I’ve published an analysis of the growing stupidity of Western public life at Crisis Magazine. The topic was the theme of a recent meeting of the New York meetup group.
Basically, I say the problem is the technological attitude toward human life. If thought is reduced to pure formal expertise and made a sort of industrial process it stops being thought. The more impressively it’s organized, the less like thought it becomes.
I’ve got another column up at Catholic World Report that may be of interest. Basically it says we live in a radically technocratic world and have to drop out from it in important ways. Otherwise all the talk of a “New Evangelization” won’t go anywhere because we won’t have anything to offer.
I have a short and snappy piece up at Crisis Magazine that discusses “gay marriage,” “woman priests,” and the New World Order. If that’s not enough to please everyone I don’t know what is.
I have a couple of pieces at Catholic websites that might be of interest. At the Crisis website there’s something about Catholics and Cultural Assimilation, and at Catholic World Report I give some Tardy Reflections on the Election. In the first, I say the culture should assimilate to Catholics rather than the reverse. In the second I talk about the party that believes in nothing and the party that believes in Nothing, instead of talking about the stupid party and the evil party, but it comes to the same thing.
In accordance with our mission of rousing the broad masses and uniting them behind the black flag of reaction, here are a couple of pieces just published denouncing ’60s liberation as techno-servitude and noting that the state is always sacred, so why not have Christ the King?
It’s all one struggle! Anyway,
Not all at once, however:
My blog reposts a couple of comments in which I present an interpretation of Maistre in response to a libertarian who (not surprisingly) is shocked and puzzled by the Count’s emphasis on violence.
I have a piece by that name up at the Liberty Law Blog. The point of the piece is to state the differences among liberalism, libertarianism, and (social) conservatism, so that the last can be made a little more comprehensible to people interested in the law and sympathetic to libertarianism. It’s only 1500 words long, so I don’t present all considerations, but you have to start somewhere.
The question seems important, since where liberalism comes from affects how we should deal with it and where it is likely to go. Many right-wingers, for example, think of it as psychological or instrumental: people are liberals because they feel this way or that, or because they want to get money, power, status, or whatever. Such views suggest that liberalism need not be taken seriously on its own terms, and will disappear when events shift the balance of advantages or put people in a different mood.
My view is different. I see liberalism as conceptual, as a manifestation of a peculiarly modern (post-scientific revolution) way of making sense of reality. It’s the logical outcome of fundamental modern concepts, and will last and keep on developing on its own lines as long as modernity lasts. That’s why liberals not only believe that they are right, but that people who disagree with them are irrational, demonic, mentally ill, or whatever. That means liberalism is very durable, and we had better be prepared for a long battle fought at a very basic level. Continue reading
