The Problem of Force: Simone Weil’s supernatural justice
Every human death feels unnatural. Even the peaceful passing of elderly relatives who’ve lived rich lives and completed the full circuit of experiences we all feel entitled to—work, marriage, children, vacations, holidays—are attended by a grief so massive that it slips our processes of rational cognition. It hits us obliquely, and never chronologically. I’m walking through the produce aisle of the grocery store and unexpectedly, while lifting a bag of apples into my cart, I feel the shocking lightness of my grandfather’s body as I bathed him while he was dying of cancer. Anguish so vast that it reaches you in fragmented details outside of time. A sack of apples becomes a spirit medium. How can the loss of a person be natural?
Every human death feels unnatural, but murder even more so. The first murdered corpse I saw was in Baghdad during my initial deployment as an infantryman in 2007.
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The Road to Transhumanism: How Man Became a Project
The category of the Project has been introduced into our daily lives. The very thoughts and feelings of the human person have been turned into a Project. It is happening in Russia and America. It is happening in philosophy and science. It’s also happening in geopolitics.
This is not a global conspiracy. It is a global trend. Still, one can’t help wondering whether or not the Grand Designer behind it isn’t the same one that the American hieromonk, Fr. Serafim Rose, was referring to back in the early 1980s when he wrote: “It is later than you think.”
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Seven Books Not Enough People Read
What is it with books and writers? Often, really lousy writers and their equally lousy books achieve great popularity, while miraculous works of miraculous artists and thinkers fall to the margins of obscurity. For example, no one read William Blake much until he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites and William Butler Yeats. The same was the case for a few centuries with John Donne until T.S. Eliot rescued him from neglect in the early 20th century. In the spirit of rescuing from neglect, below is a list of books I wish more people would read.
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U.S. Sanctions Must Stop
Sharon Tennison, director of the Center for Citizen Initiatives, has called for an end to the U.S. policy of sanctions against dozens of nations during a deadly global pandemic. We urge everyone to read her appeal, sign on to it, and distribute it further.
CCI’s statement notes the foolishness of a policy which “affects the ability of [other] countries to contain the [COVID-19] outbreak, leading in turn to more infections” and the likelihood that the virus will then spread beyond those nations’ borders, restarting the global outbreak.
CCI’s appeal draws attention to the obvious inhumanity of the United States’ actions against Iran in particular, a country whose economy was already in shambles thanks to the so-called ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions regime …
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Talking Heads: Why Tucker Carlson Tell It Like It Is
[Published Feb. 10, 2020 in The National Interest ]
Over the past few years, an unusual political-philosophical realignment has appeared in the United States, one which brings together a certain kind of Christian conservative and a certain kind of secular leftist.
Judging from their public pronouncements, what unites these contrasting camps is a concern for ordinary workers, their families and their communities, and a refusal to worship at the altar of profit maximization and technological change. And that is just by way of first approximation. This is still a moving target. By far the most well-known member of the group to which I am referring is Fox News host Tucker Carlson. His show is the second most popular news show on American television today. With a figure like Carlson finally championing these ideas, a “new” strain of conservative thought has finally pushed its way into the public square.
READ ARTICLE ON THE NATIONAL INTEREST
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Meet the Cold War Liberals
[Published in The American Conservative, December 30, 2019]
They see a new Iron Curtain dividing right-wing authoritarianism and the democratic values embodied by American and Euro progressives.
Before Donald Trump’s election, many progressive foreign policy thinkers were simpatico with conservative and centrist realist thinkers. “Progressive realism begins with the cardinal doctrine of traditional realism: The purpose of American foreign policy is to serve American interests,” wrote Robert Wright in The New York Times in 2006. Sherle R. Schwenninger was a founder of the New America Foundation and one of those progressive foreign policy thinkers. “The progressive realist critique…,” he stated, “centered around international law; non-intervention; disarmament; and winding down the worst excesses of the post-9/11 period.”
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