I have tried to get my head around the unravelling drama around President Obama’s healthcare bill, and have not completely succeeded. But one thing is clear to me: that it is a tragedy that something which should have been about helping the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, should have become something that simultaneously [...]
I have never concealed the truth that I am a Trekkie. Additionally, I have never hidden my conviction that I am a traditionalist and a conservative in the way defined by Russell Kirk. While there are thematic and ideological elements worthy of criticism in the Star Trek worldview, there is much that can be redeemed. [...]
Bertrand de Jouvenel The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State. In the disaster for humanity that was the [...]
Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013, 278 pages In 1954, in a span of less than two months, Russell Kirk hammered away at what would become, arguably, his best book, A Program for Conservatives. Two years later, he revised and re-titled it, Prospects for [...]
What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos,” which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word or linguistic meaning, science, rationality (the Latin word is “ratio”), the principle of exchange between things…So [...]
It was a crisp fall evening when I met the storyteller for the first and only time. He was old, but probably not as old as he looked. Preoccupied with the few hairs he had left growing out from above his ears, he pushed the thin weeds back over his dome each time the wind [...]
Barry Cooper Thomas Heilke’s and John von Heyking’s edited volume, Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy, is a festschrift to Barry Cooper, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. The themes of hunting and weaving are ones illuminated in Cooper’s own career as he brings together political philosophy and empiricism in [...]
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in [...]
After changing health insurance providers and having difficulty getting prescriptions filled, I was getting testy. Very testy. Then I read that the new national insurance program would be released on 35 floppy discs, and that did it. I knew there was no help coming from Washington any time soon. In a slow burn that waxed [...]
In various lectures and publications, I’ve had occasion to call attention to the problem of the “birth dearth,” the fact that the birth rate has dropped below–often well below–the rate of replacement in just about every prosperous and high-tech country. The relevant facts are laid out for our country (if hardly for the first time) [...]
No less than a counter-revolution has begun in social science, threatening to turn much of the Enlightenment topsy-turvy. Not only is it fast gaining support within its own disciplines of anthropology, psychology and economics, but it has begun to influence other, “harder,” sciences too. The repercussions may be astounding, altering our view of how cultures [...]
In 1953, when Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, the reigning and virtually uncontested view of America among scholars and other intellectuals was that from the beginning America represented a break with the ancient traditions of Europe. America was not weighed down by feudal and aristocratic social structures and was born out of enlightened, progressive ideas. It [...]
In the recent trilogy of Swedish movies beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a rather unpleasant fantasy plays out for the viewer. A young, misfit girl (Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander) is sexually abused, and, as the films drive towards their conclusion, revenges herself upon her immediate tormentors, and then ultimately upon the more [...]
If original sin lies at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s work, redemption lurks out there somewhere too. In 1989, the year before his death, the great Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a letter to rock-and-roll legend Bruce Springsteen, which read, in part: This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, [...]