Humanist Traditions

• In the meanwhile…

  Yesterday I wrote about what I believe has to happen in the long run if the machines aren't going to win. By the machines winning I mean that we're at a balance point where technological development can go one way or the other: either the machines will serve human needs or humans will come to

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• Fear of the Future

  The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence

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• Quote of the Day: Simone Weil

  Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this true breaking of the pact between the body and the soul. . . .Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible.

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• A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

  My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe

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• Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

  Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however,

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• Eagleton on “Theory”

  'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble. But it is as much a revealing a symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities

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• Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers

  This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly

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• History & Meaning

  Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?–Blaise Pascal  The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs.

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• It’s the Meaninglessness, Stupid

  I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a

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• Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 3

  Part 3: The Impersonal Order In Part 1, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about a social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but understanding its implications reinforces the idea I have written a lot about on this blog, which is the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is very provisional: humans did not always

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