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Populists vs Oligarchs
Anything James Pogue writes about the New Right is worth reading. His piece this morning in the NY Times focuses on the factional strife that already is besetting the new administration. Key grafs— In the article, Mr. Bannon “declared war” on Mr. Musk, and by extension the whole set of tech barons who had gained
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What is Beauty For?
From David Bentley Hart's essay "That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment" in You Are Gods: What, after all, is it that fascinates or compels us in those moments when we encounter the beautiful in its most generous expressions? What calls us to itself, away from our own small and particular interests and predilections,
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Toward the Development of a Sapiential Tradition
It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence
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From Decadence to Dawn
The right has a clear idea of the world it wants to create, however revanchist and dystopian it might seem to its opponents. There is no similarly motivating spirit on the shellshocked left, at least outside of Latin America. Incremental change to a hated status quo is clearly insufficient, but progressives haven’t laid out a
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Navigating in the Dark
II find it ironic that so many "savvy" commentators talk now about how it was politically counterproductive to focus on how Trump was a threat to democracy. “That's not the way to win,” they say. “If Democrats just focused on anything else, you know, the so-called kitchen-table issues, they would have had a better chance
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More on Civilization
[This is an expanded, edited version of a comment I wrote in response to some interesting questions and points made by Annie Gottlieb in my previous post. I recommend reading the whole conversation here. ] Appetite is desire, and desire is good or evil depending on its object. We're always looking for love in all
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A Civilization Is Only as Healthy as Its Metaphysics
Over the next few weeks, among other things, I'll be thinking out loud a bit about Hart's arguments in All Things Are Full of Gods. Hart's book is a relativelyheavy lift made somewhat more readable by its dialogic form, but some might wonder why people should make the effort to read and understand it. Well,
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Thomas Merton on Taoism
In the first chapter of the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu distinguished between the Eternal Tao “that can not be named,” which is the nameless and unknowable source of all being, and the Tao “that can be named,” which is the “Mother of all things.” Confucius may have had access to the manifest aspects of
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The Social Bandit
Whether Rob Roy MacGregor, aka the Scottish Robin Hood, or Ned Kelly, a 19th century Australian outlaw, “the crucial fact about the bandit’s social situation is its ambiguity,” Hobsbawm wrote. “He is an outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal rules of poverty. … This draws him close to
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I Loved “Yellowstone” and Hated “Succession”
What does that say about me? I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, but it came up in a NYT podcast ‘The Highbrow and Lowbrow of the Trump Era’, and the same contrast between Yellowstone and Succession was made, so I thought I’d share my two cents. As I recall, The shows are very