The deep-rooted conviction that men have lived for centuries under the obscurantist illusion that the Earth was flat is simply an invention of modernity.
One can pour money into a village, but if there are simply no businesses on which to spend it, those who receive that money will quickly use it to buy goods and services at a nearby city. Similarly, politics can promote values, but if we lack the communal context in which to exercise these and in which these might be passed on, nothing will come of it. Like rain on concrete, it may get the ground wet, but nothing will grow.
The Twelvetide is an open gate to benevolent magic, to mages and faeries, a time in which we may recognize what is exalted, as the wise men did, by exchanging gifts and thereby seeing exaltation in each other.
Never has libertarianism, a notoriously loud creed, been so hushed in its concern for liberty.
This is true individuality and true solidarity: We are all free lords subject to no one, yet also dutiful servants subject to everyone. Why? Because of the equal status of all human beings before God. We are all unworthy sinners, yet we are all worthy of salvation through trust in God. Thus, regardless of our earthly status, we all possess equal and inviolable dignity as individuals. And we are all called to solidarity in service to others.
Cancelled for denouncing Arab anti-Semitism, Bensoussan’s publicized trial has crystallized a larger malady that ails France’s intellectual life.
If conservatives seek to uphold the law of the home, it is because they consider it neither feasible nor desirable to transcend it. Hence, they defend the local over the universal and the familiar over the anonymous. Their attachment to their country is founded on reverence and fidelity to that place which made them, and whose geography, law and culture constitutes the fabric of their identity and the object of their true affection.
We should be open to receiving wholeness and beauty, open to the transcendent as it manifests in the bizarre fact of harmony, the startling presence of relationship. In this way we may manifest our oikos in all its coherence, its unity, and avoid developing the kind of resentment that would have us go about compulsively deconstructing our neighbor’s identity.
Any state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself. No state can survive if it consciously chooses to ignore these prerequisites. For the Serbs, the basis of their political life can only be found in the teachings of St. Sava.
It is easy to see why short-term jobs are conquering the market. They allow people to experience the freedom and moral comfort of a small business, something far more traditional than any nine-to-five job. They are also the natural response to our age of the internet and globalisation, ever-changing circumstances, and the over-bureaucratised corporate cultures.
By insisting on cultural neutrality, by insisting that it merely baby-proofs every hard edge and socket, the new mentality rejects any account of the anatomy of the human mind. It does not care, or does not know how to care, whether aspects of our lives distort our nature.
The New Puritans feign an aversion to pride and idols only insofar as it serves their political ends. They should be rejected as menacing imposters. But we should also reject a more sincere application of Puritan principles.
