It has become hackneyed to say, like Ivan Karamazov, that without God everything is permitted. And though it is rather simplistic and question-begging, this statement comprehends some significant and enduring problems. One of them is that it is extremely difficult, in the effectively post-Christian ...
If you want to understand politics, it is instructive to overcome the common prejudice against negative feelings—enmity, hatred, contempt, envy, resentment, and others—because though often concealed by people’s moral delusions and self-serving social games, they are constitutive of political ...
In recent columns I’ve argued that Steven Pinker, Kevin Williamson, and others are terribly wrong to insist that material progress entails a superior form of life. For our problem today is that we Americans are so devoted to work and consumption that we don’t know how to live. We talk about GDP ...
It is often said that what is most unique about Western civilization derives from Athens and Jerusalem, the former city representing Greek philosophy and the latter Judeo-Christian values. This is somewhat simplistic, to be sure, and even more so, perhaps, is the concept of Judeo-Christianity. ...
“Things are in the saddle,/And ride mankind.” —Emerson Last week National Review published an unintentionally funny bit of sophistry by Kevin Williamson. “The division of labor is the meaning of life,” the article begins, and lest anybody should be confused, Williamson explains: I ...
The general method, or rather hustle, of the Confidence Man Steven Pinker is to use evidence of greater material well-being to justify the value judgment that human life has never been better. Like everyone, I am all for material progress, but it should be known that, besides using dubious ...
Man is an animal who gets lost in his own ideas, rosy abstractions obscuring the hard realities he’d do better to behold. Consider multiculturalism, that mad fantasy. Different groups, we are to believe, can all flourish together provided they work hard, follow the law, be good neighbors, and so ...
According to journalist Paul Brian, [Brent] Tarrant’s perceptions and actions are the outgrowth of years of rhetoric that’s portrayed immigrants as “invaders” and the paranoiac tendency to point to numerically small minority communities with high birthrates as somehow to blame for ...
The neoconservative movement has always been more of an alternative left than a school of conservatism proper. Hence the right’s main enemy has long been not the left, but the phony, neoconservative right. For the right cannot realize conservative values—nationalist economics, immigration ...
On Wednesday, The Washington Examiner published an op-ed by Kimberly Ross, “No sacred cows: Don’t tolerate Tucker Carlson’s indefensible words just because he’s conservative.” Ross starts off on a reasonable note: Outrage mobs are nothing new and have grown in popularity as the ...
