This blog entry is partly intended as a public service to the sane. I’ll first provide links to alternative takes on the So-Called Coronavirus Pandemic and then I’ll simply state some beliefs I already tentatively held about the likely fate of the West, beliefs reinforced by the current happenings in the various public spheres of … [Read more…]
Early in May, I read The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan H. Shagan. I thought the analysis was pretty good, but I didn’t like the ‘global’ conclusion: Enlightenment rationality did not devour the world in its ravenous maw, it was only a subset of … [Read more…]
The basic idea is simple. For decades, geneticists have been able to chemically separate and analyze genes. This made possible a fruitless search for the magic gene which `causes’ schizophrenia or depression or intelligence or other human qualities or disorders of human being. A lot was learned, perhaps most importantly—there are no such magic genes. … [Read more…]
The West has broken down into a gangster-land of sorts, with the realms of centralized governments and money-center banking collapsing into moral chaos. I’ve written often about this. But… If the West is so disordered, morally and politically and so on—`morally’ actually covers all human social possibilities, why don’t the gangsters just take over in … [Read more…]
Jose Ortega y Gasset “was a Spanish philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and republicanism infiltrated by communist agents, and dictatorship of a stabilizing and fascist-tinged sort. His philosophy has been characterized as a “philosophy of life” that “comprised a long-hidden beginning … [Read more…]
The problems of the United States, and of some other countries in the West—maybe most, are deeper than are usually acknowledged. I’ll start with this claim: Crimea is more truly part of the Russian realm than California is part of the Anglo-American realm. American leaders are ignorant, functionally stupid, and maybe innately stupid; they are … [Read more…]
I’ll not write too much about this issue I’ve addressed before, but I’ll go further than before on one detail: the United States government is barely such a thing and perhaps it’s leading us into a fragmentation which might lead to multiple governments of some sort or a civil war or some periods of each. … [Read more…]
The Orthodox and Catholic Christian patriarchs of Syria have made a plea to Western countries and their citizens, especially to their fellow Christians in the West. This statement, follows on similar pleas over the years by Christians, including Orthodox and Catholic bishops, from various countries in Southwest Asia, a region which we Westerners, especially Americans, … [Read more…]
We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ … [Read more…]
In The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher, we learn of the very prominent role played by aristocratic families, even royal families, in the conversion of the European barbarians to Christianity. The missionary monks and bishops and priests were often from powerful and wealthy families of Ireland and England and then Francia … [Read more…]