“However, people who think like this do so because they have asked the wrong question, or looked down the wrong end of the telescope. They have asked where poverty comes from instead of where wealth comes from. You might as well ask how ignorance of cardiac surgery ever came into being, rather than knowledge of …
First Things First
“It is from social prejudice that one learns social virtue. Metaphysical thought and reflection come later” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, p. 83).
Modified Burke
“In the field of aesthetics, all that is necessary for kitsch to triumph is for men to fail to discriminate” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, p. 75).
A Special Form of Naivete
“One convention has been replaced by another. When I attended a bourgeois bohemian funeral in Paris recently, it was I who stood out in my dark suit and tie—so provincial, so conventional! Everyone else looked as if he or she had just popped into the cemetery after a bit of shopping in the local grocery …
The Funniest Convention
“But the kind of originality that everyone shares is not the kind of originality that modern romantics require in order to feel fully individuated in mass society. What they need is original originality, or meta-originality, as it were. This sets up the equivalent of an arms race, with more and more extravagant gestures required to …
Concupisco Ergo Sum
“The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays …
More Postmodern Hooey
“I part company with [postmodern] writers, when they reject the notion of a normative human nature or deny that we can know about such a nature . . . The Enlightenment did not invent the concept of a universal human nature or the notion of a universal moral law, nor did Immanuel Kant or St. …
Warping the Men
“The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons’ characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex. I am witnessing a perceptible dissolution of manly virtue in the young men I teach” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 148).
How the Modern University Gangs Up on Women
“It is, rather, that these young men know they can force matters further because the rules and institutional safeguards under which young women once upon a time could take protective cover are gone. Let us not kid ourselves: Coed dorms and apartments work to the advantage of male sexual aggression at the expense of female …
Whitewash for the Sepulcher
“Sentimentality is the feeble attempt of our lax and liberal culture to claim innocence where there is transgression and perversity, to ignore tragedy in the desperate endeavor to feel comfortable” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).