The modern man of the West knows in his bones that he is an individual, born an individual, a clearly defined entity which stands in some sense above not only the confusing and often chaotic world around us but also above our bodies, our organisms which are also confusing and chaotic at times. An individual … [Read more…]
Albert Jay Nock wrote of a friend of his who had spent some years in the United States and was returning to Europe. This friend spoke of his admiration of many American characteristics, but said he was disturbed on realizing that Americans are the first people in history to pass directly from barbarism to decadence … [Read more…]
In The Return of Fear, Peter Frost, an anthropologist, gives a few facts which don’t argue fully against the current belief among Americans and Europeans that Muslim men are prone to violence and fanaticism; those facts do tell us of the ethnic basis for this inclination. Indonesians—88% Muslim—have low rates of violent crime, as do … [Read more…]
We think ourselves now so sophisticated because we know the world isn’t designed, at least not in the way of a human engineer. But there are patterns and the ways of thought which provide some serious understandings of those patterns arising from states of seeming disorder are difficult and are certainly not yet part of … [Read more…]
It’s not the failures but rather the great successes of the West which have left it as a hollowed-out and collapsing civilization, that is, our successes as individualists and our successes in nurturing our individualistic inclinations and pushing them ever further at the expense of our communalistic inclinations. It’s not hard to understand. Human being … [Read more…]
Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being … [Read more…]