thoughts in and out of season
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 ...
A friend wrote to ask what I thought of various academic attempts to try to avoid objections to liberalism that are based on the liberal tendency, now out of fashion, to claim that liberalism should rule because it’s based on universally valid rational principles of some sort. My response:
… More ...The attempts you mention basically claim
A correspondent asks what metaphysical liberalism, as “the denial of the Good as a self-sufficient entity which exists independent of any individual’s personal preferences,” has to do with “the modern Left’s hysterical denial of differences between (and in some cases among) different racial sexual and myriad other groups.”
My response:
… More ...To my mind, the craziness
The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what … More ...
An old friend, who considers herself a liberal, asked why I classified W as one. It really seemed batty to her although she could see that the “big spender” label would apply. My reply (somewhat edited):
… More ...He’s a liberal because he thinks he’s called on to reconstruct things to bring about a universal order in