Category: Ideas and Reflections

Reflections On The New Tribalism

A Symptom.— Public shaming implies a character that is incapable of mercy, which implies a lack of empathy, which implies an inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, which implies seeing the other as specially separate and thus essentially unfamiliar. The inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, i.e., to see the subjectively unfamiliar as objectively familiar, indicates an uncivilized man....

Reflections on Appearances

The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...

Learning and Stereotypes

Any two objects seen from a great enough distance will look fundamentally similar. The closer we get, the more differences we will begin to discern. The same is true with mental distance. The unfamiliar tends to group itself together in our minds, naturally. As we get to know individual instances within the group, they separate themselves from this new generality in our minds, and we see….

What You Are Going To Do

We spend a lot of time (which is itself an illusion) hemming and hawing with mock-profundity about what we are going to do, as though we were making decisions, rather than merely waiting to do what we must do. We must either flow with the wave in which we inevitably find ourselves, or struggle to remain standing and resistant against its force. But...

Musings to Begin the New Year

Lost in the Cloud.— We are all, today, in all our endeavors, at the mercy of everything we ever did, everything we ever said, and everyone with whom we ever interacted in any way, at any time, under any circumstances. In practice, this means that standing apart from others, or disagreeing in any way with current moral or political orthodoxies, no longer merely...

Merry Christmas

It is typical these days, among those still sufficiently sentient and resistant to ideological indoctrination to have wayward thoughts, to wish others a Merry Christmas with a disclaimer to the effect that Christmases, at this historical moment, do not seem to offer much to be merry about. While I certainly sympathize with that mixed tone of well-wishing lamentation, I always try to remind...

Napoleon: My Review

Having now seen part of one of the trailers for Ridley Scott’s “epic” “historical” “biopic” Napoleon, and having been urged by no one to divulge my own impressions of this important cinematic event (i.e., box office smash), I feel that it is time at last to add my two cents — more than I would waste on watching a modern Hollywood movie —...

Race To The Bottom

The entire world is being taught today, from kindergarten through graduate school and throughout the popular media and the mainstream commentariat, that racism is specifically, endemically, and inescapably a white tendency; that is, a mental trait essentially characteristic of those who are born white….

Speech, Truth, Wisdom

You should believe most of what you say, but you need not say most of what you believe.

There is no rationale for deferring speech until you are absolutely certain of the truth of what you will say. Or rather, the only rationale for adopting such a policy is…

The Official Chatter

Let us list, with comments, a few terms that one cannot avoid hearing or reading persistently these days, at least to the extent that one’s mind has the misfortune of being within range of the popular media (in all its manifestations) and the headline-shouting world it both embodies and engenders. The far right. This expression has no determined meaning in modern discourse, beyond...