Everyone in America today—right, left, or middle, if there still is one—can agree that the explosive political response to Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented in American political history. Liberals’ clinically hysterical reaction to the President’s plans for The Wall, to the travel ban, to his response to the Charlottesville affair, and to his cancellation of...
When I was in Catholic high school, some 15 years ago, even as the last of the marble altars were being pulled out of America’s churches, the ornate wooden confessionals uprooted in favor of plywood-and-plexiglass “reconciliation rooms,” one devotional custom persisted from centuries before, in the undershirts and blouses of the Vinnics, Patricks, and Marias...
In January 1995, residents of the small town of Libby, Montana, received a surprising invitation. Proffered by federal authorities, it announced that meetings would be held on the 28th, simultaneously at Libby and 28 other locations throughout Montana and Idaho, to discuss something called the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Its purpose, they were...
“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...
“Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.” —Aristotle The claim to objectivity on the part of reviewers is, if not ill informed, precious. I make no claim to offer the one true reading of Edward O. Wilson’s autobiography. However, by my scheme of reckoning, he is one of the...
Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order? Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state. For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence. Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...
Archeofuturism, a concept that arose on the French New Right in the 1970s, charts a path toward a rebirth of tradition amid a future convulsed by technological change.
Conscience and its Enemies is a collection of Robert George’s recent writings for a general audience. In addition to the title topic, it includes chapters on the defense of natural marriage, the protection of life from conception to natural death, the nature of moral reasoning, and the need for limited government. Overall, the pieces in...
In his November 27 televised speech explaining his rationale for sending United States troops into the Balkans, President Bill Clinton said his goal is “preserving Bosnia as a single state.” Testifying three days later before the House National Security Committee, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said “only with peace does Bosnia have the chance to...
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats...
It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase “The New Criticism” by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and R.P. Blackmur. But actually, he was criticizing the critics...
Most readers upon seeing the title of this article likely thought, “Well duh.” However, The New York Times opinion page apparently needs a reminder of this basic fact of metaphysics, as philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell argues that this idea is “a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.” There is...
This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.” To do so could be a...
Dining out with my wife in a restaurant in Paris recently, I became aware of the well-dressed Frenchman seated with his wife two tables away from us listening in on our conversation. The table for two between us was unoccupied. “Where are you from?” he inquired, in excellent English, when he saw I had noticed....
Mongol airships fire disintegrator rays to destroy America. (Buck Rodgers, 2429 A.D., 2-9-1929, Roland N. Anderson Collection) [This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper...
Caroline Bird: The Good Years: Yours Life in the Twenty-First Century; E. P. Dutton; New York. Richard Louv: America II; Jeremy Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin; Los Angeles. There are some serious people in the United States today attempting to ensure that the next generation of Americans has a decent place to live. Unfortunately, none of their work...
Many years ago, on a train trip from New York City to Philadelphia, a friend (a city girl, actually) remarked to me, as we passed through the Jersey industrial swamps, that she would happily cancel the Industrial Revolution, supposing only that modern dental technique could be rescued for the benefit of a restored pastoral society....
NATO has undermined the security of its members and created enemies that, in turn, justify further NATO interference in an increasingly unstable “security environment.”
Since 1892, when the original text was composed, the Pledge of Allegiance has been revised three times. Viewed chronologically, the alterations appear to have aimed at a greater specificity, but also a wider and deeper self-assurance. The current text, dating from 1954, capitalizes “Nation” and adds “under God,” as if the editors (a committee, no...
“Human rights are not isolated, private, and ‘at war’ with each other,” explained Sue Ellen Browder, former journalist for Cosmopolitan and author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement. “Human rights are indivisible.” The occasion for Browder’s reflection was the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, a date...
A.I. Artificial Intelligence Produced by DreamWorks and Warner Bros. Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Ian Watson, based on a story by Brian Aldiss Released by Warner Bros. Sexy Beast Produced by Channel Four Films and Recorded Pictures Company Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures...
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a ...
Every year, the Christian calendar is more and more marginalized by anti-Christian “holidays” and commemorations. In 2013, the first week of Advent, by decree of President Obama and National Public Radio, was displaced by Nelson Mandela Week. Since we were only in December, I could not wait to see what our masters will pull out...
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had a rough time of it lately, and I won’t say they don’t deserve it. Barack Obama is their President, after all, when it comes to most political issues; for example, immigration and immigrants’ rights, tax policy, economic inequality, “social justice,” peaceful internationalism, and national healthcare. The exception,...
When we recall the great artists of the 19th century, perhaps the vibrant and theatrical images of Delacroix come to mind. Or do scenes of daring and struggle from Hugo flood our memory instead? Or the ebullient audacity of a Schumann song resonate in our ears? Perhaps all three, and more, for theirs was the...
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” —1 Corinthians 10:31 My father, God rest his soul, was very fond of Thai food, with its quickly sautéd noodles and peppery élan. Not far from his condominium in the Rossmore section of Los Angeles, there was a...
The president of a prominent liberal arts college recently conveyed to its philosophy department (and to other constituencies) that regulations may soon be in place which would influence, if not altogether control, the conferring of bachelor’s degrees. Mandated by the federal government, these “guidelines” would have a strongly utilitarian bias. However supportive this might be...
A little over 30 years ago, I was attending a conference in a faraway place when disaster struck. I became sick, really sick—the sort of illness where one can barely crawl out of bed, let alone attend conference sessions. Lacking care of any sort, I lay in bed for two days, waiting for some semblance...
At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
On June 30, the government of Israel committed an act of piracy when the Israeli Navy in international waters illegally boarded the Spirit of Humanity, kidnapped its 21-person crew from 11 countries, including former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, and confiscated the cargo of medical ...
3. Reason, Sentiment, and Tradition Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, palaeoconservatives might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality. Instead, they are more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition and for their rejection of the “science” of politics preached by the highly unscientific followers of Leo Strauss...
“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.” —Karl Marx After the Last Man is a short and dense book, consisting of a series of vignettes (excursus) ranging from a paragraph to a few pages in length on the contemporary technological system. Each excursus is...
The phrase human dignity is as ubiquitous today in enlightened global discourse as human rights. Indeed, the two are intimately connected, the first being regarded as a subset of the second, as in, “the right to human dignity.” But dignity in this context is used abstractly and in a universal sense, rather than concretely and...
The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over...
The problem of evil has confounded humans throughout history. Philosophers and theologians have perennially constructed systems and myths to assuage the perception of the contingency of life. Religious belief, at least in Western civilization, usually filled in the gaps between the “ought” and the “is” that conflicted in the minds of those affected by the...
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur: “The First See is judged by no one.” Thus reads Canon 1404 of the current Code of Canon Law of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, and Canon 1556 of the previous code. Romanus Pontifex a nemine iudicatur: “The Roman Pontiff is judged by no one.” That is Canon...
“Nature knows no equality.” —Luc de Varvenargues For about four years before the publication of The Bell Curve last fall, occasional news reports dribbled out tidbits of information about the book and its coauthor. The stories were often pegged to Charles Murray’s departure from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute in 1990 because of the institute’s discomfort...
Last year, when the Washington Post’s Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq, an anonymous contributor to the leftist web network Indymedia announced the sad news with the tasteless headline “WP Nazi columnist bites the Iraqi dust.” Word spread quickly, especially after Glenn Reynolds, the hawkish proprietor of the widely read InstaPundit.com, declared that “the Indymedia...
The phrase “America’s Christian Heritage” might irritate any hearers who do not want to be classed as members of the tribe that first received its name in Antioch (Acts 11:26). But wait: we recognize that one does not have to be a member of the family to be remembered in a will, nor be of...
“Without the spiritual rebirth no political changes will make people free. But the spiritual rebirth, a Christian rebirth, is the ascent of a free man, and not of Russian nationalism, the cult of homeland, fatherland, and one’s country.” -Mihajlo Mihajlov in “Some Timely Thoughts” (written in 1974 in response to Letter to the Soviet...
I want to talk to people who have been shaken out of themselves by art, who have heard a piece of Mozart’s Magic Flute reach out and grab them by the heart, who have seen the grave look on Flora’s face as she steps out of Botticelli’s Primavera the way the gods always do, lit...
“Parson,” wrote the Tory radical William Cobbett in an open letter to Thomas Malthus in 1819, “1 have, during my life, detested many men; but never any one so much as you.” Cobbett’s hatred of Malthus, the founder of modern population science, is comparable to the dislike that most conservatives feel toward him today, though...
“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.” —Daniel Webster In the spring of 1963, my sister and I were invited, along with my parents, to a dinner party given by White Russian friends at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan, whose tall mahogany-framed windows overlooked lower Central Park. ...
“The choice of a point of view is the initial act of culture.” —Ortega y Gasset Because I have spoken sharply to the general question of Federal support for arts and letters, and because my name is connected with certain facets of the public business, I receive through the mails a mass of publications designed...
Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly prominent presence in our lives, stirring both awe and apprehension.
The comic, as Flannery O’Connor said, is the reverse side of the terrible. I suppose the spectacle of 50 to 100 men from 20 to 70 years of age disguised in Wild Man and Coyote masks as they prance in a forest glade, beat drums, eat buffalo chili, and exorcise the demon spirits of their...
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a shadowy, parasitic negation that possesses no...