Tag: the Enlightenment

2,035 words

Modern people—particularly the university-educated, raised in predictable urban environments in relative comfort—live inside a powerful illusion: the belief that societies can change quickly.

We are surrounded by examples that condition us to think this way. Within a few decades, countries have gone from wretched poverty and primitive existence to rapid economic growth, and from illiteracy to seeming technical sophistication. (more…)

2,427 words

“Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realizes that every day is a day when he is dying? In fact, we are wrong to think that death lies ahead: much of it has passed us by already, for all our past life is in the grip of death.”—Seneca, Epistle 1.2 (more…)

3,181 words

Never have we had a more livid moment in the history of global race relations than in the former French colony of San Domingo. Today it is known as Haiti, an impoverished and volatile basket case of a nation, which is not coincidentally run by sub-Saharan blacks. How it got this way after being “gem of the West Indies” over two centuries ago is the topic of Lothrop Stoddard’s gripping 1914 history The French Revolution in San Domingo (available for free download here). (more…)

3,417 words

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct – Théodore Géricault, 1818

The case has been made to the point of exhaustion that the neo-liberal, progressivist, “woke” ideology that has clawed its way to cultural and political hegemony across the West displays all the attributes of religion. It has its scriptures, its martyrs, its own separate language (an equivalent to High Church Latin), its high priests and its heretics, and although to rail against it in the public square is no longer to risk your life, it is to risk your livelihood. (more…)

3,492 words

Satana – Fidus, 1896

Part 1

For thousands of years, it seemed like a natural law that men should have the final say in society, but thanks to the diligent work of Johann Jacob Bachofen, professor of Roman law at the University of Basel, the truth would finally come to light: long ago, sovereignty belonged in fact to women, and especially to mothers. (more…)

2,217 words

The Left clutches their pearls about the Constitution whenever the Right attempts to do anything productive, especially on immigration. Using buzzwords like “due process,” which they do not themselves believe in (as shown by the Covid lockdowns and treatment of the J6ers), is a standard Saul Alinsky tactic which is becoming less effective from overuse. (more…)

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In July of 1842, a young American sailor named Herman Melville deserted a whaling vessel anchored off  the island of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Archipelago in the South Pacific. He may not have known it then, but the several weeks he would spend among the Typee, the primitive Polynesian inhabitants of the island, would launch one of the most famous American literary careers of the nineteenth century. Four years later, his account of his time on the island was published as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life During a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas. (more…)

3,324 words

Back when liberalism was still a good thing, for the most part – that is to say, the 18th century – all this was quite an advance. Up to that point, absolutist monarchy had been nearly ubiquitous since the end of the toga-and-sandal days. Although there have been some outstanding kings, far more have been despots. (more…)

Thomas Jefferson held White Nationalist views that are incompatible with those of today’s politicians.

1,504 words

There is nothing in the principles of free speech and individual liberty which bears responsibility for turning Western governments into the anti-white dystopias we live in today.  Rather, it was the toxic pill of hostile foreign aliens which poisoned the great Enlightenment project from the start. (more…)

Alasdair MacIntyre

3,903 words

Introduction here, Chapter 9 Part 2 here, Chapter 10 Part 2 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Communities, whether ancient or recent, and whether of a historical, ethnocultural, linguistic, religious, sexual, or other nature, are natural dimensions of belonging. They accompany and underlie chosen forms of identity. No individual can exist without belonging, if only to distance himself from it. (more…)

Jean-Claude Michéa

6,046 words

Introduction here, Chapter 5 Part 1 here, Chapter 6 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

No doubt we should have expected this. The views developed by Jean-Claude Michéa were not slow to earn him many critiques, mostly directed at two of his books, Orpheus’s Complex and Mysteries of the Left. (more…)

1,320 words

Igor Shafarevich
The Socialist Phenomenon
New York: Harper & Row, 1980

In his landmark 1980 work The Socialist Phenomenon (first published in Russian in 1975), mathematician Igor Shafarevich recounts dozens of socialist doctrines throughout history to demonstrate how their common features, even among those from many centuries ago, can still be found in the repressive socialist states of the day. (more…)

The Blood Compact Monument in the Philippines, which commemorates the blood compact between that country and Spain that was made in 1565.

2,089 words

Most classical liberal thinking, which is still ultimately liberal and thus subversive, is based on the idea of the Lockean social contract. But what if the idea of a social contract is a complete farce? Given that classical liberalism underpins much of lukewarm conservatism, if we knock out the idea of social contracts, we also knock out conservatism. (more…)