Rules are good things to have. We need to learn not to wipe our noses on our sleeves, not to take stuff that isn’t ours, not to scream at people when we’re debating them on television, not to shout abuse at politicians even if they deserve it. But as useful as rules like that can [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been nearly lost. Indeed, evidence of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus we should be well aware that one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. [...]
Edmund Burke It took Edmund Burke a very little time to decide that French Revolutionary philosophy posed a massive threat to civilization and social stability throughout Europe. By the end of his life, eight years after the storming of the Bastille, his fears of Jacobin contagion had led him to ask for a [...]
We live in mean times. While many of us do not daily experience the kind of civic ugliness featured on the evening news, or common place in Op ed sections of national newspapers, if we simply look and listen, we catch the mean spirited discourse all too common. Forget that this is even an election [...]
Robert Nisbet In a recent posting on The Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen laments the loss of civility and decency in present-day America. By looking at the roots of foul behavior (in this case, a group of middle school boys bullying an elderly school bus monitor), he finds fault in the “warehouse model” of [...]