Society and culture

I suppose the Puritan’s (and maybe Plato’s) hesitation about something like Delacroix’s Basket of Flowers is that its excellence and this-worldly self-sufficiency seem to divert beauty from a better function. (I’m no doubt making too much of this, but the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and all that so I’ll pursue … More ...

While visiting the Metropolitan Museum this past weekend we wandered through one of the galleries devoted to French painters of the post-Revolutionary period. It looks like they mostly wanted a return to normalcy. Hence Ingres’ portraits of extremely self-possessed and incredibly well-tended notables and their wives. All the storms in the world couldn’t affect … More ...

I found the to-do over the New York Post “chimp” cartoon unbelievably depressing.

The idea that there are all those racists out there is extremely useful to some people. It explains why black people have problems and our rulers have the right to rule us. They are, after all, morally superior, and the rest of … More ...

My excellent American adventure continues with George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief—not the whole book, but enough to get the picture.

In Marsden’s telling, American colleges were originally designed to serve both a public and a religious purpose. That worked well enough: the social order … More ...

I just finished (more or less) another book on my Americana reading list, Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. It’s a straightforward book that uses lots of examples to make the obvious points that conservative locally-minded people mostly don’t like foreign adventures, and that war … More ...