Our civilized world is passing out of one age and into another epoch. The age that is passing has been called the Age of Discussion. The age that we are entering I call the Age of Sentiments. Most people are aware of this change only vaguely, if at all. As Disraeli put it, “Prevailing opinions [...]
With the film trilogy “The Hobbit,” Peter Jackson returned to Middle Earth with less respect to some of the best “material” ever written. The results are rather awful. There must be something about New Zealand that brings out the megalomania in movie makers. It recently was announced that James Cameron, that titan of trite who brought [...]
Does The Imaginative Conservative matter to you? In your abundance of reading options, do we make the cut? Have we inspired you? Have we vexed you? Have we piqued your interest in something? Have you laughed with us? If the answer to any of those questions for you is yes, then we're thrilled. The Imaginative Conservative doesn't [...]
During World War II, philosopher Arthur Lovejoy tried to explain the reasons for the international crisis and the totalitarianism in Germany. According to his view, the roots of the trouble could be found in the German Romantic period which ranged approximately between the years 1780 to 1830. During this time certain relatively new ideas took [...]
Those of us who belong to The Imaginative Conservative community spend a great deal of time lamenting the all-pervasive influence of ideologies, systems, and abstractions in this modern and post-modern vale of tears. We distrust them and those who advocate them, knowingly or unknowingly, and we presume they indicate a certain amount of undue pride, that [...]
We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise—what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition [...]
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly The authors of this latest attempt to give life “meaning” and to “uncover the wonder” of the world—concealed, as it has been, by modern technological culture—begin their argument with an episode. In 2007, a young [...]
Up to their rooms squabbling children were sent, The toys are all broken, the money is spent, The credit-cards maxed and the beer has gone flat, She swears the new negligee makes her look fat, The overcooked goose, like an old leather shoe, Is unappetizing but what else is new? The car just won’t start, [...]
I came across this the other day, from the Washington Times: Kids flee football in light of NFL violence, Pop Warner participation plummeting. The author is Nathan Fenno, and I hasten to say that I am the last man in the world to wish to kill the messenger. His article is on the whole fair, although [...]
My friend Tancy has a child attending school in Magnolia, Texas. I cannot think of a more idyllic name for a Texas town—and it is absolutely beautiful and tree laden—but apparently small towns have their problems too. They have rejected Rousseau and have public schools. Anyway, her child has the following assignment: she can either [...]
We all know the arguments against the notion, but somewhat reluctantly I conclude that libertarians are indeed human. After all, our species contains the incontinent, the mentally disabled, the incurably giddy, and Mr. Walter Block. Mr. Block is an elderly academician inspired by Ayn Rand, Nathanial Branden and Murray Rothbard. Libertarians find him pleasant and [...]
John Lennon, sly dog that he was, got one thing right: the power of imagination, especially young people’s imagination, is one of the most influential political agents in the world. Young people will slide flowers into the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle. Young people will stare down tanks in Tiananmen Square. Their elders will [...]
The bedrock principle of all Liberalism, whether of the Right or the Left, is Locke’s assertion that “every man has a Property in his own Person.” It is from this principle that Murray Rothbard can assert, “The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a [...]
Imaginative conservatives flee from the mass mind, so you should expect their Christmas gifts to come from parts unknown. They haven’t run just to be different—heaven forbid. Being obsessed with being unprecedented is itself a symptom of the mass mind. Instead imaginative conservatives are always on the lookout for things that are true, good, and [...]