Deeper unconsciousness, not greater awareness, characterizes the modern mind. This may be the fundamental irony of our times. The intersection of ignorance and intention has been the site of art and argument for millennia. Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex explore the limits of knowledge to powerful effect. After visiting the theater, Athenians returned to daily life [...]
Although Gnosticism has conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character, the United States itself, as we are once again discovering, is a historical, not a providential nation uniquely blessed of God. Nothing makes inevitable continued American prosperity or even American survival. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it [...]
On September 11, 2001, Muslim terrorists attacked the United States on her own soil. Today, on the anniversary of this terrible event, let us recall the address of President George W. Bush in order to remember the innocent men and women who lost their lives. May God bless America. […]
If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, [...]
The convergence of the American and British presidential and parliamentary systems on a new form of tyranny poses a serious threat to what scholar Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion,” the only civilized hope of free government known to mankind today. Introduction In his classic 1867 book The English Constitution, the great Economist editor and [...]
It is true that we can’t say with certainty what will happen in the future because it will depend on the choices we make. But we can be almost certain what will happen in the future based upon what we know about the past. It’s not often that I find myself disagreeing with G. K. [...]
Benjamin Harrison insisted America’s truly dangerous enemies were not Great Powers abroad but a lapse of integrity and purity at home. He believed republicanism would spread in the world by “sympathy and emulation” and feared the harm Americans might do to themselves and to others should they undertake to extend their institutions by force: “We [...]
By turns eager and reluctant to embrace newcomers, Americans in the twentieth century followed no uniform course of action. In 1919, when sections of almost every major American city were teeming with men and women who spoke a multiplicity of languages, former president Theodore Roosevelt, wondered whether the United States had not become a “polyglot [...]
Richard Cerasani’s book, "Love Letters from Mount Rushmore," provides an antidote to cancel culture in its depiction of the monumental sculpture not as an intrusion defacing nature, but a means of restoring the souls of spiritless and restless Americans. Love Letters from Mount Rushmore: The Story of a Marriage, a Monument, and a Moment in [...]
The vision presented by the 1776 Commission—established by President Trump and recently quashed by President Biden—suggested that it would prove ultimately irrelevant in combatting the efforts of the 1619 Project. In fact, the 1776 Commission offered an interpretation of American history that is not only wrong-headed, but completely self-destructive. To anyone devoted to the political [...]
Prohibition had cultivated both a growing mistrust and a growing acceptance of state power. It was becoming not only a legal and political mechanism to regulate personal habits and to modify social customs but also a means to impose cultural unity. Whatever dangers it posed to liberty, government regulation was by the 1920s a fact [...]
“The False Promise of Liberal Order” and “Tomorrow, the World” provide a useful two-dose vaccine against the now-viral view that something ambitious must be done to repair and revitalize the fraying liberal international order. Both books counsel against doubling down on a postwar order that was more imperial than liberal. The False Promise of Liberal [...]
In virtually every major field of thought today, Westerners are advocating conflicting paradigms concerning change. In some areas, there is a dogmatic insistence on infinite fluidity. In other areas, there is an equally dogmatic insistence on inflexible fixity. This indicates that we moderns have not thought much about change at all. All of Western philosophy—all [...]
Vague collective guilt leads to societal disorder and societal evils greater than the ones that originally caused the problems. Owen Barfield suggests that by re-imagining not only the glorious dignity of each individual person but also by recognizing the sin of which the person is capable, we can move out of the deadly cycle of [...]