I had exquisite timing this summer, was well prepared to think in a rational, fact-based way about Europe’s crisis with immigrants as well as with the slower moving crisis in the United States. For the umpteenth time, I was also reminded of one of my high school history teachers: a somewhat eccentric man who was … [Read more…]
I don’t get it. What world do political theorists and philosophers, political commentators of all sorts, live in? For decades, their fellow practitioners of the humane arts and sciences, the historians, have been trying to deal with the realities of human biological existence—William McNeil, the distinguished historian from U of Chicago, was well-known for trying … [Read more…]
In the past few months or so, I’ve tried to allocate more of my mental energies to studying mathematics and history, concentrating for a short while (4 or 5 substantial book’s reading time) upon some histories of the ancient Celtic peoples (Gauls to the Romans) and the Germanic peoples of the era of the Roman … [Read more…]
In March, Justin Raimondo wrote an essay, Rand Paul, Revisited, in which he quoted Garet Garrett: “There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, ‘Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.’ These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had … [Read more…]
An article published in March by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought., begins: It is a commonplace to bemoan the vanishing of serious criticism in our popular culture. The past, it is said, was a golden age. More than 25 years ago, … [Read more…]
Fred Reed is a smart and insightful man. Courageous as well, caring more for truth than for conventional opinions and public myths. And a friendly, neighborly sort of fellow so that just “Fred” is usually sufficient. In the recent article, The 145 Solution: Sapience, not Sentience, Fred writes: If fourteen percent [of American voters] are … [Read more…]
In The Return of Fear, Peter Frost, an anthropologist, gives a few facts which don’t argue fully against the current belief among Americans and Europeans that Muslim men are prone to violence and fanaticism; those facts do tell us of the ethnic basis for this inclination. Indonesians—88% Muslim—have low rates of violent crime, as do … [Read more…]
It’s not the failures but rather the great successes of the West which have left it as a hollowed-out and collapsing civilization, that is, our successes as individualists and our successes in nurturing our individualistic inclinations and pushing them ever further at the expense of our communalistic inclinations. It’s not hard to understand. Human being … [Read more…]
Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being … [Read more…]
Ten years ago or more, I read the Inferno, the first volume of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It didn’t make too much of an impression on me, seeming to be at least in part a matter of Dante taking shots at some of his enemies, a lot of people he didn’t admire (often, for good … [Read more…]