thoughts in and out of season
Another column by Stanley Kurtz lays out in more detail the conservative liberalism that I noted a few days ago. In That Other War: Where the moral debates are, post-Bennett-gate, he proposes that “we are living in a moral universe consisting of three broad groups: religious traditionalists, social liberals, and a balancing and relatively … More ...
Stanley Kurtz has a generally sensible discussion at NRO of the practical function of sexual taboos, that by defining what is fitting within sexual relations they make it possible to rely on such relations to be something definite and so make family life possible as a social institution. He then says:
… More ...I would rather accept
Stanley Kurtz has a generally sensible discussion at NRO of the practical function of sexual taboos, that by defining what is fitting within sexual relations they make it possible to rely on such relations to be something definite and so make family life possible as a social institution. He then says:
… More ...I would rather accept
An oddity of modern life is that experts run everything, nothing they do works, and obvious repeated failure makes no difference. Education and liturgy are everyday examples. Students learn nothing and act badly, people abandon the mass and faith, but no matter how bad things get nothing can be done. After all, the responsible way … More ...
Turnabout is:
The relation between civilization and cultural revisionism is paradoxical. On the one hand, revisionism visibly contributes to a decline in civilizational standards — rising crime, declining standards of culture, and increasing crudity and violence in daily life. On the other hand, the most educated, cultured and prosperous places are the most revisionist. The moderately pro-family … More ...
How seriously should anyone take complaints that American society is “totalitarian”? After all, people here can mostly say and do what they want. Elections are free, the press uncensored, the police and courts comparatively honest and law-abiding, person and property generally secure. Education, religion and culture are as independent of outside control as … More ...
What does it mean that our society has officially rejected the notion of a common moral reality in which all participate? (See, e.g., Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the … More ...
“Neoconservatism” is a contentious term, but it’s useful as a description of a movement that attempts to moderate and so stabilize liberal modernity. In particular, neoconservatism accepts both the modern aspiration to reform all things and bring them in line with clear universal principles, and the liberal choice of freedom, equality and efficiency as the … More ...
Philosophical pragmatism is mostly the habit of changing the subject if a line of thought makes one uncomfortable. It’s the collapse of the coherence theory of truth into a comfort theory of truth. Such a view can have the appearance of great reasonableness, of not wanting to take things too far. A consequence of the … More ...