I’m making another novel, The Open Independence of the Sea , available for download, free for personal use and distribution. The license is Version 3.0 of the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license as written and published by Creative Commons Corporation. This license can be found at the Creative Commons website . I also append a copy [...]
In one of his novels about the American Empire, Gore Vidal quotes the American-English novelist Henry James as claiming, circa 1900, that it was the United States which was corrupting political systems around the world. The Irish political scientist, William E.H. Lecky, wrote in the 1890s of the great divide in American morality, the citizens [...]
Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the [...]
As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted years ago, western Christians built Western Civilization as a home for the churches united to Rome. St. Augustine and St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great laid the foundations and many others built upon those foundations. For centuries, Western Civilization was a home for the Catholic Church and then for [...]
There is no such book as Civilization for Dummies though it’s what a modern man might hope to find if, that is, he were aware of the nature or even existence of such a complex entity as a ‘civilization’. In fact, modern man has decayed into that barbarian child foreseen by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, [...]
Once the thought of Plato and Aristotle had a home — the Greek city-state. Once the thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had a home — Western Civilization. The two situations were different because the Greek philosophers struggled to find the best way to inhabit a home built by their [...]
Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings [...]
The policy analysts, Right and Left, are working hard to assign blame for the problems of modern economies and polities. In the United States, they examine taxation and regulation policies of governments from Washington’s administration right to that of Obama. They also examine the strong dislike Americans have for taxes along with the longing they [...]