Modernism and Plato

“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …

Ten Reasons For Not Taking Postmodernism Seriously

1. Postmodernists take themselves seriously enough already. 2. It might make some sense to speak of the “post-colonial” era if a hundred years or two have gone by since the era in question has assumed room temperature. But until then, you can’t really see it, and ought not pretend as though you can. For all …

Hip Off the Rack

“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …

Overflowing Like God

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 69 “There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty” (Prov. 11:24). God has placed us in the world in a such a way as to bless us. …

The Un-Ad

“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …