The Idiots

Race, Nobility and Culture

(1) Discrimination should be on the basis of culture and not race. (2) No one has developed culture to a high degree by focusing on race. (3) No one has developed culture to a high degree by neglecting his heritage, which is partially racial. (4) The cultured man stands as a free man, subject to [...]

“Family Values”

Following on from the last post, traditional and humanist China was fixated on family values, to a level which most of us would find oppressive. The West no longer is, it seems. My wife and I married in our late twenties. Even as sexual mores were changing (and the birth rates falling) in the 70s, [...]

Secular Society: The Confucian Analogy

Not so long ago the intellectual consensus (for what it was worth) was that religion was doomed as societies modernised. That evidently seems to be untrue in some cases, not least the USA and now India. Now the reverse trope emanates from the religious right: that secular societies are doomed to extinction . I mean, [...]

Till the Longing is Less and the Good is Gone

Plato’s VIIth Letter, on Beauty “There is no writing of mine on this subject nor ever shall be. It is not capable of expression like other branches of study; but as the result of long intercourse and a common life spent upon the thing, a light is suddenly kindled as from a leaping spark, and [...]

Easy Game

We do not always know who is predator, who is prey and how to distinguish the two, or even if we should. It is all a game, we are told, and our chiefs, whether justices or executive officers, can only articulate the corporate good — to maximize profit. Corporations are thus not corporate as bodies, [...]

Peter Saint-Andre on Politics, Technology and Art

(1) Last May in your essay on “the Gathering Storm” you quoted Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” and provided a number of tips for surviving it, including exercising our right to speech, defense, privacy and association. A year has passed. Is there anything you would add or modify today [...]

One Glimpse

Hillel Halkin’s new book, Yehuda Halevi, is an exploration of the life and passions of this important Jewish figure of religious and philosophical significance. What this book tells us about the history of the medieval period in which he lived in Spain, however, is interesting in and of itself, and it is especially provocative in [...]

Definitions of Terms Political

In general, these definitions are suggestive and mechanistic, meaning that all actors and their actions can be described with respect to a rational choice model and without any necessary appeal to outside or irrational forces. Political Union A group of people who recognize an authority or authorities, which can commit internal and external acts of [...]

A Weak People

Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal. Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would [...]

“Black Mass” Book Review

John Gray is a former professor of philosophy at Oxford and the LSE, and not to be confused with the pop psychology author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In 2007 he published one of the most thought provoking intellectual works of the past decade. The title derives from the fact that [...]