Tribal Thinking
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J.G. Herder’s Nationalism
Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of their living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man–as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection
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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 1: What Is Human Flourishing?
[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.] Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social
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Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories
I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that
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Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order
Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage–the priggish Neo
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Some Thoughts on Equity Language
Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you
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Some Thoughts on ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic? I would expect it
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Stop Saying that Republicans Are the Party of Law and Order
Order maybe; Law, not so much. Too many in the punditry are talking about conservative Republicans as if they're hypocrites because they endorse the lawlessness of J6 or because they're now calling to defund the FBI. The GOP has not been a party that respects the rule of law for a long, long time–at least
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Crazy Always Wins…
…in a culture that has lost its mind. This isn't a statement of hopelessness, because I believe that we will eventually recover our minds, even if it takes fifty or sixty years to do it. I haven't said anything about the mass shootings of the last few weeks because no solution seems possible until we
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Radicalized Elites on the Right 1
And I think this is why it is now the case that the Right finds it easier to move left on economic issues than the Left finds it to move right on social issues. And this is why, whether you like it or not — and this is not going to result from our conversation,