Learning Wisdom in the Midst of Reversals
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 24 […]
A Suitable Boy
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 [...]
The Conservative Vision of Hayao Miyazaki
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 and the Buddha
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 [...]
Confusing Confucianism with Collectivism
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 [...]
The Dalai, the Dinosaur, and the Tao
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 [...]
Artistic Decadence in Meiji Japan: Lessons for the Modern West
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 [...]
Down Home American Zen
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 [...]