God and liberal modernity
That’s the name of my March column at Catholic World Report.
Political theory
Techno-traditionalism?
It seems accepted among educated Westerners that the rationality of an action is a matter of means and ends, of what we want and whether what we do is going to bring that about.
That’s true even among people who consider themselves right-wingers, reactionaries, traditionalists and so on, and who in many ways really are … More ...
Liberal Values and the Seduction of the American Right
The following is a talk delivered at the 2011 Conference of the H. L. Mencken Club.
Why has American conservatism been such a flop? It finds it impossible to define what it wants, stick with it, and defend it. The result is that it never wins and never even stands its ground.
To understand what’s … More ...
Liberal theosis
Modern thought can’t make sense of man. Science wants to treats him as part of single system of cause and effect, and liberalism also takes that approach when considering social policy. The problem though is that science and liberalism need scientists and liberals as they understand them—that is, they need thinkers, observers and agents who … More ...
Propositioning the nation
Princeton professor Robert George gives a remarkably pure presentation of the “America as proposition nation” thesis here. If you want to know what that thesis is, watch the clip—it’s only a couple of minutes, and it’s a collector’s item.
Here are a few obvious issues the thesis raises:
- If America is all about freedom
A fragment on democracy
The world is run by people who run things. Liberalism eliminates the principle of authority and puts the individual and his desires at the center of concern, so it makes it important for people who run things to be able to claim that the people at large have agreed to what they’re doing—they approved the … More ...
Reason and religion
Four religions:
- Liberalism: A single human world ordered only by reason, based on pure (content-free) concepts. Freedom says you ignore the content of human goals and promote all of them simply as such, and equality says you ignore the content of human qualities so you treat all men as equal in value. Put them together
Response to a reader’s question about environmentalism
Environmentalism has several aspects. The most justifiable is the view that the natural world is a complex evolved system that we depend on but can’t understand and control completely, so we should respect it the way a traveler respects local customs or someone sailing a small boat respects the sea. The point can be extended … More ...
How is Professor Epstein unlike the Pope?
Richard Epstein has an online piece entitled How Is Warren Buffett Like the Pope?
It seems that on the way to Spain for World Youth Day the Pope said that the economy “cannot be measured by the maximum profit but by the common good,” and that it “cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs … More ...
Escape from the antiworld
Here’s the text of a lecture I presented at the 2011 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
Escape from the Antiworld
James Kalb
Presented at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone Riviera, Italy,
July 6, 2011
This conference raises a variety of questions. What is the present situation? How should we deal with … More ...