Bernard Iddings Bell on Nationalism

Nationalism is to patriotism what a cancer is to healthy flesh.
--Bernard Iddings Bell, 1949.


Brilliant.

Dan McCarthy and the Christian Republic

"In practice, what we have two centuries later is a combination of the degenerate forms of those types: we have something closer to a mass democracy than a federal republic, and the influence of a landed and well-read aristocracy has given way to what Aristotle would have recognized as a money-minded oligarchy. The putative “aristocrats” of old Virginia certainly knew how to use wealth as well as reputation to get their way; today, however, commercial wealth speaks more loudly than the Framers had expected, and 18th-century notions of character and reputation have fallen before modern concepts of charisma and celebrity."

To read this full article by Dan McCarthy, well worth reading, please click here.

Faith and Mind

"Even religious faith, in our time, can endure only when reinforced by the works of the mind."--Russell Kirk, MODERN AGE, 1957

Gary Gregg on Executive War Powers

"The drumbeat of war is raging yet again with many calling for American intervention in the Syrian civil war conflict and for American action to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons program. However, successful short-term policy outcomes often make for bad constitutional precedents. On March 19, 2011, President Barak Obama ordered American missile and air strikes against targets in the sovereign nation of Libya in support of rebel forces opposing the government. By late October, Muammar Gaddafi’s body was being dragged through the streets and abused by the triumphant rebels who had been assisted by American bombs."

To read the rest of Gary's fine article, click here.

The Aim of the Humanist--Irving Babbitt

“The aim of the humanist, and that from the time of the ancient Greeks, has been the avoidance of excess. Anyone who sets out to live temperately and proportionately will find that he will need to impose upon himself a difficult discipline. His attitude towards life will necessarily be dualistic. It will be dualistic in the sense that he recognizes in man a ‘self’ that is capable of exercising control and another ‘self’ that needs controlling. The opposition between the two selves is well put by Cicero, one of the most influential of Occidental humanists. ‘The natural constitution of the human mind,’ he says, ‘is twofold. One part consists of appetite… which hurries a man hither and thither; the other is reason, which instructs and makes clear what is to be done or avoided; thus it follows that reason fitly commands and appetite obeys.” (Irving Babbitt, On Being Creative: and Other Essays, 1932, pg. xiv-xv)

Edmund Burke Reviews Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

The following is from: Edmund Burke, review of Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in Annual Register 19 (1776), 241.

The growth and decay of nations have frequently afforded topics of admiration and complaint to the moralist and declaimer: they have sometimes exercised the speculations of the politician; but they have seldom been considered in all their causes and combinations by the philosopher. The French economical writers undoubtedly have their merits. Within this century they have open the ways to a rational theory, on the subjects of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce. But no one work has appeared amongst them, nor perhaps could there be collected from the whole together, anything to be compared to the present performance, for sagacity and penetration of mine, extensive use, accurate distinction, just and natural connection, independence of parts. It is a complete analysis of society, beginning with the 1st rudiments of the simplest manual labor, and rising by an easy natural predation to the highest attainments of mental powers. In which course not only arts and commerce, but finance, justice, public police, the economy of armies, and the system of education, are considered and argued upon, often profoundly, always plausibly and clearly; many of the speculations are new, and time will be required before a certain judgment can be passed on their truth and solidity. The style of the author maybe sometimes thought difficult, but it must be remembered that the work is didactic, that the author means to teach, and teach things that are by no means obvious. 

The Continuity of the Humane in Western Civilization

The philosophical roots of modern political conservatism extend back over many generations through Burke and the natural law to the Middle Ages and classical antiquity.  This meant that in every historical epoch in Western civil society there have always been some conservatives.  Over the next three decades Russell and I found that this fact so distasteful to Marxists, liberals, and their allies among so-called ‘neo-conservatives,’ that they totally disregarded the evidence in the tradition of Burke’s politics.  Either out of invincible ignorance or malacious perversity, they revealed a willful genius for self-deception.  In order to denigrate the conservative tradition and deny it intellectual respectability, they claimed that American conservatism is of very recent origins, that it is centered in a mindless religious fundamentalism or jingoistic patriotism, and that it is devoted wholly to defending the status quo, especially the selfish interests of the business community.  For more than three decades this has been the constant strategy of those at work with the conservative tradition, and it is a technique that will undoubtedly be used into the future.

--Peter Stanlis, 1994