I am writing this essay shortly after finishing a good book, longish by modern standards, which discusses two personality types in European peoples—especially those of the Northwestern countries. These two types of aristocratic individualist and egalitarian individualist have formed the liberal orders of Europe. That book is Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Kevin … [Read more…]
There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns … [Read more…]
Christians in the past century or more have failed utterly to face up to the biological reality: God has created a world where family-lines of organisms are kept in good condition by Darwinian selection processes leading to death or reproductive failure of organisms with `inadequate’ traits—often caused by mutations. Complex traits, such as intelligence or … [Read more…]
[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.] What is truth? Not so ridiculous a question as some would have it, certainly those who don’t understand how difficult … [Read more…]
What is truth? Where is truth to be found? There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and … [Read more…]
Realism, as the term is used in foreign policy, builds upon the same foundations as Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand analysis of economics. It is an empirical analysis at the level of human actors without necessarily making any explicit attempt to understand why it is that those actors behave as they do. Hence, the invisibility. And … [Read more…]
Most modern Americans don’t truly believe in biological evolution because it conflicts with a once plausible idea which remained strong in ghetto-Christianity after the separation of Christian understandings of Creation from mainstream science and philosophy; the idea is “human beings came into being once and for all and nothing can undo that”. Most Westerners, including … [Read more…]
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. At his website, he states: “I write about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.” His general view of the politics seems to be describable in non-standard terms as “liberal realism”. For example, while making it clear he is far more liberal than … [Read more…]
I’ve been reading a fair amount of works of narrative history lately, most dealing with the history of the Celtic peoples—especially those of the British Isles; lately, I’ve been reading more general histories of the British peoples for greater context. For decades, some prominent historians have been integrating archaeological and linguistic knowledge into their analyses … [Read more…]
Wayne Allensworth has a frighteningly interesting commentary on virtual reality, an addictive abuse of technology which might generate still more problems than what we’re seeing from our better established abuses of technology (`ordinary’ video games, cellphones for 4 to 104, etc), Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality, where he writes near the end: Alistair Charlton of the … [Read more…]