[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.] From 2006 to the present, I’ve been writing about the need to make peace with empirical reality. This is not … [Read more…]
Conservatism: looking backward for wisdom and understanding about human being and about all of God’s Creation. Progressivism (of a truer type): moving forward into an everchanging world. Liberalism: unleashing individual human beings from traditions and from true progressive movements to the benefit of would-be centralizers in (corrupt) politics and (corrupt) business. The real point I’m … [Read more…]
Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our great promise. Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our possible madness, but so strangely decent and often gentle and kindly … [Read more…]
For some reason, isolation is seen as only `isolationism’: a total policy, an ideological hardening of sorts. Even highly intelligent commentators of realist leanings will write and speak as if we Americans can choose only between some sort of major involvement in international relationships or a permanent and total withdrawal. This hardly accounts for all … [Read more…]
I’ll start with a link to another insightful and honest analysis by Paul Robinson, a seemingly true expert on Russia who is a professor at the University of Ottawa: Patriotism is enough. Western analysts often mistakenly describe the people now governing Russia as nostalgic for the Soviet Union, an idea which Putin’s recent statements about … [Read more…]
Historical narratives will typically note that the Magna Carta was a result of struggles between an unpopular king and a group made up of secular lords and lords of the Catholic Church in England. It’s actually a pretty complicated story which played out over centuries and also had a long prologue, but the point is … [Read more…]
Realism, as the term is used in foreign policy, builds upon the same foundations as Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand analysis of economics. It is an empirical analysis at the level of human actors without necessarily making any explicit attempt to understand why it is that those actors behave as they do. Hence, the invisibility. And … [Read more…]
[I am reposting this essay because it shows how I’ve been dealing for more than five years with the problems of self-righteous blindness in Americans, beginning at least with the Puritan Fathers of New England. Puritanism—Calvinism in general—was one of the most important of the early ideologies infected with radical individualism. And, true to form, … [Read more…]
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. At his website, he states: “I write about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.” His general view of the politics seems to be describable in non-standard terms as “liberal realism”. For example, while making it clear he is far more liberal than … [Read more…]
I’ve been reading a fair amount of works of narrative history lately, most dealing with the history of the Celtic peoples—especially those of the British Isles; lately, I’ve been reading more general histories of the British peoples for greater context. For decades, some prominent historians have been integrating archaeological and linguistic knowledge into their analyses … [Read more…]