Today’s political debates often set up a simple tension: the individual versus government. Certainly individual liberty and limited government are fundamental principles of a free society, but such a polarized perspective overlooks the ways we actually live our lives—in families, as part of neighborhoods, in church communities, in civic groups, and so on. In this [...]
The good intentions of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights took place in stages. Drafted in large measure as a response to the horrors of World War II and in the face of the continuing horrors of communism, the 1948 Declaration sought to “transcend” political, religious, and ethnic differences in the name of an [...]
Modernism is an ancient phenomenon. If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then modernism is the world’s oldest heresy. Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity. Plato reveals them in his dialogue The Euthyphro. The character of Euthyphro is a prototype of modern man. In the dialogue Euthyphro is prosecuting [...]
Clyde Kilby, an English professor from Wheaton College, worked with Tolkien in the summer of 1966. “Tolkien was an Old Western Man who was staggered at the present direction of civilization,” Kilby recorded after a summer of conversations with Tolkien. “Even our much vaunted talk of equality he felt debased by our attempts to ‘mechanize [...]
For a little more than 100 years we have had standardized IQ tests, and over those 100 years there has been a consistent, linear increase in IQ scores, on the order of three points per decade. According to IQ tests, we are getting smarter. Also over the last 100 years, rates of belief in God [...]
With the exception of a few figures like Professor Peter Augustine Lawler, who is a self-identified “postmodern conservative,” conservatives are generally suspicious of the word “postmodern.” I think this aversion is uncalled for, and that the interests of a broadly-understood postmodernity align with many of conservatism’s central tenets. Critics such as William Lane Craig have [...]
Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Swerve: How The World Became Modern is a narrative in search of a story. The narrative is a simple and familiar one: the world became modern when the forces of reason, enlightenment, and human dignity replaced the benighted and repressive superstitions and hypocritical hierarchies of medieval Christendom. This emancipation [...]
A friend of mine, staying in Paris with his wife, booked into the same room in the Regent Hotel in which they had stayed two years ago in order to enjoy the beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower that it afforded. Upon setting foot in the room and looking out of the window they were [...]
In the wonderful world of Walker Percy, old fashioned Southern gentility saunters in seersucker into sub human behavior and sips bourbon while planning a congenial genocide. Their shabby chic sophistication makes the nefarious activities of the characters in The Thanatos Syndrome even more chilling. In dozy Feliciana parish, psychiatrist Tom More observes that something strange [...]
Art is the pulse of the soul. It expresses much of what is kept hidden and even what could not be expressed in any other form. Many people talk of a crisis in modern art—its abstractness, banality, and, could we even say, ugliness. If there is such a crisis, to me, it is nothing other [...]
“The Pursuit of Happiness.” It is an indelible line signaling one of the three inalienable rights identified by the Founding Fathers when they framed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It echoes down the generations of American society in ever distorted waves. In this land, the very definition of happiness is now almost universally understood [...]
Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman The polarities of boundlessness and limits have helped to define the human experience. Although men and women have always lived with infinite longings, at one time they could not avoid [...]
The death of Gabriel García Márquez gives Conservatives an occasion to reflect on the idea of Modernity. A thoughtful Conservatism unequivocally opposes the rise of Materialism—whether from a religious perspective, like Kirk and Eliot; a Humanist, like Babbitt and Santayana; or a Culturist, like Maurras and Arnold. A fixation with mundane material realities (consumerism, promiscuity, [...]
Over the years I have gotten into trouble more than a few times for things I have written or said in public, but I suppose the chief cause of my notoriety is a speech I gave to the freshmen of Yale College suggesting that they would be wise to make the study of Western civilization [...]