Humanist Traditions

• Return of the Repressed

  In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans

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• Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West

  Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of

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• Jacobin Magazine on The Great Books

  As early as 2003, a student editorialist for the Harvard Crimson complained that it was possible to graduate from that august institution without reading Aristotle or William Shakespeare. True, students bothered by this tend to be conservative little shits — but they are right to complain. More important than the decline of Harvard, however, is

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• A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

  [This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post] “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and

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• il n’y a pas de hors-texte

  I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause. Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good

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• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

  And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means

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• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

  I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live–as much

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• The Healthcare Technocracy & the Pandemic

  So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology

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• The Return of the Bobos

  A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful. For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the

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• Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

  I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to

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