Post Secularism

• Getting to the Big Story

  [If readers here are too busy or shy to ask questions, I’ll ask them for you. If you have better ones, ask them in comments.] Q: Here's what I don't get so far. You say metaphysics is best understood as story or a narrative. That makes no sense to me. Stories are things we make

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• Is a Post-Liberal Open Society Possible?

  I have no truck with the Illiberalism of either the Right or the Left, and yet I look at the Liberal Order as no longer sustainable. We are moving into a Post-Liberal world whether we like it or not. I want to defend an open, pluralistic society, but it seems clear to me that the

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• Here We Are

  Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it

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• What Is After the Future About?

  Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today: After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were

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• Genealogy Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West

  The following post is a mainly a background piece to provide context for the first conversation between the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus and the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke. This is also a contribution to my ongoing Genealogoy Series which has two primary objectives. First, to establish that the metaphysical imaginary that developed in the West

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• End of History?

  Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a

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• 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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• Liberation to What?

  The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe. –Tom Nichols Nichols' reference is

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• Liberalism + Whatever

  There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful

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• How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2

  Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as

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