Thoughtful Conservatism

• Hazony’s Conservative Paradigm

  Is Hazony a Continuist or a Discontinuist? I thought before that he’s more of a Discontinuist, but maybe he needs another category, say, Re-Contintuist. There’s a part of me that thinks that Hazony would be better off if he called what’s he’s talking about something other than ‘Conservative’, perhaps a Whig. I don’t think the

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• Herder Office Hours

  Q: I think I kind of get it, but could you clarify why you’re spending so much time talking about two ancient Germans that hardly anybody has heard of? A: There are several reasons. First, I thought that all my talk about Aristotle and Neoplatonism needed to be balanced by something more down to earth

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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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• 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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• The Return of the Bobos

  A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful. For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the

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• What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

  [I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable

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• Heroes of the Fourth Turning

  I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day.  I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a

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• This Moment is Different

  I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical

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• Belief and Cash Value

  I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has

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• It’s the Meaninglessness, Stupid

  I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a

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