thoughts in and out of season
Here’s the text of a lecture I presented at the 2011 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
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 ...
I mentioned marriage as an example of the antiliberal implications of the new science of complex order developed by writers on architecture such as Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.
There are of course many other examples, because the new science goes to basics. It helps make sense of living systems, explains how their specific qualities … More ...
I’ve been reading Nikos Salingaros’ Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design. It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented in his other books. … More ...
[The following review appeared in the January 2011 issue of Chronicles.]
The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner, translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 256 pp., $26.95
Pascal Bruckner is a French version of the Cold War liberal, updated for the age of jihad. … More ...
A recent discussion with Bruce Charlton on knowledge, society, and the Eastern and Western Church provokes reflection.
It’s notorious that involvement in particular activities makes it hard to keep their connection to the whole in mind. Standard examples include making money, attention to the opposite sex, and attempts to control things generally. Hence the monastic … More ...
Over at Alternative Right I had a discussion with a participant who—like a lot of people who comment there—tended toward a sort of action-oriented tribal relativism. His basic thought seemed to be that social order doesn’t go very deep but comes out of crude drives plus choice, with this and that expedient added in to … More ...
Here’s Hollywood’s take on the meaning of the Battle of the Bulge in 1949, four years after the shooting stopped:
(Battleground, 1949)
“We must never again let any force dedicated to … a super idea or a super anything become strong enough to impose itself … We must be smart enough and tough … More ...
Here’s a talk I gave yesterday at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club.
… More ...The title of my talk is PC: The Cultural Antichrist.
It’s an odd title, but political correctness is an odd tendency. It’s a bit uncanny. It doesn’t fit in with how we normally think about things. That’s why
A reader writes to complain about the tendency of many conservatives to adopt “Islam oppresses women” as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn’t that approach (he asks) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true … More ...
Gornahoor, apparently an Integral Traditionalist site, had some complaints about my recent post on tradition (which I crossposted to Alternative Right).
I’m Catholic rather than Integral Traditionalist, so the complaints probably reflect a difference in point of view. Nonetheless, most of them can probably be allayed by an explanation of the point of … More ...