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) [...]
Don’t worry. Be happy. Live in the present. The philosopher Rousseau said that was the natural condition of man, before he was screwed up by self-consciousness, time, awareness of death, and delayed gratification. So the key to happiness is to be really, really stupid. The Epicurean philosopher says the rational person can achieve the same [...]
The reason Socrates banished laughter or comedy from the poetry of the just city is that comedians, at their best, remind us of what we all know: there is an inexpressible sadness just beneath the surface of all our happy talk, and that means there are limits to how much any of us can be [...]
I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about really tough love. The best way to motivate students is to challenge them with realistic (and therefore tough) assessments of their shortcomings. It’s a good idea to shout [...]
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to disappear: the world, in truth, is more modern than ever. So we must contest Hegel’s assertion that the modern world is the end, the fulfillment, of history. The [...]
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system and give degrees based on real demonstration of measurable competencies valuable in the 21st century marketplace, and you’ll find out what studying Plato’s Republic is really worth. [...]
Thoughts on The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash W. J. Cash follows Mencken–and genuine Southern Stoics such as the poet William Alexander Percy–in having a very poor opinion of the uneducated individualism and raw emotion of Southern religion. It is, as Will Percy said, for “white trash” and for “Negroes” [...]
The report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about the sorry state of the humanities was utterly forgettable, and Andrew Sullivan focused sharply on what’s wrong with it. But I think a bit more should be said in the service of my conservative defense of liberal education, part of which is the defense [...]
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it seems to me, is divided between people who use that language earnestly in the belief that it is a sign of scientific precision and sophistication and those who [...]
As a professor of political science, I can’t help but be concerned with all the enthusiasm about “civic engagement” as some radically transformative, disruptive, “Copernican” revolution in higher education. All the literature that makes such bogus claims is rife with management-speak barely masking progressive ideology. It makes the agenda-driven proclamation that the point of higher [...]
It is my pleasure to be able to introduce Nalin Ranasinghe’s Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias to you as one of the most able, eloquent, noble, profound, and loving books ever written on Socrates. Ranasinghe restores for us the example of a moral hero who inaugurated a moral revolution in opposition to his [...]
R.R. Reno, quite an astute conservative public intellectual, claims that those with eyes to see know that the big news these days is the global victory of capitalism. I’m not following Reno in every respect here, but going with what I would say in support of his position. The good news is that productivity has [...]
Plenty of liberals—and not just liberal professors—think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see no organized conspiracy, and much of the liberal paranoia amounts to whining about the results of legitimate political defeats. Nonetheless, there is something to the thought that hostility [...]
Here’s the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. This is a thought experiment, and you’re perfectly free to disagree with it, have contempt for it, or just hate it. Walker Percy’s self-help book is basically in the form of a twenty-question self-help quiz. The questions are about various self-understandings people have. [...]