The proverbial Martian would find contemporary discourse about race in the West peculiar, even paradoxical. On the one hand, many modern intellectuals insist that race is a pernicious reification of superficial human differences that has been decisively refuted by modern science. On the other hand, many of these same intellectuals…
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
Karl Marx
“But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle…One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”
Ibram X. Kendi
In a twitter exchange late in 2020…
“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…
“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…
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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
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…
