Am. History & Culture
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Liberals & Virtue
Slate has an interesting piece on Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity A Guide for Grown-up Idealists which analyses why Liberals, who in their own mind are the moral superiors to neanderthal conservatives, nevertheless offer thin gruel to the more deeply morally serious: Why have moral values become the property of the right? Her [Neiman's] diagnosis, in
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Moby Dick Syndrome
I don't like what the Clintons stand for. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Bill in his second term, but I did feel that he was unfairly treated by the Republicans and the press in the runup to his impeachment, which was bad political farce from beginning to end. That's when it first became
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Cultural Identity II
In my post the other day, my fundamental point was that too many, probably most, people who call themselves Christian tend to look at the Gospel message through their tribal filters rather than to look at their tribal culture and its presuppositions through a Christian filter. No one is able completely to transcend the culture
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Cultural Identity I
And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brothers? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brothers! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother. Mark 3:33ff You have heard that
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Racism vs. Tribalism
Racism in America after slavery, I would argue, has been less about skin color and more about power clashes between tribal cultures in the North as well as in the South. Southern racism is different from northern racism because the tribal alignments and conflicts are different. So it's not really racism, but "tribalism". Humans have
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The Internecine Democrat Culture War
From the Economist: Obamaworld is a universe of liberal professionals and young people — plus blacks from all economic segments. Hillaryland, by contrast, is a place of working-class voters, particularly working-class women, and the old. These are people who occupy not just different economies but also different cultures. How many white Obama voters eat in
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Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was
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Managing the Fear Factor
During my sophomore year in college I lived on the same floor in a dormitory/apartment with some guys who were into heavy-duty weight-lifting. They were very nice guys, the kind who would give you the shirts off their backs if you were in need on one. They were not particularly testosterone driven–they were, in fact,
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Retrieval of an Unflattened Wor(l)d
Let’s take a break from politics, shall we? I’m back to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I wanted to focus on this important idea about how the redemption of language is the path to the redemption of experience: . . . in the post-Romantic context, the complaint is often made that language as we
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Liberal Cognitive Dissonance
This post is a bit of a vent, but if you want a case study of Liberal cognitive dissonance, read Joan Walsh’s piece on Barry Bonds. Walsh is the editor of Salon, and when it comes to women’s and race issues she’s about as knee-jerk predictable as they come. She’s aware of her biases, but