A Suitable Boy: A Novel, by Vikram Seth (Harper Collins: 1993) What are book reviews for? Some are to vent righteous spleen—a scribbler has wasted our time, and here is the moment for revenge. Some are to establish superiority—what an author has made a critic can now break. Some are to whet the appetite—a writer has [...]
Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, like all conservatives, has a tender affinity for precious things that are passing away. Sometimes they can be preserved and brought to new life. At other times, they may only be preserved in memory for another generation such as ours, who may open the record and feel them in our own hearts, [...]
Irving Babbitt embraced the inherent Stoic qualities not only of the ancient Western world but also of high, ancient Asian culture as well. One of Western Civilization’s greatest defenders in the twentieth century, Harvard University’s Irving Babbitt, founder of the New Humanism, best friend to Paul Elmer More, and the teacher of T.S. Eliot, considered [...]
Respect for the notion of tradition comprises a core element within the paleoconservative bag of ideas. As it should. Respect for tradition constitutes one of those attitudes that separates the paleoconservative from both the neoconservative (for whom tradition begins some 200 years ago at most) and many libertarians (for whom the individual is an end in [...]
In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis referred to himself as a type of dinosaur; a species of “Old Western man” that was about to go extinct in the mid-20th century. Today I had the extraordinary opportunity to spend some time watching a man who I fear might also be one of the [...]
Students of Western cultural decline may find parallels in the aesthetic decay of Japan starting in the mid-nineteenth century. These four elements seem to have debased the graphic arts especially: technology, political reform and equality, industrialisation and wealth, and reduced popular support for traditional culture among new elites. In both places these factors overturned venerable [...]
Like all great nations through history, America borrows freely, adopting and adapting. Her Pilgrim Fathers included parlous few, say, Jews or Italians or Africans, yet look at how they later added to American culture and her living traditions. When America borrows some aspect of another culture she often gains a perspective of something that [...]