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…]
Ten years ago or more, I read the Inferno, the first volume of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It didn’t make too much of an impression on me, seeming to be at least in part a matter of Dante taking shots at some of his enemies, a lot of people he didn’t admire (often, for good … [Read more…]
A large number of Americans, leading good lives in most ways, believe the United States is and always was a champion of justice and charity towards all nations when we really believe that the only good life is one ordered to the individualistic tendencies so attractive to those descended from the residents of northwestern Europeans. … [Read more…]
Reality often messes up our formal models or our less rigid schemes of how reality should work. A good thinker takes such glitches not as a sign that we can’t use models in a particular situation but rather as an invitation to think their way to a better model or perhaps to develop a more … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded an update to the collection of my weblog writings: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2014. Here is the text from the Preface for this new edition: I’ve added nearly 50 chapters to this Fifth Edition. All but this chapter are reformatted essays from my writings during 2014 which were … [Read more…]
Some young men who think to solve problems with machine-guns killed some men, of ages unknown to me, who think to advance human enlightenment by sneering at all things of which they don’t approve. They don’t approve of God or those who claim, falsely or truly, to serve God. The intellectual and moral midgets at … [Read more…]
See the article, Notable: Bigger groups make less social time for red colobus, at John Hawk’s website. [I had a problem linking properly to this article but it can be found under “Stories” if it doesn’t come up on the front page. I will adjust my link when possible.] Professor Hawks discusses an article summarizing … [Read more…]