Not Much Changes

“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).

Within A Generation

“More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger population will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for …

Cultural Backbone

Chesterton once commented that a man who does not believe something will fall for anything. The observation certainly holds for societies, and only a blind man could fail to miss that such a necessary gullibility is currently driving our culture. The gullibility is not created by various social pressures; rather, such pressures reveal the gullibility. …

Age Before Duty

“The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and fast than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls …

Dull Dogs

“The idea is to treat all the pupils as though they were equally intelligent. The standard of achievement is set to fit the average, which is fair-to-middling low. The result is a mediocrity which frets and frustrates the more able while it flatters the incompetent. This mediocrity is making Americans increasingly a set of dull …