The center hasn’t held and the pieces fly away. Without the most basic sorts of order, the sorts of order which are specifically labeled `moral’ aren’t possible, at least not on a large-scale such as that of the United States or even that of the city of Springfield, MA less than a quarter mile away … [Read more…]
A number of those most consistently and honestly upset by Obamacare seem to be libertarians and I’ll side with them on this issue though I consider myself to be what some have called Orestes Brownson—a radical conservative. I’ll ignore the clueless conservatives and liberals who think moral order to be a gloss upon their favorite … [Read more…]
What is a male? Is any human being with XY genes a male—the `Y’ chromosome being the carrier of genes which mostly lead to male development and the maintenance of male characteristics? (There is a recent discovery that the `X’ female chromosome actually can play a role in the development of males; this might greatly … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Cafeteria Catholics and Ghetto Catholics, I claimed: From an intellectual viewpoint also simple, the problem with many traditionalist Catholics is that they don’t think in terms of a world in which new facts and knowledge emerge over time, forcing our understandings to develop over time in a “communal process” as the … [Read more…]
In this essay, I’ll sometimes write about the West as a whole and sometimes try to be more particular, especially in giving examples, by writing from the American viewpoint. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the current moral and social disorders of the West began in the United States. Henry James is said to … [Read more…]
In the recent article, ‘Networked Minds’ Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics, we learn that scientists have discovered the existence of “networked minds”, a concept overlapping my concept of “communal minds”. Jacques Barzun covered some important regions of this territory in the 1950s with his book, The House of Intellect and others were very tentatively … [Read more…]
Scientists have succeeded in creating false memories in lab mice, though it’s not at all true they created memories from scratch. Rather did they expose the mice to a bad experience in one location and then manipulated activity levels of brain-cells so that the mice associated that bad experience with another location where they’d not … [Read more…]
Good news from genetic research. At least it’s good news for those of us who believe in the value, and truth, of moral purposefulness. A recent article, Be Happy: Your Genes May Thank You for It, tells us: People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being—the kind of happiness that comes … [Read more…]
I’ve often referred readers to one of my early essays, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality:, for a very short discussion of Bohr’s insights into the primacy of relationships over stuff—in fact, it’s not clear to me that Bohr fully realized the implications of his stance but that’s true of many a … [Read more…]
Bruce Schneier, a prominent expert in cryptography and other areas of security, regularly provides interesting commentary, sometimes technical in nature and sometimes philosophical or sociological. In his blog post of 2013/07/09, Another Perspective on the Value of Privacy, Schneier merely provides a short quote from and link to an opinion piece at the website of … [Read more…]