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…]
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…]
In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun wrote about a gradual and long-term decay of the West. He wrote that only about 50% of French peasants in 1500 were literate but also noted that those peasants were reading novels far too complex for most (nearly all?) modern-day college professors. Quality of … [Read more…]
Despite the urban legend I had once accepted, the phrase Here be dragons was not often used on maps and sometimes the dragons or other monsters drawn on unknown regions were decoration rather than warnings. Yet, they clearly state what “should have been true” though it was only “sometimes” true: “Here be dragons” means dangerous … [Read more…]
I’ll ramble a bit in a way suited to a discussion of a life lived in the chaos and moral coarseness of Western Civilization in its period of advanced decay. Why are there so many men, mostly white and middle-class, who are said to have been living good lives and said to have been happy, … [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 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…]
Pope Francis has recently caused a stir by allegedly claiming there to be no Hell and even possibly once claiming there to be no Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven. See Francis, Spin Doctor To Himself. His Latest Exploits. I also have speculated there be no Hell and tend strongly to that view, but I’m a firm … [Read more…]
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories depicting a moral sickness found deep inside the souls of New England Puritans, fearing he himself was infected by this strange malady which turned warm blood into ice-water. Great historians, such as John K. Fairbank (who mentioned in The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 that American opium-smugglers in China, all from the … [Read more…]