The determined move to abolish the hereditary lords is part of a process of self-destruction. The lords are part of the mythical bulwark that sustains England. When the current session of the British Parliament ends this spring, the nation will abruptly bring to a close a 700-year institution. On March 10, the House of Commons [...]
For the conservative, the universal imperative that binds human beings does not announce its purpose in simple, declaratory statements. How, then, does one discern its demands? First of all, a conservative is acutely aware of the flawed nature of man. The capacity of human reason is limited. Our existence is ultimately a great mystery. Conservatives [...]
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party government is presenting a bill to abolish the hereditary lords from the upper chamber of Parliament. Hereditary lords are those House of Lords’ members who inherit the right to sit in the upper House based on services rendered to the realm. Many storied families have retained this right for generations. [...]
We now live in a world, as I suppose we always have, that needs to relearn what happened in Oklahoma City 29 years ago. We need to know and feel what radical violence looks like, what it means to snuff out human life for no reason... how it crushes the survivors, and disfigures the communities [...]
Unlike reality—which is infinitely and ultimately unknowable—Marxism as ideology pretends to understand the world, but, in reality, it offers only the merest shadow of true complexities. Though responsible—directly and indirectly—for the murder of nearly 150 million innocent children, women, and men in the previous century, Marxism is making a comeback in Western civilization. Not only [...]
Surely it is a noble desire to try to create a heaven on earth, to make a paradise in this valley of tears, but that is an end that ultimately requires the denial of the reality of human existence. We are fallen, we are mortal, we are not meant to end in perfecting this created [...]
The HBO series “Chernobyl” serves to warn us about the danger of persistent lies in a society that refuses to acknowledge truth. It would be a grave error not to take stock of our own tendencies toward deceit, as if our lies are radically different from those that underpinned the Soviet Union. Over several long [...]
Do we not find ourselves living with a scenario in which the liberal elites consider themselves to be the wise, cool minds overseeing and running things. Do they not look upon those who oppose their agenda as being a “savage,” “uncivilized” set of local people, natives, “deplorables”, who must be subordinated to the elite’s will [...]
We have no way of knowing whether the twenty-first-century collapse is yet another momentary stumble or finally the Dark Age. Like good Carolingians, however, we keep looking backwards for our recovery, trying to rebuild what we once had. Christopher Dawson’s prophetic The Making of Europe (1932) ends where the Gentle Reader might expect such a book to [...]
Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In the opening [...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]
Irving Babbitt was an eccentric, armed with both a brilliant mind and personality. While we ought to remember his thought, we should also remember the man. As the leader of the American humanists, Irving Babbitt (1864-1933) stood solidly and forthrightly in the American conservative tradition of John Adams and Nathaniel Hawthorne and drew upon the [...]
Government programs cannot restore broken families and shattered communities. Only a moral regeneration of non-economic values can do this. The ravages of loneliness, despair, and suicide must be addressed by filling the spiritual voids that haunt people’s lives—and not by issuing government checks. The fight over the latest spending package is raging. Democrats are intent [...]
Communists know that the strength of their regime is measured in terms of ideological uniformity. This is what makes the pervasiveness of COVID kitsch so unnerving. The coordinated censorship of opposing viewpoints, both scientific and conspiratorial, is creepily reminiscent of 20th-century excess. Sabina, the headstrong artist in Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, is haunted [...]