An Afternoon with Michel Houellebecq
FROM THE FALL 2023 PRINT EDITION: Houellebecq is a dystopian visionary who has discovered that reality has overtaken him.
FROM THE FALL 2023 PRINT EDITION: Houellebecq is a dystopian visionary who has discovered that reality has overtaken him.
In stark contrast to the way Camus has been mis-portrayed by others, readers will encounter a heroic “committed opponent of conspiratorial thinking of all kinds.”
If we consider the origin myth of sumo, we may reflect on how the war between the celestial and earthly realms was tamed by the sport and turned into an arena structured by higher principles.
Liberalism leaves our cultural traditions and moral life at the mercy of whatever happens to result from the totality of individual human wills.
It is hard not to draw the conclusion that the observable obsessive impulse to destroy Pius’ reputation is driven more by ideology than by any objective historical inquiry.
Poles have learned the hard way that there are no holidays from history.
CBDC is a paradox: it is a money based solely on trust that is structurally set up to destroy that trust. If people lose trust in the currency, the government would lose any control it had over the economy.
Against the endless liberation of the individual and the atomization of society, conservatives must uphold a concept of man as part of society with a shared identity and a shared ethos.
We have not been gradually losing our rights, freedoms, and political power. In truth, we never really had them to begin with, for they were never grounded in true political authority.
The combination of continuity and change has always been central to the genius of coronations, reassuring us that the past is being honoured, yet reaffirming the new order of things.
Christ alone can rescue His Church, but we have ousted Him in a diabolic effort to divorce Bride from Bridegroom. Perhaps the sacred magic of Hermes Trismegistus is what’s needed to banish the black magic of Enlightened man.
The bullfight will long continue to fascinate, as well as shock, upset, and mesmerise. Hemingway wrote, “Anything capable of arousing passion in its favour will surely raise as much passion against it.”
The spirit of modern Western man is like a faulty pressure cooker that’s going to explode, and every attempt to fix the problem pushes him further into false and malignant solutions of individualism, statism, transhumanism, and all the deceitful promises of the technological age.
“Some have questioned the importance of remembering our painful history. To those who believe that the youth should not be burdened with the past, let me say: a nation without memory is like a ship without a rudder and compass.”
It seems to me that the paradigm of rationalism—with all its chaotic relationships, ugly architecture, shallow sentimentalism, fetishization of abstractions, legal positivism, and blindness to persons—to which the institutional Church has conceded so much moral territory, must be overcome if we are to recover the primacy of the mystical in the life of the Church.
The advent of scientific ‘progress’ and the marginalisation of the farming world have given the illusion that we can do without them. Climate change has put things back in their proper place, and we are seeing the return of rogations and processions in our countries.
Never in human history has it been easier and cheaper to amass an enormous personal library of the greatest literature produced by our civilization (and others)—and never, perhaps, has it been more important to do so.
FROM THE SUMMER 2023 PRINT EDITION: In Europe, populists were permanently marginalised—or so it was claimed by hostile observers. However, since pandemic policies ended, unresolved problems have returned to the forefront of political debate, giving a boost to right-wing populist parties everywhere.
The message Monteverdi wants to deliver is clear: “I master all techniques and styles, from the most learned ‘stile antico’ to the most modern styles.” Not surprisingly, a contemporary described him as “the greatest composer in Italy.” As far as I am concerned, he could have added: “of all time.”
We must rediscover the principles that—in as many forms as there are Western nations—founded each of our countries and the West as a whole.
Women are facing many forms of reprisals—including censorship, loss of employment opportunities, loss of income, deplatforming, and threats of legal action—simply for daring to question the transgender movement.
Under Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, the Francoist nobility was collectively singled out for extirpation, and its heads of family found themselves officially ‘disennobled.’