Humanity’s ongoing plastic saga suggests that mass production and mass disposability—the same process that replaces fabrication and craftsmanship with production—also reduces our ability to make ourselves, that is, to reproduce.
For the first time in many decades, German politicians must learn to think, rather than feel— and to assert Germany’s vital national interests.
Our dreary present, in its moralizing arrogance, believes it can judge countless generations of our ancestors, while refusing to even try and grasp the spiritual richness of our past.
Contrary to what many Western journalists and politicians persistently assume, there exists little continuity between Imperial Russia and the Soviet regime, just as there was no ideological or political identity between pre-war France and the Vichy regime.
Whether it is the threat of being canceled or anxious concerns that we’ll lose out in the meritocratic race for success, we’re more and more enslaved and less and less free. We’ve lost sight of the true sources of freedom, which come not from permission but from commitment.
It is spurious to insist, as many do, on a contradiction between conceiving of Greek independence through a yearning for the Byzantine past, on the one hand, and the romantic-nationalist lionizing of ancient Hellas, on the other.
Western political philosophy focuses on inherent features of man, and so Europeans were able to build a system which recognises and respects them. It is arguably the best system in the world, which is evidenced by the success of the countries that adopted it. It safeguards everything we value, and we should do everything to preserve it.
If journalism helped Scruton to synthesise ideas in a single thought, it also displayed the rich literary gifts which first brought him to the attention of the British public in the 1970s. For him, journalism was much more than conveying information, news, or opinion. It was an attempt to stir the imagination of the reader so that the ‘unfashionable opinion’ being expressed might become theirs.
Francis Bacon was the talisman of Renaissance science, producing an inductive philosophy which he advanced with all the zeal of a religious convert. But as far as he was concerned, promoting such methods required no actual conversion from the Christian beliefs which prevailed in his day.
Eurasianism, with its glorification of the Mongol Golden Horde and eastward orientation, tends to divorce Russia from its European heritage, a divorce that is incompatible with any drawing closer to Ukraine.
Geography and natural resources will motivate political conflict, but identity and national construction will determine what social cleavages can be exploited by local and foreign agents in that conflict.
The notion that there are limits to our growth is holding the West in a psychological stranglehold. Whereas other civilizations are thriving, the West suffers from a weariness that stifles any belief in further progress. This weariness has had a name for almost 2,000 years: Acedia.
The idea of motherlessness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s Brave New World may help us understand our own age, in which state encroachment and market forces work together for the abolition of motherhood.
World order will tend to follow its own momentum. Rivals to U.S. hegemony like China do not, therefore, represent an alternative world-order, but an alternative bid for leadership over developing structures of biopolitical control.
Liberals like to claim that their political worldview is not even ideological, but simply what happens when kindness and common sense are allowed to prevail over dogmatism, tyranny, and impractical forms of political romance. But is liberalism, the ruling philosophy of our modern world, really so immune from the utopian temptation?
It is an irony that the regimes of godless Communists and imperial thugs must preserve the corpses of their revolutionary leaders, made incorruptible by enormous amounts of money, for their subjects to worship.
The concept of ‘dwelling’ serves as a source for our pre-political loyalties and these loyalties allow a sense of the
Organic association and the principle of subsidiarity are the rescue of nations. They allow for the political articulation of common roots without alienating local cultural differentiation. They also permit overarching identities to be honored along with overlapping ones. Keeping this principle in mind, we may trace the history of relations between Moscow and Kyiv with an eye to how it could have been, and may yet, be applied.
Terminal care no longer encourages us to balance the pursuit of treatment with emotional and spiritual support. Rather, the conversation turns continually back to, “What do we do next?” as though the body were a computer with a glitch in the programming. No heed is paid to the reality–that the time will come when we do nothing.
The first generation of human rights promulgation after World War II sought to guarantee freedoms to the individual against the state. Now, we are in a situation where we are suppressing other rights, such as the right to freedom of expression, in the name of the “right to a safe environment.”
The life of the mind is fundamentally dangerous when divorced from the world. Indeed, intellectuals have a moral duty to seek out ways of encountering reality—the thing out there—if they are to avoid becoming a tremendous nuisance to others, a trait so common among their kind.
While Charles’ Centennial did not feature ritual obeisances by the successors of those who so cruelly wronged him and all whom he loved, one may hope for something different from the quasqui- or sesquicentennials. It may be that young people living today, by taking to heart the lessons he taught by his life and sacrifice, shall live in a world where this injustice is at last put to rest.
Pilgrims came because Blessed Karl of Austria lived those virtues and qualities contemporary society longs to see in its leaders, in Church and State. He was a man of integrity, a ‘whole’ man; his inner and private life was the same as his public life. He believed in the virtue of duty: to be dutiful, even to the point of losing his country, his Empire, his worldly goods and ultimately his life, makes him a man worthy of admiration and imitation.
One of Christian theology’s most radical moments came early in its history. It happened through the person of St. Gregory
What many globalist idealists cannot accept is that it is in man’s nature to love more strongly according to proximity. There are bonds that run deeply within the human heart and mind and are the center of community and cultures.
Miguel de Cervantes presents us with the mirrored vices of savagery and civilization. Like Tacitus, he celebrates indigenous prerogative to resist foreign excess, even as he asserts the imperial principle.
More than 500 years ago Antoine Brumel wrote a 12-part Mass that allows us to experience the uninhibited spirituality of the pre-Reformation world of the early 16th century. Its construction from a tiny motif of Gregorian chant from the Easter Lauds is nothing less than awe-inspiring.
What the nine worthies provided was a thematically unified account, a sweeping narrative, from Homer through the Bible and into Christendom, which western Europeans could use to understand and in some wise enshrine the canon of their history. The question we may venture to ask, in whose answer we might come to understand our era and its place, is whether it is possible to discern modernity’s worthies.
The attendance of a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion during Holy Week has long been a staple of the educated bourgeoisie. But what once used to be a reverent experience, is in danger of becoming increasingly demystified. A plea for awe.
That is what the world is desperately yearning for, which is why people still flock to their churches to kneel down and kiss the Cross on Good Friday. Most may not fully understand why they are there, but they know that Christ did not give his life so that we would remain the same. He gave his life so that, having crucified the old self, the burden of bondage would be lifted forever.
When discouraged by events in the here and now, we should remember that “not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.”
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