By doing a certain thing, by perfecting a certain skill, by learning a certain trade, a man becomes specific, becomes particular. Today, however, labor no longer helps us become who we are, and so trivial things, like taste in music, rush in to fill the gap. The most tiresome part of living in a faux [...]
There is something undemocratic in a society of machines. Men receive more or less power, honor, and esteem because of their capacity to purchase the use of certain devices—not because of who they are. The capacity to “go camping” proves to a man and his fellows that his access to this or that machine is [...]
Public screens and background music are a form of theft. They are a way of enclosing common spaces. They ordain a mood and mandate a climate, which would not be so bad, if making a climate was not a particular (and wonderful) power of each and every man. My wife and I have a wonderful [...]
Throughout the Middle Ages, to cherish and respect sanctuary was seen as the sign of a pious and powerful ruler. This was not some arbitrary custom, but an extension of the love and logic of the family into the world at large. Now if sanctuary seems unreasonable to moderns, it cannot be because we think [...]
In the liberal tradition, Adam is described as the one who must toil against a surrounding lack in order to be properly made man. But Genesis undercuts the idea that toil is man’s “lot,” if by it one means that toil is man’s by nature, in the order of Creation, rather than by punishment, in [...]
AI pronouncements mine our natural hope for an impersonal truth, not by outlasting man like granite, but by appearing to not need him at all. In truth, however, we make the word-collating machines, they feed on our words, and we intervene into their operations in order to produce correct and pleasing results. But in appearance, [...]
The purpose of human conversation is not limited to pragmatic ends, as if we only spoke in order to learn new recipes and get salient tips on what stocks to invest in. A good conversation is always a discovery of the person who reveals himself in speech. So much fighting concerning AI is really no [...]
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, [...]
As I read Matthew Crawford's "Why We Drive," I was struck by the book, not so much as an ode to awesome driving— which it is—but as a long observation of two modes of being in the world, two political stances that I have increasingly come to identify as Liberalism and Catholicism. Why We Drive: [...]
Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not [...]
Even in this darkness, there is hope. Because liberalism is a Christian heresy, it has held and still does hold the breach between the peace and the coming darkness, when anti-Christian technocratic power will be all in all. And in this time that liberalism has bought us, we can act, pray, and by the power [...]