracy is government of a state “by priests or according to religious law,” or perhaps “by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” As such, it applies to states like traditional Tibet, early Mormon Utah, and revolutionary Iran, but not in substance to any traditional Christian … More ...
The Left (which in most important respects includes liberals and “moderates”) thinks about things technologically. Leftists may talk about the evils of logocentric thinking or whatnot, but that sort of thing answers no questions, and when something actually has to be decided scientism cuts in. As a result, all principles that matter have to be … More ...
Michael Blowhard points to a recent instance of how PC is playing out in Britain: a young American woman is assaulted for 15 minutes on a crowded tube platform in London by a couple of black punks. “The assault and abuse was both physically violent and sexual in nature.” Nobody does much of anything and … 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
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 ...