thoughts in and out of season
The West is a sort of abstract version of “Europe”, which in turn is a secularized version of [Christendom]. As such it is not completely clear what it is or was, except that it wasn’t the “East” (thecommunist world) or the “South” (the Third World). It included New Zealand but not Argentina, for example, and … More ...
Tradition is a collective term for the beliefs, habits, attitudes, institutions, stories and so on that grow up among a people living together and give them a common mind and spirit that enables them to make a life together. Tradition is also the knowledge of things that can’t easily be put into words, diffused and … More ...
What kind of moral life is possible depends on what the world is like. The view educated men in the modern West take seriously is that what exists is (1) the world described by modern physics, and (2) sensation and desire. Those things are somehow just there, and no one understands or agrees on their … More ...
This four-part essay was published in slightly edited form in the Summer 2004 issue of Telos (number 128). There is also a *.pdf version of the essay as published. Comments are, of course, welcome.
I’ve noted the Amnesty International view that violence against women is the greatest human rights scandal of our times. Their campaign against that scandal continues, with their submission of a report to the UN that complains, on human rights grounds, about the failure of the Spanish Government to do away with violence against women… More ...
Scientism and the cult of the expert are fundamental features of contemporary liberalism.
Liberalism intends to abolish oppression. Since oppression includes all subjection to the arbitrary will of another, liberalism attempts to base government action not on will, or on particular personal understandings of the good, but on what the situation objectively requires as determined … More ...
The following dialogue is intended to clarify the basic arguments for philosophical liberalism and problems regarding those arguments. Since I’m not a liberal, it seems fair to me that liberalism should lose, but since it’s a dialogue it should present the liberal point of view as forcefully as possible. The liberalism I’m concerned with is … More ...
He’s written a useful discussion of the collapse of liberalism into radical-left extremism: Supremely Modern Liberals.
Hitchcock seems to waffle somewhat on the nature of liberalism itself and whether things might have turned out otherwise. That might be because he’s a historian and as such tends to view something like liberalism as a complex … More ...
The claim that the history of Europe from 1517 to 1648 shows that mixing politics and religion leads to endless violence, so that peace requires the secular state, always seemed odd to me. After all, states kill by nature, and they can be defended only if someone is willing to put his life on the … More ...
A review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police in The New Pantagruel brings out the nature of “celebrating diversity” in school textbooks: since almost anything one might assert, suggest or mention would be more favorable to one group or culture than another, the only things that can be asserted, suggested or mentioned are things like … More ...