In recent years we have seen a growing phenomenon dubbed, not very surprisingly, the animal liberation movement. The main theoretician of animal rights is Professor Tom Regan, professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. Other supporters from the theoretical side are Professor Peter Singer, of La Trobe University in Australia, although Singer speaks only...
“Nor will this Earth serve him; he sinkes the deepe where harmless fish monastique silence keepe, who (were death dead) by roes of living sand might spunge that element and make it land.” —John Donne, “Elegie on Mistris Bulstrode” John Donne reminds us of a natural fact that most of us would rather forget: the...
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well. And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...
In this rich and dense book, Michael Allen Gillespie is self-consciously trying to correct the “standard” understanding of the origin of modernity. Rather than being the “victory of secularism,” modernity, he says, is a series of attempts to grapple with fundamental theological issues: the realities of God, man, and nature, and, in particular, how meaningfully...
“I wanna go back and do it all over But I can’t go back I know I wanna go back ’cause I’m feeling so much older But I can’t go back I know” —Popular song by Eddie Money (1986, CBS Inc.) Mostly we take space for granted so long as we have enough of it....
For several years now a heated debate has been going on over Western civilization and humanities requirements at some distinguished universities, most notably Stanford. The debate has brought up the question of a justification—or lack thereof—for forcing students into a sequence of courses devoted exclusively to Western thought. It has been argued, correctly, that thinkers...
This book is a collection of largely reprinted material (with revisions in some cases) and a couple of original essays. Its nine chapters cover (according to section titles) “the Catholic human rights revolution,” “peace and economy, again,” and “the life of the mind.” The expected repetitions are sometimes distracting if one reads the book straight...
Barely a week after, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ronald Reagan showed up in London to deliver himself of some post-presidential opinions. As the nation’s newest elder statesman, Mr. Reagan received international headlines for his speech, which turned out to be a long variation on his best-known line from Death Valley Days: progress is our most...
Ever since human societies became a clear and definite field of inquiry, which for Westerners means ever since Greek antiquity, current wisdom holds that the best of imperfect, nonutopian—i.e., viable—human societies have always been those in which predominated what came to be dubbed a “middle class.” Though commonly used, the content of the term remains...
The Post’s weekly circulationnreached one million in 1908 andnclimbed to nearly three million in thenlate 1920’s, when the average numbernof pages in a single issue burgeoned tontwo hundred. (The Post’s readership,nas Cohn rightly adds, was probablynthree to four times larger than thennumber of sold copies. In the agenbefore radio, and particularly duringnthe Depression, it is...
Liberalism is an increasingly organized, coordinated, and aggressive assault upon human society, even the human race. Its grotesquely perverted, officially imposed, and relentlessly enforced understanding of humanity and what it means to be a human being has sundered over the past half-century the historical connections between traditional societies and contemporary ones to the extent that...
In the realm of the spirit, there are few prospects more terrifying than meeting God—the Father, the Creator, the unconditioned Absolute Whose essence is His existence. Even Moses, the appointed mediator for his people, could not view God face to face; so God granted him a burning bush as an icon. God’s spirit or shadow...
Even if I had done all the things the prosecution says I did, I would still not be guilty of any crime, because I am fighting against colonialism. We have heard such arguments in recent years from a variety of sources: IRA bombers, African National Congress supporters (bishops and necklacers), and Marxist rebels all over...
Where does man fit into nature? What is his response to the created universe? Lynn White has argued that the Christian position is at the very heart of the environmental crisis. He, and others, see the biblical view of the dominion of man over nature as being responsible for our misuse of our natural resources....
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,...
The New York Post‘s editorial page has been one of the few bright spots in the City of Dreadful Night. Generally a steamy tabloid in its news coverage, the Post has nevertheless offered thoughtful and informed editorials and Commentary of a mainstream conservative orientation under its editorial page editor, neoconservative Eric Breindel, and his deputy,...
You could say Parag Khanna is the quintessential “Davos Man.” This silver spoon globe-trotter, a specialist in globalization, wants to change the world forever, openly advocating a mix-and-match “Civilization 3.0” under a decentralized world government. And he couldn’t care less how you feel about it. The term “Davos Man” was coined by Harvard political scientist...
to apologize for chief of staffrnRene Emilio Ponce, dismissing thernmurders as a sort of forgivablerncorporate glitch, like runningrnout of Xerox toner. “Managementrncontrol problems can exist inrnthese kinds of situations,” hernsaid.rnDiscussing the wider problem of staternviolence and repression in El Salvador,rnWalker was remarkably circumspect.rn”I’m not condoning it, but in times likernthis of great emotion and great...
Since the 60’s, liberals have been talking about “victimless crimes,” offenses that are prosecutable by law but that liberals claim “hurt no one.” Prominent among these were homosexual encounters, which over the next several decades were decriminalized by most states and eventually recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as acts of love, and finally conjugal...
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
“[After creating man] He immediately created other animals besides. God’s first blunder: Man didn’t find the animals amusing – he dominated them and didn’t even want to be an ‘animal.'” -Friedrich Nietzsche Bernard E. Rollin: Animal Rights and Human Morality; Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. Mary Midgley: Animals and Why They Matter; University ofGeorgia...
“All the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” —Acts 17:21 To some, Jordan Peterson is a breath of fresh air. To others, a guru. Many find him and his ideas to be dangerous. Still others see him as a...
In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.” We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...
The familiar lane is rutted with two deep truck tracks. “This always happens when it rains,” I think, and worry about getting stuck until I remember that the rain was two days ago and the ruts would have hardened by now, forming a two-lane trail to the farmhouse, Grandma’s house, “Grandma in the country.” Grandma...
Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5. This unprecedented change should then accelerate: By 2050, old people are...
From the October 2016 issue of Chronicles. Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5. This unprecedented change should...
Just after receiving an invitation from the editor of Chronicles to write about the college humanities curriculum, I received a letter from a friend and ally in education reform. It expressed alarm that “I had gone over to the other side”—an opinion that started, according to his letter, when I declined to label myself a...
“Dangers by being despised grow great.” —Edmund Burke Although preelection polls indicated that likely voters would favor candidates who supported immigration control, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot did not consider the issue worth mentioning during the recent presidential contest. But if our leaders wish the “i” word would go away, in the future...
It was 1936 and the Depression still held America in its grip. Few doubted that a new European war was coming, and Japan and China had been fighting in the East for years. Most Americans were opposed to participating in another futile European war. The President had begun his successful campaign for the White House...
On the morning of July 13, 1985, as I noted in my journal, I woke with an exceptionally clear recollection of a dream. In it my wife, Elizabeth, and I were in a high-ceilinged Victorian room with brown walls fashioned of rotating metallic discs. From there, we moved outside onto New York City’s Park Avenue,...
We know that nothing in this world stays the same. What we do not know is how or why it doesn’t. Probably, this is because we do not need to know. After five or six years in western Wyoming, in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, I recognized what seemed a stable weather pattern. Summers...
The halls and vast columned spaces of the St. Scholastica convent in Atchison, Kansas, are dark and empty now. The sisters who filled these buildings with busy religious life for several generations are dead or departed into the secular world with the virtual demise of convent life as a result of Vatican II. I talk...
One can safely claim that Leo Strauss was an enigmatic man, since he prided himself on being enigmatic. He raised the art of double-talk to the dignity of a requisite for any serious philosophizing: For him, it took stupidity or insignificance for a (self-proclaimed) philosopher to be able to afford to write or speak in...
To the modern mind, religion and magic are related. Both are based on superstition, and both have been proved false by science. C.S. Lewis thought otherwise: Magic is more closely related to science. Both function as alternatives to religion, both lack skepticism, and, most importantly, both desire to control the world. Science, not religion, is...
Democracy has meant so many things over the past 2,500 years that it is really impossible to make any comprehensive statement about it that applies to all of its usages. The historical record shows that what people called democratic government and democratic society existed for millennia before the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the...
From the July 1988 issue of Chronicles. If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no...
signified, aggressor and vietim, ethnie cleanser and ethnicallyrncleansed, eventnally eliminates the creator and—nltimately—rnthe subject, leaving nothing but the subject’s “signature,” in thernform of bomb craters if need be.rnThis is the “culture” of the artificial world, of post-historical,rntechnological man who has lost his bond with nature, surroundedrnby artificial reality and permeated by it. The “Jamies”rnof this...
On April 10 of last year, the European Patent Office quietly awarded a patent to Michigan State University (MSU) for “euthanasia solutions which use the anesthetic gammahydroxy-butramide (embutramide) as a basis for formulating the composition.” On the surface, the event was not out of the ordinary. In the abstract of the public document, the new...
If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no matter what their major. This spring of...
Nothing has pushed forward cultural life as much as the invention of printing, nor has anything contributed more to its democratization. From Gutenberg’s time until today, the book has been the best propeller and depository of knowledge, as well as an irreplaceable source of pleasure. However, to many, its future is uncertain. I recall a...
“You only have I known among all the families of the earth.” —Amos 3:2 The early chapters of the Bible present two major stories of judgment: the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The first, the story of the dramatic “liquidation” of the vast majority of the human race, has no parallel in recorded history,...
For more than a decade now, Christopher Norris has been writing clear and informed discussions of where deconstruction and other versions of critical theory in the humanities are headed. The clarity of his accounts has been a public service, since few of the philosophers and literary and cultural theorists he discusses write clearly. Stanley Corngold...
Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their...
Three days before the world “changed forever,” U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson tried to put a pretty face on a lackluster summit that had just ended in Durban, South Africa. The nine-day conference, designed to address “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” was doomed when the United States and Israel withdrew over objections...
A few years ago I found myself in the belly of the beast. To be more accurate, I was actually in the appendix of the beast, the Department of Education, giving a paper on curriculum reform. Secretary Bennett, who preceded me, spoke with his accustomed exuberance of the then current crisis in the humanities and...
It’s hard to know whether the dirty bomb the Washington Post detonated two months before the Virginia gubernatorial election will affect the outcome of the race. The Post dropped it August 30, instead of October 10 or 15, when it would have done maximum damage to its target, Republican Bob McDonnell. Other issues, such as...
“The trowel in hand and the gun rather easy in the holster” —Nehemiah, according to T.S. Eliot “Say you got two Gucci jackets, you hock one and you get yourself a gat.” —The “Bad” News Bible Jesus, contemplating His departure from this world, instructed His disciples to arm themselves, and, ever since, Christians enrolled in...
There are whole afternoons when a part of me wishes I had paid more attention in Bio 100 because then I might have ended up in cancer research, where being on the cutting edge makes sense. But for better or worse, I settled on literary criticism, a “discipline” that wears inverted commas around its neck...
Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post op-ed calling for Americans to put an end to our new post-truth society might have been laudable. Unfortunately for her, she fails to realize that her piece is a fine example of politically-biased, mainstream media spin-doctoring. Furthermore, Rubin’s piece demonstrates that when either side pretends that one party or one ideology...
In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver explains different types of argumentation. The most effective type is the argument from definition, which forces one’s attention on values and demands either assent or rejection of those values. In Lincoln’s arguments on slavery, to follow Weaver’s example, the Negro was either a man or not...