Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

29 Oct, 2017

Times Out of Joint

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Europe went off daylight savings time this morning, and America follows suit next week.  I suppose this means we are still trying to catch up with Old Europe. The twice a year time change inevitably unleashes a pack of feral economists snapping at the heels and howling criticisms of the inefficiency of savings times and all the hours of work lost to the plantations of international capitalism.  Being economists—or, what is almost worse, business writers—they enjoy the high privilege of always missing the point.  If  it is true that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the...

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Feature / Fleming

26 Oct, 2017

Mea Culpa

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I have not intentionally abandoned our readers these past few weeks, but I made the unwise decision to leave my laptop at home and rely on my wife’s iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard plus my iPhone.  The keyboard never worked, my iPhone fell to a hard floor and is worthless, and access even to the iPad has been a bit limited. We have enjoyed our week on a farm outside Spello and with Mark Beesley and our son Garret we have visited—in addition to Spello—Gubbio, Bevagna, Montefalco, Lago Trasimeno, and Spoleto.  Mark has done all the driving, which has made...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

6 Oct, 2017

Rambling Thoughts

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We left Friday the 29th on the next to last direct flight to Rome on United and flew without incident to Rome.  The only unpleasantness was provided by the surly waitresses–oh, excuse me, professional flight attendants who are on the plane for our safety–who slapped the unasked for stuffed noodles down on the tray, with a curt:  “We’re all out of everything else.”  Pasta? On a flight to Rome?  With green stuff?  The last time I ate cooked spinach on a United Flight I was sick for several days.  When she uttered her brusque “You’re welcome,” I made the mistake...

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Fleming / On the House

16 Sep, 2017

Tradition! Simple Simon’ Political Lexicon, Conservative Part IV OTH (Free to All Subscribers)

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“This is all very well,”  I can hear some readers saying, “but it is a bit generic. Other than opposing feminism and Marxism—which is something, I suppose—it doesn’t get us much a a program for action.  In particular, these general principles of human nature are even more general than Aristotle’s notion of Natural Justice which, unlike fire that burns the same in Greece and Persia, varies to some degree from people to people.” I agree that we have only reached the threshold.  To construct a specifically European-American Conservatism, we’d have to take account of particular principles and institutions that have...

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Fleming / Free Content

4 Sep, 2017

The Nature of the Beast: Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon, “Conservatism” Part III

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Most political/ideological movements are defined more by what the movement opposes than by what it supports.  Jacobins were a bit fuzzy about their Golden Age vision of a restored Roman Republic, but they were pretty clear about whom they wanted to kill.    (By the way, one easy way of distinguishing a wholesome religion or religious movement from a mere sect is that sectarians tend to define and name themselves according to their leaders and spend an enormous amount of time destroying what previous generations have created.  Iconoclasts and progressives  act more or less like ISIS and the Communist Party.) Conservatives...

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Fleming / On the House

31 Aug, 2017

What is Truth? Part II of Simple Simon’s Definition of Conservatism (Free to Subscribers)

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What is truth, asked jesting Thomas, who stayed for an answer. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is possible to tease out some fundamental principles that undergird all or most conservative movements and sentiments.  Let us further suppose that the most basic principles are not specifically American, Anglo-American, or even Christian-European but could be revealed not only in Sophocles, Aristotle, and Cicero but, perhaps, even in Confucius and/or Lao Tsu.  Once the more general principles were established, we could then see how they develop more particular attributes and requirements as part of Christendom and even Anglo-American...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

28 Aug, 2017

Cultural Genocide: I swear I’m not making this stuff up!

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Jim Easton asked me yesterday when the UN is going to be summoned to punish Americans engaging in cultural genocide by vandalizing and tearing down historical monuments and engaging in an endless damnatio memoriae.  Every week, it seems, we witness a new reductio ad absurdum.  The recent winners are the not the  Jews of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center who went to tear down the statue of the “anti-Semitic” Peter Stuyvesant in New York,  and recommends “replacing all traces of his name with that of Asher  Levy, one of the first Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam.”  No, as hilarious as their proposal is,...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

24 Aug, 2017

Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon: Conservative, Part I

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As preface to discussing Conservative, I begin with a few more words on Liberal (which I have inserted into the previous article.) The term “Liberal” is simple in conception but obscured by confusion and deliberate misrepresentation.  After all, it comes from liber, the Latin word for “free” and was used to translate the Greek eleutheros, which had secondary senses that range from humane to noble to generous.  We still speak of “the liberal arts” and of people who are liberal in making gifts or doing favors.  It is quite proper to speak of non-political liberalism as a peculiarly western form...

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Uncategorized

23 Aug, 2017

Chesterton Conclusion–Go Back to Being Roman

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But Rome endures in more places than the seven hills on the Tiber.  The civilization of Europe and its colonies is only an extension of the Roman world, from which we have never been really cut off. Where world- historians such as Spengler have seen ages and cycles severed from each other by cataclysmic events, Chesterton sees continuity. We do not understand, to be sure, the few monuments left by our distant neolithic ancestors; but the Greek gods have never died in that fashion; and the Roman empire has never died at all. Of the most modem industrial cities in...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

23 Aug, 2017

The Counter-Revolution–Back to Square One (Conclusion)

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Then what are we to do with the Great Books of the revolutionary tradition?  They are to a great extent a poisoned chalice which is fatal to those who drink from it.  There is a sense in which the system of American education is taking care of at least some of the problem.  Apart from Great Books colleges and Western Civ courses, no one actually reads Montaigne or Voltaire.  They are simply dead white males that only a conservative fuddy-duddy would read. But suppose we confine the question only to people we care about, our children and students.  Do we...