Making Sense of Religion
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Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries
I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B
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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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Quote of the Day: Terry Eagleton
Western capitalism, in short, has managed to help spawn not only secularism but also fundamentalism, a most creditable feat of dialectics. Having slain the deity, it has now had a hand in restoring him to life, as a refuge and a strength for those who feel crushed by its own predatory politics. If it finds
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Young Conservative Intellectuals
From David Brooks in the Atlantic reporting on the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month in Orlando. You know, the one where Hawley gave his American masculinity speech: Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have
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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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On Reading Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’
There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago