In a post from January called Degeneracy Pressure, I remarked on the similarities between a collapsing star and a collapsing civilization. In both cases the differentiated parts of the system that once created stabilizing and uplifting forces have been transformed, by an irresistible alchemy, into a homogeneous, inert mass that exerts a crushing gravitational pressure. […]
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]
James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]
January 16, 2020 – 5:59 pm
Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death […]
November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia: I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that […]
February 8, 2019 – 9:52 pm
In my previous post I expressed qualified approval for Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Some commenters took me to task for this, because hey, we’re still doomed. They’re right, we probably are. And make no mistake, there’s plenty for a conservative, let alone a reactionary, not to like about Donald Trump, and about the […]
Jonah Goldberg has a new book out, called The Suicide of the West. (I don’t know why he felt he had to swipe the title of James Burnham’s monumental assault upon the modern liberal order, but it would’ve been nice if he hadn’t.) I haven’t read the book, but I know Jonah Goldberg’s oeuvre well […]
November 8, 2016 – 1:51 pm
I have noted often in these pages that in the absence of a natural and organic social framework, order must be imposed artificially from the “top down”. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2014 post, The Death of Culture: To create the new metaculture, muticulturalism cannot not add cultures together, due to the […]
In San Jose last night, supporters of Donald Trump were assaulted by an angry mob as they left a campaign rally. Nobody should be surprised by this. It is all a perfectly conformant and predictable manifestation of the West’s rapidly advancing social and political disease. It will continue to get worse, probably much more quickly […]
While taking a three-mile constitutional this afternoon (we of the American Right never, of course, forget the importance of constitutionals), I had a listen to John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb podcast. It was a particularly good one, with fine segments on immigration, automation, and social engineering. You can listen to it here, or read it […]
Our recent post, Douthat and Reaction, featured a link to a video clip of a young woman disrupting a speaking event at the University of Massachusetts. She is seen flailing her arms and shouting obscenities — in short, having a child’s temper-tantrum. The video clip has gone “viral”, and its star has been the object […]
January 10, 2016 – 12:46 pm
In a post a few months ago, while developing a metaphor involving collapsing stars, I commented on the vulnerabilities of the load-bearing structures that support a civilization’s weight: Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ”˜memetic’ ”” an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared […]
October 27, 2015 – 8:57 pm
Making the rounds today (hat-tips to, among others, Bill Vallicella and our commenter Whitewall) is a jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson, who has made these lamentations his métier in recent years. In this one, he mourns in particular the lost virtues of the West: the qualities that made our civilization shine so brightly, that gave […]
October 26, 2015 – 10:20 pm
The modern attitude places the burden of proof upon every aspect of traditional life. All is disposable unless proven necessary, including even the axioms upon which such proof depends. What vessel could contain this universal acid?
In a response to our recent post on the entropic influence of the political Left, commenter ‘Epicaric’ wrote: It is my impression … that these forces have accelerated of late, shedding its once linear progression for a pace far more geometric in nature. This is entirely ‘lawful’, and is exactly what we should expect. All […]
January 21, 2015 – 2:47 pm
I hope you will forgive me for a series of nested self-quotes in this post. Back in November, I posted a little item in which I quoted this, from an even earlier post: The universal acid of radical skepticism having nearly completed its work, all transcendent values have now been dissolved — and if all […]
November 29, 2014 – 11:54 pm
In a post the other day I wrote: The universal acid of radical skepticism having nearly completed its work, all transcendent values have now been dissolved — and if all that once was sacred is now remembered at all, is only to be mocked and scorned. Nietzsche saw this coming: “the total eclipse of all […]
November 26, 2014 – 1:42 am
By now even the most rose-bespectacled Pollyannas among you (you know who you are) must be noticing that things are getting a little, um, frayed. As I write, civil order is fracturing, with impressive coordination, all over the country. Last night an American city was sacked by barbarians — looted, pillaged, and burned as the […]
February 1, 2014 – 10:59 pm
Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying […]
November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm
Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals. This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation […]
September 1, 2008 – 10:51 pm
There is an organization, which I expect most of you have heard of by now, called “the The Brights“. It is dedicated to the promotion of what it calls a “naturalistic worldview”, which it defines as being free of “supernatural and mystical elements”. The name, I think, is exceedingly unfortunate; it seems smug and pollyanna-ish, […]
December 5, 2007 – 12:58 am
In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about […]
August 4, 2017 – 12:54 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, we have an essay by David Gelernter on the “Resistance” to Donald Trump, a term embraced even by some “conservatives”. We read: I’d love for him to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative […]
November 15, 2016 – 12:00 pm
I (and many others) have written often about the obvious religiosity of Progressivism, and about its being, quite plainly and transparently, a secular continuation and direct descendant of the Puritan “mission into the wilderness”. A particularly instructive aspect of this atheistic quest for holiness and salvation is the patently crypto-religious “climate-change” crusade. Early last year, […]
I’m off to Vienna later this week; it seems timely. After the Turks were driven back from the heart of Europe, progressive modernism gradually expanded its range. The Sublime Porte’s senescence deepened — the shrinking Ottoman Empire began to be known as “the sick man of Europe” — and finally the unthinkable happened: the last […]
November 3, 2015 – 12:12 pm
Following on our previous post, I”d be remiss not to bring to your attention a white-paper from the French-based Société de Calcul Mathématique, which specializes in complex mathematical modeling, on the “climate change” cryptoreligion. In the paper’s summary, we read: All public policies, in France, Europe and throughout the world, find their origin and inspiration […]
January 27, 2015 – 1:36 pm
In a post written earlier this month, after a conversation about global warming with an intelligent and well-educated friend, I remarked on the similarity between secular environmentalism and religion: I was struck once again by the clarity with which global-warmism reveals itself as a secular repurposing of the religious impulse — a deep and universal […]
January 3, 2015 – 12:59 am
The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or […]