Wednesday, August 27. 2008
...whenever Christians actually dare to make political choices on the basis of those beliefs, then the enlightened gatekeepers of American secularism in the academy and in the media rise up in righteous wrath and rush to the barricades to defend us against the barbarian hordes of true believers who if unchecked will transform our republic into a "theocracy" and impose their intolerant bigotry on everybody else. And when the President himself is one of these religious fanatics, then the prospects for the republic and the Constitution are dark indeed—even the usually rational New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman whined after the election that he was depressed "because Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president."
But not this year, funnily enough. Hmmm. Read his whole essay (link above).
Sunday, August 17. 2008
One quote from his 1978 Harvard Commencement address: However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century. As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that "communism is naturalized humanism." This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and of Marxism.
Monday, August 11. 2008
From Chantrill in American Thinker, one of the best short essays of the year: The Politics of the Social Safety Net. One quote: But the real problem is that the expansion of the safety net has led to increase in government power and the rise of the beauracracy. This combined to diminish individual responsibility which diminishes ones productivity and accumulation of wealth. With less wealth, it's easier to be dependent. With more people jumping in the net, taxes go up to maintain benefits, which cuts savings, which increases the demand for the safety net as more people retire destitute from taxation in furtherance of its support. Let's be real - we are never going to see a change in the safety net for too much political power is invested in, and generated by it. Also, its very existence has enabled our population to grow as those who would have otherwise died from disease, exposure or starvation due to lack of wealth have been spared by it (sorry for the cruelty). It's not going away. Any safety net, no matter how modest, who provides it, or what name you give it will mature into a welfare state.
Read the whole thing.
Wednesday, August 6. 2008
Three videos by James May. Well done, and an excellent topic.
Friday, August 1. 2008
Our Editor forwarded me this 1992 paper by Tooby and Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, (here in pdf, without the typos), which he found at Overcoming Bias. I wish I had known about this paper years ago. It's a dense and scholarly critique of what is known as "The Standard Social Sciences Model." The authors argued that this dominant model is obsolete and failing, resulting in a reactionary anti-scientific movement in the social sciences. I found it particularly interesting that the authors suggest that the clinging to an obsolete model has more to do with emotion than logic - a "fear of falling off the world." Similarly, they indicate that social scientists are emotionally attached to their blank-slate, meliorative views of human nature (there is no "human nature" - environment is everything, and thus people, culture, and society can be perfected - by them, natch). Their desire to hold on to that illusion causes them to resist many sorts of new information which conflict with their ideas. That is very human, but it ain't science. Indeed, what goes on in the social sciences would make for a fascinating sociological study.
Tuesday, July 29. 2008
Prof. James Duane. h/t, Coyote. Entertaining advice for the innocent and the guilty.
Monday, July 28. 2008
A quote from AVI: I was a theater and literature major in the 70's, with a contempt for Southerners, fraternity guys, all things military, hunters, and business majors. No matter how smart any of them might be individually, those groups were known to be generally closed-minded, uncurious, and shallow.
Not like Me. I was deep, you see. And sensitive. I was a socialist, not because I actually thought through whether it fed more people, but because it seemed generous, and the free market seemed selfish. I was against The War, not because I had any clear foreign policy ideas, but because I was convinced that liberals wanted to understand different cultures and get along, while conservatives just wanted to shoot people they didn't like.
Yes, read the whole thing. It's short and to the point.
Friday, July 18. 2008
 From Joseph Bottum at First Things. A quote:
He begins: America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets. The average American these days would have trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their quiet meetinghouses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the hothouse of the inner city. And yet, even while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the nation’s history, these endless divisions and revisions of Protestantism renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled, sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that. Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.
and ...somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end. And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.
Read the whole thing.
Wednesday, July 16. 2008
A quote from the piece at New Criterion: This spring marks the fortieth anniversary of that climacteric of cultural catastrophe, 1968, when for a moment the forces of anarchy and malignant sentimentality seemed poised to overrun the bulwarks of civilization in the West. We are pleased to publish in this issue “The Sixties at 40,” an important reflection on that critical moment by Peter Collier, who lived through les événements as a participant observer. The spirit of the Sixties, Collier suggests, didn’t die, exactly; rather, it’s been absorbed as a sort of toxic parody: “a fate worse than death as its anarchic brio dissolves into a glutinous mixture of revisionism, political correctness, multicultural clichés, and progressivism.”
It gets better: You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how “creative,” “idealistic,” and “loving” it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the “herd of independent minds.” Its so-called creativity consisted of continually recirculating a small number of radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for “love” was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.
Sunday, July 13. 2008
A weekend re-post from 2005: Anthony Esolen: If Jesus’ parable is an extended metaphor for a life of mercy—if we are to treat those suffering souls whom chance has thrown in our way as if they were people among whom we live—then we have taken the wheels off that metaphor’s vehicle. If you do not really have neighbors, how can you understand Jesus’ command to be a neighbor to others? You have to disembody it, etherealize it into a manifesto of general benevolence and almsgiving (perhaps of the political variety, whereby you stoutly sacrifice the alms of other people). Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, and you hear a call to be kind to your friends and to give to the United Way. But before I come to how I think that parable must be understood, I should vindicate myself and my family just a bit, and in so doing point out a few reasons why neighborhood life in America is past. You see, my wife and I are not by nature sullen or withdrawn or suspicious. We live in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, but we have begun to spend summers in a small home in an old fishing village, called West Arichat, on the coast of Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. In that village, after only a few weeks, we have met more people—have been in their homes, have eaten with them—than we have in eight years in our place in the States.
Read entire piece at Touchstone.
Saturday, July 5. 2008
Quote from an essay of the above title by Roger Scruton in City Journal: Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London. Citizens protested, and conservation societies fought throughout Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, but the modernists won the battle of ideas. They took over the architecture schools and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio.
Read the whole thing. Photo below: The charming, friendly, safe, and human-scale Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, which was a crime-ridden "slum" one generation ago, part of Hell's Kitchen. Ripe for massive demolition and "urban planning" and "urban renewal." The social engineers are almost always wrong because they are oblivious to human nature. This one-time slum is a very pleasant place to live in, provided that your neighbors behave themselves. Don't blame the old buildings. 
Tuesday, June 17. 2008
A quote from Arthur Brooks in City Journal, "Free People are Happy People:" Freedom and happiness are highly correlated, then; even more significant, several studies have shown that freedom causes happiness. In a famous 1976 experiment, psychologists in Connecticut gave residents on one floor of a nursing home the freedom to decide which night of the week would be “movie night,” as well as the freedom to choose and care for the plants on their floor. On another floor of the same nursing home, residents did not receive these choices and responsibilities. The first group of residents—no healthier or happier than the second when the experiment began—quickly showed greater alertness, more activity, and better mood. A year and a half later, they were still doing better, and even dying at half the rate of the residents on the other floor.
This chart from the article: 
Read the whole thing.
Monday, June 16. 2008
This is a re-posting from 2005:
Regular readers know that we are big fans of English political philosopher Roger Scruton. This is from a 6-page piece in the Intercollegiate Review this month:
Can there be a public spirit whose foundation is the internationalist idea? It seems at first that there can be. Some of the most public-spirited movements of our century have been expressly internationalist in their aims: the Olympic movement, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the aptly named Médecins sans Frontières. Again, however, I do not think that any of these movements could have succeeded without the fund of national sentiment on which they drew—unless, that is, they take their inspiration, as does the Red Cross, from a religious idea. The Olympic movement seeks to bring about international cooperation through enhancing, rather than diminishing, national pride: for that is what competitive international sport requires. And as the Berlin Olympics of 1936 conclusively demonstrated, the result may enhance nationalist belligerence too.
Furthermore, public spirit is an attribute of nations. Not all people possess it in equal degrees. Indeed, there is a notorious difference between those people for whom family is the source and object of all social loyalty and those people who recognize the web of obligations to strangers. The Sicilians, being of the first kind, have often wrought havoc in America, where they have found themselves among people of the second kind, who are without effective defenses against them. And in the new international jurisdiction in Europe we find an interesting dividing line, which separates the Langue d’oc from the Langue d’oeil and the German-speaking from the Latin and Greekspeaking peoples. Above this line corruption is minimal; below it corruption is the normal state of affairs.
A serious read but well worth it: entire important essay here. If you need a reminder about langue d'oc and langue d'oeil, here's one.
Sunday, May 25. 2008
 This is a re-post from 1682:
Thomas Brewton on Locke's view of the centrality of wisdom and virtue in education: Wisdom follows from the foundation of virtue. Wisdom is knowing how most effectively to manage one’s affairs with foresight. Acquiring it is a product of good temper, application of mind, and experience. Wisdom can only be initiated by the teacher, as it is a life-long process of learning from experience how to apply the lessons of virtue. What the teacher can do is to hinder the student from being cunning, what today we call playing the angles, or being street-smart (both of which are end products of John Dewey’s pragmatism, now taught as situation ethics, the idea that you make up the rules for each situation that arises).
Closely related to virtue and wisdom is the concept of good breeding, which flows from the love of God. What Locke meant by the term was an Aristotelian mean between extremes: the student should not be too bashful or gauche in dealing with other people, nor should he be prideful and too full of self-importance. He summarizes the aim as “not to think meanly of ourselves, and not to think meanly of others.” Ill breeding reveals itself in “too little care of pleasing or showing respect for those we have to do with.” The aim is “that general good will and regard for all people, which makes everyon
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