Author: Chilton Williamson (Chilton Williamson)

Liberals love psychology, as a science and as pseudoscience, while being very bad at it.  Indeed, the liberal persuasion and the discipline of psychology have a natural affinity for each other, grounded in their morally relativistic values, that partly accounts for their taste for social and personal engineering and other forms of “behavior modification.”  Ideologically,...

For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country.  In this spasm, as in past...

The American political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, religionists and secularists.  It is between roughly two halves of the country, each of which would be perfectly happy to see the other wiped, by violence if necessary, from the face of the earth.  That was not how the North and...

When people speak of a society being “decadent,” they commonly understand decadence in terms of standards of personal behavior and the sense of morality, or want of it, that behavior expresses.  For conservatives, personal morality begins with sexual morality grounded in revealed religion; for liberals, with what they call an “ethical” approach to human relations...

The modern world abounds in modern heresies.  One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with liberalism and conservatism, right and left. Modern...

At a recent dinner party someone remarked that the two secure careers remaining in America are business and science.  There are also education and academia, but since both have been for several decades now radically inhospitable to anyone to the right of Howard Dean, no one thought it necessary to mention them.  I thought at...

Liberalism’s Glorious Age of parliamentary democracy, nation building and national consolidation, free trade, and empire, of which Great Britain was the chief power and paramount symbol, reached a catastrophic close in 1914.  After 1945, liberalism in renovated form attempted to launch a modern Glorious Age dominated by the Pax Americana and the United Nations and...

A French writer argues that “humanity” has become the accepted “version of the universal” in contemporary Western thought, functioning as the “action” of  modern democratic polity.  While Pierre Manent’s thesis is a convincing one, political and social occurrences in the past decade seem to indicate that the West’s humanitarian “version” is becoming discredited at an...

Paradoxically, Westerners of every faith and political opinion seem perennially unhappy with Western society, despite the West’s assurance that it is the best, most fair, most free, most enlightened, and most humane way of life in human history.  The left faults Western institutions because they seem to it insufficiently fair and progressive, too much influenced...

“[W]e may expect,” Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, “that one day someone will venture upon . . . research into the pathology of civilized communities.”  This statement directly follows Freud’s suggestion that, if it is true that the evolution of a civilization proceeds similarly to that of an...

A reader not of the Faith who happened, since the installation of Pope Francis, to glance through almost any issue of L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s official newspaper, might well conclude that the conclave that met in the Sistine Chapel last spring elected a social worker instead of a cardinal as the successor to Benedict XVI. ...

The three pillars of liberal morality are engagement, compassion, and inclusiveness; its corresponding demons apathy, hatred, and exclusiveness.  The shorthand word for the three cardinal virtues is niceness; for the three supreme vices, meanness.  Nice is a word familiar among middle-middle class Americans, who have been liberalized whether they know it or not: the sort...

The New York Times’ headline for Thursday, July 4, 2013, printed above a nearly page-wide photograph showing a spectacular eruption of fireworks in the nighttime sky above Cairo, read Egypt Army Ousts Morsi, Suspends Charter.  Almost an earth’s half-turn apart, Egypt celebrated the downfall of her year-old “democracy,” while the United States of America memorialized...

Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers.  Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons.  Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...

In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner.  Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...

The title of the most famous book published in the 19th century is in fact a misnomer.  Das Kapital should really be Die Industrie.  It is true that in Volume One, Chapter 1, Karl Marx begins with a discussion of money as having originated not as capital but simply as a means of exchange.  Money,...

A naive visitor arriving in the United States from abroad might conclude from the popular emphasis on “moderation” in contemporary American political discourse that Americans live under a government that represents a moderate theory of the appropriate scope and power of the state and harbors only modest political ambitions.  If he happens to be a...

Several months ago I spoke briefly at the Baltimore Bar Library against passage of the Maryland Dream Act, the state version of the federal initiative that has been hanging around the capitol for a dozen years now.  My remarks were countered by two supporters of the act, a pair of earnest young men: both Catholic,...

People forget, in an age of promotion, self-promotion, publicity, advertising, the internet, and social media, that personal privacy is essential not only to civility but to civilization.  Today, as never before in history, the maintenance of privacy depends on the moral fortitude to resist intrusion by others and the self-restraint and tact not to intrude...

Over drinks in the hotel lounge in the course of a scholarly meeting a year or so ago, I mentioned to a professor of political science and philosophy that I was writing a book on democracy.  “Can you give me an example of democracy in its perfect, most complete form?” he asked. “National socialism,” I...