In an unpublished book I have written which charts the evolution of Western Civilization from its roots in Ancient Greece, I spend a lengthy chapter citing the real-life results of the so-called Romantic Rebellion against the “restrictive” Rationalism of the Enlightenment. This may seem to have little relevance to our contemporary world but please bear …
Monthly Archives: July 2020
Education or Ideology?
At Stanford University in 1980 Jesse Jackson introduced the chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.” Over the last 60 years, based on the assumption that it has violated and oppressed both many of its own citizens as well as much of the “third world,” Western Civilization as a core requirement has …
July 22, 2020
Just a few examples of the crass immaturity and narrowness of vision to which I referred in my last entry: It has just been reported that Boston BLM activist Monica Cannon-Grant last week posted on Facebook a vicious diatribe against Republican Rayla Campbell who is challenging radical Leftist Ayanna Pressley for her seat in the …
The Devaluation of “Truth”
Romanticism’s disdain for what Blake termed “the realm of necessity” emerged naturally from the speculations of the philosophers of the 18th Century. Enlightenment thinkers had generally assumed the empirical world to be an accessible source of Objective Truth, but Emmanuel Kant [1724-1804] separated the Subject from the Object, distinguishing between noumena [things in themselves] and …
“Sensibility” Unleashed
How might the world look if denied the benefits of Saul’s reviled Structure, Efficiency and the Rule of Law? Might it not, in its inevitable dysfunction and deprivation, be one of endlessly contending factions impervious to the needs and rights of others? Might it not be the nightmarish world implied by the theories of de …
Through Rose-Colored Glasses
In the aforementioned Viewpoint discussion between Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia, the latter suggests that “progressivism” ultimately places its faith in the unsubstantiated and incredibly naive principle that if you’re nice to other people they will be nice to you. It’s clearly a reference to the sort of pseudo-scientific drivel served up by Saul, …
The Rule of Law
The disrespect for the Rule of Law so evident in the democracies of the West today is not a mere accident but rather the direct result of ideas that have been propagated by our “intellectuals” for over 200 years now. Blake and the Romantics saw emotion, intuition, imagination, as the keys to human fulfillment, those …
History Eradicated
2017 saw the publication of a typically “progressive” work inveighing against the victimization of Blacks by Whites. a work which simply ignores human history as an aspect of its narrative, a work predictably celebrated in The New York Times. In “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” Black sociologist and Baptist minister Michael …
Thank You, Candace
In a wonderful speech in late February before the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in Maryland, Candace Owens states that her three years of interacting with hysterical “woke” liberals has clearly revealed that the vast majority of them know absolutely nothing of human history, or at least of that portion of it which preceded 1776. …
White People Bad…Everyone Else, Good!
Daily we Canadians are reminded of the moral squalor of our past, of the fact that we occupy this land because our ancestors viciously wrested it from its innocent Indigenous owners. But Lawrence Keeley, in his 1997 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,” points out that only 13% of America’s Indigenous …