“The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty.”

Sam Harris

Public intellectuals should be humble, open, erudite, and perhaps even witty, but more important than all of these, they should be intellectually honest. That might strike one as banal. Of course they shouldn’t lie. But intellectual honesty is not a simple abstention from mendacities; it is also a positive commitment to telling the truth, to the best of one’s ability, about controversial and even taboo topics.

For most of human history and still in many countries today, telling the truth could…

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— -William Faulkner

A good political ideology must be concordant with human nature. Ideologies that are not, however inspiring they might sound, will inevitably lead to frustration and ultimately to disillusionment. I believe that conservatism is the political ideology that is the most consistent with human nature. And therefore, I am a conservative.

The fundamental premise, as I see it, of conservatism is original sin. Humans are flawed, fallible, limited creatures. For thinkers in the Christian tradition, original sin was a separation from God and…

The philosopher Kate Manne forwarded the concept “himpathy,” or the “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.” In this short essay, I wish to examine this concept critically, unsympathetically, but fair-mindedly.

There are two variants of the notion of “himpathy,” one (the strong version) which I think is demonstrably false, and the other (the weaker version) which I think is partially correct but poorly named and quite misleading. The strong version (call it himpathy SV), which I don’t think Manne would necessarily endorse…

“It’s not unusual to be a conservative. But it is unusual to be an intellectual conservative.”

— Roger Scruton

I am a conservative. And although there is nothing unusual about being conservative, I hope there is something unusual enough about my particular path to conservatism that it will prove edifying.

For most of my life, I was a member of the left. I voted for Democrats in every election. But around 2015, I started to change. (The left started to change as well.) I became much more skeptical of the left, especially its increasing embrace of woke ideas…

“In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.”

—Rob Henderson

A number of thinkers in recent years have applied signaling theory to explain the often bizarre beliefs of educated elites in the West. In this short piece, I’d like to explore this application, focusing especially on what Rob Henderson has called “luxury beliefs.”

Before proceeding, it’s worth noting that analyzing some belief or another as a costly signal does not mean that the believer is mistaken, lying, or otherwise confused about the contents of his…

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since at least the Enlightenment, when religious skepticism became widespread among the educated, philosophers have tried to provide an answer for why people believe. Many such theories have been simplistic and dismissive. For example, Freud posited that religious belief was related to family dynamics and one’s relationship with one’s father as well as a delusional way to alleviate the fear of death. Many people who disdain religion find some variant of the “delusion” hypothesis appealing, probably more because it is insulting…

“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”

Albert Camus.

Many liberals, progressives, and other cosmopolitans view nationalism as a moral failure, a manifestation of human barbarism and a confession of human flaws and fallibility that should, as soon as possible, be discarded for a broader, less divisive international order. I strongly disagree. Nationalism, of course, is not without costs. However, on balance, it is clearly the…

Many thinkers have profitably compared wokism to a religion. Here, I want to drill into this comparison by looking at the way wokism resembles a certain strand of apocalyptic thinking and then examine now Nietzsche’s analysis of the triumph of Christianity in “The Genealogy of Morals” might explain the popularity of such an ideology, concluding by noting that Nietzsche’s explanation is only partial and that signaling and justificatory functions are also important to consider.

In simplest form, apocalypticism is the view that the end of the familiar world is imminent. Often, apocalyptic believers assumed this end would be…