Tag: Culture
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2023-03-24
In Defense of the Non-Moral
Of course we aim at virtue, and of course the pursuit of virtue should take pride of place in everything we do. But the truth is that we should also educate our children in non-moral excellencies that are intrinsically valuable and choiceworthy for their own sake. It is simply a beautiful thing to learn history well whether or not it makes you a better person morally.
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2023-03-17
The Mind of a Gentleman
This essay explores St. John Henry Newman's conception of a gentleman's education; it was originally published in the Classical Teacher.
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2023-03-10
The Comforts of Misanthropy
My pessimism makes me hopeful. Human beings---myself very much among them---cause me so much dismay, with their perpetual stupidity, immorality, incompetence, incivility, and philistinism, that I am inclined to judge the present shambles of our society to be rather good in the grand scheme of things.
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2023-03-03
Asceticisms
The whole ethos of asceticism, with its valorization of difficulty, can obscure the radically different motives for which ascetic practices might be adopted, and in the literature of these religious orders, one sometimes meets with a rhetorical excess, which, if we are not careful, threatens to undermine the philosophical foundations of our most basic thinking about goodness.
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2023-02-24
Wrong-Headed Charity
Christians sometimes think—or talk as though—any glorification of excellence signals a hostility toward everyone who has failed to achieve it, that genuine love for the least of these requires the denigration of excellence. The only issue with this line of thinking is its utter incoherence. The very idea of charity presupposes the goodness of that which is given and the badness of the recipient's condition.
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2023-02-17
False Humility
A man who looks for excellence, it is thought, must surely be both proud and judgmental. In some circles, one gets the impression that the good news of the Gospel is that human beings will always and forever be terrible at everything they do, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and stop trying. If some trouble-maker comes in and suggests that we can do better at this or that, such exhortation is interpreted as a case of 'human striving.'
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2023-02-10
Self-Acceptance
It is no surprise that a whole self-help industry has sprung up centered around the notion that we have no real inadequacies or failures: You are perfect and beautiful just the way you are. After all, there is a large, highly-motivated, paying audience who desperately wants just this message.
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2023-02-03
Inclusivity
No one likes to be left out of the club, but every club can only exist by making a distinction between those who are members and those who are not. If everyone is part of the club, then there is no club.
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2023-01-27
Egalitarianism
All discussion of excellence rests on a rejection of universal unqualified egalitarianism. Excellence in any field requires a scale of better and worse, and this scale of better and worse rests on the inequality of whatever things are on that scale.
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2023-01-13
Cultural Relativism
Apart from the cheap points we can score by pointing out the internal contradictions of cultural relativism, a much deeper critique can be leveled against the assumption that there is widespread cultural disagreement about core values.
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2023-01-06
Luxury Beliefs
Enemies of Excellence Part 2. Luxury beliefs are those beliefs that one can only afford to hold once sufficient material and cultural wealth guarantees that the implications of those beliefs need never be faced.
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2022-12-30
Enemies of Excellence - Intro
Introduction to the Enemies of Excellence series of posts. What are the mindsets that hold us back from excellence or from valuing a philosophy of excellence? Where do they come from and why do they sometimes have such a visceral force behind them?
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2022-12-09
Cynicism
Why the spirit of cynicism haunts the internet and how to exorcise it.
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2022-12-02
In Praise of Pretension
We should not use 'pretentious' as a sneering word. One must, after all, pretend to be something before becoming it. That's how aspiration works.
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2022-11-11
The Varieties of Excellence
We can observe the profound inseparability of moral and non-moral excellence. In the sweetest times, I cannot disentangle the aesthetic from the virtuous, the contemplative from the useful, and I would not wish to do so if I could. Doing so would be like disentangling a tapestry or dissecting a living thing.
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2022-11-04
Survivor's Guilt
Many in our contemporary anti-culture are tempted to think that they should not enjoy the wealth of past culture because it comes with dirty hands. The best way to help those left out in the cold when we are enjoying a family dinner, however, is not to cancel the dinner, but to invite them in.
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2022-10-28
Generational Wealth
We are born into a particular time and place and many of our parents bought into the post-war American culture of the 60s and 70s—some more than others. Many of us did not grow up learning to read Latin or play Bach because we went through childhood as the unwitting subjects of a school system more concerned with denigrating and supplanting a tradition than passing one on. This means that we must be modest in what we can hope to cultivate and leave to our own children. But there is substantial hope for progress: stone upon stone, generation upon generation.
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2022-10-21
Onion and Crouton Soup
Like a perfectly crafted onion and crouton soup, culture is a constantly refined tradition. Culture is natural to man because human nature *is to cultivate*, in all the senses of that word's root, the Latin word *colo*: to till the soil, to reap the fruits, to inhabit the same estate generation after generation, to devote oneself to the perfecting of something beautiful, to worship. Man is the cultural animal. We are *Homo Colens*.
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2022-10-14
In Defense of Loveliness
The partisans of lost culture are quick to praise the big ideals: Beauty, Goodness, Nobility, Virtue. Such ideals win wars, and rightly so. But loveliness deserves its own praise.
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2022-09-30
The Unread Library
The only thing preventing me from reading every volume in my library is my death. It may come soon, in which case the number of unread volumes will be quite large. It may come many decades from now, in which case the number will be many times larger.