Humanist Traditions

• Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 2

  Part 2. Reform: The Rage for Order Many societies have moments of 'reform', but Taylor wants to make the case that the rage for Reform in the Latin West was unique and was central to the emergence there of the secular society Westerners introduced to the world. As described in Part I, before the reform bug bit elites

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• On Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 1

  Part 1:  Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the

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• When the Party’s Over

  We are a country now in the hands of deeply deluded people, people who are living in bubbles, whose minds are addled by chronic cognitive dissonance at best or at worst an addiction to power and wealth. Electing sane people to fix things in Washington isn’t a solution because it’s like sending a sober person

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• Mythos and Logos 3

  In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s

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• Dewey, Lippmann, and the Problem of the “Public”

  After WWI, Lippmann was very pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy. Dewey while he was more optimistic nevertheless agreed with Lippmann about the social dynamics that were hollowing out democracy. Lippmann wrote The Phantom Public in 1925 and Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in 1927 in response. For Lippmann the public was

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• Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis

  Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says: Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to

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• What Is More Natural Than Markets?

  Reflections on The Great Transformation, Chapter Three: "Habitation versus Improvement" Central to Polanyi's argument is that markets are not natural, that contrary to the assumptions of classical economists, to "truck and barter"  is not something that has been a central element in human social activity for thousands of years. He argues that the market economy is

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• Man Up

  [This is an encore post from March 2005. I put it up because it relates to what I've writing about Humanity 3.0, and might provoke further discussion about it along a different track. Check the comments for a further elaboration on this idea.] Last week I put up an excerpt of an interview with Stephen Ducat in

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• Wandering in the Wilderness II

  I'm a little reluctant to do this, but since I've started with the Intro, why not put up Chapter one of Wandering in the Wilderness, entitled "The Shift from Outer to Inner". This chapter relies quite a bit on Owen Barfield's, I think, great book Saving the Appearances. I met and had a chance to

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• Irony and Decadence

  From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today: Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of

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