Well, August is over, Labor Day has come and gone (and with it the annual four-day gathering and concert series of the Shoal Survivors, the musical collective I’ve been a member of for a decade now), and I really should try to get this blog up and running again. I’ve been in a slump for too long now, and enough is enough. For today, I’ll link to two items that I think will be of interest.
The first is a fine essay by professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere, on seeing one’s nation through “alien eyes”. In this post he writes about an essay by “a Japanese gentleman who visited Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, and who was curious about Western civilization because his own civilization had undertaken to Westernize itself. He was an old man, a philosopher and student of history, and the Westernization of Japan filled his mind with doubt and dark foreboding.” This gentleman, in what today would be the darkest of heresies in the epicene and self-loathing West, writes about his dread of the accelerating Westernization of Japan, for the reason that cultures are not one-size-fits-all garments that any nation can simply slip on or off, but are, rather the natural expression of a people’s distinct and essential natures. One might say, as I argued here exactly nine years ago, that cultures are what Richard Dawkins called “extended phenotypes”, and that “the fashionable notion that “race is a social construct” probably has things exactly backwards.”
The second is a response at Substack by my friend, the philosopher William Vallicella, to a letter I had sent him a while back suggesting (as I have done many times in these pages) that the Enlightenment’s enshrinement of doubt as a supreme guiding principle has led us, centuries later, to cultural and civilizational disaster.
You can read Bill’s post here. I will be posting a response of my own, but not before I give it some thought.
Back soon.
3 Comments
Welcome back, Malcolm. Over the next two months we need all hands on deck.
I disagree. The Enlightenment was a product of the 18th Century. It was replaced in the 19th Century (at least on the Continent) by Romanticism, which rejected reason and science for emotion. Romanticism continues as the various leftist programs: various socialisms, fascism, naziism, communism, feminism, wokeism… It is these various “isms” that have destroyed modern culture.
PS. Romanticism is in the deep past, too, and we have progressed beyond Modernism and Post Modernism into who knows what.
bob,
No, I must stick to my guns here. I think the critical issue is that the relentless assault of radical doubt on the moral, categorical, and metaphysical foundations of Western life and thought created huge, aching voids — and because Nature abhors a vacuum, the evils you list came into existence to fill them.