thoughts in and out of season
Conservatives are always expecting a wakeup call that will rouse the American people so they will rise up, recapture the citadel, and restore sanity and good government. None ever comes. The most recent failed wakeup call was September 11. For a while it seemed significant that people were putting up “God Bless America” stickers, and … More ...
Privacy, tolerance, and the “wall of separation” were supposed to keep the government out of our private affairs, and especially out of our churches and bedrooms. Things haven’t worked out quite so smoothly, or at least that’s most likely the view of the Christian mother who is appealing a judge’s decision that prohibits her … More ...
Turnabout is:
A reader asks—evidently hoping to provoke discussion—whether America is the most evil society ever.
The obvious answer is “no.” Abortion isn’t as bad as abortion plus infant exposure. The Colosseum was worse than MTV. And the consumer society has its problems but so did slavery. Still, the question is provocative. America and other present-day Western … More ...
New studies show that the whole idea of basing what you do on studies, psychological advice and general schemes of social improvement is a bad one. In particular:
Why Nazism? Many of the theories proposed to explain something so horrible and bizarre have had an ulterior purpose—it was all about big business, Christian antisemitism, authoritarian child-raising practices, or whatever. Pick the thing you like least about European society, and that’s what caused the Nazis. A contemporary eyewitness account by a young German, “Defying … More ...
Here in New York we didn’t know what to say about the September 11 atrocities, so we repeated old patriotic speeches and spent a couple hours reading the names of those who died in a sort of spoken equivalent of the Viet Nam Memorial. In England they apparently had the same problem, and Spiked provides … More ...
Signs that things are the same everywhere: Nude Performance Artist Shocks Conservative Chile and Japanese Activists Hail Ruling on Transgender Sacking. The news reports can’t be relied upon, of course, but it appears there is no serious, sustained and effective opposition to such things anywhere. The ubiquity of cultural radicalism suggests that its sources … More ...
Traditionalist conservatism has an air of paradox in America. It reinterprets or rejects things often identified as American in the name of understandings people find unfamiliar. After all, many would ask, haven’t Americans always idealized science, progress, material prosperity and individual success? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants from a variety of traditions? Isn’t it … More ...
There’s something admirable in a liberal outlook that maintains interest in new ideas and sympathy with other ways of life. It shows an awareness that the world is bigger than what we think about the world, which is all to the good. It’s not an outlook that can be turned into a final standard, though, … More ...