My wife and I are in Kaliningrad, Russia – in what the Russians call ‘Little Russia’ as opposed to ‘Big Russia’ – where the ‘Kant 300’ conference (commemorating the 300th birthday of this great thinker) has just ended. As philosophers would know, Enlightenment …
The Latent Fascism of Today’s Anti-Fascists
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
Simone WeilThe terms “fascist” and “fascism” are continuously bandied about today. But those who use these words most seem …
The delusion of having a meaningful job
I suspect Montaigne was being coy when he complained of the “wild and useless weeds” that would encroach on his mind in idleness. It is to those wild shoots that Montaigne owed his genre-defining essais, and thus his lasting influence. …
Ancient Political Advice for Today’s Rulers
It is probably the case that politicians who are encouraged to read the works of the ancient Greek thinker, Plato – particularly The Republic – to learn something there about the prerequisites for being able to govern appropriately and wisely, …
False Knowledge is Our Fool’s Gold
At the end of 2023, I was talking with a man who has a PhD in one of the hard sciences and happened to mention deaths from the experimental Covid injections. In surprise he responded, “Wait, people died from the …
The Four Sins of ‘Thawteffery’
The neologism thawteffery is for “thought F-ery.” F-ery connotes a short-run horizon, such as the election cycle. I pronounce it “thaw-tef-fery.”
Thawteffery is the wicked management of thought, election-to-election, by wicked people for wicked purposes. I speak of the wicked …
The lunacy of Child Liberation
Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, Mania, starts from the wild and wacky premise of a world in which “the last civil rights battle” is being fought against discrimination on the grounds of intelligence, and the “s-word” is as taboo there as …
Renaissance Man Reborn
Gone are the days of the Renaissance Man; The polymath ideal of humanism; Man is the center of the universe and he should embrace the search for all knowledge because man alone has the limitless capacity for development!
Alberti, the architect, …
Would Kant really support BLM?
Poor old Immanuel Kant, scourge of many an undergraduate essay crisis, whose 300th birthday fell this week. Was ever any other major intellectual figure put through so much painful contemporary “rethinking”?
According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, …
The enlightened case for being selfish
Ever since the events of October 7, the streets of American and Western cities are routinely filled with heated demonstrations. The vast majority of the people in attendance are usually not themselves citizens of Palestine or Israel, but locals whose …
A Coup Without Firing a Shot
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.
The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that …
We’ve Forgotten Kant’s Moral Lesson
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant – arguably the most important philosopher of the historical European Enlightenment – gave us what is known as a ‘deontological (duty-oriented)’ moral philosophy, as opposed to, for example, a ‘consequentialist’ variety, or one that …
The extinction of the political animal
For the past few years, scientists have warned that a human-driven mass extinction of animal species has begun. The focus falls mostly upon land-dwelling vertebrates, but fails to mention one critically endangered species: homo politicus, threatened on all sides by …
A Devil’s New American Lexicon
In 1942, C.S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape, a devil, mentored his nephew Wormwood on how to manage his patient, so as to serve their common spiritual master. Screwtape advised: “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally …
The Bison Advantage
They say that bison are the only animals that purposefully walk into a storm rather than drifting with the wind because they know that doing so will get them through it faster.
I often think about the decision I made …