thoughts in and out of season
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 ...
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 following review appeared in the 2006 issue of The Political Science Reviewer:
The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millenium, by Paul Edward Gottfried (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). (SDM)
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy, by Paul Edward Gottfried (Columbia: University … More ...
The following review of Christopher J. Insole, The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Telos.
What is liberalism and is it good or bad? Its pervasiveness makes it difficult to gain the perspective needed to … More ...