Tagged: Progress

Convenience vs. Life

A map must be read, which is to say it must be deciphered, thought through, examined and understood. Digital navigation is not a replacement for the map; it is a replacement for the map reader, i.e., for the mind’s processes of absorbing and contextualizing information. Calculation is a difficult skill which must be studied as a child, and then practiced regularly for years...

Living Against the Age

He sees that something may bring tangible benefits and boons, and yet lead to decay and deterioration in the long run — and he is therefore eager to retain at all costs the vantage point needed to discern the difference between short and long. He is suspicious of everyone inclined to speak of certain positive conditions arising in our times (such as the...

Where We Are Headed (As If You Didn’t Know)

The likelihood that the current pandemic was manufactured in a laboratory, by researchers working under totalitarian rulers but funded by tax dollars from the supposed vanguard of the free world, is a neat little reminder of what should be glaringly obvious to every thinking person in the modern world at all times: We are going to annihilate ourselves with progress. This is not...

Conservatives and Radicals

A conservative is a person who knows, and never allows himself to forget, that all humans live in the fog, straining to see beyond their immediate surroundings, and therefore always susceptible to the error of assuming that the world within their sight and reach is more real, more essential, than whatever might lie beyond. A radical, also known these days as an activist...

On Our Moral Certainties

Because we live in our society, in our time, we cannot avoid exposure to the dominant moral atmosphere and the tenor of discourse around us. Growing up in a peculiar kind of social environment, the things that are considered “normal” in that environment inevitably come to feel normal to us too — and that includes the things about which we have reservations, or...