I am writing this essay shortly after finishing a good book, longish by modern standards, which discusses two personality types in European peoples—especially those of the Northwestern countries. These two types of aristocratic individualist and egalitarian individualist have formed the liberal orders of Europe. That book is Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Kevin … [Read more…]
Despite the urban legend I had once accepted, the phrase Here be dragons was not often used on maps and sometimes the dragons or other monsters drawn on unknown regions were decoration rather than warnings. Yet, they clearly state what “should have been true” though it was only “sometimes” true: “Here be dragons” means dangerous … [Read more…]
Jose Ortega y Gasset “was a Spanish philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and republicanism infiltrated by communist agents, and dictatorship of a stabilizing and fascist-tinged sort. His philosophy has been characterized as a “philosophy of life” that “comprised a long-hidden beginning … [Read more…]
I’ve proposed that the Body of Christ, the real and not nominal or virtual, community into which the friends of God will be integrated is a civilization with the Christian Church as His central organ. In this proposed understanding, the Church isn’t the entirety of the Body; after all, I think that all that is … [Read more…]
I’ll first provide links and summary quotes to two of my earlier posted essays: In Is God’s Creation Compatible with Centralization of Authority and Power?, I concluded: …that God’s Creation isn’t compatible with anything approaching complete centralization of power and authority, though centers of power and authority do exist and have their own role, often … [Read more…]
Introduction On 2017/04/20, Judge Andrew Napolitano published: What if We Don’t Really Govern Ourselves?, a simple and coherent article questioning whether democracy exists in the United States and whether democracy is, in any case, an absolute good or an answer to our various political problems. Napolitano’s essay is in the form of questions which move … [Read more…]
[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…]
[`Complete’ in this essay refers only to the willingness of a human being to acknowledge his communal human being as well as his individual human being and is no claim that we human beings can ever be complete in this mortal realm.] In a recently posted essay, Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Moving in Circles, I … [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…]
Or… Are they? That is, are the roots really amoral? More appropriately, do we humans see wrongly when we separate moral order from other sorts of order, raising moral order to angelic, ethereal realms? Once upon a time, when the West was truly Christian, we Western men did that with human nature. By tying Christian … [Read more…]