Post Secularism

• Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke’s “Awakening” Series v. My “Genealogy” Series

  Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build

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• Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

  I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it

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• Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

  At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a

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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 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

  Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical–or Wisdom–dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West–Christian Neoplatonism–worked for so

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• A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

  [This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post] “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and

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• il n’y a pas de hors-texte

  I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause. Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good

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• Young Socialist Intellectuals

  Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo– What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard

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• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III

  In 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 continue to associate the Democratic Party

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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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