Metahistory
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Greed Makes a Mess of Things
Always has, and always will. The superwealthy always seem to win in the short run, but they and all the rest of us lose in the long run. The rich do what they do with a predictablility that is driven by the logic of greed, but the rest of us let them because deep down
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Why American Conservatives Are Not Conservative
While difficult to define, contemporary American conservatism seems to be shaped by a certain set of core commitments. While not exhaustive, among those characteristics one could confidently list: 1. Commitment to limited government as laid out by the Founders in the Constitution; 2. Support for Free Markets; 3. Strong National defense; 4. Individual responsibility and
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Post Secular Thoughts II
I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future–it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to
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Post Secular Thoughts
[Ed. Like other posts this week, this is a repost from a piece written several years ago that I've revised somewhat for clarity and to make it fit into the flow of what I'm thinking now. There's clarifying and integrating value for me in lining these posts up one after the other in this way.
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The Power of Myth
As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the power of mythic narratives. To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives. Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not
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Getting After the Future
[Editor's Note: This is a repost from October 2007 slightly revised. It's a reminder for me about the task I established this blog to think about. I got too sidetracked by the crisis in the political sphere, and the truth is that now I can no longer bring myself to pay attention to what is
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John David Ebert on Myth at the End of History
This is the most interesting thing you’ll hear this week: This is the second segment of af a longer interview. The other segments of the interview can be found at this YouTube link. See also related ATF posts here, here, and here.
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What’s the Matter with Connecticut?
While Creative Class locations [BosWash, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin] are successful in generating financial and creative capital, they are comparatively poorer in social capital. Bishop discovered that people living in non-Creative Class settings enjoyed “the comfort of strong families, bustling civic groups, near universal political participation, and abundant volunteering.” Creative Class cities, by contrast,
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Some Thoughts on the Fourth of July 2010
Readers here know that I have a Whiggish view of history. It's not the cool position to take because it could be characterized as a celebration of mostly dead, rich, white guys, so historians like the Beards and Howard Zinn would tell me I have it all wrong. Nor is it a particularly intellectually respectable
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More Post-Secularist Thoughts
Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that