“Like the ancients, we experience far more than we understand”
…we denizens of the third millennium ce make constant recourse to specialists whose art has no...
Tag Archives: Culture
“In recent years, our society, and our college campuses, have been infused by an approach to identity politics that…seems to be struggling with…tension of humility and arrogance”
As we learn about ourselves and one another through talking and listening and being...
“…many things…fall in and out of fashion for reasons that have more to do with fashion than with reason”
Surely many things, including bikes, fall in and out of fashion for reasons that...
“Cultural blind spots are the inevitable consequence of transitioning from one culture to another”
Obituaries are commemorative totems for the natives and educational tools for immigrants. The native...
“I never imagined that the Baptists I knew in my youth would come to seem mellow, almost slackers by comparison”
I’ve talked to people who say they’ve happily dispensed with God, and don’t even...
“…recognizing that culture shapes behavior and that moral frameworks matter doesn’t require thundering denunciations of the moral choices of the poor”
…when you have a cultural earthquake that makes society dramatically more permissive and you...
“In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter”
…a complacent humanist is a humanist who has not read his books closely, since...
“…there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life”
Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for...
“The new devices do not in themselves authorize a revision of the standards of evidence and argument and style that we championed in the old devices”
Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag...
“A culture is an internecine contest between alternative conceptions of the human. Which culture is free of contradictions between first principles?”
A culture is an internecine contest between alternative conceptions of the human. Which culture...