Ancient Romans, more than any other Indo-European people, attempted to restrict the natural duty of self-defense and the natural desire for revenge, but even there the primitive traditions of self-help yielded only gradually to a centralized legal apparatus.
A number of friends, real and virtual, on Facebook have listed the books they most enjoyed or profited from reading this past year. I was surprised how many were books about books, that is, tertiary rehashings of movements or developments for which there are superior first-hand sources.
Rather few people have any idea about what conservatism is or was and how it evolved. I don’t blame anyone for not caring, because it is not worth the effort.
For several hundred years, ordinary people have been taught to regard such practical necessities as surviving and defending themselves as rights that derive from nature. Theories of natural rights are, alas, a poisoned chalice, since every assertion of right can be met with a counter-assertion
The ancient pagan ideal was not Christian humility, which pagans found puzzling if not degrading, but the proper self-respect that encourages to do the right thing and not make fools of ourselves.
Dr. Fleming explains to Rex, the criteria of the insanity of children who kill.
Claudel, one of the great Christian poets of the last century, was subject to the crudest vilification from the communist and surrealist enemies of all things European, Christian, and civilized, in other words, the literary intellectual class that has destroyed literature and learning.
