Humor Is Resistance

Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew his totalitarians (and the liberals who loved them) once said, “To laugh is to criticize . . . Humour, that is to say, is a kind of resistance movement, which is sometimes indulgently tolerated, sometimes barely tolerated, and sometimes not tolerated at all.” George Orwell, who also knew something about the …

Willful Mediocrity

“The dishonor was not the in the confusion, but in the ritualistic character of that confusion; not in the appalling cultural, scientific, and historical ignorance, but in the refusal to mend that ignorance; not in the incompetence, but in the exaltation of that incompetence; not in the mediocrity of execution, but in the meanness of …

Avoiding Moral Incongruities

The Lord’s brother warned us about the problem of incongruity in speech. With the same tongue we praise God, in a service of worship, and we also curse those who are made in God’s likeness — whether in traffic, or in family irritations, or in self-righteousness censure. Gossip during the week is inconsistent with what …

The Chattering Classes

[Speaking of Carlyle] “The danger, as he saw it, was in the distraction: ordinary men and women turned to ‘art,’ and the worship of art, only when they had nothing more important to do or to think about. And idle humans – bored humans – were not whole humans. They were shells, chattering away to …