“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say.[1] He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding.[2] It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. [...]
Contemporary culture encourages cowardice as the human norm. This new emphasis, including the decade-old insistence on “safe spaces” at colleges, is something more dangerous than anything we might encounter otherwise. Not long ago, I heard a psychologist saying that the most important thing in his practice is the safety of his clients. Understandably, patients in [...]
In one of the great ironies of history, we find socialists and anarchists on the side of the new generation of slave-holders. The workers and wage-slaves of the world are being delivered into the hands of the overlords of the globalist future. These socialists and anarchists, obsessed with the slavery that was, sell us into [...]
Sometimes all that is needed is one person to take a stand in the workplace, one person who is willing to take the abuse and insults, one person who is not afraid to risk things that matter to him. Such risk-taking inspires others. Socrates observed that cowards experience pleasure every time they back down, while [...]
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 [...]
Reading books forces us to concentrate for longer periods of time than we do while sprinting from site to site online. Certain books demand the employment of certain analytical skills and close reading. But in our age of jittery distraction are readers becoming “an endangered species?” In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine [...]
One thing that is abundantly evident from the demands for the cancellation of Shakespeare in public schools is that none of those demanding his removal from the curriculum have been able to read or understand his work. Had they been able to do so, they would know that Shakespeare’s plays show us relevant, perennial truths. [...]
Shame is a product of a society that prioritizes the soul over the body and is a defense mechanism against all that is low, vulgar, and sinful. The loss of shame in today’s world comes from a profound change in values. We used to have a sense of shame that influenced our behavior. Reflecting upon [...]
In our time of fatherlessness, underachieving boys, social fraying, and the collapse of marriage, helping boys to become men needs to be done. We owe it to them in justice, or else we will not have healthy families, parishes, neighborhoods, and towns. Many years ago, in an article for Touchstone called, “A Requiem for Friendship,” [...]
As the old year ends and the new year arrives, The Imaginative Conservative looks back at some of its finest essays of 2020. —Editors In the late 1950s, as Russell Kirk considered what needed to be conserved in the Western tradition as well as what needed to be discarded, he lamented that much of what [...]
I worry that a society that ceases to marvel at the actions of daredevils is in danger. Though their moral calculus is not always straightforward and though I have no wish to imitate such actors, I view them at the end of the current year with new eyes. We should watch, listen, and ask if [...]
The atonal music produced in the twentieth century consists largely of random outbursts that could be described as groans wrapped in mathematics. The result makes little or no sense to the ear, and these works remain more items of curiosity than objects of love, and audiences have begun to turn their backs on them. In [...]
Without free will and a belief in it, there is no dignity and certainly no freedom of the human person. And without moral responsibility, there is no certain morality. Everything is merely as it was shaped to be, for good or for ill. This is the extremely dangerous situation in which we find ourselves today. [...]