My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]
I distort for the sake of modern men who have trouble focusing upon reality. Apes are our cousins, not our ancestors; the terms used for the common ancestors of men and ape seem to change every few years or so. And those ancestors were only killers part of the time, perhaps less often than modern … [Read more…]
In the back of my mind, I’ve been pondering a strange blind spot in mainstream modern historians and political commentators since reading Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly in May of 2013. It seems to me that she saw clearly the somewhat complex and fluid balance of forces between individuals and families or other tightly knit … [Read more…]
It’s natural for most human beings to seek simple understandings. They correspond at least roughly to the simple (or elegant) understandings which are a goal of many theorists in the sciences which have a large mathematical component. Einstein pointed out that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler. Closer to ordinary … [Read more…]
I’ve written on this general topic before: as one example, one revealing an important development in my thoughts, see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding as one example. In that essay, about the necessity of abstractions, but proper abstractions, I stated: My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes of New … [Read more…]
The center hasn’t held and the pieces fly away. Without the most basic sorts of order, the sorts of order which are specifically labeled `moral’ aren’t possible, at least not on a large-scale such as that of the United States or even that of the city of Springfield, MA less than a quarter mile away … [Read more…]
Pepe Escobar is a world-traveling journalist who’s worth more than the entire staff at CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, and most of the others in the American mainstream news-media. He seems to often be in the most dangerous regions of our planet and to have lots of solid information and to be able … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Cafeteria Catholics and Ghetto Catholics, I claimed: From an intellectual viewpoint also simple, the problem with many traditionalist Catholics is that they don’t think in terms of a world in which new facts and knowledge emerge over time, forcing our understandings to develop over time in a “communal process” as the … [Read more…]
The essay, Disorder on the March, by Joseph Wood ends with the paragraphs: The confusion of the moment is so comprehensive, as demonstrated in just the recent examples above from popular culture, law, science and politics, that any kind of coherent political or public square response is difficult to envision. As a friend recently reminded … [Read more…]
In this essay, I’ll sometimes write about the West as a whole and sometimes try to be more particular, especially in giving examples, by writing from the American viewpoint. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the current moral and social disorders of the West began in the United States. Henry James is said to … [Read more…]