“It used to be one of our proudest boasts that we welcomed the downtrodden, the oppressed, the poverty-stricken, the fit and the unfit to a land of freedom, of plenty, of boundless opportunity. Our hindsight tells us that this boast was fatuous.” —George Horace Believe it or not, Chronicles was not the first magazine in...
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Abuse Your Illusions
Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions. Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a ...
The Unmeaning of Unmeaning
A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...
Post-Human America
Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric, if not utterly insane or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream.” The trouble is that normal people do not take madmen seriously enough. This works to the advantage of politicians—an inherently insane breed—and their subjects’ attitude of “they can’t be serious” allows them...
Remembering Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield formulated a political theory of limited liberalism around his Augustinian Christianity, which tempered personal liberty with the recognition of man's fallen nature.
A Deal With the Digital Devil
Transhumanism is a materialist inversion of spiritual aspirations, which promises to create a heaven on earth in exchange for merging our souls with machines.
Invasion of the World Savers
There is still time left to rescue the past, present, and future from William MacAskill’s ideological future savers.
Human Rights and Self-Government
In the United States, the federal system of government is undergoing profound changes that compel students of American politics to rethink traditional ideas about national identity. Questions such as: “What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States?” and “What are the duties and privileges of U.S. citizenship?” and “In what manner...
A New Logic of Human Studies
Consider the following paradoxes. A welfare system designed by well-meaning politicians guided by the advice of the wisest sociologists and economists available, costing billions of dollars, whose net effect is radically to increase the numbers of the poor, especially women and children, and to deepen their misery, incapacity, and despair. A stock market which rises...
Credo for Conservatives IV: More Abortion Debate
Two more Arguments, from God and from rationality. GOD Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions. [Cf. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature III.12 ) From the Christian perspective nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true...
Romancing the Skull
“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.” —Sigmund Freud An old professor of mine once joked that ecumenism was a case of “the bland leading the bland,” an epithet that could just as appropriately describe contemporary humanism. Cast your net at Google, and you will haul...
Natural Technology
If asked to state the goal of the environmental movement, a participant in it would probably say something like: “to promote a sustainable relationship between human beings and nature.” How could one possibly object to such a formulation? Yet hidden in it is a set of assumptions that may paradoxically lie at the root of...
Vol. 1 No. 7 July 1999
The crisis in Kosovo continues to illuminate the glaring gap between the quality of reporting in America and in the rest of the world. In Western Europe, in particular, the tragedy in the Balkans has come to be seen as the defining moment of our civilization and of its chances for survival in the coming...
The Universe Within
Dr. James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, has written that the human brain is “the most complex thing we have yet discovered in the universe.” Indeed, with its 100 billion cells, the human brain is a universe within a skull. This isn’t an original insight: The importance of the brain was understood for...
Frederick Turner and the Rebirth of Literature
The breach that opened between the serious and popular arts during the early years of this century has so widened over subsequent decades that the current “postmodern” era is characterized by a kind of cultural schizophrenia. While visual images bombard us through the media, the graphic arts have increasingly evaporated in performance and conceptual art....
Conservation and Animal Welfare
Not so long ago, nor all that far away, we knew our place. The old could command the young, parents command children, the well-born command the lowly-born, men command women, and the High King over all. No one need have any doubts about his duty. We all owed duties of deference to those above us,...
Communitarians, Liberals, and Other Enemies of Community and Liberty
I remember a time when the terms “community” and “virtue” had almost disappeared from philosophical discourse. Working on a doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in the mid-60’s, I took a seminar in ethics from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg, who had written the definitive history of phenomenology. One day, he observed that philosophers no longer even spoke...
Dune’s Modernist Space Heresy
A stunning new film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, Dune, recently graced America’s silver screens. The talented Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve has fully utilized modern cinematic technology to bring to life Herbert’s bizarre story of a far-flung neofeudal humanity existing some 20,000 years in the future. Villeneuve’s adaptation of these best-selling science fiction...
Open—Or Empty?
In the work of Professor Germino’s prime mentor, Eric Voegelin, and that of Hannah Arendt, the subject of Professor Young-Bruehl’s biography, we have the head and the heart of a theory of man that understands politics as phenomenality, as self-disclosure in a space of appearances, originating in the “experiential locus of humanity.” This locus is...
Chicken Little Is a Christian
“Good News.” -Title of a novel by Edward Abbey about the collapse of civilization in the American Southwest The chief victim to date in the so called Culture War is neither George Bush nor the Republican Party but “the Environment,” or what Christians used to call Creation. In the more than two decades since environmentalism...
Ahistorical Admonitions
“One age cannot be completely understood if all others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.” —Ortega y Gasset In The Politics of Human Nature, Thomas Fleming has boldly undertaken to delineate a system of natural politics. A classicist by training, Fleming believes that “the collapse of Roman...
Being Human
Questions of transhumanism have been the subject of many dystopian and futuristic movies, but our fascination with the subject says more about ourselves than the machines.
Conservative Credo IV: The Abortion Debate
The Abortion Debate In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view. Few debates have been so heated as those involving the decision to terminate...
Treason Against the New Order
I was doing my best to mind my own business on a very busy Saturday. My wife was in England, and after nearly two weeks of playing mother, I was catching up on the laundry, shopping for the dinner I would have to prepare, and, in between trips to the store, I had to take...
The Living Constitution and the Death of Sovereignty
As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...
The Burden of Racial Guilt: A New Declaration of Independence
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America As I write I am sitting in Pitt County, North...
Rights of the Wild and Tame
Conservationists tend to be shy of using any arguments but the merely “economic,” partly in the odd belief that these are more “rational” than other and overtly “sentimental” ones, and partly because “economic” reasoning seems likely to appeal to a larger audience.Economic arguments are not bad ones: it is indeed incompatible with any sort of...
Angels From the Time to Come
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
Enduring Achievement
The Washington Post is best known outside the newspaper business for the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein—not to mention Janet Cooke. But in the long run, the Post‘s most enduring achievement is that it pioneered the modern newspaper feature section. Until the late 1960’s, most features sections were called “women’s pages,” but when Post...
Carry On
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...
Human, Not-Quite Human
The doping scandals that plague professional and “amateur” sports have done little to shake the enthusiasm of fans and sportswriters for their heroes. Fans still flock to the stadiums and spend their weekends watching NBA basketball games, NASCAR races, and even (if ABC is to be believed) AFL football exhibitions. As a child, I once...
Imitation of Life
“You shall have life and that abundantly.” What did Jesus’ followers make of this bold promise? He had shown them that he could cure the diseases that afflict both body and mind, and, in bringing Lazarus back from the dead, He lifted the veil to reveal a part of the mystery of His own being. ...
Carry On
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. 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...
Abuse Your Illusions
Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions. Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a question of zoning or a case of censorship. Honest man that he is, he opposes both zoning and censorship as...
The Angry Summer
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
Pitirim Sorokin: A Prophet of Our Present
The desire to know what tomorrow will bring, to know the future, is as old as the human race itself But how? Who among us has the “gift of prophecy”? The book of history might seem to offer guidance, but human expectations and prognostications often mislead. When the most brilliant generals, industrialists, scientists, and politicians...
Boethius and Lady Philosophy
As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
Nationalism, Patriotism, and Internationalism I
Recent press reports inevitably describe Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica as a
Restless Work, Energetic Play
The family home is a last flickering outpost of liberty, though it is besieged from without by the school and the workplace and vitiated from within by mass entertainment.
Pain Without Purpose
“We must remain absolutely silent on what we cannot talk about.” Wittgenstein’s interdict would surely apply to the mystery of human suffering; at certain intensities, pain becomes literally as well as idiomatically unspeakable. Even to allude to the educative value of pain is to risk an inhuman glibness, a cold-blooded reduction of the specificity of...
Do Androids Tweet…?
The America depicted in the news is every day coming closer to the dystopian future imagined by science-fiction novelists. I am not referring so much to the rising tide of violence and irrationality that has overtaken our society at all levels as to the systematic spiritual, intellectual, and social desolation of our public culture. One...
Hell Is Other People
Robin N—wasn’t sure what was wrong. The suburban Milwaukee mother of three had experienced a pang upon turning 35, but these “pangs” seemed to be intensifying as the months passed. Sometimes, they took the form of paralyzing depression; other times, of anxiety verging on panic. She found herself fearful of going out in public or...
Pope Francis in Arabia (II): Futility of Appeasement
In the course of his 48-hour visit to the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis addressed an “interreligious meeting” in Abu Dhabi on February 4 and celebrated an open-air Mass attended by 135,000 Catholic guest workers the following day. His homily at the city’s Zayed Sports Stadium, inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, was unremarkable but...
Saving the Humanities
While political battles rage over why Johnny cannot read, the teachers of Johnny’s teachers enjoy virtual immunity from public scrutiny. Their intellectual profile remains invisible to the public eye. In a sense, this is understandable. They were educated in the rarefied atmosphere of this country’s great universities where the life of the mind is protected...
None More Terrible Than Man
The past half-millennium that began with the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent discovery of the New World has gone by so many titles that its name might be legion: It has been the age of “progress” and “discovery,” a period of “enlightenment,” the era of “democracy.” However, all these glorious nicknames that stud the...
Back to Reality
The modern age has been a 500-year revolution against Aristotle. Bacon and Galileo assailed his authority in the natural sciences; neoplatonists rejected his metaphysics in favor of a false mysticism that was little better than black magic; Epicureans, thrilled with the insights of the rediscovered poem of Lucretius, preferred hedonism and materialism to Aristotle’s morality...
Deep History
As I read the announcement and noted with admiration those receiving The Ingersoll Prizes, I can say in all humility that it never entered my head during the past several years that I might someday be so honored, and for that I thank you. I thank you also for the opportunity to make the following...
The Skeptical Mind
“Skepticism is less reprehensible in inquiring years, and no crime in juvenile exercitation.” —Joseph Glanville In an intellectual climate characterized by conformity and wishful thinking, John Gray is among the most interesting and consequential thinkers contemporary Britain has to show. From his office at the London School of Economics (where he is professor of European...
On Genetic Determinism and Morality
In his recent speech to Congress, Anatoly Shcharansky said, “All understanding between the East and West must be based on human values common to all men.” This appealing statement takes us straight to the central question of moral reasoning: What, if anything, are common human values? Humanity is and always has been faced with a...
Remembering Augusto Del Noce
Augusto Del Noce viewed politics and philosophy as inseparably linked and believed that society had to be understood in reference to the history of its thought. He diagnosed Marxism as the deification of history.